There is an advantage to detonation, like that produced by the hydrogen/oxygen burn. And that is, if you can control it, a whole lot more power than with the slower burning gasoline.

It is reasonably common knowledge among experienced mechanics that, in regular car engines, that the burn pressure is about 4 times the compression pressure. So, if you can get higher compression pressure on a mixture, you get more power out from the same amount of mixture under lower compression pressures. This is a burn. What about a detonation, which is essentially a very fast burn occurring in nano-seconds rather than much longer time frames of ten-thousandths to hundred-thousandths of a second that are in a burn?

The burning material in the first nano-second of a detonation, compresses the close, unburned parts of the mixture, to a point much higher than the pressure that the first materials were under. This higher pressure makes those parts of the mixture burn under higher pressure, creating higher power. This compresses the remaining mixture that burns in the following nano-seconds to an even higher pressure, to produce much higher power outputs from them, all with the same amount of mixture. These higher detonation pressures are so powerful that they break parts of the engine. That's why engineers try to design engines and fuels to avoid detonations.

Why not rather design the engine to use the detonation power? A simple variation of the Stelzer engine could do just that.

  

 Well Mel, if you could manage to get your hands on pure Oxygen and pure Hydrogen -- either by separating it yourself or buy buying it -- you're going to have a problem using it as fuel in an internal combustion engine.

Regular gasoline doesn't burn the same way that Hydrogen and Oxygen do. Regular gasoline burns much slower, and the higher the octane rating, the slower it burns. The reason for this is so it won't all immediately burn, which is exactly what Hydrogen and Oxygen would do.

If it DOES burn all at once, it's called detonation, commonly referred to as "pinging" because of the sound you hear when "pinging" occurs in an engine.

It's a great way to ruin an engine -- unless the engine has an extremely large "squish area" in the combustion chamber combined with very low compression. And even then. . . .

Question: how much of the pages of text are necessary to building a  functioning fuel cell and how much is it just these guys wanting to demonstrate how smart they are? I built a fuel cell a couple of years ago when gas had gone up to $4.25 in Austin. I attached it to my truck, had some issues that were not resolved before the price came down enough that we were all willing to just pay the price. I am blue collar. That doesn't mean I am half witted or mentally disabled, just that I don't follow the mumbo jumbo. Just tell me HOW to build the thing if you are truly concerned with eliminating oil dependency and spreading the good news of water to fuel. If you expect me to read your miles of technical data , forget it. I'd rather pay the pump than pump up some nerd's ego.. with all due respect...