What happens to a water car when the water freezes? Stan Meyer's answer

"They always ask me about what happens if water freezes in the wintertime" — Stan Meyer, Denver, 1997. It's a fair question: water swells about 9% as it freezes, which is how it cracks pipes and engine blocks. Hydrogen itself stays a gas down to -253 °C ("in cold weather, you don't freeze gas," Stan said in 1990), but the water it comes from freezes at 0 °C. Stan's answer was a heater he called the steam resonator, shown on the buggy in his 1992 slides: pulses that "stretch" the water molecule "like a rubber band and release it," and "it releases energy that heats the water." If that sounds odd, look at any new diesel truck. It carries a tank of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), which is mostly water and freezes at about -11 °C (12 °F), so the tank and lines are electrically heated. Same problem, same answer; Stan's heater ran on pulses instead of a heating element. The tapes are on stanslegacy.com.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer lecture · Denver, 1997
• Stan Meyer at his garage · 1990 interview
• Stan Meyer · Global Sciences Congress, Orlando, 1992
• Stan Meyer, lecture, Denver, 1997, at 48:02 and 48:19 — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, 1990 interview at his garage, at 35:09 — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, Global Sciences Congress, Orlando, 1992, at 37:50 (steam resonator slide) — stanslegacy.com
• Ice is about 9% less dense than liquid water; hydrogen boils at -252.9 °C
• Diesel exhaust fluid (32.5% urea in water) freezes at about -11 °C (12 °F); SCR systems heat the DEF tank and lines