Climate Change : Yahoo! Green — If this is remotely true I can just imagine the future. “Daddy, I heard that years ago they burned that icky oil for energy.” “It’s true, son. What were they thinking. hahahahaha.”
ERIE, Pa. – An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the “most remarkable” water science discovery in a century.
John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.
The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.
Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations.
The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said.
The discovery is “the most remarkable in water science in 100 years,” Roy said.
“This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywhere,” Roy said. “Seeing it burn gives me the chills.”
This begs the question. How do you put out a water fire?
found by Wild Bill Reising
This begs the question. How do you put out a water fire?
Simple. Turn off the radio.
This is why you don’t use water on some types of fire as they are so hot that all you are doing is adding fuel to it
Question is does the energy needed drive the radio frequency exceed that we would recoup from the burning water?
Nothing special here. As #1 said just turn off the device which is spitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Water is the product of hydrogen and oxygen that are chemically combined – or burned which produces energy in the form of heat.
The process is 100% reversible with the application of sufficient energy to separate the bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen.
The energy required to separate hydrogen from the oxygen (water) is greater than the energy generated by the burning of same.
Actually it is incorrect to say energy is ‘generated’ as energy is neither created nor destroyed it only changes state with a net loss during the conversion. (First Law of Thermodynamics – the conservation of energy).
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/thermo1.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/firlaw.html
This is why perpetual motion machines are impossible – except in the ‘National Enquirer’, Oprah or on ‘eBay’.
Cheers
On the BS-O-Meter, this is at least a 90 out of 100.
“Of course there is still much more work to be done and scientists have to figure out if the energy output from the burning is greater than the electrical input.” Well, duh. That would take maybe one day in any junior college physics lab.
These fine folks are about to receive the BubbaRayDipDork award. Where is Hop when you need him? — the UKKMA can’t be far behind.
Anybody remember “cold fusion?” I can’t believe people actually pay real money to subscribe to this:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/
Maybe I’ll just go get me one of those Moller Sky Cars, too. Oh, and be sure to invest in this — Dallasite Patents Invention Which He Claims Substitutes Water for Gasoline as Fuel:
http://keelynet.com/energy/garrett.htm
John, I’m appalled… You’re supposed to have some degree in Geology or Chemical Engineering…
I’m sure they teach the impossibility of perpetual motion… 😉
Besides the question of energy out vs. energy in, I wonder what the products of the combustion are? Oxides of sodium? Possibly toxic chlorine compounds? Even if it is possible to get more energy out, this could easily be worse than burning coal in terms of toxic reaction products.
piffle.
I’ve seen this before. Thought I’d seen it here. This may not be a fuel source, but it may have other uses, like cutting torches, welding, etc. It is interesting to watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGg0ATfoBgo
I heard Mars become desolate when they burned all the water.
Microwave emitter into dirty / salty water equals hydrogen / oxygen or / also H202 which is Brown’s gas.
If you microwave pure water – won’t warm up real fast. Dirty it up, and it will boil.
More energy going in, than what is going out.
Solar panel + electrolytes + catalysts + water = hydrogen + oxygen, that could be used to recharge a fuel cell.
Really, the most exciting part of this discovery is not the hydrolysis, it is that the brown’s gas spontaneously burns at over 3000º under the influence of this field. That seems to indicate that it’s some form of plasma, which would be amazing for a 200 watt input of energy. The scientists involved -claim- that it is over-unity, which would seem to defy the thermodynamic ‘laws,’ but, then again, the common sterling engine also defies those ‘laws’ by transforming heat energy to kinetic energy, so perhaps they are more like guidelines after all. 😉 13.56 Mhz, it could be the wave of the future.
#5, Bubba,
Anybody remember “cold fusion?
Hey, how’d ya guess my old nickname???
While I understand your skepticism, considering the background of the researchers, I don’t think we should count this out just yet. It isn’t as if some Gr. 10 dropout discovered this principle. These are Penn State researchers now involved.
Using today’s technology, this might seem a bit far fetched, yet as the article states, there may be possible uses waiting to be discovered. Also, the article was a little short on specifics.
BTW, loved the link. Some great reading for the three minutes I wasted.
36, BryanP “Water is a byproduct of combustion…”
Partially correct. Depends on what you burn and how you burn it, but not all combustion results in a water byproduct. Kind of like Bill Clinton, I guess it depends on what your definition of “burn” is.
Hydrogen and oxygen will burn (hello, Captain Max Pruss). producing water, but like I said above, the energy to split water into H and O exceeds the energy output of burning the gases.
If I remember correctly, there’s thermolysis, electrolysis, photosynthesis and one other. All take more energy to produce H and O from water than recombining them produces, regardless of catalysts and impurities.
Cripes, I’m not a chemist, John C. is — he should be writing this.
At one point in the demonstration he passes his hand between the rf emmiters. Why didn’t the saltwater in the blood in his hand combust the same way the saltwater in the test tube did?
Other than that, yeah, this guys fails 6th grade earth sciences class.
#16 – Watch the video again and tell me if I’m wrong. He sticks some kind of probe in there. It doesn’t look like spontaneous combustion. It looks more to me like you get sustained combustion in the field after manual ignition.
Could we test this out by removing the Great Salt Lake? That thing stinks!
This is similar to a fireplace that “burns” water that came on the market in 2005. Check it out:
http://www.core77.com/corehome/2005/08/clean-burning-fireplace-runs-on-water.html
This is debunked in ‘The Skeptics Guide to the Universe’,
sow #103
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive.asp
This is debunked in ‘The Skeptics Guide to the Universe’,
show #103
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive.asp
#20 Wow, the skeptics have figured out retro-causality now, eh? Given that the show was on 7/11, and this latest info is from this month, that’s quite a trick. Call me skeptical, but I doubt they were basing their debunking on the latest info. . . .
2 – Not exactly. Some chemicals/elements will combine with water in an exothermal reaction, sodium for one.
We need someone up on chemistry.
Browns gas is old news. William Rhodes filed patent for a process to electrolyze water into this stuff in 1962.
#14, Mr. (ex-cold) Fusion — Some great reading for the three minutes I wasted.
Darn, the BubbaRay® endorsement for a link usually stands for quality, entertainment and exploration, not “wasted time.” Well, I never pretended to be a chemist, that’s John’s old job… Forgive me this one time. 😆
You could give it a shot, yours are usually pretty good!
Cripes!
Submarines use oxygen generators to produce O2 from seawater via electrolysis.
1. Place seawater into an evaporative distiller – pump the concentrated brine overboard, and run the distilled water through a de-ionizer [H-OH resin] filter to get “DI water”.
2. Place DI water into electrolysis cells of the oxygen generator – affectionately called “The Bomb” – add a little potassium hydroxide for conductivity, and run a shitload of electrical current through the cell…
et voila… Hydrogen and Oxygen disassociate, with pure Hydrogen going toward one electrode, and pure Oxygen toward the other.
3. Vent hydrogen overboard – through a diffuser – and send Oxygen to the storage tanks.
The ones in my day were called “the Bomb”, because it took much less energy to re-combine O2 and H2 than it took to cause them to disassociate.
So, if anything went wrong while the generator was running, there was a possibility of explosive re-combination…
O2 generators were the only piece of equipment on submarines which had Emergency Shutdown switches nearby… so the guy on watch could hit the switch as he ran away, no matter which way he ran.
And so these clowns want to use RF to disassociate water, just so they can re-combine it again via combustion???
#7 – JoaoPT – You’re supposed to have some degree in Geology or Chemical Engineering…
Nope, he’s just a good ol’ opinion machine! 😉
“…This begs the question. How do you put out a water fire?…”
Dirt.
Of course water can combust!
That’s why they use foam on REALLY hot fires. Otherwise the Hydrogen and Oxygen split and you end up FEEDING the flames.
#25, Bubba,
It is a quality site when viewed it with your warning in mind. I don’t think these sites realize just how humorous they are simply because they so fervently believe they are right. It is quite possible that crackpots like these are what Mustard refers to when he suggests some view science as a religion.
BTW, you have yet to disappoint me with any of your links.
Hey hellooooooo, look up browns gas a wonderful way to cut metals and the jewellery people know all about the water flame, they just use a differnet approach to splitting h2o