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Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

(OP)
Anyone seen this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiKa4nOkHLw

I wonder if the energy balance on this (after subtracting the energy to generate the radio waves) is favorable?

Good luck,
Latexman

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

in one of the videos you could see the watt meter on the systemand when look at the flame and the tiny toy striling engine, you can imagine that the system is less than 50% eff.

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

At a theoretical limit, doesn't it take the exact same amount of energy to create a chemical bond as it does to break a chemical bond?  If this is true, then how can it be favorable? Shouldn't you need the same amount of energy to make the O2 and H2 from water as you'd later get out of burning them and reforming the water?

It's been a long time since chemistry.

Of course, if there's some strange nuclear process going on and mass reduction, all bets are off.

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

(OP)
I noticed how LARGE the radio wave generating equipment was compared to the little flame.  Here we go again, similar to nuclear fusion in a jar.

Good luck,
Latexman

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

It's not running off the "salt water," it's running off the electricity that's generating the RF that's cracking the water.  So, yeah, you can run a car with this "invention," but you'd need to drag along, for me, a 25 mile extension cord to power the RF generator.  

So, what's the big deal?  This "invention" was posted on ET about 2 yrs ago, and nothing came of it then.

TTFN

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RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

(OP)
It doesn't take much imagination to envision a self-sustaining system.  The RF creates the fuel and the fuel is burned to create the RF and power the car.  All done onboard the car.  Unfortunately, thermodynamics gets in the way.

 

Good luck,
Latexman

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

Well, we can simply add a solar panel to the roof to make up the miniscule difference, since the process is soooo efficient.  Voila!

TTFN

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RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

I thought Fred Flintstone already figured out how to cheaply power cars.

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

The sad part is that this guy can probably get a couple of million in funding, where anything that might really work cannot get a dime.   It also shows you that science education in america is poor.

Regards
StoneCold

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

I think Obama drives a car like this doesn't he?  Oh, yes, he is going to have GM build them now; all painted green.

rmw

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

Quote:

At a theoretical limit, doesn't it take the exact same amount of energy to create a chemical bond as it does to break a chemical bond?  If this is true, then how can it be favorable? Shouldn't you need the same amount of energy to make the O2 and H2 from water as you'd later get out of burning them and reforming the water?

Actually, there usually is a "preferred state" for most molecules and the amount of energy that it takes or gives off is dependent on whether the molecule is in its preferred state or going to it.

Water is a very stable compound.  To break the chemical/molecular bond between the hydrogen and oxygen requires input of energy (i.e., it's an endothermic reaction.)

On the other hand, free oxygen and hydrogen are rather unstable (which is why you usually see them described as H2 and O2.  If present in sufficient concentrations, they are quite willing to join together in an exothermic reaction to create water, with a large release of energy.  Ever heard about the Hindenberg?

I haven't watched the U-tube video -- can't access it at work and I had better things to do at home last night.  However, if he's proposing to power cars by dissolving the hydrogen/oxygen bond in water -- he's all wet.

Patricia Lougheed

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RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

(OP)
Patricia,

He's using radio frequency waves to liberate H2 and O2 from saltwater.  Kind of like electrolysis.

Good luck,
Latexman

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

He, apparently, was a good RF engineer,  but he was a poor scientist, though, since there are a large number of coupling inefficiencies that are difficult to overcome, otherwise, we would already have RF-beamed power sources.
 

TTFN

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RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

Hydrogen bond is very strong as pointed out above and this process is undoubtedly not what one would define an efficient-wise process. Moreover it seems that during this process, chlorine is liberated: definitely not environment friendly.

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

The chlorine is to eliminate anyone who pokes their nose too deeply into the process!

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

From this point of view the process should be efficient (at least more effective than a "keep out" plate)

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

I don't see any thermodynamics laws broken.Also no perpetual motion here. But----

In the clip, I see a RF generator getting power ( which came from a fuel based power plant, efficiency  (e1)) from the wall and using it to get less power to make RF (e2)from burning something (e3) which goes thru a Stirling engine(e4) yielding less mechanical power. All told he would probably be lucky to get 30% efficiency --E=e1*e2*e3*e4.


If he calls the saltwater "fuel" he is dreaming.


I don't think Saudi Arabia is worried about this just yet.
 

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

Nah, zekeman, but hook the back end of the process up to the front to power it, as some people seem to believe is going to happen, and Sadi Carnot may have a few points of contention with the idea.

That's what I was getting at.  Plus, Homer Simpson is the source of the 'obeying the law' quote and that makes it even funnier.

The problem is fundamentally what I was getting at in my first post.  The water is not a fuel.  This process creates a fuel from the water (and some would argue that isn't even true, that the hydrogen is merely an energy storage medium, like a battery), but to do that takes energy input, and you can never get out of it what you pump in.  Take gasoline, for instance.  The sun and earth have made it, and from our viewpoint, there is a net energy gain when we burn it, but when you look at everything it took to create that fuel, there's a lot more energy that went into making it over time than we get out of it, and we don't really think about that.

Aaaanyway, a chemical bond is a chemical bond.  We can nitpick about preferred and ground states, but to get it into or out of those states requires energy flowing into or out of the molecule.  Since the whole point of a preferred state is that it's the most energetically favorable state for the molecule, it's pretty safe to start from the viewpoint that on average, without a directed input of energy, a bulk material is statistically going to be in its preferred or ground state. Getting a large number of those molecules into non-preferred states should take extra energy, making the process even less energy favorable.

I light of that, the gist of my argument was that a chemical bond represents a certain amount of energy.  Since this process is in essence first breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen, then turning them right back into water, the net energy moved is zero.  The minutiae of which process is endothermic or exothermic doesn't really matter because we start with water and end with water. Whatever energy moved into or out of the water to create the hydrogen and oxygen should be equal in magnitude and opposite in flow to the energy moving when the gases recombine to reform the water.  Viewing just that reaction, there is no energy added to or removed from the system by splitting the water and recreating it.  Of course, this reaction is not spontaneous, so take a step back, and you have the input in the form of RF required to kick it off, and then you get the heat and light put off by burning the hydrogen.  The energy is coming from the RF forcing the water to do unnatural things.

Now, if the RF generator were powered by a nuclear process, then we could get a net energy gain due to mass reduction in the nuclear reaction.

Otherwise, I don't see how this possibly works.

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?


After all concerns about the 2nd law have been accounted for, IMHO if hydrogen (as a chemical reagent) can be obtained from a 'new' (potential) process cheaper or more efficiently than by conventional electrolysis, it merits attention.

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

My point is that I see no thermo laws being broken ( as Homer says) and no claim for a perpetual motion machine. And therefore, it is entirely patentable although its future may be in considerable doubt.
If it were any good , don't you think the oil people would be rushing to buy the patent rights to squelch the idea?

It looks like an expensive torch to me.
 

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?


To burn water with a flame one can use fluorine.

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

How do you figure that?  Fluorine dissolves in water in a manner similar to its cousins chlorine and bromine.  No fire involved.  Put a piece of rubber into a stream of fluorine and you'll get a very nice flame...If you want the water to burn, sodium will do the trick.  But making sodium is a VERY lossy process.

Saltwater is not the real fuel here- saltwater is not a fuel.  Most of these "free energy" scams are fueled by ignorance, compounded by bad measurements.  

Even if you were able to split water by some magical electrical or electromagnetic process to produce hydrogen and oxygen with 100% of the maximum possible thermodynamic efficiency, you STILL would be incapable of building a perpetual motion machine much less an over-unity machine.  The fuelcell or Stirling engine or whatever else you'd try to use to generate energy from the hydrogen and oxygen has an efficiency significantly lower than unity.  And hydrogen as an energy storage medium is only good in respect to the product it generates.  It is a real pain in the @ss technically in virtually every other respect.

Thermo in a nutshell:  #0- you must play the game- there's no other game in town.  #1- you can't win.  #2  You can only break even on a VERY cold day.  #4- it NEVER gets that cold!

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?


To moltenmetal, you speak about fluorine-in-water, and I refer to water-in-fluorine. From the little I know about fluorine, it can put water aflame since it is a powerful oxidant and highly electronegative, taking oxygen from the -2 to the 0 or +2 state.

The internet tells us, I quote:

"It is so reactive that glass, metals, and even water, as well as other substances, burn with a bright flame in a jet of fluorine gas."

Translating from old Chemistry notes of mine:

"Fluorine has the highest reduction potential of all common chemicals, and it reacts violently at room temperature with almost all other elements. Water burns in fluorine with a weak, luminous flame to give HF and hydrogen. An equimolar reaction of HF and water results in HF + O2. An excess of fluorine can result in oxygen difluoride and HF."

Are these notes wrong?

I agree with your message in all other aspects.

 


 

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

to benchmark a water powered car, one should really ask the question:can the procesgrid,to provide hydrogen to a car be made more environmental friendly (more efficient) than the procesgrid, to provide gasoil to a car?
 

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

25632:  you're right- you can react water vapour to HF (and O2, not H2) in fluorine, yielding a weak flame.  But there'll be no flame in the presence of liquid water.

CH5OH: I'm afraid I probably don't understand your post.  If a fossil fuel other than coal is used as the energy source, I'm afraid that making a liquid or even liquified gaseous hydrocarbon fuel for transportation purposes is definitely going to win out over using it to make hydrogen, in terms of well-to-wheels energy efficiency.  Pure hydrogen generation, transport and storage are all (energetically) lossy, and real fuelcells are not THAT much more efficient than a hybrid IC engine, to say nothing of the comparative cost.  Once you've converted your entire electrical grid over to renewables or nuclear, hydrogen might then be worthy of consideration as a transport fuel.  Until then, it's a distraction.

RE: Saltwater - the fuel of the future?

If it stores electrical energy that was previously generated from renewable sources (i.e. solar, geothermal, etc.), it's already ahead of fossil fuels (to an extent). I don't see enough of an energy density to be worth a darn, though. This is competing with Hydrogen, methanol, and other carriers of energy developed off-site.

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