Saltwater - the fuel of the future? 1

[Latexman]

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

 

[zekeman]

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.

 

[25362]

To burn water with a flame one can use fluorine.

 

[moltenmetal]

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!

 

[25362]

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.

 

[CH5OH]

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?

 

[moltenmetal]

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.

 

[kevindurette]

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.