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

 

[dcasto]

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.

 

[jistre]

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.

 

[Latexman]

I noticed how LARGE the radio wave generating equipment was compared to the [small]little[/small] flame. Here we go again, similar to nuclear fusion in a jar.

Good luck,
Latexman

 

[IRstuff]

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

FAQ731-376

 

[Latexman]

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

 

[jistre]

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

 

[IRstuff]

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

FAQ731-376

 

[mauricestoker]

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

 

[StoneCold]

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

 

[rmw]

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

 

[vpl]

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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[Latexman]

Patricia,

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

Good luck,
Latexman

 

[IRstuff]

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

FAQ731-376

 

[ione]

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.

 

[jistre]

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

 

[ione]

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

 

[zekeman]

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.

 

[jistre]

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.

 

[25362]

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.