Seawater as Fuel?

[severus]

At first I was sceptical, but after checking Snopes.com and re-reading the article I think it may have merit. If it's true it may be an incredible discovery. What do you think?

 

STORY HERE

[Newt]

I think "incredible" may be the understatement of the year.

 

The possibilities are mind boggling.

[chesters1]

i'm sceptical no mention of how much power you need to imput to get the out put ,physics generally says you always get less than you put in

[RobStubbs]

i'm sceptical no mention of how much power you need to imput to get the out put ,physics generally says you always get less than you put in

 

My feelings exactly. It appears all you are actually doing is converting water to hydrogen (and obviously also oxygen). Maybe the radio waves help in some way but that must need a lot of energy to crack water.

 

Rob.

[Steve Walker]

All the energy out is coming from the radio waves that he's bombarding it with. There's no such thing as a free lunch (though I expect to be told that applying the laws of thermodynamics indicates narrow mindedness...).

 

Discussion on Snopes:

 

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?p=320311

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=11424

 

I agree with this comment:

 

"Flame" is really water vapor with ionized salts entrained, as you'd find right above the surface of a boiling liquid. The RF induces a current along this ion plume, providing so much energy that the electrons in the ions move away from the nucleus and return, causing emission spectra. Note the jagged movement of the "flame" - a bit like lightning. The color indicates what is probably excited calcium.

 

The use of salts makes the steam plume more exciting and helps draw away from the fact he's using a very large microwave to boil water, and then using that water to turn an engine, which then generates some fraction of the energy used to boil the water.

 

An exciting science project. And one of thousands of free energy scams.

[ColinW]

The energy you obtain from burning the hydrogen will be exactly the same as the energy required to break the bonds in the first place. So at best you could hope for a balance (energy in = energy out). In reality you won't get anything like that because the efficiency of the RF energy input will be way less than 100% due to impedance mis-matching and the efficiency that you can produce the RF energy in the first place will be even lower. So you might end up putting a kilowatt into the RF power supply to get 100W out of the hydrogen flame. Chemists are as clueless as journalists!

[chesters1]

The energy you obtain from burning the hydrogen will be exactly the same as the energy required to break the bonds in the first place. So at best you could hope for a balance (energy in = energy out). In reality you won't get anything like that because the efficiency of the RF energy input will be way less than 100% due to impedance mis-matching and the efficiency that you can produce the RF energy in the first place will be even lower. So you might end up putting a kilowatt into the RF power supply to get 100W out of the hydrogen flame. Chemists are as clueless as journalists!

enery from water is old hat but as said but pretty bad in power in out terms ,waterwheels produce electricity but lots of energy is lost through friction and the conversion process ,steam engines use water and as above its a pretty poor conversion rate and ofcourse splitting water using electricity gets far less out than in.

water can produce power but at a far less output than the process to make it work.

[obe1]

Don't think I'll bother with it, even if it doesn't work somebody will probably stick a tax on it soon anyway.

 

Joe

[Leon Roskilly]

I remember in the '50s someone came up with a capsule that you put into your fuel tank (previously filled with water) and the car would run quite happily on that.

 

But then the oil companies bought him out and erased all records of the discovery.

 

 

[Steve Walker]

Chemists are as clueless as journalists!

 

This is the chap in question:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rustum_Roy

 

Seems his main interest these days is homeopathy advocacy.

 

The "cancer researcher" inventor is actually a retired radio technician tinkering with this stuff in his spare time.