Igniting Salt Water

Very interesting find!

http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=node/1570

Igniting salt water using radio-frequencies. Apparently, the radiowaves weaken the bonds in the water molecules, thus releasing hydrogen. There were no details on how much energy it took to do this, but I do know that the radiowave is one of the lowest energy frequencies in the spectrum.
WP

The trick would be to see if the heat energy output exceeds the RF power input.

TANSTAAFL
(There ain't no such thing as a free lunch)

It's always going to take more energy to break the hydrogen/oxygen molecular bond in water that you'll get back when you ignite the hydrogen in an oxygen atmosphere to reform the water. This is basic science. No miracle device is going to change the laws of physics. I wish some reporters would have a basic understanding of what they are reporting on and not even bother. The story gives a clue of what this is really about, getting government research funding.

DonShock said:

TANSTAAFL
(There ain't no such thing as a free lunch)

It's always going to take more energy to break the hydrogen/oxygen molecular bond in water that you'll get back when you ignite the hydrogen in an oxygen atmosphere to reform the water. This is basic science. No miracle device is going to change the laws of physics. I wish some reporters would have a basic understanding of what they are reporting on and not even bother. The story gives a clue of what this is really about, getting government research funding.

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Not necessarily nor entirely true.....but we don't know the details so everything is speculation. Many reactions require only activation energy in order to kick start the general reaction. For example, the energy required to start the chain reaction for a nuclear explosion is a lot less than the output energy of the explosion itself.

I found the discovery interesting because I don't think water has ever been ignited before.... this can lead to some very interesting applications.

WP

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

Not necessarily nor entirely true....Many reactions require only activation energy in order to kick start the general reaction....

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I beg to differ. This is necessarily and entirely (first Law of Thermodynamics) true.

Reactions "kick started" by activation energies are releasing potential energy locked up in the molecular or atomic structure of the reagents. No potential chemical energy in seawater by itself means no net energy can be generated.

There is potential nuclear energy in seawater, but that would take some really heavy duty radio waves and containment to release....:naughty:.

This article makes it clear that what they are doing is splitting the hydrogen-oxygen molecular bond. Thsi is vastly different than a nuclear reaction. Water is a stable molecule and will require more energy to break apart than you'll get back when the hydrogen and oxygen recombine when burning the hydrogen. Direct electrolysis is probably the most efficient way to split the hydrogen and oxygen. Going the extra step of converting the electicity to RF first will just add more losses. A nuclear reactor or bomb is using an unstable atom which splits/decays into smaller atoms and converts part of the mass to energy. All the nuclear reaction does is force the natural process to occur at an un-natural rate. A controlled rate in a reactor and an instantaneous rate in a bomb.

nerdgineer said:

No potential chemical energy in seawater by itself means no net energy can be generated.

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I beg to differ back! :kiss:

If there are chemical bonds (like in water), there is potential chemical energy. We're not breaking any thermodynamic laws here.... we're releasing the energy stored in the chemical bonds. Just like lighting up gasoline.... you don't require massive amounts of energy to do that, do you? As well, nobody is saying that this is a perpetual energy reaction. We all know it is a zero-sum game. Assuming 100% efficiency, H-O bonds break requiring X amount of energy. H-O bonds re-form.....releasing X amount of energy (this is where you get the flame).

Anyways, I don't wish to argue based on speculation. What I do find interesting is the use of low-energy radiowaves to initiate the reaction. Usually, if you wish to force a reaction, you would resort to something with higher energy such as gamma rays or x-rays.

But what do I know? It's not like I have an advanced degree in chemistry or anything.......or do I?

:naughty: WP

If you read up more on the structure of the water molecule, you will find that, in the liquid state, the three atoms H-O-H do not stay together due to the protonation/deprotonation process (hydrogen atoms are constantly exchanging between water molecules). In essence, the H-O bond is weak. The water molecule, by itself, is highly unstable. What gives water its "strength" is the concept of hydrogen bonding between water molecules.

If you read further about hydrogen bonding, you will find that the strength of this bonding can be influenced, usually by electromagnetic fields or magnetic fields. Long story, but I have never heard of the use of radio-frequencies to weaken the bonds.

It's just a stepping stone folks. It's not like they are wanting to fit this contraption to cars everyone next week. It takes years, or decades to work through a new technology. It may not be self sustaining today, but who knows a few years from now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6vSxR6UKFM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtmK3hwYO6U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4gOS8aoFk

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

Anyways, I don't wish to argue based on speculation. What I do find interesting is the use of low-energy radiowaves to initiate the reaction.

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Speculation isn't really involved, since the science involved is pretty obvious. The water doesn't burn. The water breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen, just like electrolysis. It's the hydrogen that burns.

Your term "initiate the reaction" is interesting. The process doesn't initiate a reaction. The process sustains the action. The statement made in the article was "he discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn." In other words, the molecular breakdown stops when the RF energy stop. There is no initiated reaction anymore than electrolysis initiates a reaction.

Breaking the molecular bonds requires a sustained application of energy, since there is no self sustaining reaction that occurs.

It's sad to see how deeply flimflam can be embedded, to the point that it appears on the surface to be a worthwhile research investment. It may or may not be a newly recognized method of breaking down the hydrogen and oxygen in water. If so, that's interesting. Trying to get funded for water as a "new fuel source" though, is pure flimflam. That it has attracted some newspapers, TV stations and such shows how flimflam can so easily seduce us.

Understood, but I am still interested in the atomic process of breaking O-H bonds using radio-frequencies. My understanding is that this has never been done before. I can see potential applications in the medical field in particular.

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

...If there are chemical bonds (like in water), there is potential chemical energy. We're not breaking any thermodynamic laws here.... we're releasing the energy stored in the chemical bonds. Just like lighting up gasoline.... you don't require massive amounts of energy to do that, do you?...

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OK. Let me try this again.

To "release" the potential energy of a chemical bond, you have to convert the chemical bond into something else with less energy in its chemical bonds. The difference in potential energy between the two configurations is the energy released in the reaction.

For example, the chemical energy in an octane (gasoline) molecule and the appropriate number of O2 molecules required to burn it is much higher than the potential energy of the C02 and H20 molecules which result from that combustion. The conversion from one to the other (combustion) therefore releases energy. The stored energy of the tightly wound octane molecule was originally put there from something alive a long time ago which absorbed sunlight and used it to screw the octane molecule (or some predecessor molecule) together.

The H20 molecule which resulted from that combustion (and any H20 molecule) starts off in a very low energy state. I don't know offhand of anything with a lower potential energy content except maybe ice which exploits the attraction between free water molecules to release some additional energy when water gets cold enough to stick to itself in a lower energy crystalline structure. That's about it (ignoring nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium which this most definitely is NOT).

If you start with H20 which has a low potential energy of chemical bonds and want to end up with H2 and 02 molecules which have much higher potential energies, you have to ADD energy to make up the difference. There is no other way in the same sense that there is no way to get a ball from the bottom of a hill to the top of a hill (on Earth) except to add energy and roll it uphill.

If you do add energy (microwave radiation, or electrolysis, or whatever), you can make H2 and 02, which you can then burn to get some of that energy back (and end up with H20 again). However (First Law of Thermo again...), you will always get less back than you put in in the first place.

On a micro scale, protonation is the process which exploits local irregularities in the energy of water molecules to occasionally strip an electron from the molecule (I thought about one out of every 10-to-the-minus-7 molecules is so ionized in pure water) to form a hydroxyl (OH-) ion and a hydronium (H30+) ion. These ions float around for a while and then recombine to make up 2 H20s again (transferring energy back to the mass of water molecules) for a net energy balance of zero (with slight gain of entropy - 2nd Law of Thermo).

On a macro scale, you can consider the average energy of ionized water molecules as being essentially that of deionized water so the previous model applies. That is sort of like saying it takes energy to roll a ball up a hill whether the hill is smooth (pure water) or bumpy (ionized water).

There are many other minor interactions among water molecules and molecules dissolved therein, (energy transfer of dissolution, or whatever...) and even some quantum effects I think; but none of them change the basic truth of the you can't get something for nothing rule of physics and particularly of thermo.

Ok. Enough with the "getting something for nothing" talk because I never suggested that this process breaks the laws of thermodynamics. :shrug:

What I would like to know is the precise mechanism by which radio-frequencies can be applied to break O-H bonds as well as its influence over the Van der Waal forces.

Like I said, there will be interesting applications in the medical field.

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

Like I said, there will be interesting applications in the medical field.

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That's what he was trying to do, cure cancer. So far, he's had some success in laboratory settings. The whole burning salt water thing was just a pleasant side discovery. Watch the videos I linked to above.

Don't know if this particular discovery is just a interesting effect, or if there is a scam behind it (no such thing as a free lunch or "free energy").

But, we have had a few discussion involving water and free-power on CPF in the last year...:

Very pertinant information fuelles and perpetual power.
Brown's gas
Cars can run on pure WATER-Check it out

Whatever happens with this guy--best bet is to keep your money in your pocket around "burning water" for energy... Some of these "discoveries" have decades of scams (and lost money) behind them.

-Bill

I know it has no current practical use in this thread, but the first law of thermodynamics assumes it is an inviolable doctrine of nature. The law was made up based on observations and theories about energy in the known dimensions of existence.

It will only remain valid until it is broken. There are already interesting discusions on "genic energy" "free energy" & other topics in subquantum kinetics.

LuxLuthor said:

I know it has no current practical use in this thread, but the first law of thermodynamics assumes it is an inviolable doctrine of nature. The law was made up based on observations and theories about energy in the known dimensions of existence.

It will only remain valid until it is broken. There are already interesting discusions on "genic energy" "free energy" & other topics in subquantum kinetics.

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The law of thermodynamics can be broken and is broken frequently at the quantum level via quantum tunneling. The law of thermodynamics is generally a "law" at the classical mechanical level. Even then, many rules of this "law" breaks down if we are dealing with relativistic speeds. This takes you into relativistic thermodynamics which are now theories and not law.

So, Lux is correct that laws can be broken. True scientists should acknowledge these laws, but not blindly follow them.

One of the reasons why I'm interested in the interaction of radio-frequencies with the H-O bonds is that I want to understand the mechanism by which such a low energy electromagnetic wave can break a bond. It might be able to explain certain phenomena in our universe.

WP

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

The law of thermodynamics can be broken and is broken frequently at the quantum level via quantum tunneling...WP

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I thought quantum tunneling was where - at a small scale - potential energy barriers could prove to be leaky. I don't know of unexplained (didn't come from anywhere, disappeared somewhere), enduring energy jumps that occur at the quantum level. That is (if you choose to use an "energy jump" model for quantum tunneling), you might borrow energy for free sometimes, but you have to give it back immediately (and I mean in ZERO time), so that you really never had it at all...

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

...many rules of this "law" breaks down if we are dealing with relativistic speeds...WP

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I'd be interested in hearing an example...

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

...This takes you into relativistic thermodynamics which are now theories and not law...WP

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It's (again) been a while, but I thought quantum thermodynamics was all the complicated math that explained how the laws of thermo still held TRUE in any inertial frame of reference, independent of how fast it was going (sub-light), not the other way around. Is there a loophole now?

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

...So, Lux is correct that laws can be broken. True scientists should acknowledge these laws, but not blindly follow them. WP

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True enough. The "can't get something for nothing" law is pretty deep though. A lot of past history has just been finding ever more subtle ways in which that law has held through many paradigms of physics.

Talking about imponderables, I remember someone (don't know who) once saying that if we ever found a truly free source of energy (say, tapping vacuum energy), we would use it and use it until one day, we'd find out that it hadn't been free after all and that we had thus screwed up some subtle structure in the universe (superstring attraction between adjacent branes in the higher dimensional space or whatever...) by draining all its' energy. That is, perhaps the something for nothing rule was the deepest of all.

Or maybe not. But I'm pretty sure that burning water, sea or otherwise, is an energy consuming activity.

nerdgineer said:

I'd be interested in hearing an example....

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For example, at relativistic speeds closer to the speed of light, the "law" PV=nRT breaks down and needs to be reformulated.

nerdgineer said:

It's (again) been a while, but I thought quantum thermodynamics was all the complicated math that explained how the laws of thermo still held TRUE in any inertial frame of reference, independent of how fast it was going (sub-light), not the other way around. Is there a loophole now?....

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The field of relativistic thermodynamics is very young and not entirely established. That's why there are only theories out there. The problem is that scientists are trying to force the classical laws of thermodynamics to hold true at relativistic speeds, but the only way to do it is to redefine energy. In my mind, this is "scientific cheating" and is the major barrier that prevents these new theories from being upgraded to "law".

But....that said, as work continues in this area, there's nothing stopping them from eventually revising their theories into law....but lots of work is ahead.

nerdgineer said:

That is, perhaps the something for nothing rule was the deepest of all.

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I am also a strong proponent of this for closed systems. But are systems ever truely closed? We have our universe, sure. But is it truely closed if energy is shared among multiple universes? Where does the definition of "closed" end? It works well on paper, but for practical purposes, it's not so easy.

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

For example, at relativistic speeds closer to the speed of light, the "law" PV=nRT breaks down and needs to be reformulated...

Click to expand...

Well, this is certainly interesting, and it may be that it's just you and me reading here, but...

I'm pretty ignorant about the math that goes into relativistic thermodynamics, but it seems to me that it generalizes the interrelationships between energy, heat, mass, temperature and entropy which occur in relativistic conditions. The resulting conservation equations become much more complex since energy and mass can interchange but I do believe that they still conserve. They just conserve a combination of energy/mass/momentum, all of which begin to act squirrely in those conditions.

If you understand the math, you're better than me; and if you think that math allows violation of relativistic conservation, then you'll have to explain it to me.....

As for burning seawater with microwaves to gain energy, I take comfort in Einstein's (?) relativistic postulate, that:

"all laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames"

so that classical conservation of energy still applies to those microwave guys since none of us is moving much faster than 1000 mph relative to each other (and even though we are in a rotating reference system...).

I also like the short form version of both classical and relativistic thermo someone once wrote down:

Rule 1 (conservation of energy): You can't win.

Rule 2 (increase of entropy): You can't break even.

Rule 3 (unattainability of absolute zero): And you can't get out of the game.

...which work for me.

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

...The field of relativistic thermodynamics is very young and not entirely established....The problem is that scientists are trying to force the classical laws of thermodynamics to hold true at relativistic speeds, but the only way to do it is to redefine energy. In my mind, this is "scientific cheating"...

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I'm not sure what you mean by "redefine energy". If by that you mean the equivalency of energy and matter at relativistic speeds (by Einstein's good old E=mc2), that's a pretty well established fact (why the atom bomb and sun both work) and far from scientific "cheating". If you mean something else, well then that's over my head...

WAVE_PARTICLE said:

...I am also a strong proponent of this for closed systems. But are systems ever truely closed? We have our universe, sure. But is it truely closed if energy is shared among multiple universes? Where does the definition of "closed" end? It works well on paper, but for practical purposes, it's not so easy.

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Multiverses, branes, and interactions among them which create the quantum foam are (to me) waayyy speculative. They might be true, but ideas like that always float out there, just beyond the reach of my light...

However, as an engineer, closure is a necessity to establish the context for a problem, without which meaningful solutions (and conversations) are hard to have. Getting something for nothing by tapping energy from a truly infinite source (e.g. from transfinite aleph null 2 multiverses) requires that there be a true physical manifestation of such an infinity in our physical universe (the Big one). While mathematicians and poets speak of infinities often, actually encountering such a thing in the flesh would be, I think literally, overwhelming. We would see ourselves as small, indeed...

Anyway, enough philosophizing. This has been fun but it's getting late - so ...:sleepy:...and have a good evening...