Topic: we can burn salt water now! (Read 1911 times)

pickled kitten · « **on:** September 12, 2007, 08:50:18 AM »

Quote

ERIE, Pa. - An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the "most remarkable" water science discovery in a century.

John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.

The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations.

The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said.

The discovery is "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years," Roy said.

"This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywhere," Roy said. "Seeing it burn gives me the chills."

Roy will meet this week with officials from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to try to obtain research funding.

The scientists want to find out whether the energy output from the burning hydrogen — which reached a heat of more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — would be enough to power a car or other heavy machinery.

"We will get our ideas together and check this out and see where it leads," Roy said. "The potential is huge."

Well....there goes our oceans!

Seriously, this has the potential to be a really really great energy source provided the energy used to do this doesn't out weight the energy produced.

BizB · « **Reply #1 on:** September 12, 2007, 09:09:45 AM »

I heard something about this yesterday. I'm in awe. To think that after all this time that research has been done on radio frequencies and on water, that it wasn't until 2007 that someone put the two together in such a way.

Now, if you have salt water and you release and burn the hydrogen, your waste would be NaClO. The O would presumably remain in a gaseous form and be released into the atmosphere. The NaCl would have to be dealt with, though... right?

I can see how the auto industry could actually accept and adopt this technology because we all know that it is road salt that causes our cars to rust. The more salt there is, the faster our cars rust out. The faster our cars rust out, the more often we'll have to buy them!

If only we could convince seagulls to eat the salt off the roads left behind our saltwater cars.

Paladin · « **Reply #2 on:** September 12, 2007, 11:41:26 AM »

Well, it's been a long time since my last chemistry lesson, but still:

Water can not burn (no matter how salty it is). What it can do is decompose into hydrogen and oxygen. Then the hydrogen can re-combine with the oxygen (burn) creating back water.
No matter how you separate the water in the first place (by high temperature, radio waves or voodoo), you always end up putting more energy in that than you can get from burning the H. If not, then you just created a perpetuum mobile that violates the first principle of thermodynamics (or is it the 2-nd?). So you can't get energy from that.

Maybe he found a new way to separate water, and that would be good, or maybe he's just another crackpot presented as a real scientist by reporters that think creationism is a science.
Couldn't find anything serious on google about that so i'm leaning towards the latter.

BizB · « **Reply #3 on:** September 12, 2007, 01:30:15 PM »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kKtKSEQBeI

Very cool.

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Author Topic: we can burn salt water now! (Read 1911 times)

pickled kitten

we can burn salt water now!

BizB

Re: we can burn salt water now!

Paladin

Re: we can burn salt water now!

BizB

Re: we can burn salt water now!