Burn Salt Water for Fuel?

[Dardedar]

They can't make this stuff up when it's not April 1st right?

***
Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water

By David Templeton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Tue, 11 Sep 2007, 11:41AM

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."

[Savonarola]

They can't make this stuff up when it's not April 1st right?

***
Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water

They can and they do.

If they start with salt and water, and they end with salt and water (they claim the H2O splits into H2 and O2, which then burn to produce H2O), then the only energy they can get out according to the first law of thermodynamics is exactly what they put in. Of course, the second law says that they can't get out as much as they put in... ("You can't win, you can't break even...")

Unless there's some change in the salts that they're not telling us about -- and frankly, I don't know what possibly could be happening -- I'm not believing this for a second.

[Dardedar]

SAV
If they start with salt and water, and they end with salt and water (they claim the H2O splits into H2 and O2, which then burn to produce H2O), then the only energy they can get out according to the first law of thermodynamics is exactly what they put in.

DAR
I thought they were claiming a better way to release and burn the hydrogen:

"...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."

Isn't the only question (besides pure lying) whether they use up more energy creating the radio frequencies than they get out of the hydrogen?

D.

[Savonarola]

I thought they were claiming a better way to release and burn the hydrogen:

It's extremely unclear what they actually mean, as is typical of pseudoscience. The only of major "elements that make up salt water" that contains hydrogen is water, so the hydrogen has to come from the water.

Isn't the only question (besides pure lying) whether they use up more energy creating the radio frequencies than they get out of the hydrogen?

Even if the radio waves were free, the laws of thermodynamics kick this thing's ass. Think of it this way: You're starting with water, which has x amount of energy. You're ending with water which still has x amount of energy. Net gain (ignoring loss due to inefficiency): x - x = 0.

[Dardedar]

DAR
Well that must be some pretty powerful salt then.

But wait, if the radio waves were free, it would certainly be a great deal. Salt water is plentiful and cheap (to say the least) and we are about to have more of it than we want. Extracting hydrogen from water is expensive right now (uses more energy than you can get from the hydrogen), especially when made from water. If this is a new more efficient way of extracting hydrogen from water then it should be a very big deal. What makes me skeptical of this claim is the idea that someone wouldn't have tried this before.

[Doug]

Even if the radio waves were free, the laws of thermodynamics kick this thing's ass. Think of it this way: You're starting with water, which has x amount of energy. You're ending with water which still has x amount of energy. Net gain (ignoring loss due to inefficiency): x - x = 0.

DOUG
I don't know if this report is accurate or true, and since the cold fusion scandal we have to take this with a radio-waved grain of salt, but we can at least say this:

a. From the short report, I am not clear that the end up with the same amount of water. I would suppose that they have less water than what they started with, in which case the laws of thermodynamics would not have a problem with this process.
b. You are adding energy from the radio waves, although not much.

[ChristianLoeschel]

Heres some food for thought.

When adding energy to a molecule, the molecule can absorb this energy and go from its ground state to an excited state, which is higher in energy. This excited state wants to relax back to the ground state and it has a few ways of doing that. Most commonly, the molecule will give off a photon (i.e. it glows). If it does this immediately, its called luminescence, if there is a slow energy transition involved, its phosphorescence. Another very common way to relax is to give off heat.

If this molecule cant readily relax (such as in the case of phosphorescence), the excited state is a bit more long lived. The bonds in an excited state are weakened, making it plausible that they could be burning it. Now the equation actually looks like this (given the amount of water doesnt change):

Water + energy (vibration) -----> Water* -------> Water + energy (heat)

The star stands for excited.
So yes, theoretically, burning water is possible to generate heat. At best though, we are converting vibrational energy from the sound to heat. Probably fairly inefficiently. But as Sav pointed out, as long as the amount of water doesnt change, no energy is actually generated.

I have more to post on this, but Im out of time, so Ill be back with more.

[Dardedar]

More here:

***
Salt water fuel gets major university review

Excerpt:

For months, Channel 3 reporter, Mike O'Mara has been getting emails from around the world claiming there must be some kind of trick involved. Many thought the flame erupting over the test tube was a hoax.

Professor Emeritus, Rustum Roy, at the Penn State University Materials Lab is a leading expert on the science of water. He was impressed by the discovery but wanted to see it for himself.

On September 6th, lab assistants wheeled the Kanzius RF invention down the hallways at PSU into a large laboratory on the first floor.

The Material Science faculty exposed more than 50 different water combinations to the radio frequency to see the reaction.

"This is the biggest discovery in 100 years in water research" exclaimed Professor Roy.

Scientists at Penn State University believe the frequency used in the Kanzius machine is releasing atomic hydrogen molecules from the salt water by weakening the bonds holding the sodium chloride, oxygen and hydrogen together. That's why the flame is so incredibly hot.

PSU research associate,Tania Slawecki said,"I think this is an excellent breakthrough. The steam engine wasn't invented because thermodynamics existed. The steam engine was invented and then thermodynamics came along. We've got lots more to discover about this invention, too."

However, many engineering experts aren't as impressed. Energy experts like University of Akron Professor Emeritus, Rudy Scavuzzo, Ph.D, say the burning of salt water is nothing more than a new twist on a high school science experiment.

Scavuzzo told Channel 3's Mike O'Mara that the Kanzius invention requires too much energy to be worth celebrating.

"There is no breakthrough", said Professor Scavuzzo, "Because there are more efficient ways of breaking water down to hydrogen and oxygen."

Scavuzzo's son, Steven, a technical consultant for Babcock & Wilcox, said that salt water is not a fuel.

"You can make steam or you can break it down," said Scavuzzo. "One way or another you have to add energy and one way or another, what's going to come out is less than what you put in."

However, at PSU, Professor Roy wants the critics to reserve judgment until more research is done with the device.

"Certainly it needs investigation and certainly we ought to look at the question of how efficient it is", said Roy. "Because that will determine how much John Kanzius shakes up the world. He has shaken up the scientific world already. But this will determine how much he shakes it up."

LINK

See a little news station video bit on it here:

http://www.glumbert.com/media/saltwater

[Savonarola]

But wait, if the radio waves were free, it would certainly be a great deal.

Any "free" energy is a great deal. So let's simplify this immensely: Which has more energy: (a) the free, initial radio waves, or (b) any amount of energy that comes indirectly from those radio waves? The second law of thermodynamics says that no process is 100% efficient, and because our products are the same as our reactants (and therefore no energy can possibly come from the alleged chemical changes), the answer is (a). Why go to all this trouble to lose energy?

a. From the short report, I am not clear that the end up with the same amount of water. I would suppose that they have less water than what they started with, in which case the laws of thermodynamics would not have a problem with this process.

Seems to me the laws of thermodynamics certainly would have a problem with this. The first one says that matter can be neither created nor destroyed. If there is a net loss of water, where did it go? (Burning hydrogen produces water: 2H2 + O2 --> 2H2O)

b. You are adding energy from the radio waves, although not much.

So you're getting out a maximum of (x - x =) 0 + E, where E is the energy of the radio waves. But you started with E, and the second law says you'll lose energy in any procedure, so you get out some value less than E.

Scientists at Penn State University believe the frequency used in the Kanzius machine is releasing atomic hydrogen molecules from the salt water by weakening the bonds holding the sodium chloride, oxygen and hydrogen together. That's why the flame is so incredibly hot.

First, atomic hydrogen is hard to produce. Get two atoms of hydrogen near each other, and they'll bond spontaneously.
Second, salt water doesn't contain sodium chloride, it contains sodium ions and chloride ions that are not bonded to each other.
Third, the bonds that "hold" the [ions] to the water molecules are weak bonds; breaking them doesn't produce much energy.
Fourth, the only bonds with any substance to them (energy-wise) here are the bonds between the atoms in a water molecule, which allegedly are re-formed when the hydrogen burns. Unless there is some chemical change in the ions that has gone unmentioned, there is no net gain in energy.


Here's a silly riddle/analogy (that I've made up just for this). Suppose you -- starting from point A -- travel around the world. You end at point A. In relation to where you started, how far have you traveled?

Answer: you haven't gone anywhere. The difference between your finishing point and your starting point is 0. The universe doesn't owe you anything: It's not the universe's fault that you spent so much energy going nowhere.

[Dardedar]

Bob Park chimes in:

***
WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 14 Sep 07 Washington, DC

1. WARNING! TURN OFF THE RADAR BEFORE THE OCEAN IGNITES.
All week long I’ve been getting URLs, for which I’m grateful, about
some
guy in Erie, PA who discovered a way to burn salt water. It’s an AP
story, but the warning signs are all there: Described as a "cancer
researcher," the protagonist built an RF generator with the idea of
killing cancers by heating metallic nanoparticles injected into the
cancer. I guarantee that it’s possible to kill cancers with RF,
along with the host. Anyway, he’s not exactly a cancer researcher, he’s
a retired TV station engineer who discovered that retirement sucks - but
that’s been discovered before. He then decided to see if his RF
generator would desalinate water, but when he tried the water
caught on fire. He needed a scientist. Instead, he found Rustum Roy,
an emeritus chemistry professor at Penn State, who called it "the most
remarkable discovery in water science in 100 years." That would include "polywater,"
which Roy fell for 40 years
ago. Roy said that RF weakens chemical bonds, releasing hydrogen which
burns. It’s the Bush "hydrogen initiative" fallacy again
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN03/wn013103.html . Must I now lecture a
chemistry professor on thermodynamics? More energy is needed to free hydrogen
than you get by
burning it. The story was shunned by major news outlets, except, of course,
Fox News, which did point out that Rustum Roy is also "a specialist in
holistic medicine and Christian sexuality."