Thoughts on Global Warming: Man Converts Salt Water To Energy For Cars

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Man Converts Salt Water To Energy For Cars

Now this is pretty cool:

7 comments:

Gregory said...: Sounds great on the surface. But. What if some evil genius figures out how to create a hydrogen bomb using the concepts of critical mass and the radio frequency is published. Big Bang that I don't particularly want to be around for. Needs closer scrutiny than any Nuclear Power Plant. And by the way don't they use salt water in nuclear power plants? At least I know that there are two separate water systems in Nuclear plants dirty water and cooling water. Call me crazy but this scares the S--- out of me.; July 8, 2007 at 5:21 PM
Anonymous said...: Where do I start?

- the clip mentions the microwve generator once; then mentions FALSELY "just salt water for fuel" a dozen times.
- NO MENTION of the amount of evergy required to generate a little flame.
- "intense flame"?; "1500 degrees C"? Well how hot do you think an ordinary flame is? JUST THAT!

Pure bunk if you just think critically.; August 20, 2007 at 8:37 PM
Anonymous said...: This is amazing! Good work America!; September 12, 2007 at 1:37 PM
Anonymous said...: The headline above the video says:

"Man Converts Salt Water To Energy For Cars"
"Now this is pretty cool: "

So far, cool is egg-zackly what it is.
I don't wish to be a nay-sayer, but I'm skeptical ...

Nowhere in any of those videos do we hear information about how much electricity it was taking to produce a small hydrogen flame at the mouth of a test tube. They could easily have been beaming a few KW of RF at that salt water. How many KW of electricity does it take to provide an RF beam that can tear apart the covalent bonds in that test tube of salt water?

In the demonstrations in the video, the hydrogen flame produced is really only a conversion product of electricity - it isn't really 'fuel' at all. At best, the original fuel may have been some wind powered or photovoltaic electricity.

How does the ultimate efficiency of that conversion compare to wrapping some nichrome wire around the heat exchanger of that little Sterling engine and using the electricity to heat it directly? Or using the electricity directly in hydrolysis to make hydrogen and oxygen, and burning those to run the Sterling engine?

I hope I'm wrong ... but I'm guessing that standard hydrolysis would beat the demonstrated RF conversion to hydrogen and oxygen every time - even after a lot of refinement of the process.

To use this technology for cars, as the headline of the video sets forth, this whole process would have to be made portable. The electricity to produce the RF would have to be on board the vehicle. By comparison, hydrolysis converts water into separated streams of hydrogen and oxygen - a truly portable primary fuel. So I'm guessing that, if this technology has any application, it will be for stationary purposes rather than for vehicles. De-salination of water with some co-generation to use the 'waste' heat, such as pumping the salt water to be desalinated, might be a candidate.

Now, as a science experiment ... it's *very cool*.

Roger; December 1, 2007 at 10:43 PM
Anonymous said...: So I understand that you can’t break the laws of thermodynamics to get a wash on energy produced versus energy expended. But perhaps someone with a better grasp on engineering can quell my curiosity. Who cares if you have to expend more energy to burn the fuel if it is renewable energy you are expending. For example: I noted that John Kanzius’ rf machine needed about 200 watts to generate the radio frequency that would cause the saltwater to separate the H and O2 molecules and to ignite the H. So if you were to apply this to a vehicle for instance. A wind turbine can generate 200 watts at 8 meters per second or perhaps less. Why couldn’t you rig up a scoop and turbine in a vehicle designed to generate the same and augment it with solar cells on the roof and perhaps Lithium ion or other batteries to store excess energy? With this combination or other more innovative ideas, it wouldn’t matter if you were using more energy to create the H burn would you? You would have a constant fuel supply as long as you were generating 200 watts of power capable of running the RF machine. Please respond.; April 22, 2008 at 12:36 AM
Simmons said...: I think you're right, anonymous. It's like with electric cars: right now they arent' so beneficial, but if our entire grid was powered by wind and solar, they would be (nearly) emissions free.; April 22, 2008 at 6:44 AM
Simmons said...: I think you're right, anonymous. It's like with electric cars: right now they arent' so beneficial, but if our entire grid was powered by wind and solar, they would be (nearly) emissions free.; April 22, 2008 at 6:44 AM

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