Yeah, but they forget to mention the gold nanoparticles after they mention it first... gold is quite expensive though gold nanoparticles are quite easy to make the engine is unfeasible...
Salt residue left over in the engine will render it useless and the engine will have to be cleaned out very regularly (not to mention corrosion). I also doubt that the reaction would occur fast enough to power conventional piston-based engines.
In our lab we use a conventional (house) microwave to heat up a lithium compound to 900+ within 6 seconds, unfortunately i couldn't see how fast his reaction proceeded to get to 1400 degrees... but that kind of heat sounds too hot for engine temperatures to me... need an engineer to be certain though.
The chemistry sounds like basic water splitting. The gold obviously becomes a site for electrolysis with the microwaves acting as weakening agents by vibrating the H bonds and thus the hydrogen and oxygen recombine higher up.
You'd be better off storing pure H2 in your car than storing a vat of water or salt water... the energy density of water isn't that great.
This is completely stupid. Totally dumb. He's using radio waves to split hydrogen from water, and then burning the hydrogen again. It's a net loss of power, absolutely guaranteed.
If there was useful chemical energy in saltwater, by now something would have evolved to extract that energy by turning it into something else, a waste product.
Couldn't this could still be useful for converting seawater to pure water? Particularly if you have an extremely reflective chamber and recapture some of the energy from burning. Also, what happens to the radio waves once they're absorbed? Are they re-emitted at the same frequency? That would help.
Couldn't this could still be useful for converting seawater to pure water? Particularly if you have an extremely reflective chamber and recapture some of the energy from burning. Also, what happens to the radio waves once they're absorbed? Are they re-emitted at the same frequency? That would help.
It'd be simpler and smarter to just use solar or wind power to do this.... just using electrodes within the water...
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The gold is only for the cancer stuff not the engine.
The reaction looked instant to me in the video.
Hmmm. I don't think radiowaves split water. They can heat it up and evapourate (eventually) it but nothing that would get to 1400 C.... otherwise it wouldn't be safe for humans to put their bodies in front of the machine...
[edit] Yeah, in fact in the video you see him add the gold nanoparticles to the salt solution before it catches fire...
Oh and both his inventions are stupid. The cancer invention will work effectively.. but will also give the patient burns inside their body.... Most cancers are in delicate areas that probably wouldn't react well to being burnt...
Malor wrote:
Possibly. It may also be a fairly efficient way to split hydrogen for fuel cells. But it's not an unlimited power source.
Nothing is an unlimited power source - especially when talking about on-board solutions. The only thing i can see that this might have going for it is that the energy cost to producing the radiowaves is much smaller than actually electrolysing the water from a battery - thus providing longevity for a vehicle.... the only problem is that i can't see it working in an engine.
Lester_King wrote:
They certainly couldn't charge me much for salt water, Ed. There's an ocean of it next to my house.
Ah, yes... but the problem with that is that the water source must be clean. You see the guy mixing table salt with water - i'd bet that the water has been filtered or is deionised before the addition. Any impurities (like silt) would likely mess up the reaction chamber or absorb the radiowaves - so you couldn't just go to the beach and get some sea water.... unfortunately.
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Nothing is an unlimited power source - especially when talking about on-board solutions. The only thing i can see that this might have going for it is that the energy cost to producing the radiowaves is much smaller than actually electrolysing the water from a battery
Either I'm confused, or you know somehing I don't. Why would you electrolyze water *from a battery* to get hydrogen? You'll spend more energy than you get, so your 'battery' won't work... it wouldn't be a net store of energy, and thus not a battery. You have to expend the energy ahead of time, storing it as hydrogen for use later. Right?
It seems possible that this might be a more efficient way of splitting hydrogen than the standard electrolysis, which would be good. But it's not going to be a WILD difference, probably just a few total percent. It might also, potentially, be cheaper to build, run, or maintain the machines, which would mean less overhead, which is an indirect efficiency improvement. Without any knowledge of that field, though, I have no way to know.
Nothing is an unlimited power source - especially when talking about on-board solutions. The only thing i can see that this might have going for it is that the energy cost to producing the radiowaves is much smaller than actually electrolysing the water from a battery
Either I'm confused, or you know somehing I don't. Why would you electrolyze water *from a battery* to get hydrogen? You'll spend more energy than you get, so your 'battery' won't work... it wouldn't be a net store of energy, and thus not a battery. You have to expend the energy ahead of time, storing it as hydrogen for use later. Right?
Well, i'd never have water as an onboard energy storage medium anyway - it's not dense enough to meet the DOJ or any motorist's expectations. I was talking in a completely theoretical sense - talking the logical progression of the idea...
Unless you had a hugely efficient onboard solar array, a battery is the only other way to get hydrogen from water. I'm not sure about the energies involved here but i think that electrolysing water from a battery using materials that reduce the dissociation potential (like the gold nanoparticles in this example) would be more efficient than just having a battery power an electric motor. Of course you'd have to remove and clean the electrodes every now and again.... though probably this wouldn't be much of a problem... returning them to a usable condition might be quite energy intensive though.
The whole video never talks about storing hydrogen and his whole invention is based around direct power from a radio-emitter to dissociate hydrogen from oxygen... something that if you're going to do ahead of time would be better suited to windfarms and solar arrays - like i mentioned in my last post.
Quote:
It seems possible that this might be a more efficient way of splitting hydrogen than the standard electrolysis, which would be good. But it's not going to be a WILD difference, probably just a few total percent. It might also, potentially, be cheaper to build, run, or maintain the machines, which would mean less overhead, which is an indirect efficiency improvement. Without any knowledge of that field, though, I have no way to know.
Radiowaves can be very low energy... but what i didn't pick up from the video is that he's using very high energy radio waves
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While the phenomenon is interesting, it is not yet practical for energy generation. More energy is consumed by the radio frequency device than is produced for burning.
In total this mechanism seems to be ultimately useless. There are better ways of performing this function...
Well, i'd never have water as an onboard energy storage medium anyway - it's not dense enough to meet the DOJ or any motorist's expectations.
That's true, but probably not for the reason you think. Water is very stable and has almost no chemical energy at all; its energy density is quite close to zero. (I want to say 'zero useful energy', but I'm not certain enough of my chemistry to make that claim. 'Extremely low energy' should be safe.) You can use it to store thermal energy, and in theory the constituent parts could be used to drive a fusion reactor, but for chemical energy? Nothing there. It has to be split to be used, meaning the power is coming from elsewhere, not the water.
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I'm not sure about the energies involved here but i think that electrolysing water from a battery using materials that reduce the dissociation potential (like the gold nanoparticles in this example) would be more efficient than just having a battery power an electric motor.
Oh, okay, I get it now. I rather doubt that would be more efficient. With a battery driving an electric motor, you have the resistance in the wires and the resistance in the motor. Everything else is turned into forward momentum. (and some can be regained on stopping.)
With the electrolysis approach, you'd use the battery to split hydrogen, which will lose a good chunk of power, at least 40%. Then you have the burn the hydrogen, turning it into heat... not 100% efficient, but close. Finally, you have to then use the heat to power your wheels, which is a terribly inefficient process. I don't remember the exact efficiencies offhand, but I think you'd probably lose around 60% of your heat energy.
I think you'd end up with, at the wheels, 40% of 60% of your original power... about 24% efficiency. I think you'd probably be close to 70% with direct-drive electric and regenerative braking.
That's true, but probably not for the reason you think. Water is very stable and has almost no chemical energy at all; its energy density is quite close to zero. (I want to say 'zero useful energy', but I'm not certain enough of my chemistry to make that claim. 'Extremely low energy' should be safe.) You can use it to store thermal energy, and in theory the constituent parts could be used to drive a fusion reactor, but for chemical energy? Nothing there. It has to be split to be used, meaning the power is coming from elsewhere, not the water.
Actually i was talking about potentially usable energy - i.e the volumetric and gravimetric quantities of hydrogen stored within water in comparison with a hydride, bottled or liquid H2. I'm pretty sure that water has the lowest gravimetric and volumetric of all four.
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Oh, okay, I get it now. I rather doubt that would be more efficient. With a battery driving an electric motor, you have the resistance in the wires and the resistance in the motor. Everything else is turned into forward momentum. (and some can be regained on stopping.)
With the electrolysis approach, you'd use the battery to split hydrogen, which will lose a good chunk of power, at least 40%. Then you have the burn the hydrogen, turning it into heat... not 100% efficient, but close. Finally, you have to then use the heat to power your wheels, which is a terribly inefficient process. I don't remember the exact efficiencies offhand, but I think you'd probably lose around 60% of your heat energy.
I think you'd end up with, at the wheels, 40% of 60% of your original power... about 24% efficiency. I think you'd probably be close to 70% with direct-drive electric and regenerative braking.
Well, again, i'm not sure on this but i reckon that for the amount of energy you had in a battery (combined with the proper catalyst on the electrodes) you could generate more hydrogen - used in a fuel cell rather than burning - to produce more energy than was stored in the battery to begin with. You could still use the braking/dynamo to recharge the battery and provide more lifetime from it...or use that energy to electrolyse the water instead of the battery doing so.
Actually i was talking about potentially usable energy - i.e the volumetric and gravimetric quantities of hydrogen stored within water in comparison with a hydride, bottled or liquid H2. I'm pretty sure that water has the lowest gravimetric and volumetric of all four.
I have no way to know whether or not this is true, but because it's not in useful form, I'm not sure it matters. You still need the energy to split the water into hydrogen; it's not available without a big energy input. And then you can extract the energy again by burning it, which gives you water again, and you can then resplit it. You wouldn't actually need very much water, since it's transferring energy, not generating it.
But every time you convert energy from one form to another, you waste a lot of it, and your process involves two unnecessary conversions. Why not just use the energy source, whatever it might be, to drive the wheels directly?
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Well, again, i'm not sure on this but i reckon that for the amount of energy you had in a battery (combined with the proper catalyst on the electrodes) you could generate more hydrogen - used in a fuel cell rather than burning - to produce more energy than was stored in the battery to begin with.
Energy doesn't come from nowhere. You can't, can't, can't get more energy out of a battery than what you stored in it initially; in fact, you can't ever get as much. TANSTAAFL. If you think you can, then you either missed an energy input somewhere (chemical energy, perhaps), or you've invented the world's first perpetual motion machine, and you will soon be wealthy beyond imagination.... as would we all, shortly thereafter.
I wouldn't suggest placing many bets on the perpetual motion thing; there appears to be no rule more fundamental in the universe.
Energy doesn't come from nowhere. You can't, can't, can't get more energy out of a battery than what you stored in it initially; in fact, you can't ever get as much. TANSTAAFL. If you think you can, then you either missed an energy input somewhere (chemical energy, perhaps), or you've invented the world's first perpetual motion machine, and you will soon be wealthy beyond imagination.... as would we all, shortly thereafter.
I wouldn't suggest placing many bets on the perpetual motion thing; there appears to be no rule more fundamental in the universe.
Yes, the energy doesn't come from nowhere. I did pass my A level physics and chemistry .
The energy comes from the compound on the electrode. In fact, for a year or so there has been a couple of papers from one group in america that have stumbled upon a room temperature water splitting compound that will obviously degrade over time and have to be replaced. There will and probably are known compounds such as Pd-alloys that could be used as electrodes and thus add "more" to the energy equation.
Ah, okay, so the water in this case is just intermediate, the actual energy is stored in the other chemicals in the battery.
Yeah, that could work; it might indeed be better than hydrogen, which isn't very energy-dense and which most people won't like. Given sufficient energy density, it could overcome the inefficiency problem, but it would need to carry a great deal more power than the present technologies to be workable.
Ah, okay, so the water in this case is just intermediate, the actual energy is stored in the other chemicals in the battery.
Yeah, that could work; it might indeed be better than hydrogen, which isn't very energy-dense and which most people won't like. Given sufficient energy density, it could overcome the inefficiency problem, but it would need to carry a great deal more power than the present technologies to be workable.
Huh? No, i think you've gotten confused. You're still using hydrogen - but in a non-flammable chemical reaction over a membrane. You generate hydrogen from the water by using a small amount of electricity (through electrodes situated in the water) to accelerate the dissociation process that would naturally occur over the electrode material. You could also run this like a hybrid - with the battery providing some power directly to the electric engine - like for starting up.
They certainly couldn't charge me much for salt water, Ed. There's an ocean of it next to my house.
Ah, yes... but the problem with that is that the water source must be clean. You see the guy mixing table salt with water - i'd bet that the water has been filtered or is deionised before the addition. Any impurities (like silt) would likely mess up the reaction chamber or absorb the radiowaves - so you couldn't just go to the beach and get some sea water.... unfortunately.
Duoae, There's another video I saw where he goes to the lagoon behind his house, pulls up a glass of seawater -probably brackish, really- and puts it in a testtube and then straight into the machine.
But it would have to be filtered for a production machine probably, but considering that this probably won't ever be a positive energy source, filtering the water is the least of concerns.
Duoae, There's another video I saw where he goes to the lagoon behind his house, pulls up a glass of seawater -probably brackish, really- and puts it in a testtube and then straight into the machine.
But it would have to be filtered for a production machine probably, but considering that this probably won't ever be a positive energy source, filtering the water is the least of concerns.
Yeah, but the problem is that you'd get contamination if you used the same vessel, time and time again. They wouldn't use test tubes in commercial "engines".
Huh? No, i think you've gotten confused. You're still using hydrogen - but in a non-flammable chemical reaction over a membrane. You generate hydrogen from the water by using a small amount of electricity (through electrodes situated in the water) to accelerate the dissociation process that would naturally occur over the electrode material. You could also run this like a hybrid - with the battery providing some power directly to the electric engine - like for starting up.
I keep reading this as you thinking that energy is getting made for free somehow. Water does not store chemical energy. Hydrogen will NOT naturally just split out of a water molecule. Won't happen. Water is a stable molecule. It takes energy input to cause the hydrogen to split, and then you get back LESS energy by recombining the hydrogen with oxygen to make water again. You get it as heat, which can then be inefficiently transformed into mechanical motion.
The energy to split the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. And if you have that energy available, it's probably going to be best used to drive the wheels directly, unless it's in some kind of very dense chemical form that can split hydrogen from the water. If it's very dense, the split/burn process would give you range, but at the cost of efficiency. The cost per mile would be far higher.
We're getting into an age when we will have to actually pay for all the energy we use, and an inefficient process like that won't fly unless there's no other option.
Malor... i'm doing a PhD in Hydrogen Storage. I did a MSci in Chemistry. What i'm saying is correct. Trust me. You don't need to tell me about having to put in energy or that we'll have to "pay" for energy when oil and gas run out.
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Like i said, there are compounds (alloys in fact) that will split water at room temperature. They get contaminated, sure but they work and then have to be replaced. You can accelerate this process by heating the system up.... and probably (if not for the same compound) you can also accelerate it by putting more energy into the system - i.e. electricity.
And trust me, getting the energy from recombination of H2 and O2 doesn't have to be through burning. This is what i said before. Apart from the fact that H2 combustion is more efficient than with oil or gas, you can also use (usually) a Pd membrane that allows H2 to pass through it. The process still produces heat - which can also be collected to help heat a vehicle or help produce more H2 from the H2 store (preferably solid-state storage) - but is more efficient (AFAIK) than burning it.
This seems to be quite good at explaining what i mean.
Yeah, but they forget to mention the gold nanoparticles after they mention it first... gold is quite expensive though gold nanoparticles are quite easy to make the engine is unfeasible...
Salt residue left over in the engine will render it useless and the engine will have to be cleaned out very regularly (not to mention corrosion). I also doubt that the reaction would occur fast enough to power conventional piston-based engines.
In our lab we use a conventional (house) microwave to heat up a lithium compound to 900+ within 6 seconds, unfortunately i couldn't see how fast his reaction proceeded to get to 1400 degrees... but that kind of heat sounds too hot for engine temperatures to me... need an engineer to be certain though.
The chemistry sounds like basic water splitting. The gold obviously becomes a site for electrolysis with the microwaves acting as weakening agents by vibrating the H bonds and thus the hydrogen and oxygen recombine higher up.
You'd be better off storing pure H2 in your car than storing a vat of water or salt water... the energy density of water isn't that great.
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The gold is only for the cancer stuff not the engine.
The reaction looked instant to me in the video.
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This is completely stupid. Totally dumb. He's using radio waves to split hydrogen from water, and then burning the hydrogen again. It's a net loss of power, absolutely guaranteed.
If there was useful chemical energy in saltwater, by now something would have evolved to extract that energy by turning it into something else, a waste product.
This is typical crap science reporting.
Couldn't this could still be useful for converting seawater to pure water? Particularly if you have an extremely reflective chamber and recapture some of the energy from burning. Also, what happens to the radio waves once they're absorbed? Are they re-emitted at the same frequency? That would help.
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Possibly. It may also be a fairly efficient way to split hydrogen for fuel cells. But it's not an unlimited power source.
The radio waves are absorbed and converted into the power necessary to split the water molecules, I suspect.
They certainly couldn't charge me much for salt water, Ed. There's an ocean of it next to my house.
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It'd be simpler and smarter to just use solar or wind power to do this.... just using electrodes within the water...
Hmmm. I don't think radiowaves split water. They can heat it up and evapourate (eventually) it but nothing that would get to 1400 C.... otherwise it wouldn't be safe for humans to put their bodies in front of the machine...
[edit] Yeah, in fact in the video you see him add the gold nanoparticles to the salt solution before it catches fire...
Oh and both his inventions are stupid. The cancer invention will work effectively.. but will also give the patient burns inside their body.... Most cancers are in delicate areas that probably wouldn't react well to being burnt...
Nothing is an unlimited power source - especially when talking about on-board solutions. The only thing i can see that this might have going for it is that the energy cost to producing the radiowaves is much smaller than actually electrolysing the water from a battery - thus providing longevity for a vehicle.... the only problem is that i can't see it working in an engine.
Ah, yes... but the problem with that is that the water source must be clean. You see the guy mixing table salt with water - i'd bet that the water has been filtered or is deionised before the addition. Any impurities (like silt) would likely mess up the reaction chamber or absorb the radiowaves - so you couldn't just go to the beach and get some sea water.... unfortunately.
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They don't use radiation therapy on cancer victims already?
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Either I'm confused, or you know somehing I don't. Why would you electrolyze water *from a battery* to get hydrogen? You'll spend more energy than you get, so your 'battery' won't work... it wouldn't be a net store of energy, and thus not a battery. You have to expend the energy ahead of time, storing it as hydrogen for use later. Right?
It seems possible that this might be a more efficient way of splitting hydrogen than the standard electrolysis, which would be good. But it's not going to be a WILD difference, probably just a few total percent. It might also, potentially, be cheaper to build, run, or maintain the machines, which would mean less overhead, which is an indirect efficiency improvement. Without any knowledge of that field, though, I have no way to know.
Well, i'd never have water as an onboard energy storage medium anyway - it's not dense enough to meet the DOJ or any motorist's expectations. I was talking in a completely theoretical sense - talking the logical progression of the idea...
Unless you had a hugely efficient onboard solar array, a battery is the only other way to get hydrogen from water. I'm not sure about the energies involved here but i think that electrolysing water from a battery using materials that reduce the dissociation potential (like the gold nanoparticles in this example) would be more efficient than just having a battery power an electric motor. Of course you'd have to remove and clean the electrodes every now and again.... though probably this wouldn't be much of a problem... returning them to a usable condition might be quite energy intensive though.
The whole video never talks about storing hydrogen and his whole invention is based around direct power from a radio-emitter to dissociate hydrogen from oxygen... something that if you're going to do ahead of time would be better suited to windfarms and solar arrays - like i mentioned in my last post.
Radiowaves can be very low energy... but what i didn't pick up from the video is that he's using very high energy radio waves
In total this mechanism seems to be ultimately useless. There are better ways of performing this function...
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That's true, but probably not for the reason you think. Water is very stable and has almost no chemical energy at all; its energy density is quite close to zero. (I want to say 'zero useful energy', but I'm not certain enough of my chemistry to make that claim. 'Extremely low energy' should be safe.) You can use it to store thermal energy, and in theory the constituent parts could be used to drive a fusion reactor, but for chemical energy? Nothing there. It has to be split to be used, meaning the power is coming from elsewhere, not the water.
Oh, okay, I get it now. I rather doubt that would be more efficient. With a battery driving an electric motor, you have the resistance in the wires and the resistance in the motor. Everything else is turned into forward momentum. (and some can be regained on stopping.)
With the electrolysis approach, you'd use the battery to split hydrogen, which will lose a good chunk of power, at least 40%. Then you have the burn the hydrogen, turning it into heat... not 100% efficient, but close. Finally, you have to then use the heat to power your wheels, which is a terribly inefficient process. I don't remember the exact efficiencies offhand, but I think you'd probably lose around 60% of your heat energy.
I think you'd end up with, at the wheels, 40% of 60% of your original power... about 24% efficiency. I think you'd probably be close to 70% with direct-drive electric and regenerative braking.
Actually i was talking about potentially usable energy - i.e the volumetric and gravimetric quantities of hydrogen stored within water in comparison with a hydride, bottled or liquid H2. I'm pretty sure that water has the lowest gravimetric and volumetric of all four.
Well, again, i'm not sure on this but i reckon that for the amount of energy you had in a battery (combined with the proper catalyst on the electrodes) you could generate more hydrogen - used in a fuel cell rather than burning - to produce more energy than was stored in the battery to begin with. You could still use the braking/dynamo to recharge the battery and provide more lifetime from it...or use that energy to electrolyse the water instead of the battery doing so.
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This is a great thread. Thanks guys.
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I have no way to know whether or not this is true, but because it's not in useful form, I'm not sure it matters. You still need the energy to split the water into hydrogen; it's not available without a big energy input. And then you can extract the energy again by burning it, which gives you water again, and you can then resplit it. You wouldn't actually need very much water, since it's transferring energy, not generating it.
But every time you convert energy from one form to another, you waste a lot of it, and your process involves two unnecessary conversions. Why not just use the energy source, whatever it might be, to drive the wheels directly?
Energy doesn't come from nowhere. You can't, can't, can't get more energy out of a battery than what you stored in it initially; in fact, you can't ever get as much. TANSTAAFL. If you think you can, then you either missed an energy input somewhere (chemical energy, perhaps), or you've invented the world's first perpetual motion machine, and you will soon be wealthy beyond imagination.... as would we all, shortly thereafter.
I wouldn't suggest placing many bets on the perpetual motion thing; there appears to be no rule more fundamental in the universe.
Yes, the energy doesn't come from nowhere. I did pass my A level physics and chemistry
.
The energy comes from the compound on the electrode. In fact, for a year or so there has been a couple of papers from one group in america that have stumbled upon a room temperature water splitting compound that will obviously degrade over time and have to be replaced. There will and probably are known compounds such as Pd-alloys that could be used as electrodes and thus add "more" to the energy equation.
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Ah, okay, so the water in this case is just intermediate, the actual energy is stored in the other chemicals in the battery.
Yeah, that could work; it might indeed be better than hydrogen, which isn't very energy-dense and which most people won't like. Given sufficient energy density, it could overcome the inefficiency problem, but it would need to carry a great deal more power than the present technologies to be workable.
Huh? No, i think you've gotten confused. You're still using hydrogen - but in a non-flammable chemical reaction over a membrane. You generate hydrogen from the water by using a small amount of electricity (through electrodes situated in the water) to accelerate the dissociation process that would naturally occur over the electrode material. You could also run this like a hybrid - with the battery providing some power directly to the electric engine - like for starting up.
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Duoae, There's another video I saw where he goes to the lagoon behind his house, pulls up a glass of seawater -probably brackish, really- and puts it in a testtube and then straight into the machine.
But it would have to be filtered for a production machine probably, but considering that this probably won't ever be a positive energy source, filtering the water is the least of concerns.
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Yeah, but the problem is that you'd get contamination if you used the same vessel, time and time again. They wouldn't use test tubes in commercial "engines".
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Dubious Quality has a link to an article about it.
What I found interesting was that as long as the RF field was active the flame would keep burning, and it reached 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
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Plasma's need to be maintained otherwise they return to their normal state... without the RF field the electrons cannot be flowing in a "free" way.
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I keep reading this as you thinking that energy is getting made for free somehow. Water does not store chemical energy. Hydrogen will NOT naturally just split out of a water molecule. Won't happen. Water is a stable molecule. It takes energy input to cause the hydrogen to split, and then you get back LESS energy by recombining the hydrogen with oxygen to make water again. You get it as heat, which can then be inefficiently transformed into mechanical motion.
The energy to split the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. And if you have that energy available, it's probably going to be best used to drive the wheels directly, unless it's in some kind of very dense chemical form that can split hydrogen from the water. If it's very dense, the split/burn process would give you range, but at the cost of efficiency. The cost per mile would be far higher.
We're getting into an age when we will have to actually pay for all the energy we use, and an inefficient process like that won't fly unless there's no other option.
Malor... i'm doing a PhD in Hydrogen Storage. I did a MSci in Chemistry. What i'm saying is correct. Trust me. You don't need to tell me about having to put in energy or that we'll have to "pay" for energy when oil and gas run out.
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Like i said, there are compounds (alloys in fact) that will split water at room temperature. They get contaminated, sure but they work and then have to be replaced. You can accelerate this process by heating the system up.... and probably (if not for the same compound) you can also accelerate it by putting more energy into the system - i.e. electricity.
And trust me, getting the energy from recombination of H2 and O2 doesn't have to be through burning. This is what i said before. Apart from the fact that H2 combustion is more efficient than with oil or gas, you can also use (usually) a Pd membrane that allows H2 to pass through it. The process still produces heat - which can also be collected to help heat a vehicle or help produce more H2 from the H2 store (preferably solid-state storage) - but is more efficient (AFAIK) than burning it.
This seems to be quite good at explaining what i mean.
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