Scientist Burns Water -- Nobody Cares

[Lostinlasvegas]

Mods: X posted in OOT.
As reported by Yahoo News and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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."


This was on the front page of Yahoo yesterday, yet was not reported by any major news outlet from what I can find. WTF? This could be the most important discovery of our lifetimes (think never ending clean energy source) and nobody cares?

FWIW: I would still trade the discovery for an Iphone.

[BradleyT]

Wow, who would name thier kid Rustum?

[NajdorfDefense]

Wow, he turns water into hydrogen. What are the odds?

[MrBlue]

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/951/

"That's all wonderful, and it seems like it's producing energy, except that the radio frequency generator he's using consumes several times more energy than the flame on the other end produces."

[NajdorfDefense]

You mean there's no perpetual motion machine?

Energy can neither be created or destroyed?

zomg!

[BradleyT]

[ QUOTE ]
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/951/

"That's all wonderful, and it seems like it's producing energy, except that the radio frequency generator he's using consumes several times more energy than the flame on the other end produces."

[/ QUOTE ]

Can a car power system be upgraded to power the generator? Spend an extra $2K for a car that runs on water.

[HP]

Assuming the second law of thermodynamics holds, can this possibly work?

Serious question, I don't know the entropy of salt water. Anyone?

[soko]

[ QUOTE ]
Assuming the second law of thermodynamics holds, can this possibly work?

Serious question, I don't know the entropy of salt water. Anyone?

[/ QUOTE ]

The entropy of salt water? Well if you take salt and water and put them in a vacuum they will reach maximum entropy (equilibrium) over a not too long of a period of time.

[Neko]

That yahoo article is terribly written and makes the researchers and the author sound like quacks (which it seems like they might be since they apparently don't understand thermodynamics). As others have pointed out, it's a neat trick, but the reason it's not being widely covered is because it's not really that impressive.

This is certainly not "a great discovery" and I would be willing to wager he wasn't the first one to discover this phenomena.

[Neko]

Put more eloquently my Mr Wookie in the OOT thread.

[ QUOTE ]

The idea is that, at a bare minimum, you have to pump in enough energy to the water w/ the RF radiation to break the two O-H bonds. Then, when you burn the hydrogen, you get water right back, and the energy you release is exactly equal to the energy in two O-H bonds. In other words, as a best case, the energy you get out is exactly equal to the energy you have to pump in. Furthermore, according to the laws of thermodynamics, you're never going to be able to achieve this best case. Instead, energy you're pumping in will be lost along the way due to heating the environment, so the energy you spend is going to be greater than the energy you get out, resulting in a net loss.

Now, this would be acceptable if somehow we got the RF radiation for free, say, from the sun. However, we don't exactly get a whole lot of RF radiation from the sun. Instead, we get a lot of IR, UV, and regular old light, and that's not what we need here. To power this guy's RF source, he's using electricity, energy we've already taken great pains to produce. Thus, this system represents a pretty significant net loss in energy. He's found a cute substitute to electrolysis, the process in which you break the O-H bonds in water with straight electricity, but he's not found a miraculous source of energy. Any junior physics or engineering major could tell you this guy's a crackpot.


[/ QUOTE ]