Sea Water Fuel?

[Matheous-2]

I hope the YT link works.....
Anyway, does it seem feasible to ignite sea water using radio waves? Media URL: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e8utkoK2DhA
Description:

[Matheous-2]

[woofgang]

for some reason, this fascinated me as a 4/5 YO child http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2008May/EndPoint.asp

[Old_Geezer]

Interesting. Claims of water powered engines have been around a long time, if this one has anything going for it in terms of more energy out than in, it'd be either a sudden hit or bought to take off the market. We'll just have to wait and see.

[EDDIE51]

That link is a fake , water does NOT burn salt or not.
what can be done is to seperate water into its compoants Oxygen and Hydrogen then use the Hydrogen as fuel. Seperating water this way is called electrolysis , it works but it takes more energy to seperate it as you get from burningthe Hydrogen produced. The only way it could be profitable is to use 'free electricity' for example from solar cells to seperate the Hydrogen and produce fuel.

[Matheous-2]

EDDIE51 "That link is a fake , water does NOT burn salt or not. "
Ok, but does constant bombardment of radio waves cause ignition?

[EDDIE51]

Water salt or not DOES NOT BURN ever in any way.
Burning is the 'Oxidation' of a substance , the combining with Oxygen, water is already combined with Oxygen , it is made of Hydrogen and Oxygen, H2O. So another name for water could be Hydrogen Oxide or 'oxidised ( burnt) Hydrogen.
When you burn or light Hydrogen it combines with Oxygen from the air and forms water. Not the other way about!
Another indication that the video is fake is the colour of the flame , yellow, the colour you get when burning a substance that contains Carbon ( like natural gas). When Hydrogen burns in air the flame is colourless , invisible , it gives out UV and IR radiation but no visible light.

[EDDIE51]

if you listen to the video it says that intense radio waves breakdown the water to form Hydrogen whch burns (as i said) . All he has invented , if he has, is another way to breakdown water into Hydrogen and Oxygen instead of electrolysis.
But again as i said, Hydrogen does not produce a luminous yellow flame when it burns , the flame is invisible as all the light is in the UV range.
I am an analytical chemist by training and one instrument we use a lot is a AA spectrometer, this often has an air/ Hydrogen flame as an Ionisation detecter.
One hazard of this is that the air/Hydrogen flame is invisible, but it is still very hot and causes burns if you are not carefull as I know to my cost!

[LazyGun]

V.interesting article on this and on the guy himself, John Kanzius. He was originally looking at cures for cancer using RF therapy and nano-particles/nanotubes preferentially binding to cancer cells and then being heat destroyed using an RF generator.

His original experiments with salt water had less to do with trying to find a new energy source as much as looking at novel means of desalinization.

He has an interesting wiki page;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kanzius

[Matheous-2]

Just to conclude; I was rather saddened to hear that John Kanzius had died as a result of cancer. The Wiki article states a quote from John
"Kanzius admitted that this process could not be considered an energy source, as more energy is used to produce the RF signal than can be obtained from the burning gas and stated in July 2007 that he never claimed his discovery would replace oil, asserting only that his discovery was "thought provoking".[19]"

[EDDIE51]

Yet another 'non story' dreamed up to fill in a news item.

[Old_Geezer]

Suspected it would turn out that more energy was put in than taken out. Still maybe one day .....

[atalanta]

No, but you can actually make a fuel out of CO2. I went to a talk the other day by an Oxford U Professor who has patented a way of doing it. Now it has to be scaled up to industrial treatments. And then it has to be profitable.
2 rather large obstacles, I'm afraid.

[Teddio]

There's nothing new in that.

Carbon dioxide gas passed through hot carbon (in the form of white-hot coke) reacts to produce carbon monoxide, a very calorific fuel.

This process occurs in blast furnaces and coke works.

The reaction is highly endothermic however.

[Matheous-2]

EDDIE51- Sorry to waste your time and effort with a 'non story'. I can't always tell dates from YTube clips....

[LazyGun]

I don't see that you need to apologise to Eddie, Mattheous. You posted a question about a process that you had seen on you tube, and questioned the science of it, which is what the section is for.

The claim itself - that you can generate energy by burning salt water - is false yes, but Kanzius himself was one of the first to rubbish that idea - but his ideas relating to the use of RF in cancer treatment are interesting, and are being looked at quite seriously.

[Matheous-2]

Thanks LG! - I'm always a bit apprehensive in this section that I will make a complete fool of myself {as I have done in the past!!}....

[atalanta]

No, it was not Carbon monoxide. It was methanol/ethanol. The whole process has not yet been revealed, as patents are involved. All I can say is that the ( absolutely genuine) Ox U Professor O'Hare seems to have come up with a really ingenious idea, and has a pilot project going on a lab scale. As I said, he has to get backing for industrial development. The resulting fuel will not be as energy-dense as petrol or diesel, (maybe about half to two-thirds as energy-dense) but it will be almost entirely clean, and will use up excess carbon-dioxide. Which can't be a bad thing - if . . . .
Lots of "ifs" . . .

[jomifl]

There are many chemical processes that yield 'fuel' of some kind. They all require more energy to be put into the process than can usefully be got out.

[Graham-W]

Is it April 1st already?

[jomifl]

Every day is April the 1st on AB Graham :o)