Like most amazing inventions, most are by accident. This too is such a case.

AMAZING.... We'll be seeing this soon, unless big oil buys it and puts it away...

Video--watch this!!
http://www.wkyc.com/video/player.asp...27&bw=hi&cat=2


Ok, so what happens if you direct the radio wave at the ocean? THAT would be scary. Would it only ignite the area where the radio waves hit, or cause a chain reaction? Would the fire die when you turned off the wave? (I would think so).. so freaking cool. I love hearing about stuff like this.

Ooohh, wish I'd thought of that...

According to the science given in the video -- the radio wave breaks the H-O bonds in the water and you burn the resultant hydrogen and oxygen. Problem - it must take at least as much energy to break those bonds as you can extract by reforming those bonds.

Asides from that minor problem, its cool.

That's GENIUS!!! Instead of fossil fuels or nuclear power, we should just use ELECTRICITY! It will solve the energy crisis!

Ending sarcasm here, I would really like to know what makes it better than the good ole' electrolysis? Does it use less power or something? The obvious problem I see is that it is much harder to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. And, unless I'm mistaken, the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen is rather volatile and will ignite if you try to pressurize it, making it even harder to store than the already dangerous hydrogen. And distilling the gas would, again, require quite a bit of energy, which we are trying to save.

Or maybe the idea is that one of those engines shown on the video is more effective than the electric motor. But if that is the case, the salt will cause problems.

Now see, here's the thing. Gasoline is extremely volatile. If it weren't the base line internal combustion engine wouldn't work. While diesel fuel is somewhat less volatile, it's not exactly tap water. We already drive around with smallish bombs under our "control". No matter what anyone may want to say about a hybrid, they are still main powered by an internal combustion engine burning gasoline. So, they are dirty, period. You might be doing a little bit to help the environment, but in the end, the vehichles still harm it. The idea here would be completely clean. What kind of fumes did you see coming off the flames, as I didn't notice any. Even if it proved to be impractical for automobile usage, it would still be a cleaner way to produce electricity than the cleanest coal plants. I can, however, see how it could be applied to automotive use, relatively easily as well. It would put the spark plug people out of business, as the technology became more affordable, but it's not that hard to implement. Judging by the video, it provides plenty of power, and if that power were to be placed into a small space, such as the combustion chamber of an engine, it would provide the necessary energy to turn the crankshaft, and make the engine go. From there, it's all mechanical anyway, so no need to change much in the way cars are designed.

I really don't see any downside, with the temps produced in the controlled experiment, there is plenty of energy potential, and it may even wind up being self supporting. Of course, it's so easy to say "that can't work". He had it working, and if that small engine had been hooked to a smallish generator, he'd have been producing the electricity needed to power the radio waves. I can't see how that can be a negative.

Robert the Bard: The idea in this guy's invention, as I understood it, is to use radio waves to unbond the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen atoms, ignite the hydrogen-oxygen mixture, and get energy from the re-bonding of the atoms. The problem here is the law of the Conservation of Energy, which states that the energy you get from the re-bonding of the atoms cannot, ever, in any circumstance, be greater than the energy used to unbond them. And since there's energy lost to light in the flame, boiling the water, power transition and probably other things, the invention uses more electricity than it could ever give. This device is not an infinite energy source.

As for the volatility, gasoline might be flammable but it still needs oxygen to burn. And it is not pressurized. Normal hydrogen they use now in fuel cell cars is in pressurized containers, meaning that if the container breaks, all the hydrogen is sprayed out and will ignite from a tiniest spark and explode in a big fireball. Gasoline, now, would just slowly leak on the ground. It might catch fire and explode, but only if the heavier-than-air gasoline fumes come to contact with something hot. And in the device on the video creates a perfect mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. It does not need external oxygen to burn. If you raise the temperature enough, it will explode, regardless of how it is stored. And if you try to pressurize it, it will explode even in cold temperatures, meaning that you can't really store it.

And near the end of the video, I think I can see some kind of white residue forming to the end of the tube and nearly putting out the flame. I think it would be salt thrown up by the boiling water. Or maybe the radio waves also vaporize salt which then deposits to the end of the tube. This could cause problems if you want the hydrogen plant to run seamlessly for a long time.

Have to agree with you about the hybrid cars, though. I don't have any numbers, but I don't think they are much less polluting that regular cars, let alone the solution to all pollution they are advertised as.

Gasoline may not be pressurized in the tanks where it is stored, prior to being pumped into your car, but the next time you go to fuel up, listen for the hiss. Pressure is essential to the function of internal combustion engines, hence the compression ratio. On any model year vehichle newer than 1996, if the fuel cap is left off, it will trigger the infamous Check Engine light, signalling an emissions problem. The problem is that the fuel pump has to work harder to maintain the 14psi required to keep the fuel in the fuel rails for consumption. Every time a compression stroke fires, there is pressurized fuel. It looks as if the medium for burning doesn't require pressurization, again, just from the video, since it's burning in an open test tube. While I'm not a physics major, I am an ASE certified automotive technician, it's my field of choice. Assuming that the radio transmitters can be placed on the top of the piston, and the top of the compression chamber, which is the area between the top of the piston, and the cylinder head when the piston is at the top of it's stroke, it could fire the medium just as efficiently as modern engines use gasoline. Assuming some salt residue, I don't see it being any worse than fuel deposits or oil that find their way into the compression chamber. Check your plugs the next time you do a tune up. Periodic cleaning would probably be required, but since scheduled maintenance now includes replacing spark plugs, if the transmitter is set up similarly, where it can be removed from the chamber as a plug currently is, it wouldn't be any different than what is happening currently. Engines in general produce more power than they need. For example, an engine at idle will not use the energy it produces to push a vehichle at 60mph, but the potential is there for that power. I think this could very well work to replace fossil fuels, w/out causing an undue strain on the environment. I think it would be much cleaner, just in the lack of carbon emissions. I'm sure there would be some kind of waste product, but I'm not sure what it would be...I seem to remember seeing a special on one of the science channels where they ran a car on hydrogen, and the by product was pure water, drinkable pure water...

"This is the most abundant element on the planet: water"

.... Sorry no. You just lost all credability with that statement.

[ 05-30-2007, 10:39 AM: Message edited by: Beaumanoir ]

The waste products of burning salt water would be water and salt. And that's exactly the problem Iron Greasel points at.

I won't repeat his explanation, but I'll agree that based on what we can reasonably assume, you can't generate energy from salt water by first splitting and then reassembling it any more than you can shine a bright lamp at a solar panel and expect to generate enough energy to power the lamp with it.

Robert: One can work around the salt residue with some engineering, but the initial problem is still there. That red flame is hydrogen, sodium and probably chlorine burning in oxygen. Mostly hydrogen. When you bomb the salt water with radio waves, the atoms get more energy and break free from the other atoms. Above the tube the atoms bond again and give away the energy. This energy is seen as a red flame. But all the energy in the flame comes from the radio device that broke the atoms in the first place. Ergo, the flame cannot give any more energy than the radio device uses.

When burning fossil fuels, you raise the temperature until the bonds between the carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms break, and and both atoms bond with oxygen creating carbon dioxide and water. The C=O bonds and the H-O bonds have less energy than the C-C bonds and the C-H bonds in the fuel. The excess energy manifests as burning.

In the radio thingy you start with water, containing H-O bonds. The radio waves break the bonds, giving you hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms. These recombine back into water, which still contains H-O bonds. No extra energy.

edit: typo

[ 05-30-2007, 11:40 AM: Message edited by: Iron Greasel ]