[raidenn]

If this works, transport costs will drop down drastically and the oil barons will panic.

[Necropolis]

To say that gasoline is ready to burn fairly easy isn't exactly correct. To refine crude oil to a useable fuel does require a rather extensive amount work to prepare it. I doubt your car would run smoothly on crude oil.

But at any rate, I don't see how it's hard to believe. There are already cars running on hydrolysis, and they require little energy to maintain the production. Hydrogen fuel-cell cars are already on the market. There are cars that run of recycled cooking oil as well.

But no matter, I hope they perfect it and we see some tangible results from it.

[Malacite]

We all do.

- Cheaper fuel source, as salt water is practically everywhere.
- Infinitely renewable.
- Much, much kinder on the environment.

[Raydeus]

It will all depend on the ability to generate the radio waves in a way that it consumes much less energy than the energy generated by the combustion of the Hydrogen liberated by the salt water.

But without fully understanding the process, specially the salt's role in the liberation of Hydrogen, no one can really dismiss the posibility of this actually working.


I guess we'll find out eventually, after Kanzius gets the patent and a few years of research are put into this. If it works, exciting times indeed; if it doesn't, then we'll just keep paying for that gasoline till we run out of oil and go back to real horse power.

[Feba]

If it works, exciting times indeed; if it doesn't, then we'll just keep paying for that gasoline till we run out of oil and go back to real horse power.

bicycles are much better suited to modern society and living conditions than horses, not to mention much cheaper and probably more fuel efficient in terms of need to eat.

The biggest problem with replacing our entire society with bicycles in place of cars is suburban sprawl tends to be very long and winding, it's not so noticable in cars, but when the layout is so inefficient it really hurts foot and bicycle traffic... bicycles more than feet, because most people have no qualms about walking through someone else's yard.

[Malevolent]

Originally Posted by raidenn

If this works, transport costs will drop down drastically and the oil barons will panic.

The oil barons are very rich and powerful...more powerfull than Chuck Norris...

This reminds me of the movie Who killed the electric car. I think we'll be seeing another movie about who killed the water car...And was it just me or did the lab guy in the first few mins of the clip have a lil nerdgasim...

But you know what the sad thing is...a perosn dies every 34 seconds from heart disease...

[Raydeus]

Originally Posted by Feba

bicycles are much better suited to modern society and living conditions than horses, not to mention much cheaper and probably more fuel efficient in terms of need to eat.

I was kidding though.

With the technology we have nowadays, and the technology that'll be available in the 50+ or whatever years it will take for oil to run out, the worse case scenario would be ultra-light car/cycle hybrids fueled by either natural gas, ethanol, solar pannels or a combination of technologies.


Edit > Seriously, the only reason we don't have all that right now is the dependence on the speed and power oil produces. Specially societies like the US which are completely dependant on power and speed are what's preventing the changes, but they will happen eventually unless we find a new type of fuel like what salt-water could potentially be.

[IfritnoItazura]

Originally Posted by Raydeus

It will all depend on the ability to generate the radio waves in a way that it consumes much less energy than the energy generated by the combustion of the Hydrogen liberated by the salt water.

Almost a winner; you just forgot that bond energy is the same, going either way in the reaction.

Raydeus and Ziero are the only ones in this thread who made any sense, BTW. /sigh

Originally Posted by Necropolis

To say that gasoline is ready to burn fairly easy isn't exactly correct. To refine crude oil to a useable fuel does require a rather extensive amount work to prepare it. I doubt your car would run smoothly on crude oil.

You're beginning to catch on.

Much of the energy in crude oil is used up to produce usable products like gasoline. The process is not efficient. It's just that crude oil contain so much chemical energy (unlike water), it still makes sense to do so economically.

Our cars are inefficient machines which convert into kinetic energy what remains of the precious chemical energy in refining crude oil.


* * *

This thread is a distressing proof of the failure of science education in U.S. -_-

It takes a certain amount of energy to break the covalent bond in H2O; if we have that kind of energy, why not just use it on doing useful work instead of breaking H2O apart?

Burning salt water is a neat trick, but common sense with a little basic chemistry/physics tells us it cannot be efficient. Unless this process involves harnessing a source of energy we cannot get to otherwise, breaking apart water's covalent bonds is just a waste of energy. (I sucked at chemistry, but this is hardly a difficult concept to grasp.)

Cosmology and oddball cases aside, if you find yourself using phrases and words like "hope", "I believe", and "I don't believe" when talking about science, you're on the wrong track.

[Malacite]

^^ if nothing else, seeing water burn made my day.

[Raydeus]

Originally Posted by IfritnoItazura

Almost a winner; you just forgot that bond energy is the same, going either way in the reaction.

You are saying it as if they were just spliting water into hydrogen and oxygen with radio waves alone (like they have been doing for many many decades using electricity and other means), but that's not the case here, what's making this work is the salt.

So, unless you can explain to me how exactly does the salt affect the process - and give me a comparative between the energy used to produce an X amount of radio waves vs the amount of energy produced by burning the hydrogen released - I'll give this at least the benefit of the doubt.

[IfritnoItazura]

Originally Posted by Raydeus

You are saying it as if they were just spliting water into hydrogen and oxygen with radio waves alone (like they have been doing for many many decades using electricity and other means), but that's not the case here, what's making this work is the salt.

The whole idea is that you don't need to know how it's done:

1. Lavoisier and Laplace’s law (1782): the heat exchange accompanying a transformation is equal and opposite to the heat exchange accompanying the reverse transformation.
2. Hess’s law (1840): the heat exchange accompanying a transformation is the same whether the process occurs in one or several steps

(Read "heat" as "energy".) No matter how you split the molecule, the amount of energy it takes to break the bonds is a constant.

Forget the the salt. The key here is that to get the H2 to burn, they needed to break the H2O's covalent bond--and the energy from burning H2 is the same amount of energy in that bond.

* * *

Magicians often distract audience with something while they perform tricks. This salt water burning is nifty trick with poor distractions--just keep your eyes on the energy of the molecules involved, and you'd see through it.

[Raydeus]

Originally Posted by IfritnoItazura

The whole idea is that you don't need to know how it's done:

1. Lavoisier and Laplace’s law (1782): the heat exchange accompanying a transformation is equal and opposite to the heat exchange accompanying the reverse transformation.
2. Hess’s law (1840): the heat exchange accompanying a transformation is the same whether the process occurs in one or several steps

(Read "heat" as "energy".) No matter how you split the molecule, the amount of energy it takes to break the bonds is a constant.

Forget the the salt. The key here is that to get the H2 to burn, they needed to break the H2O's covalent bond--and the energy from burning H2 is the same amount of energy in that bond.

* * *

Magicians often distract audience with something while they perform tricks. This salt water burning is nifty trick with poor distractions--just keep your eyes on the energy of the molecules involved, and you'd see through it.

Just repeating what my science teacher told me when I was a kid doesn't respond my question about this, the truth is you simply can't even imagine this working from your point of view, but provide absolutely no data about the process in question.

Like I said before, until they provide solid data about this particular experiment (meaning actual field data) there's no way for us to know what exactly is going on here.


I'll tell you why I give this experiment the benefit of the doubt in very simple terms.

You know what a lever is. With the proper lever you can lift a 1 ton of weight just applying a minimal force on the other end of it. Forces are all equal and all that stuff, but the lever is what makes the difference between being able to lift the weight where you want it and suffering a back injury trying to lift it directly.

That's pretty much the way I could see this working, if somehow the salt worked as a lever for the radio waves it would be possible for said waves to separate the hydrogen and oxygen using a fraction of the energy it would require if you tried to do it directly. The salt would be doing the work the same way a lever+fulcrum would.

And that's pretty much it, if it works or not only time will tell. Theories can fail miserably (most seem to), but if scientists and inventors had closed their minds to new alternatives of doing things we would still be using horses to move around and laughing at the insane idea of flying like the birds.

At least wait till the patent is done and other scientists and researchers do their thing before ruling this one out.

[IfritnoItazura]

Originally Posted by Raydeus

Just repeating what my science teacher told me when I was a kid doesn't respond my question about this, the truth is you simply can't even imagine this working from your point of view, but provide absolutely no data about the process in question.

Your science teacher would be heartbroken to hear that you failed to understand the first law of thermodynamics. =/

Originally Posted by Raydeus

You know what a lever is. With the proper lever you can lift a 1 ton of weight just applying a minimal force on the other end of it. Forces are all equal and all that stuff, but the lever is what makes the difference between being able to lift the weight where you want it and suffering a back injury trying to lift it directly.

I know what a lever is, but do you?

How much energy is needed in order to use a 10 meter lever to lift 1 ton of weight by 1 meter? Distance to weight from fulcrum is 5 meter, and you get to press on the 5 meter arm on the other side.

How much energy is needed in order to use a 95 meter lever to lift 1 ton of weight by 1 meter? Distance to weight from fulcrum is 5 meter, and you get to press on the 90 meter arm on the other side.

The answer is, "The same amount of energy."

The "trick" was the different length levers; they're there to distract you from the key question, "Amount of work needed to lift 1 ton weight by 1 meter?" Regardless how you've lifted the weight, the minimum amount of energy required--the amount of work it would take--is the same. ("Work" and "energy" are basically equivalent in the world of science, before someone starts objecting; "force" and "energy", however, are not.)

Lever changes the force needed, but not the amount of energy needed. No matter how you break the covalent bond, you need to supply the bond energy, which is a constant.

[Raydeus]

Man you just didn't get it at all, close your mind to anything that doesn't appear on your text books if you want, I wont bother anymore.

[Taskmage]

If the machine is doing only exactly what he says it is and liberating hydrogen from the water and igniting, then this is stupid. You can't have water and energy on one side of the equation and put water and more energy on the other side. 1 + 1 does not equal 1 + 2. You're just converting electric current into EM radiation into heat into mechanical energy. We already have a way to convert electrical current into mechanical energy, so the machine is just wasting energy and making a pretty show by putting it through those extra conversions.

I was thinking though, what if he only told a half-truth? What if it isn't the H-O bond that the radio waves are breaking, but the Na-Cl bond instead? Sodium ions react exothermically with water to form sodium hydroxide, liberating hydrogen in the process. The hydrogen will recombine with free oxygen in the air to reform water, but if there's a difference between the bond energy of sodium cloride and sodium hydroxide, that leaves the possibility of actual generation of energy, even if the part of the reaction involving the hydrogen we see burning is actually circular.

But, if that explanation is on the mark, that means we're taking saltwater, the source of all life on the planet, and turning it into caustic sodium hydroxide and mustard gas to create energy. The environmentalists are gonna love the hell out of that. I can just see some James Bond villian turning his giant satellite radio transmitter on the world's oceans.