Salt Water Fuel?

Because the amount of energy required to ignite the salt water is greater then its output.

Put another way, energy produced is x, but energy consumed is greater then x. The process uses more energy than it produces.

Or as Homer puts it: In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

> Why hasn't this sent repercussions around the world?

My hummer get 1 mile to the gallon, and I make huge monthly payments, and I don't care. Don't bug me with this boring stuff. I am too busy watching American Idol.

> Why haven't I heard about this before?

How many buildings in New York City fell into their own footprint on September 11, 2001?

> Why isn't it giant news that everyone has heard about?

Cause that moe joe stuff is a bumch a hooey. moe-joe-working.com We don't believe that hippy internet stuff. Only watch Fix News. Only read stuff in books. The law of thermodynamics is the only law, and the only law to believe in da house.

> This guy John Kanzius should be famous to everyone already, shouldn't he?

He not as perty as Paris.

They give brief mention to the fact that he is using a "radio frequency generator" to do this. I know it's on a different frequency, but he has basically made a microwave - BFD. The fact that it needs the salt water inside the "chamber" and burns it right there, right away tells me somethings, along with the fact that they never show the contents of the vial *after* the burns. The sodium and chlorine of the salt have to go somewhere, and if they don't sit as precipitates at the bottom of the vial then they go into the gasses being put off by the recaction, one of which could well be HCl, hello acid rain!

Very funny. This is the state of investigative reporting these days! No one mentioned these factors to the reporter? The reporter didn't ask about any drawbacks? That scientist who was all smiles at the other lab didn't say anything EXCEPT how phenomenal it was? I guess it should have been telling that in the second video the bikers on their Harley Hogs were all excited about the cancer cure and didn't say a word about the burning salt water. No wonder he doesn't care about someone buying him out on the burning water device, but would refuse to take any offer for the cancer cure.

Television news! The only time I watch television news is to catch the two minute local weather report (17 minutes after the hour on each station--coincidentally?) or when I stumble on it on the internet like this. I forget how dismal it is as objective reporting. I get all my news off the internet, but that, of course, is iffy a lot of the time as well. What do you think is going through this reporter's mind when he consciously doesn't tell the equally important other parts of the story? Or maybe some news editor is the main culprit? Maybe they're all so used to telling only the sellable side of the story that they don't think consciously. It's all just habit already.

So, for the flame to stay lit it has to remain inside the radio beam, and that beam requires as much energy as a microwave oven? The second video calls it a "low power" radio wave. The shot of the wattmeter gives the impression it requires only a short burst of energy to get the flame started. If there's only water, salt, and radio waves involved here, then for this setup to create more energy than it takes in, it would be practically the equivalent of a nuclear fusion reaction? So what's going on? The energy from the radio wave is transferred to what to create a flame? What's creating the flame?

So everyone thinks we're stuck with fossil fuels and nuclear reactors and the spike in oil is about...what?

Pause that around 2:35/2:36. Looks like a crapload of leftovers to me.

It would have to, as pointed out earlier, not burn _anything_ but hydrogen and oxygen or there's trouble in River City...

-- Macinjosh

No. But junk science won't save us either.

Water is not a fuel, it's the ash left over from burning a fuel - hydrogen. To convert it back into fuel you have to pump more energy into it than you get back.

Take it up with God, not us. That's just the way the universe works.

DrBunsen, I think you mistakenly read attitude into my question where I meant none. It was a honest question. It wasn't a complaint about the feedback here. Of course, we all know there's alternative energy sources, wind, creative hydroelectric, solar, etc.--all of which are viable and have more potential but have certain challenges and remain cost inefficient compared to fossil fuels and nuclear. Maybe my question should be rephrased, do you see only those two remaining the main sources of energy (along with, of course, the Hoover Dam, etc.) for the foreseeable future? You know, things like these videos come along that get people excited and hopeful about the future, and then the giddiness subsides, and reality comes rumbling back into place, and it's basically down to oil and uranium again. Mr. Bush's policies are based almost completely on this old, long-lived paradigm. Is he right to hold fast to it? I ask because there's a lot of people here who are well educated in the sciences and well informed generally and whose input I respect and get a lot of education from. I don't ask to conflict.

The word "ash" must have a greater reference in physics than I've ever heard. You're calling water an ash--meaning, I assume, a byproduct of burning hydrogen. Sorry, it's been a long, long time since I took elementary chemistry. So the source of the flame is the volatile gas of the water molecule--hydrogen--and this device is causing the release of enough concentrated hydrogen to produce a flame. The radio waves are providing enough energy to cause the break of the hydrogen-oxygen bond of the water molecule, and that energy required to cause that break is greater than the energy produced by the flaming of those separated gases. If you increase the wattage of the radio wave then you increase the amount of hydrogen released which increases the heat of the flame. The energy of the radio wave does not contribute directly to the actual heat produced, or is the radio wave actually heating the water? Would the bond break be produced by a heat energy?

Sodium chloride's role is what? Salt raises the boiling temperature of water or something like that, if I remember my spaghetti right.

Any idea why radio waves? What about the wide spectrum of other types of waves? Would any of those others work as well?

Most significantly, what could there be to patent here? The mechanisms by which the radio wave is directed? It's not just as simple as bombarding salt water with concentrated radio waves or else this would probably be an old, old discovery, right? So the patentable aspect is devising a means of focusing a radio wave to produce...what?...a specific kind of energetic dance? Radio waves + sodium chloride + H2O--just exactly what would be the unique, patentable injection here that surprisingly produces the chemical reaction? Where would that lie? Is that a mysterious secret or is it easily deducible?

**mmphosis, I love your answers to my original questions. They're very pointedly funny.

Isn't there a science class demo where two electrodes of different conductivity are placed in salt water, and a charge is developed? I know that preserving conductors from salt water's corrosive effects is probably the big trick here. . .

. . . but does anyone else remember this one?

Mutant_Pie

P.S. Now that I've posted it, I'll Google. Sorry for doing it in the wrong order.

Here's a link, but as I thought, one of the electrodes is consumed in the process.

"http://www.miniscience.com/projects/airbattery/"

However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the idea is without merit. Why couldn't a boat at sea cost effectively use this process?

Mutant_Pie

The battery operates by the movement of ions from one metal to the other, creating the corrosion. There is a reason specific metals and dielectric substances are used to make various types of batteries: LiON, NiCD, Lead-acid, LiPoly, etc. The battery simply could not operate and have no corrosion. Some physical transformation must occur, otherwise we hit the 2nd Law of Thermo and get into the perpetual motion realm.

The membrane cell here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloralkali_process
Could that have anything to do with anything here?
At this point, this is all just a mental exercise to try to help abate Alzheimer's or Parkinson's for me, and I'm on foreign ground, but it's very interesting--getting in touch with all that's elemental in the universe.
Not to be outdone by Homer Simpson (who I assume is the Homer mentioned earlier, although I've never watched an episode of "The Simpsons"), I'm rereading the laws of thermodynamics, but it remains all slippery for this poor layman's head and I'm tempted to go back to rereading instead, the other Homer, which I've been doing lately, as many headed sea monsters and beautiful singing sea women with filed teeth are a little easier to grasp than entropy and equilibrium in isolated systems.

HC,
The only use I've ever heard of the chlor-alkali process for was making industrial sodium hydroxide. I used to work a place that did it the mercury cell way that was mentioned further down the page in the wikipedia article. My former workplace used a prodigious amount of NaOH, so they actually made it this way on site. That is, before they decided that having tons of mercury around was a Bad Thing.

I'd have to do some looking around, but this whole thing smells a little like cold fusion in terms of rigorous science. (and boy don't I wish cold fusion actually worked)

mike

History of the Joe Cell - from http://www.thejoecell.com/History.html

OK this is weird. I lived in north NSW in '91. In a large warehouse. ASTRO had their workshop on the lower floor. I met these guys and saw their devices in operation.

All this time I never made the connection that this was where the famous "Joe cell" originated. No, I am not making this up.