[Whitelight]

http://green.yahoo.com/index.php?q=node/1570

Burning water.  

[Herra Tohtori]

 

Is it a way to pump energy into water with radio waves to separate hydrogen from oxygen, then burn the hydrogen to water? Or does it burn water molecules into hydrogen peroxide?

Or does the oscillating electromagnetic field actually weaken the covalent bonds in water significantly?

As far as hydrogen technology goes, it might have some potential, assuming the efficiency ratio for separating the hydrogen is higher than with other means (electrolytic separation and intense heat)... or, if by some chance radio frequencies really do affect the properties of the water by actually weakening the covalent bonds, then things become interesting because then there would be reason to assume that other covalent bonds might be similarly affected, which would obviously offer some pretty interesting options because cracking (ie. breaking covalent bonds between carbon atoms in organic molecules) is kinda the most important process for oil industry (apart from the burning when the products are used, that is). Currently, catalytic and thermal cracking are the two main methods for it; if radio waves could weaken the molecules, the required temperatures could be lowered, requiring less energy, which could possibly


And it's definitely interesting aspect in the behaviour of water-salt ion solvent, as far as I'm concerned... unfortunately, the story was kinda vague - it didn't tell what frequency and intensity produced the "burning" water, and it didn't give any enthalpy values of the reaction (positive/negative), and it didn't even give any raw energy in/out values.

Curses to inaccurate science puff writers.

[Kosh]

Sounds like a good candidate to be used in Hydrogen combustion engines, totally awesome.

[Herra Tohtori]

Post-Gazette article of the same thing, with somewhat more information.

For obvious reasons, scientists long have thought that salt water couldn't be burned.

So when an Erie man announced he'd ignited salt water with the radio-frequency generator he'd invented, some thought it a was a hoax.

John Kanzius, a Washington County native, tried to desalinate seawater with a generator he developed to treat cancer, and it caused a flash in the test tube.

Within days, he had the salt water in the test tube burning like a candle, as long as it was exposed to radio frequencies.

His discovery has spawned scientific interest in using the world's most abundant substance as clean fuel, among other uses.

Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, held a demonstration last week at the university's Materials Research Laboratory in State College, to confirm what he'd witnessed weeks before in an Erie lab.

"It's true, it works," Dr. Roy said. "Everyone told me, 'Rustum, don't be fooled. He put electrodes in there.' "

But there are no electrodes and no gimmicks, he said.

Dr. Roy said the salt water isn't burning per se, despite appearances. The radio frequency actually weakens bonds holding together the constituents of salt water -- sodium chloride, hydrogen and oxygen -- and releases the hydrogen, which, once ignited, burns continuously when exposed to the RF energy field. Mr. Kanzius said an independent source measured the flame's temperature, which exceeds 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, reflecting an enormous energy output.

As such, Dr. Roy, a founding member of the Materials Research Laboratory and expert in water structure, said Mr. Kanzius' discovery represents "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years."

But researching its potential will take time and money, he said. One immediate question is energy efficiency: The energy the RF generator uses vs. the energy output from burning hydrogen.

Dr. Roy said he's scheduled to meet tomorrow with U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Defense officials in Washington to discuss the discovery and seek research funding.

Mr. Kanzius said he powered a Stirling, or hot air, engine with salt water. But whether the system can power a car or be used as an efficient fuel will depend on research results.

"We will get our ideas together and check this out and see where it leads," Dr. Roy said. "The potential is huge.

"In the life sciences, the role of water is infinite, and this guy is doing something new in using the most important and most abundant material on the face of the earth."

Mr. Kanzius' discovery was an accident.

He developed the RF generator as a novel cancer treatment. His research in targeting cancer cells with metallic nanoparticles then destroying them with radio-frequency is proceeding at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and at the University of Texas' MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Manuscripts updating the cancer research are in preparation for publication in coming months, Mr. Kanzius said.

While Mr. Kanzius was demonstrating how his generator heated nanoparticles, someone noted condensation inside the test tube and suggested he try using his equipment to desalinate water.

So, Mr. Kanzius said, he put sea water in a test tube, then trained his machine on it, producing an unexpected spark. In time he and laboratory owners struck a match and ignited the water, which continued burning as long as it remained in the radio-frequency field.

During several trials, heat from burning hydrogen grew hot enough to melt the test tube, he said. Dr. Roy's tests on the machine last week provided further evidence that the process is releasing and burning hydrogen from the water. Tests on different water solutions and concentrations produced various temperatures and flame colors.

"This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywhere," Dr. Roy said of salt water. "Seeing it burn gives me chills."

Most important parts bolded and underlined by me. IT won't help at all in hydrogen-powered transportation if the energy required by the RF generator is greater than what is released in the reaction, because even if it would enable one to just carry a water tank around (would solve the storage problem of hydrogen), it would still demand big honking batteries to store the energy to run the RF generator, and it would be more effective to run electric motors directly instead.

Although I'm jsut wondering how much power this particular experiment needs of the RF generator, which are usually quite low-power gadgets, since radio waves aren't usually very powerful in terms of energy... Well microwaves generated by magnetron can cook food pretty well and fast, but then again they also took a fair bit of power from the grid (no surprizes there). But since the article says nothing exact about energy in/out ratios, we can only guess... My educated guess is that it won't solve any energy problems but might offer some interesting applications.

Accidents in labs - you just gotta love them. They give us kick-ass movies about zombies and giant lizards causing apocalypses, and in real life they can spur whole new theories and applications. Like the frog's leg twitching in Mr. Galvani's lab, once upon a time in Italy, and countless other examples...

[WeatherOp]

I'm gonna have some fun.

Now assuming it does produce a good bit of energy and it is installed in cars, factories, ect in a decade or so. The side effect of such a thing, or the exhaust from an engine would theoretically be water or water vapor from what I've heard about engines that use hydrogen as a fuel source. First off all, that is eco-friendly in of minds so that would be a good thing.

But, the reality of this is if it were to produce water vapor as an exhaust you would be emitting a greenhouse gas many, many times more powerful than Co2. What does that mean? Well it means if you believe that man is causing global warming and should it really be happening like that, we'd fry ourselves many times faster, but in an eco-friendly way.

Now in effect I am just rambling to cause trouble and dissent and I'm not saying this would not be a great improvement to using fossil fuels. Just stirring the pot as I normally do.

[karajorma]

I'm calling shenanigans on this one.

First I don't see how this could possible put out more energy than you put in without breaking the law of conservation of energy. More importantly, look at the source. Rustum Roy has already published one paper that claimed that there was scientific plausibility for homeopathy.

Which - lets face it - is hokum of the highest order.

[Nuke]

feasibility of a seawater-rf rocket engine?

[DiabloRojo]

kara: I've not seen a claim that they're getting more energy out than putting in.  They do exclaim that they're getting a ton of heat out, sure, but it didn't say if he's using a megawatt for the radio or not...  Regardless, it was Roy that got in on the PR work here, not the inventor.  There's still hope...

Still, I'd think at the very least, it could potentially be a cheaper/greener way of obtaining pure hydrogen for fuel-cell powered cars, assuming they're using relatively low power.

WeatherOp: Nice try 
We'd only be taking oxygen and hydrogen that already exists in our atmosphere and oceans so we'd be "Water Vapor Neutral" in that case.  Good luck to all of us even coming close to .1% of the water vapor 'created' by sunlight shining on our oceans.

[karajorma]

Exactly. WeatherOp obviously seems to think that CO2 precipitates out of the air with the same ease that water does. Obviously my assertion that he lives on another planet must be true.

kara: I've not seen a claim that they're getting more energy out than putting in.  They do exclaim that they're getting a ton of heat out, sure, but it didn't say if he's using a megawatt for the radio or not...  Regardless, it was Roy that got in on the PR work here, not the inventor.  There's still hope...

Not really.

As Herra Tohtori pointed out even if it does work and is something new (which I right now am hugely sceptical of) then whatever you used to power the rf transmitter would be more powerful than any technology you could make based on this discovery. In which case why use this thing at all?


Furthermore whenever you see new technology appearing in lab demonstrations rather than a scientific paper your bull****-o-meter should be close to the level where it bursts your eardrums.

That said he might possibly be onto something with the anti-cancer therapy so the inventor himself might not be a bull**** artist.

EDIT : Nope. Read up on the cancer cure and it's bull**** too.

EDIT 2 : Okay looks like a news crew got taken in by this bull**** too (check the link at the bottom of the page). Pretty impressive flame though. Maybe I can drive a perpetual motion machine on it.

Oh and while you're at it take a look at this guy's bibliography.

[achtung]

I smell Steorn.

[Mika]

Interesting piece of news and also interesting conversation. I don't know about the device, there is not much information about it, but I find it curious how they manage to break water molecules using wavelengths going beyond microwaves. And I don't know anything about anything, but I would say that the photon energy required to ionize something is usually higher than carried by radio frequency waves.

So, now comes the question: what reaction is actually happening inside that tube then?

There is something else I have to comment about:

Furthermore whenever you see new technology appearing in lab demonstrations rather than a scientific paper your bull****-o-meter should be close to the level where it bursts your eardrums.

I have always been interested of this attitude and I would like to hear some reasons behind it, because I would say that anything that you cannot [make money of / is not important] [is/can be] published in a scientific paper. Edison and Wright brothers come to mind when someone flat out trashes piece of news by the fact that nothing like that has been written in publications. Here I need to check the source (a common science magazine published here), but I thought that the working of the bicycle was scientifically explained only a couple of years ago.

I think a better way to check out a reliability of a piece of technology news is to find out if any patents have been made of it (and here I mean accepted and US patent does not count here due to the arbitrary acceptance). But even this has undergone a devaluation since there are nations that are not particularly interested in enforcing patent protections and thus companies are using more secrecy to protect their investments.

Besides, especially in medical sciences, I have came across a couple of publications I know to be in error from my own experience. I know I'll come under heavy flak because of this, but here goes. Hammer away myth busters.

Official line: eating onions has no effect on flu and is simply opinion of uninformed people.
I say: anyone who has actually eaten one at the correct time can tell the difference and tell these researchers to stuff it and actually start doing their job.

Bottom line: Not everything is written in scientific papers.

EDIT: Yes, I once again managed to write something by misplacing a single word so that the meaning of a sentence was reversed.

[Herra Tohtori]

"Accidents in labs" can be:

-misinterpreted results
-some overlooked systematic error in the experiment
-rushed results
-deliberate hoaxes
-legitimate discoveries.


Whereas the first two are the most common, they are usually weeded out by peer review.

Rushed results are a special case of the two first, in which case the peer review system does not have the chance to verify the results and check and triple-check the experiment design for flaws.

Deliberate hoaxes are weeded out by peer review, but for a short time they may look like rushed results; the difference here is that experiment results have been tampered deliberately, where as in three other cases they are just flawed because of whatever reasons.

Despite all this, the fourth group is very real as well as damned important for advances of science. For more examples than Galvani's frog legs twitching, I might mention antibiotics (failed bacteria culture), first observations of cosmic background radiation (initially suspected to be pigeon poo in the antennae), vulcanizing rubber, dynamite, nylon, X-rays et cetera.


Something being discovered by accident does not automatically make it inaccurate or nonexistant.


Although I'm not exactly holding my breath about this, it does feel more than little like Steorn (see the -smiley in my first message to gauge my initial reaction), seeing how little they actually tell about energy input/output on the scope of the whole experiment - as was said, it doesn't help if the flames are hot if you waste energy in keeping them hot. Water does not release energy when it breaks into hydrogen and oxygen; it requires it.

And whatever the salt ions role in the equation is, I haven't got the faintest idea.

[karajorma]

I have always been interested of this attitude and I would like to hear some reasons behind it, because I would say that anything that you cannot [make money of / is not important] [is/can be] published in a scientific paper.

You must be joking. Have you any idea how many things have first appeared in scientific journals that were worth a fortune?

Scientific journals count as prior art. Which means that you've already secured strong proof that you were there first when you make a patent application. So when you a scientist claiming that he's discovered something but talking to the press first then you know something is wrong.

Edison and Wright brothers come to mind when someone flat out trashes piece of news by the fact that nothing like that has been written in publications.

And both are over 100 years old. Why not mention Archimedes and be done with it? How about a more recent example?

Here I need to check the source (a common science magazine published here), but I thought that the working of the bicycle was scientifically explained only a couple of years ago.

Did you also believe that myth about the bumblebee being aerodynamically impossible?

I think a better way to check out a reliability of a piece of technology news is to find out if any patents have been made of it (and here I mean accepted and US patent does not count here due to the arbitrary acceptance). But even this has undergone a devaluation since there are nations that are not particularly interested in enforcing patent protections and thus companies are using more secrecy to protect their investments.

That and the fact that you can patent any old nonsense.

[lenard27]

Yay Erie! Haha thats my hometown. But seriously Kanzius is well on his way to curing some forms of cancer and he's gotten almost no recognition for it.  Its not really theoretical on paper stuff at all either. I think he was testing on animals or something. I havent stayed up with the story since I've been at college really

[Herra Tohtori]

This brings up an interesting point.

Since animals consist about 70% of water mixed with various salts, won't this cancer healing devices make it possible to burn the patients?

Gives a whole new meaning to "no smoking", eh?

[karajorma]

Yay Erie! Haha thats my hometown. But seriously Kanzius is well on his way to curing some forms of cancer and he's gotten almost no recognition for it.  Its not really theoretical on paper stuff at all either. I think he was testing on animals or something. I havent stayed up with the story since I've been at college really

I've not seen one iota of proof that he's on his way to curing cancer. Sorry but I'd love to see it. I'm all for crazy eccentric inventors coming up with stuff that improves the world. I'm a fan of Trevor Baylis and even more so of Troy Hurtubise.

The problem is that there are some significant flaws in his idea. The main one being how do you get the nanoparticles into the cancer cells? You have to get them there in such a concentration that you can use the heating effect of the rf transmitter to kill them without getting them into every other cell in the body too. And if you can't do that then you've basically just invented another way of doing radiography. A nice invention if it works but hardly a cancer cure cause all you have is a cheaper way of doing the same thing you can do now.

[achtung]

A cheaper way is an improvement.

[Agent_Koopa]

A cancer treatment that uses high-frequency waves? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifV3ZoVHfmc&mode=related&search=

In all seriousness, however, this is an interesting piece of news. I have to say, karajorma's presented excellent reasons why it may be a hoax, but I'll just have to wait and see.

[Nuke]

is salt water susceptible  to induction?

think about it when you apply a wave to a piece of wire you essentially get alternating current through that wire. if salt water is highly conductive would it demonstrate the same properties as metal does under the same conditions?

[Black Wolf]

Now assuming it does produce a good bit of energy and it is installed in cars, factories, ect in a decade or so. The side effect of such a thing, or the exhaust from an engine would theoretically be water or water vapor from what I've heard about engines that use hydrogen as a fuel source. First off all, that is eco-friendly in of minds so that would be a good thing.

But, the reality of this is if it were to produce water vapor as an exhaust you would be emitting a greenhouse gas many, many times more powerful than Co2. What does that mean? Well it means if you believe that man is causing global warming and should it really be happening like that, we'd fry ourselves many times faster, but in an eco-friendly way.

Water Vapour has an atmospheric latency time ont he order of weeks, and there's already a fair old bit circling around naturally. It'd have basically no affect.