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PA inventor discovers a method for burning salt water as fuel
How's this for an unlikely yet extremely exciting potential fuel source: salt water. Yes, the substance that covers 70% of the earth's surface, the most common liquid on earth. A Pennsylvania man has figured out a way to burn it, opening the door for using salt water as a source of fuel. It's a pretty amazing idea, isn't it?
By using radio waves, John Kanzius discovered that he could get the water to ignite. The specific frequencies rapidly release the oxygen and hydrogen from salt water, burning it at extremely high temperatures. Now it's up to scientists to figure out how to make this discovery efficient and stick it in cars. Let's get to it, guys.
Post Gazette, via New Launches
CORRECTION: Thanks to an astute reader (see "Comments" below), the wording of the piece has been adjusted to better describe the process.
By umbran at 4:38 PM ON 09/12/07
Salt water is not held together by chemicals. It *is* chemicals. The article states that the RF radiation weakens the bonds between those chemical constituents.
By webRatPGH at 4:52 PM ON 09/12/07
I found this as a related youtube at the end of that video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rb_rDkwGnU
By SirSaxMan at 5:29 PM ON 09/12/07
Are we all sure his RF isn't releasing the Sodium from the salt-water and it's reacting with the water (raw sodium does not play well with water)? If his method works as described with salt-water, it should just as well with fresh water. Let's see a test run from water out of the tap.
By karpet at 3:18 PM ON 09/13/07
Um.....ignoring the enormous potential this actually has and focusing on an insignificant coincidence, has anyone noticed that this has already been discovered? It totally already happened. The made a movie about it in fact. It was called Chain Reaction. I mean dude, get with the program, this happened back in ’96!
Seriously, you can get hydrogen from water with electrodes, see 5th grade science books. But, that is not totally efficient, so if this process can make more energy then it takes to separate the bonds (which I would have to believe is the point and has been roughly calculated.) then this has the potential to change many things.
By wintermute44 at 1:31 PM ON 09/14/07
They're not *burning* salt water. They're subjecting salt water to a continuous RF field, which is releasing hydrogren, and then the hydrogen is being combusted. While it's a new way of doing it, the process is fundamentally similar to electrolosis. They kind of glaze over the fact that, like electrolosis, the energy put into producing the field >>> the energy released from combusting the resulting hydrogen. That's kind of a buzzkill, I know, which is probably why they don't talk about it too specifically in the article.
I don't get why this process wouldn't work with fresh water either... Salt water is a solution, not a chemical compound, so if the RF is really breaking the Oxygen/Hydrogen double bond I'm clueless as why it matters what the water is in solution with. Either way, it's not a self sustaining reaction (it stops when the RF is removed), which *would* be news, because then we're talking about a real fuel.
In any event, I'll be be in other room with my tin foil hat playing with my zero-point perpetual motion machine.
By SomeGuy at 2:30 AM ON 01/03/08
So, just for clarification, someone can go out in a boat and catch the lake on fire?
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