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Unread 19-06-2007, 08:07
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Re: Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gear View Post
its not impossible. this machine is supposedly releasing stored chemical energy in the salt water. meaning you just need to input enough energy to release it.
just like cars that use the spark plugs to release the chemical energy stored in gasoline.

correct me if i'm wrong
Unless something completely novel and previously unsuspected in the history of chemistry is going on, you're wrong. Salt water is not a fuel like gasoline. There's no stored chemical energy in it. It's more like the ash produced by burning hydrogen.

This machine is merely using RF energy to dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen. In order to do that, it must supply at least as much energy as one can get by recombining them. This process has at least one advantage over straight electrolysis: it has no electrodes that corrode and require maintenance. So if it's efficient enough, it might be a reasonable way to produce hydrogen for use as a fuel. (The next step to solve is then separating the hydrogen from the oxygen, and the step after that is storing the hydrogen.)
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