Salt Water Fuel powers a Stirling engine

[J_mclaughlin]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

This machine is merely using RF energy to dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen.

I just have a couple of questions that I don't know if anyone could answer:

Why is it necessary that the "invention" use salt water? I could see that the radio waves could be inducing some kind of current or something like that, which would require dissolved ions of some kind to make the solution conductive.

Which begs the second question- doesn't chlorine have a lower (or is it higher- I don't remember) reduction potential then oxygen? Meaning that if it was electrochemical (which would explain the necessity of the salt), the products would be chlorine and hydrogen? The chlorine gas could also explain the yellow flame, although I'm not exactly sure which color excited chlorine atoms produce.

[Nate Laverdure]

From the original article:

...
But John also came across yet another extrordinary breakthrough.

His machine could actually make saltwater burn.

John Kanzius discovered that his radio frequency generator could release the oxygen and hydrogen from saltwater and create an incredibly intense flame.

"Just like that. If that was in a car cylinder you could see the amount of fire that would be in the cylinder."
...

As you can see, there is a disappointingly small amount of real explanation as to how exactly this process works.

[dtengineering]

Bah! This invention is NOTHING next to the perpetual motion cold fusion carburator that I have developed! I can get 250 miles per gallon from a Hummer using just discarded dish soap and hamster saliva as fuel and emitting only lightly scented fairy farts as exhaust. I could tell you about it, but the oil companies have already sent hit men to sabotage my operations using government technology obtained from the Alien craft stored at Area 51.

Either that, or it is a case of reporters without a science background being asked to cover a science story and not having the slightest clue what kind of questions to ask. Just another reason why FIRST matters.

"Imagine that... hamster saliva as the ultimate clean fuel!"

Sigh... I should be doing something useful right now....

Jason

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Either that, or it is a case of reporters without a science background being asked to cover a science story and not having the slightest clue what kind of questions to ask. Just another reason why FIRST matters.

Come now, they must have had some scientific background. I mean, they managed to find a polymer engineer to exclaim the amazingness of an obscure RF based electrolysis machine. They could have asked an entomologist after all.

[pufame]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Either that, or it is a case of reporters without a science background being asked to cover a science story and not having the slightest clue what kind of questions to ask. Just another reason why FIRST matters.

Well, I'd bet a lot of the reporters did know what questions to ask but there was no point in asking them because the target audience with these stories were local people who wanted an alternative way to power their car and wanted to know what the benefits of this innovation could be, not how it works. The point is, even if the reporters had asked the questions, the answers would have ended up on the editing room floor because the target audience wouldn't care, or worse change the channel.

[Dick Linn]

There's some info here:

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directo...ng_Radio_Waves

[Cody Carey]

Yeah, it is wonderful that he is trying to cure cancer and all, but doesn't it raise anyone else's hackles that Kanzius says if someone wants to buy up the rights to the technology, that would be fine ?

I mean, It seems to me that if they find a way to improve the efficiency of the machine, so that it COULD possibly solve the world's soon-to-be energy problem... That would be a much more worthy and noble goal than curing cancer.

If you think about it logically, selling the product for "free energy" to fund cancer research would be bartering the fate of a world away for the fate of the small percentage of the world's population that has cancer (of which Kanzius is part), not a good idea. I don't know, it can actually sound sort of selfish depending on how you look at it...

[cooker52]

Originally Posted by Cody Carey

I don't know, it can actually sound sort of selfish depending on how you look at it...

When it comes down to it, he probably doesn't know anything about working with that stuff. When I see it, between his knowledge and experience, it was probably in his best interest to continue with his goal to cure cancer. The stirling engine was out of his field of study, let alone his goals. I just hope he sells the rights to someone who will do the right thing with it.

[pufame]

He has said in a number of reports that he wants to make sure that the technology is not shelved by a large corporation who just calls it not feasible when it truely could be done. The reason he wants to give up rights to this technology is to let someone who has expertise in energy work on it while he continues his work in cancer research (which has been ongoing for years now).

[cooker52]

It's like, why stop working against cancer when I've put so much time in. It was just easier for him to stay in his field of study.

[ahecht]

What a lot of you are missing is that this is completely bogus. Yes, he gets a flame from salt water, but the power produced by that flame is only 70% or so of the power required to generate the radio waves. There is simply no significant power stored in salt water.

Don't believe me? Think about it this way:

Mixing hydrogen and oxygen together to make water produces energy. Lots of energy, in the form of heat, light, and if the explosion is big enough, sound. Therefore, in order to split water back into hydrogen and oxygen (which can burn), you have to put in an amount of energy equal to that produced when the hydrogen and oxygen mix. Therefore, no usable net energy is stored by the hydrogen and oxygen in water.

So, maybe it's the dissolved salt that is storing energy. Well, it's true dissolving table salt in water is endothermic, in that it takes energy to make the salt dissolve (and therefore water will cool off slightly after you add salt). However, this effect is very, very small, and since the dissolving salt will at most lower the water temperature a degree or two, the most energy you could get out of separating the salt from the water would be enough to raise the water temperature by a degree or two (not the 3000 degrees this guy was seeing).

Okay, so maybe it's the salt itself that is disassociating into sodium and chlorine and producing energy. However, anyone who has ever mixed sodium and chlorine (hopefully from a distance to avoid the explosion) can tell you that mixing the two to produce salt produces a large amount of energy, and therefore separating the two elements requires a large energy input.

In other words, this is a cool parlor trick, and I can't see what useful purpose this would have. There are simpler ways of converting radio waves into heat.

[mathking]

There is actually a large (and growing) percentage of the population (at least in Europe and the U.S.) that has, had or will have cancer. Over one third of the population of the U.S. will get cancer during their lifetimes.

[ChrisH]

Originally Posted by ahecht

In other words, this is a cool parlor trick, and I can't see what useful purpose this would have. There are simpler ways of converting radio waves into heat.

For me the kicker is this. What is he DOING with the energy that he is supposedly generating? The stirling engine looks very similar to an engine built by a shop class at our local Junior College. It runs by placing it over a coffee cup of hot water. It also only produces enough power to keep itself turning, at least until the water gets cold, when it stops.

To really demonstrate something like this you need to hook up calibrated power measurement equipment to the microwave input. You also need some way of measuring the power output by the Stirling shaft. If the latter is bigger than the former, then you really have something. If not then you have cool looking way to heat water that you can't even use for coffee.

The thermodynamic properties of water, sodium and chlorine and their reactions are well known. For this to work as described something would have to have been missed by thousands of engineers and scientists over the years. Remember these are people who are actively looking for anomolies. There might be somthing there, but it is probably another incidence of cold fusion.

ChrisH

[Cody Carey]

Originally Posted by mathking

There is actually a large (and growing) percentage of the population (at least in Europe and the U.S.) that has, had or will have cancer. Over one third of the population of the U.S. will get cancer during their lifetimes.

Well, if you take the statistics obtained from This site, a reputable journal for cancer clinicians, it says that there are about 1.4 million new cases of cancer developing per year in the united states, In all sites of the body. If you compair that to the current population of the united states, some 301,139,947... it turns out to be a very small percentage indeed... somewhere around 0.46 percent per year. If you take a look at the average American life expectancy, (74 years) ... and ... wait. I am not going to get THAT in-depth =P. I just want to point out that there are a lot less people suffering of cancer than will be suffering through an energy crisis if we fail come up with something soon. But, as was already pointed out, the efficiency of this process right now leaves much to be desired in a perpetual motion machine, (Some 31%, I believe).

[TimCraig]

Originally Posted by Cody Carey

If you compair that to the current population of the united states, some 301,139,947... it turns out to be a very small percentage indeed... somewhere around 0.46 percent per year. If you take a look at the average American life expectancy, (74 years) ... and ... wait. I am not going to get THAT in-depth =P.

Maybe you should have. From the same website, it indicates that the current death rate from cancer in the US is 1 in 4 or 25% of the current population will die eventually of cancer. Taking your population figure, that's over 75 million people in the US alone who will contract and die of cancer in the current population.