Smoke and mirrors?: The extraordinary claims have sparked a frenzy of interest across the Internet.
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SYDNEY: A U.S. broadcast executive-turned-scientist has seemingly found a way to burn seawater. Though it has the air of a hoax, if true, it could be one of the biggest discoveries in chemistry in recent times.
John Kanzius, from Erie, Pennsylvania, blasted a test tube of salt water with high frequency radio waves, causing the water to burn like a candle, he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper. Chemist Rustum Roy from Pennsylvania State University told the same newspaper that he had confirmed the phenomenon by replicating the experiment himself.
Though the technique and results have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, they are sparking a frenzy of interest on the Internet, where video clips showing the technique are beginning to circulate (such as this one on YouTube).
"Enormous potential"
"Certainly it's interesting," physical chemist, Scott Kable, of the University of Sydney in Australia, told Cosmos Online. The technique is theoretically possible and has "enormous potential," he said. But without more information, Kable commented, the mechanism and role of salt and other electrolytes remains unknown.
Roy explained to the Post-Gazette, that the water itself doesn't burn. His best guess is that the energy from the radio waves breaks the bonds between the molecules, releasing hydrogen that can be ignited with a flame. The temperature of the flame was measured at 1,650 °C.
The accidental discovery came out of research Kanzius was motivated to undertake when he found out he had cancer. The TV station owner decided to use his broadcast knowledge to experimentally fry cancer cells using radio waves in a garage laboratory at his home. Kanzius added a solution of nano-sized gold and carbon particles into a test tube of tumour cells. He predicted that the particles would migrate to the cancer cells and act as an antenna for the searing heat produced by radio waves – in the process killing the cells. It's not clear how he planned to target cancer cells within the body.
However, when someone noticed condensation in the test tubes, Kanzius decided to try the technique for desalinating water. The subsequent blast of high frequency radio waves caused the water to seem to give off a gas that he was able to ignite with a match.
Future fuel
Kanzius now speculates that the technique could be used to burn water to produce energy – he says he has built an engine that runs off the heat produced by the flame. However, even if the claims turn out to be true, it remains to be seen if the energy produced could compensate for the radio wave energy required for the reaction.
Kanzius is seeking a patent on the technique and is currently tight-lipped on a more detailed explanation.
The most important potential application of the discovery is the safe production of hydrogen, said the University of Sydney's Kable. Presently, hydrogen is produced either from reacting natural gas and steam, which emits the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, or by sending an electric current through water. The highly flammable gas requires transport in tankers, a dangerous prospect. Kable says that the ability to produce hydrogen from water while it's already inside an engine would be an extremely useful and safe method.
But don't worry about setting fire to your cup of coffee in the microwave. Kable believes that the amount of energy required to break molecular bonds far exceeds the energy produced in the fire. This means any practical application is likely a long way off.
Energy Consumption
Before getting excited by this invention you would have to know more about the amount of energy being consumed by the radio frequency generator that is cracking the water into hydrogen and oxygen compared with the amount of energy liberated by burning the oxygen and hydrogen. My guess is that the energy equation will be extremely unfavourable.
Hydrogen from water
We have duplicated the experiment using only 5 watts of RF power by tweaking other factors like frequency and resonance.
An engine could run on this much power the only caution is storage and a possible explosion.
Details
Hi!
I'm pretty much interested in the details of your experiment, and how to reproduce it, could you please contact me?
Thanks a lot!
Luiz Silva
shivalaya777@yahoo.com.br
missing step
Ive heard alot about the effect on salt water but what about normal h2o. If there was any effect on normal water it would have been released with the original findings, in the video we see the salt burn and sit in the water, so the reaction must be due to the mixture not the individule elements.
Typo
PittsburgH Post Gazette - there's an "h"
Ooops
Typo corrected - thanks.
Resonance
It sounds like resonance to me...which means that if done right, the amount of energy needed, like hitting the right frequency of a tuning fork, could be very little (his machine to produce the radio waves is not optimized for energy consumption, because it was made for killing cancer cells...also the design of projecting the waves to the salt water...and so on).
Despite the energy
Despite the energy consumption, would it not be feasible to increase the surfae area of your salt water, place it under a boiler of some sort, and boom--steam? Sure a test tube isnt going to produce gargantuan amounts of energy, but it doesnt take much to extend a radio wave.
So you can fill a 20 square foot room with 3 inches of salt water, turn the emitter on, and have a furnace. I think that would mean more energy out than in. (The first law of thermodynamics will be shattered, someone will have to console him....) Just a thought.
And I agree on resonance... unlike electrolysis, this must shake the hydrogen away from the oxygen, rather than just knocking it away. Though one would think vaporation would occur before combustion... a lot to think about. RF waves usually only excite water; this could open up something unique in that other elements may also have specific frequencies that can burst bonds... Just my two cents.
Uh, no.
Doesn't matter how "very little" that energy is, the amount of energy needed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen will always be greater than the amount you can get from burning it.
Always. Period.
That's simple thermodynamics...that apparently only one percent of the world's population seems to understand...
...which of course explains why the world's so screwed up.
Not True
Not necessarily true. We may or may not be dealing with the laws of thermodynamics. Hyrdrogen is a form of stored energy and the energy required to produce the hydrogen was already usedto create electron bonds. Breaking electrons from hydrogen and breaking Oxygen from Hydrogen are two completely different energy scenarios.
Laws of thermodynamics say that it will require the same amount of energy to produce hydrogen as would be produced during its destruction, however, that does not mean that the separation of water from hydrogen necessarily consumes the same amount of energy as the yield of destroying hydrogen.
Fact.