Electrolysis of water into Hydrogen & Oxygen

[mcstar]

The only problem with that is that the real cost for LIFEPO4 would be about $30,000 (depending on hp and range needed of course) for such a battery and then your cost would be .50/mile. That's equivalent to $6/gallon. My bet is that the price of LIFEPO4 batteries will go up in cost long before gas gets that expensive.

[dogman]

Ya mean, between now and next friday?

[TylerDurden]

^^^ ^^^

[dogman]

Wow! first three dogbones and now three smileys. Thanks Tyler.

[Lessss]

[ptd]

Here's some math to make it concrete...

At 25mpg if you drive 10K miles => you burn 400Gallons @ $3.80 == $1520
At 27mpg if you drive 10K miles => you burn 370Gal @ 3.80 == $1470
Savings == $50 if you're consistent

At 25mpg if you drive 20K miles => you burn 800Gallons @ $3.80 == $3040
At 27mpg if you drive 20K miles => you burn 740.7Gal @ 3.80 == $2814
Savings == $225 if you're consistent

you might wanna check your math, lol... gordo, really?!? what's 370 x 3.80 ?

[Gordo]

+1 on the math

[TylerDurden]

Let's see the inventor run the RF generator using the salt-water heat.

[pdf]

Well, while I find these stories interesting and while I am pretty sure no one on this newsgroup gets taken it, it gets a bit tiresome to keep seeing these "amazing inventions" from the back of Popular Mechanics come up over and over again.

So all he is doing is taking energy and making a fuel. A simple calculation that he has apparently not done will show him that he is using more energy than he is "creating". By the way, the first law of thermodynamics still applies here. He is merely splitting water to make hydrogen and oxygen. When it is burned, it is going to release no more energy than he used to "create" it. It is the same reaction in reverse. And here, the second law of thermo is going to kill him and he will find out that he only gets a small fraction of the energy he pulled out of the wall back.

Some believe hydrogen is a good way to create a fuel from another source of energy. Some don't. At any rate, the success or failure of such schemes depends first of all on where you plan to get the energy to create molecular hydrogen. If you use solar energy, then maybe you have something; this will depend on a lot of things like how much energy you have to put in to create the system to convert the energy. Materials availability is also an issue. If you reform natural gas, you are using the embedded energy in methane to create a different fuel. When you run out of methane or create enough CO2 to cause problems, then you are stuck again.

I know I am preaching to the choir but it makes me nuts.

[oldpiper]

WOW! This is simply and utterly AMAZING!!!

Unfortunately, what is amazing is how totally wrong he is about absolutely everything. He hasn't invented anything new, he has reinvented the microwave oven that has been a staple in Seven-Elevens forever and was first introduced as a consumer item as the Amana RadarRange in 1970 or so. He is just producing a more focused microwave beam than a microwave oven, so a small volume of water is getting heated to a high temperature instead of a large volume of water getting heated moderately. There is no electrolysis going on, none at all.

Instead of electrolyzing water, he is pumping a bucketload of energy into it, raising the temperature "to 1500 C" (certainly possible here), producing superheated steam at the surface of the water. The escaping steam carries dissolved ions in it, and at 1500 C (or actually quite a few degrees lower), metal atoms in particular emit visible light: sodium: yellow, potassium and calcium: red, etc. So it's easy to get a yellow-orange "flame" which is not a flame at all. If he really had found a way to electrolyze, then burn salt water, then putting his hand into the microwaves would catch it on fire quickly. After all, what is blood? Salt water with some other junk (cells, proteins, cholesterol) floating in it. (By the way, when hydrogen burns, it produces a very faint bluish flame, not yellow-orange.)

He inadvertently showed his total lack of scientific knowledge when he said that "[water] is the most abundant element in the world." He doesn't have the slightest idea of what an element is. And, whoever APV Polymer is, I wouldn't trust them with my polymers (after all, polymers are chemicals, too), they are equally clueless.

Bad show all around.

The only redeemable point is that microwave heating to run a Stirling engine is quite possibly still more efficient than an ICE (I could be wrong here, I'm too lazy to figure up the numbers but we all know that an ICE is incredibly wasteful), considering that we're all using electrical energy for better efficiency in our vehicles, but that is just coincidence in this TV "news" drivel.

Cameron

[pdf]

Instead of electrolyzing water, he is pumping a bucketload of energy into it, raising the temperature "to 1500 C" (certainly possible here), producing superheated steam at the surface of the water. The escaping steam carries dissolved ions in it, and at 1500 C (or actually quite a few degrees lower), metal atoms in particular emit visible light: sodium: yellow, potassium and calcium: red, etc. So it's easy to get a yellow-orange "flame" which is not a flame at all. If he really had found a way to electrolyze, then burn salt water, then putting his hand into the microwaves would catch it on fire quickly. After all, what is blood? Salt water with some other junk (cells, proteins, cholesterol) floating in it. (By the way, when hydrogen burns, it produces a very faint bluish flame, not yellow-orange.)

Good show! The trail of the ions totally look like a dancing flame. Could make an interesting (if expensive) fake fireplace.

EDIT: Wow. An interesting array of patents related to water splitting:
http://www.waterfuelconverters.com/Patents.html