johnsocal

I'll take this guys discovery with a 'grain of salt'

In the end he's just burning sodium

HAZ-Matt

I did in fact invent a device that extracted energy from nowhere out of water, but the energy companies paid me $50 billion to destroy it. Sucks for you guys.

Alex 97Z28 M6

That doesn't get ratings.

5thgen69camaro

Early versions of most technologies including fuel cells are inefficent. Were still refining the 4 cycle engine. The device is not perpetual motion as it uses a finite fuel(when the water in your tank is gone). My question is could this be practical one day?

HAZ-Matt

No but it is nearly the same thing from a thermodynamic point of view because the hydrogen and oxygen in the water molecule is at a lower energy state than the component hydrogen and oxygen. It takes energy to split it, which is the same as the energy you get back when you recombine them. If you could split water for free, you could simply route the exhaust pipe back into the gas tank and it would never empty. You would then have a perpetual motion machine.

5thgen69camaro

You could recombine them which would yield energy? The result being the same salt water to deposit in the tank even after the burn?

HAZ-Matt

He isn't burning water... he is breaking the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen then combusts, recombining with oxygen to form water.

91_z28_4me

But either way more energy is being put into the system that is gotten out of it.

HAZ-Matt

Was creating a theoretical argument against this...
Was just saying that the only way you could get energy from the water was if you could split the water in oxygen and hydrogen for free. But if that was the case then you could route the exhaust back into the gas tank and that would make it essentially a perpetual motion machine.

Or if it took less energy to split the water than it did to recombine the hydrogen and oxygen back into water and you are still getting free energy out of nowhere and could still recycle the exhaust into the fuel tank... again perpetual motion.

5thgen69camaro

I thought you were saying that because currently it took more energy to split the hydrogen and oxygen that there was no use for it. And also being that Prepetual motion machines defy the law of thermo dynamics, this thing will never have a practical use. I hope they at least try to refine it so that they seperate it with less energy than it produces.

The problem I was having with routing the exhaust back to the tank in my head was this; You seperate Hydrogen and Oxygen to burn the Hydrogen. During the burn of the Hydrogen, I assumed some chemical reaction would happen to the hydrogen giving you the burn and preventing it from bonding with the oxygen to create water again. Or at least the same water you started out with. I suck at understanding chemistry. It would be awesome if something could come of this...

HAZ-Matt

I should have included if I did not the fact that you absolutely cannot split the water for less energy than you get out of recombining the oxygen and hydrogen to form water again. That would require a whole new set of thermodynamics and a greatly different understanding of physics as far as I know. Without rewriting physics however there is no way to make this a net positive energy gain.

Perhaps you could use a battery that you plug in at night to run the RF generator that splits the water that is then combusted in the ICE. But then again that is far less efficient than just putting liquid dinosaurs in your tank and burning them. Or you could just use a fuel cell.