Salt Water as a Power Source?

[LakeSuperior]

This is one example where all the media exposure in the world won't change the basic facts.

Isn't there someone that screens content to protect these media guys from their own stupidity? This is a poster child example of the dumbing down of America!

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Zanshin

The magnetohydrodynamic drive, if it ever makes it out of the experimental prototype phase, might disprove that assertion.

Incorrect.

Water is not the source of energy in a MHD motor - it’s a only a component.
Electricity is the external source of energy in this type of electro-magnetic motor.

Forms of Energy
➥ http://www.need.org/needpdf/FormsofEnergy.pdf

[Hampus]

It's only partly BS, depending on how you interpret it. There is no doubt that you need more energy creating the hydrogen than you get from burning it and if they claim that sea water is an endless source of energy with hydrogen virtually creating itself, then it's BS. But... Hydrogen is recognised as the cleanest fuel that you could possibly run a combustion engine on and it produces no green house gases whatsoever. The problem today lies in creating enough hydrogen to make it a realistic option to fossil fuels. up until quite recently hydrogen has been created through a chemical process, adding a catalyst to water and collecting the gas. If the same thing could be accomplished using electricity we have a whole new range of options. We could create hydrogen using renewable sources of energy such as wind or water powered turbines, or even nuclear power that, apart from storing the nuclear waste, is very clean. At least with regards to green house gases. If, and I say IF, hydrogen could be created using renewable sources of energy and IF most combustion engines could be powered with hydrogen instead of fossile fuels, much is gained.

/Hampus

[LakeSuperior]

If the same thing could be accomplished using electricity we have a whole new range of options. We could create hydrogen using renewable sources of energy such as wind or water powered turbines, or even nuclear power that, apart from storing the nuclear waste, is very clean. At least with regards to green house gases. If, and I say IF, hydrogen could be created using renewable sources of energy and IF most combustion engines could be powered with hydrogen instead of fossile fuels, much is gained.

Not quite sure what you mean here? We have been cracking water (breaking the hydrogen - oxygen bond to create hydrogen) with electricity since electricity was discovered. Since electricity made by renewable sources is indistingishable from electricity made by coal plants we can crack water using renewable resources.

Additionally, hydrogen powered cars have been around for some time.

So, we are where you want to be...

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by James S

... Wacko I appreciate you posting stuff like this...some may be valid science some may not, but as someone with a curios mind, I prefer to see it all than have you not post anything.

And I appreciate the smart guys explaining what we are seeing and why it may or may not work or be valid.

It makes me uncomfortable to think that in posting something we are exposing our selves to ridicule when are like to think I am among friends.

Thanks for the cool post.

The original video didn’t appear, to me, to be offered as an amusing & cool entertainment; but as awesome revolutionary science ( “Salt Water as a Power Source?”); which is obviously false.

I don’t think that correcting misunderstandings of basic science is unfriendly.

Whilst I agree that no member should ever suffer personal ridicule; some ideas are so fallacious as to be ridiculous - and this was one of those.

Of course, I’ve been wrong before ...

Respectfully,
Gord

[Hampus]

Originally Posted by LakeSuperior

Additionally, hydrogen powered cars have been around for some time.

Yes, but the problem is creating enough hydrogen to turn ALL cars into hydrogen cars, or to make it a realistic source of energy. I don't know if this way of creating hydrogen is more or less effective than using a catalyst or electrolysis, I'm saying that depending on how you choose to look at it, it's not all BS.

/Hampus

[James S]

Originally Posted by GordMay

some ideas are so fallacious as to be ridiculous - and this was one of those.

That thought is obviously not shared by all members or the post would not have been made.

[bencoder]

Originally Posted by James S

That thought is obviously not shared by all members or the post would not have been made.

The ridicule was not aimed at the poster though, apart from one joke about him getting paid. The criticism is aimed squarely at the video/invention/the idea that water can be used as an energy source (discounting fusion).

Try not to get worked up but use it as an opportunity to learn that these things just aren't possible and it will help you spot them in future. Then you can still post it, along with an explanation of why you think it's nonsense.

[James S]

Right

[Red Mantis]

It seems odd that I could lurk for months reading about boat systems and seamanship, but a physics misconception brings me out into the light. To wit:

Originally Posted by Hampus

Hydrogen is recognised as the cleanest fuel that you could possibly run a combustion engine on and it produces no green house gases whatsoever.

Combustion of hydrogen is very clean, but it does indeed produce greenhouse gases. It's not very well publicized, but water vapor is in fact the primary greenhouse gas on Earth. It is the most abundant of the greenhouse gases, and has by far the greatest contribution to the greenhouse effect.

Most climate-change activists are focused on carbon-based greenhouse gases (e.g. CO2, hydrocarbons), and ignore water vapor altogether. Some say that this is because there's very little that can be done to keep the sun from evaporating the Earth's oceans. Others say that it's because you can't tax the sun or the oceans, so politicians and regulators can't be bothered. Still others say that carbon-based industries have been demonized for decades, and that the climate change crisis is just the most recent tactic to be used against them.

Which reason you believe is probably a function of your level of cynicism and your position in the public/private/nonprofit sphere.

On the original topic: I'll never forget my high-school chemistry teacher trying to explain to us that you couldn't burn water because it had already been burned. Took a while for that one to sink in.

[Captain Bill]

The original video at the start of this thread just demonstrates the gullibility of the press in this country. As many have stated the basic laws of thermodynamics prevent getting more energy out of a chemical system than you put in.

That said, I would like to make a statement on the use of hydrogen as an energy source at least with respect to chemical energy. Hydrogen is not an energy SOURCE. There is no natural source of hydrogen on this planet that we can exploit. All hydrogen must be made by dissociating it from other chemicals to which it has bonded. This takes energy which can be generated in any number of ways, which means at best, hydrogen can be thought of as an energy storage or transportation medium. Like a battery you will never get more energy out of it than you put in, and in actuality it will always be less. In addition hydrogen is a difficult product to store and transport. Hydrogen is volumetrically inefficient due to its low density. To be stored efficiently on a volumetric basis it must be liquefied or compressed or stored as a metal hydride. The first two require a tremendous amount of energy. The second requires heavy metal storage tanks capable of holding thousands of PSI in pressure, and the last a heavy tank of spongy metal. In addition, most inexpensive metals react with hydrogen and become brittle over time (not that long of time by industrial standards). If we changed current natural gas pipelines to hydrogen we'd have to dig them up and replace them every couple of years. Despite all of the hype a chemical hydrogen based future makes little sense (IMNSHO).

On the question of water as an energy source, I think people are a bit confused by the difference between extracting energy from moving water and water as a chemical energy source. The earlier statement about magnetohydrodynamic drives could probably have been better stated as magnetorhydrodynamic generation. Saltwater is a conductor and as those of us who took physics in high school know, if you move a conductor in a magnetic field you generate an electric current. It is the basis by which all of the alternators and generators, we all know and love, work. In magnetohydrodynamics the saltwater is simply the conductor and moving that through a magnetic field generates electricity. The energy is extracted from the motion of the water, not the chemicals of the water. The water was placed in motion by some other energy source such as solar (non-tidal currents, evaporation) or gravity (tidal currents). Again water is not the source of the energy, but just a storage medium. The issue with Magnetohydrodynamics is that the conductor must be very good and moving very fast (hot) for maximum efficiency. Saltwater is neither of these. This is why magnetohydrodynamic generation works best with plasmas rather than saltwater. I'm not sure that magnetohydrodynamics in seawater can ever overcome the system losses to generate usefull amounts of electricity. If it could I suspect someone would have built a little donut shaped magnet with a couple of wires hooked to it that we could drag behind our sailboats to recharge our batteries.

There are no magical answers to the energy problems we face as a society. The ugly truth is that hydrocarbons (petroleum) are very efficient form of transportation fuel. It has a very high energy content by weight and volume and and can be stored in light weight containers at normal temperatures and pressures. It will be very hard to displace hydrocarbons as transportation fuels. The best bet might be to concentrate on biofuels. Note that biofuels (biodiesel and alcohols) are hydrocarbons, but their carbon source is atmospheric carbon instead of fossil carbon so they are by enlarge carbon neutral. I am aware of the arguments and actually agree with arguments that current biofuel technologies, especially those based on grain actually take more fossil fuel input than they replace. I do believe that developing technologies in these areas based on cellulose have the potential to fix that issue.

Now I'll get off my soap box.

Bill

[hellosailor]

Look, the typical US city dweller (and by city I mean CITY, as in megalopolis, not just a fourth-order spot on the map no matter how lovely it may be) would never think of commuting to work by car, no matter what it was powered by. New York, Boston, Chicago, DC...all have major investments in public transit systems. Paris, London, Moscow...it isn't just the US.

Many other cities and counties simply do not. The problem is not FUELS but POLITICS. Citizens who are too cheap or dumb to fund public transit systems, and politicians who aren't suicidal enough to force them to be built.

Then that is compounded by the excess of wealth in America, too many people are too f*ing rich and think that they can live on a private estate two hours away from where they work, driving both ways each day.

The bottom line is, our fuel crisis and energy crisis is not a technology problem, it is a problem of morales and ethics and riches. And a large part of that (1/3 of the retail price of gasoline in the US, as of this month) is from market speculators, driving up the price of petro stocks in commodity speculation. Find a way to stock the rich leeches from speculating in the futures market, and you'd drop gasoline from $2.79 to $1.99 overnight.

Or, become a speculator, and enjoy sucking the blood out of all those folks who had so much money they thought they could commute a hundred miles to work every day. Without public transit.

[LakeSuperior]

Hellosailer: so what you are saying is that if we burn fuel/use energy at 2/3's or 1/2 the present rate, for example, and the rest of the world eventually comes up to this standard, the problem goes away?

[slomotion]

You guys are no fun at all.

Electrolysis is really cool. And although you need external power, it doesn’t have to cost you anything. I and some wacko friends proved this in junior high school when we built an electrolyisis tank in the basement (no, Mom, it was Denny’s basement - not ours). We used distilled water with salt added as a catalyst. For power we just, uh, "borrowed" one of those monster 1 ½ volt batteries from the school science lab. It took about a week and we had to "borrow" another battery. But, eventually we filled one of those plastic dry cleaning bags with hydrogen.

After that it was a simple matter to tie off the bag with string, squeeze it out the door, attach and light the small firecracker, and let it go. About 50' up there was an impressive bang and a truly spectacular and blinding flash of light.

At the time I thought it was about the coolest thing ever. My Mom and Dad disagreed. Today I’d probably wind up in Guantanamo.

[chala]

Originally Posted by Captain Bill

[COLOR=black][FONT=Verdana] Like a battery you will never get more energy out of it than you put in
Bill

It will be interresting to think what will hapen if we where to get more out than we put in, self destruction ?