Burning Saltwater?
Published on 12 Aug 2007 at 2:08 am.
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Filed under Energy, Inventions, Technology.
A friend of mine forwarded me a news video of a man, John Kanzius, from Sanibel Island Florida, who has invented a way to burn salt water with radio frequency generator.
The question here is what exactly is burning.
The most probable explanation is that the radio waves are breaking the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen then burns creating the hot flame.
The problem is that the energy that it takes to separate the water molecule in the first place is what you get back again when you burn it (since the process of burning Hydrogen is the same as recombining the Hydrogen back together with the water). If that is the case, then he is pumping energy in as radio waves, which he then retrieves by burning the hydrogen. This will result in no net energy gain, which means that this is not a useful energy source.
Another possibility is that it is burning the Sodium ions. However, if you compare the color of the Kanzius’ flame in the video to the color of a sodium flame, you can see that Kanzius’ flame is pink or red, and not yellow which is an indicator of sodium. The red color could indeed be from the burning hydrogen, which has a strong emission line in the red. Look at the Hydrogen spectrum here and compare to the sodium spectrum.
However, some of the videocaps from the same news report show a yellow flame. They probably did not do a careful white balance adjust, and so it is possible that there is not much we can learn from these images.
As much as I would like it to be true, this is another example of obtaining the same or less energy than you put in. This is not useful. Instead, we are looking for ways to release stored energy—not store it and then release it. It may be, however, that Kanzius’ radio wave generator may have other uses… including curing cancer.
In the meantime, I will leave the idea that salt water burns and I will go back to thinking about Frank Burns:
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
