I'll get right on it, as soon as I finish assembling my Interocitor.
Posted on 09/18/2008 10:24:42 AM PDT by Red Badger
Ah.
Alternative => hydrogen generation => fuel cell (for automobile) is a good idea only because of refueling convenience for automobiles (rather than the inconvience of recharging batteries). Hydrogen as an energy carrier loses out to batteries in the end. Another thread I suppose.
The Saturn V's first stage burned kerosine and oxygen. The second stage was hydrogen and oxygen.
Hydrogen is not a "primary" fuel because it takes more energy to make it than it produces. There is no net energy gain when water is extracted from water, and then burned to get water.
My thoughts, exactly.
Weeeeee!
Yeah, but he's in Eureka Springs. Things are different there.
Does that include the laws of physics?..............
It’s not possible. That would make it a perpetual motion machine.
Your laptop's power supply is a switching power supply because step down transformers can be made smaller and lighter for the same amount of total power if they work at higher frequencies.
Switching supplies rectify the incoming 120VAC@60Hz to DC, then pulse the DC, send it through a step down transformer, then rectify, filter, and regulate the output of the step down transformer. Because the pulses are at 1-2 KHz instead of the power line's 60Hz, the step down transformer is much smaller.
The other reason your laptop uses a switching power supply is that it will work with any voltage from 120VAC@60Hz (North America) to 240VAC@50Hz (Europe) simply by varying the switching pulse width. One supply, worldwide use.
With the electrolysis of water, the only thing that matters is current flow from the negative to positive terminals, not what form that current flow takes. From Wiki:
The generated amount of hydrogen is twice the amount of oxygen, and both are proportional to the total electrical charge that was sent through the water.
It doesn't matter if that total charge was continuous, or if it was pulsed. The total charge delivered equals the amount of hydrogen produced. Period.
...and if you get enough hydrogen together in one place, it automatically turns into helium!......of course the “poof” is much bigger, though......
Good explanation..... Pulse width modulation (PWM) has revolutionized the electronics industry over the last 20 years.........
I'll get right on it, as soon as I finish assembling my Interocitor.
What a great movie. Almost as fun as Plan nine, except much better special effects! ;)
The the switch mode power supply is more efficient. i.e. less heat loss which translates into lower temperatures and lower input power.
And yes higher frequencies mean smaller lighter transformers but at the expense of increased heat loss.
But the output current whether pulsed or not should be immaterial. I doubt if the electrolytic process is affected by the high frequency pulse components. Only the average i.e. DC component of the pulse is utilized.
Thank you....first post that nails it.
The energy that is released when burning hydrogen is the energy that went into electrolyzing the hydrogen in the first place, assuming his process was 100% efficient, he’d at best break even.
Since it’s not 100% efficient, then he’s just taking his turn at making a perpetual motion machine.
“Because hydrogen burns so quickly, steam is channeled to slow down the burn. “
I think he invented a steam engine, not a hydrogen engine.
He probably forgot to include the energy required to make the steam.
When creating hydrogen, we are not stealing energy from something else.
What we are discussing here is the difference between a fuel and an energy transfer device. As I got no further in physics than a casual interest in high school, I can't give you numbers, but I can give you the picture that my teacher painted for us, many years ago.
Burning a fuel taps the effort of something else, which we harvest. The point is, we did not invest any time or energy in creating this fuel. In the case of wood, the tree spent tons of air, water, and a little soil, and used sunlight over many years to drive the processes to convert these into mass. To harvest the energy stored in the wood - the sunlight - costs us nothing but the effort of cutting down the tree, a tiny fraction of the effort the tree used to create itself.
To harvest oil, it costs us nothing but the effort of drilling, pumping, and refining. All of the energy in the oil is stored in the chemical bonds of the molecules, which yield energy when broken down. That energy was stored by processes which can in the end be traced back to the sun, the source of the energy. And there is far, far more energy in the oil than we expend in harvesting it.
Fuel is a for us a free lunch, and we eat at someone else's expense.
But there is no natural source of free hydrogen in amounts large enough to useful. The energy we get from a hydrogen burn is released when the combining atoms - oxygen and hydrogen - form a molecular bond. But to free hydrogen from water, you must break the bond - and it takes just exactly as much energy to break that bond as it takes to create it. Only to break it, you must put the energy into the bond.
As my teacher put it, it's like an old pendulum clock, driven by a weight on a chain. To wind the clock, you pull the chain to raise the weight. You get useful work out of the clock until the weight reaches the bottom of the chain, and the clock stops. But you get no more energy out of the weight than you store in it by raising it.
Electrolysis of hydrogen is a method of storing energy, so that it can be moved and harvested somewhere else. But it does not yield more energy when harvested than was put into it to create it. It therefore is a method of energy transfer. It is not a fuel.
This guy claims he can strip hydrogen out of water, burn it, and get several times more energy out of the process than was put into it. He is saying, in effect, he can charge a rechargeable AA battery to max, and then use that battery to charge ten more AA batteries. Not possible. It doesn't matter what rate you charge, what voltage or amps you use, you can't get more out of the battery than you put into it.
However... Hydrogen is a fuel and oxygen is the oxidizer...
Bzzzt.
Please don’t post nonsense like this, for your own sake.
For you, and all others who think this can be possible, please click here, and make sure your sound is on.
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