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So it's both efficient and the electricity cost is covered by the profitablity of the side products. Pretty amazing innovation, certainly a more sustainable so

So it's both efficient and the electricity cost is covered by the profitablity of the side products. Pretty amazing innovation, certainly a more sustainable solution than overthrowing the Bolivian government and murdering Native protestors. To think that an entire mineral mining industry could be replaced by processing seawater is revolutionary.

dr_dshiv 5y ago
Do you remember this guy, Kanzius, who showed that you can burn saltwater when pumping it with radio waves? Yet, the citation trail seems dead because scientists assumed that he was a crank claiming he got more power out than he put in. No, he just demonstrated a really neat approach to electrodeless hydrolysis. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:text=Kanzius'%20concept%20is%20simple%3A%20expose,for%20a%20cure%20for%20cancer https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....
- qayxc 5y ago
  If by "neat" you mean "inefficient", then yes.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    By neat I mean "holy shit, the salt water is literally on fire"
- _Microft 5y ago
  The article contains a broken link to the paper but I think I found it on Sci Hub. It's short by the way, just three or four pages of own content: https://sci-hub.do/10.1179/143307508/270875 https://sci-hub.do/10.1179/143307508/270875 Edit: it's a bit of a strange paper with a lot of talk about unrelated things (imo) but there seems to be this unexpected effect which might make it worthwhile to investigate it independently from what one thinks of this paper. The setup seems to be simple and cheap enough that there should not be huge obstacles to get easy and fast results.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Thanks for the edit. I view this all through the lens of the politics of science. Some radio technician figures out a really unexpected natural effect, it gets major news coverage by a scientifically illiterate press (claiming free energy), and the scientific mainstream pounce: "how foolish they were to think that energy could be extracted from water!" And yet (and this is the thing that makes me jump up and down), we still have a really unexpected property of nature! Study that shit, people! I might be wrong, but it seems that the reason the topic isn't studied—even to measure the inefficiency—is due to some unhealthy politics in modern science. I expect it will first be studied by YouTubers like "the plasma channel".
    - gus_massa 5y ago
      > Study that shit, people! From a practical point of view, It looks like an interesting demo, but I don't think it has too many applications. I only can imagine that it may be useful as a sterilization process, whatever virus or bacteria that is in the solution will be extremely unhappy with so much H2 and O2 around. The flame and the small risk of an explosion is a problem. From a theoretical point of view, it's easy to model isolated small molecules. Big molecules or combination of molecules is exponentially more difficult, like in ~exp(5*N) where N is the number of atoms and 5 is an oversimplification. There are some approximations that reduce it to a polynomial time like ~(5N)^12 or ~(5N)^9 less if you use more approximations. And with more approximations you can calculate it in linear time that is very useful for biochemistry that are interested in big molecules. Anyway, most of these methods assume that atoms don't move, or don't move too much, or use a lot of simplifications. Simulation water at the molecular level is a nightmare. You need to simulate many molecules, each one moving around, that form bounds between them that are not stable enough to simulate like a fixed length, but stable enough to be ignored. And now you need to add a strong electromagnetic field to the mix, and the nightmare is upgraded to the Freddy Krueger level.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
        But isn't that challenge of simulation exactly why empirical study would be valuable? I'd want to know how the Hydrolysis effect varies as a function of EM frequency and salt composition. Hypothetically, different EM frequencies could produce resonance effects in water. Basically, I'm curious how the flame might grow bigger at different EM frequencies. If anyone has any access to EM equipment like this, I'd definitely pay $1000 to catalyze. Seriously! I haven't been this curious about a physics phenomena since I learned about sonoluminescent bubble implosions "Mysterious Glowing Bubbles". Seriously. https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles RIP Dr. Apfel, he was a big influence on me. I know Alan McGaughey at CMU does water modeling at a molecular level, pretty cool stuff: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HmNtygkAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HmNtygkAAAAJ&hl=en
- pontifier 5y ago
  The RF probably just turns the glass into a capacitor plate. The AC nature of RF helps to deal with the fact that glass is a poor conductor, so a DC field couldn't create much gas before the surface saturated with charge. This should work without the RF stage using electrodes coated with glass, and using AC to drive it at high frequency.
- carapace 5y ago
  http://www.rexresearch.com/kanzius/kanzius.htm http://www.rexresearch.com/kanzius/kanzius.htm Some news articles and patents. (Rex Research is mostly crackpottery. But not all of it. The tricky bit is sorting the horse from the horseshit, eh?)

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Do you remember this guy, Kanzius, who showed that you can burn saltwater when pumping it with radio waves? Yet, the citation trail seems dead because scientists assumed that he was a crank claiming he got more power out than he put in. No, he just demonstrated a really neat approach to electrodeless hydrolysis. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:text=Kanzius'%20concept%20is%20simple%3A%20expose,for%20a%20cure%20for%20cancer https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....

qayxc 5y ago
If by "neat" you mean "inefficient", then yes.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  By neat I mean "holy shit, the salt water is literally on fire"
_Microft 5y ago
The article contains a broken link to the paper but I think I found it on Sci Hub. It's short by the way, just three or four pages of own content: https://sci-hub.do/10.1179/143307508/270875 https://sci-hub.do/10.1179/143307508/270875 Edit: it's a bit of a strange paper with a lot of talk about unrelated things (imo) but there seems to be this unexpected effect which might make it worthwhile to investigate it independently from what one thinks of this paper. The setup seems to be simple and cheap enough that there should not be huge obstacles to get easy and fast results.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Thanks for the edit. I view this all through the lens of the politics of science. Some radio technician figures out a really unexpected natural effect, it gets major news coverage by a scientifically illiterate press (claiming free energy), and the scientific mainstream pounce: "how foolish they were to think that energy could be extracted from water!" And yet (and this is the thing that makes me jump up and down), we still have a really unexpected property of nature! Study that shit, people! I might be wrong, but it seems that the reason the topic isn't studied—even to measure the inefficiency—is due to some unhealthy politics in modern science. I expect it will first be studied by YouTubers like "the plasma channel".
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    > Study that shit, people! From a practical point of view, It looks like an interesting demo, but I don't think it has too many applications. I only can imagine that it may be useful as a sterilization process, whatever virus or bacteria that is in the solution will be extremely unhappy with so much H2 and O2 around. The flame and the small risk of an explosion is a problem. From a theoretical point of view, it's easy to model isolated small molecules. Big molecules or combination of molecules is exponentially more difficult, like in ~exp(5*N) where N is the number of atoms and 5 is an oversimplification. There are some approximations that reduce it to a polynomial time like ~(5N)^12 or ~(5N)^9 less if you use more approximations. And with more approximations you can calculate it in linear time that is very useful for biochemistry that are interested in big molecules. Anyway, most of these methods assume that atoms don't move, or don't move too much, or use a lot of simplifications. Simulation water at the molecular level is a nightmare. You need to simulate many molecules, each one moving around, that form bounds between them that are not stable enough to simulate like a fixed length, but stable enough to be ignored. And now you need to add a strong electromagnetic field to the mix, and the nightmare is upgraded to the Freddy Krueger level.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      But isn't that challenge of simulation exactly why empirical study would be valuable? I'd want to know how the Hydrolysis effect varies as a function of EM frequency and salt composition. Hypothetically, different EM frequencies could produce resonance effects in water. Basically, I'm curious how the flame might grow bigger at different EM frequencies. If anyone has any access to EM equipment like this, I'd definitely pay $1000 to catalyze. Seriously! I haven't been this curious about a physics phenomena since I learned about sonoluminescent bubble implosions "Mysterious Glowing Bubbles". Seriously. https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles RIP Dr. Apfel, he was a big influence on me. I know Alan McGaughey at CMU does water modeling at a molecular level, pretty cool stuff: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HmNtygkAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HmNtygkAAAAJ&hl=en
pontifier 5y ago
The RF probably just turns the glass into a capacitor plate. The AC nature of RF helps to deal with the fact that glass is a poor conductor, so a DC field couldn't create much gas before the surface saturated with charge. This should work without the RF stage using electrodes coated with glass, and using AC to drive it at high frequency.
carapace 5y ago
http://www.rexresearch.com/kanzius/kanzius.htm http://www.rexresearch.com/kanzius/kanzius.htm Some news articles and patents. (Rex Research is mostly crackpottery. But not all of it. The tricky bit is sorting the horse from the horseshit, eh?)