Yeah but... not the rate of electrolysis of the ions of the water?
Printable View
Yeah but... not the rate of electrolysis of the ions of the water?
woops i didn't really tie that thought into what i was typing... i just edited it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
Oh... I'm still not really sure 'what the oil industry wants' has much to do with this. This thread is essentially about a private inventor... there's no reason he couldn't make a business out of this (if it actually worked, which it doesn't).
If he was able to keep them from getting money by replacing oil and there was nothing else they could do they would probably assassinate him. lolQuote:
Originally Posted by Xei
The ions aren't electrolyzed. When present in water, they speed the reaction. That's all I'm saying.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
How did you measure the speed of the reaction? Current?
I don't see how you don't know it was going faster because you just put a load of ions in the solution which could actually be electrolysed, far in excess of the number of ions naturally present in pure water.
Xei, pure water is a very good insulator. It conducts electricity about as well as space conducts sound (that is to say not non-existent, but of no practical significance). I'd feel pretty safe jumping into a pool of distilled water holding on to a plugged-in toaster.
As for the rate of electrolysis... well try this experiment. Take a glass of tap water and put copper wire in it connected to each lead of a lantern battery, then do the same with a glass of the same water with a couple spoonfuls of table salt in it. You'll notice a lot more action in the second glass. If you can get a hold of some laboratory grade distilled water and try the same thing, you probably won't notice any reaction at all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
yeah. it has A LOT to do with it, Xei (aside from the details you were getting at). as i said, innovation is often a danger to industry. there could be a number of perceived threats, especially when it gets anywhere near the scale the OP was thinking of - she seemed to be wondering about the potential and what's holding us back from that.Quote:
Originally Posted by MadMonkey
Our rig consisted of tubes over either end of the electrodes. As the water was electrolyzed, the gas would displace the water. Using a stopwatch, we timed several concentrations of ions and marked how much gas was produced. Not extremely precise, but we did observe a very noticeable difference. We used HCl as our ion source.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
i find it interesting how everyone wants to points out how, even with the technology possible, it would still cause more harm than good. that is a very backward way, logically and historically of seeing something of major change. the people really thinking jump on ideas end up changing the world forever. god bless boss.
Well this is my point; how do you know you were electrolysing hydrogen ions from water molecules, and not from the HCl? What I'm saying is that I'm not convinced adding ions increases the rate of breakdown of H2O. I wouldn't be surprised if it does but this doesn't seem like the experiment to show it.
People often get worked up about oil companies. In reality there is no stranglehold on academia, and it's virtually impossible to censor information like that these days.Quote:
yeah. it has A LOT to do with it, Xei (aside from the details you were getting at). as i said, innovation is often a danger to industry. there could be a number of perceived threats, especially when it gets anywhere near the scale the OP was thinking of - she seemed to be wondering about the potential and what's holding us back from that.
Sure, but all I'm talking about is if it's possible or not to electrolyse water. Electrolysing aqueous salt seems kind of irrelevant. I'm pretty sure that the idea of hydrogen economy is based on using electrical energy to electrolyse water (as opposed to where we currently get hydrogen from; that is to say, cracking hydrocarbons).Quote:
Xei, pure water is a very good insulator. It conducts electricity about as well as space conducts sound (that is to say not non-existent, but of no practical significance). I'd feel pretty safe jumping into a pool of distilled water holding on to a plugged-in toaster.
As for the rate of electrolysis... well try this experiment. Take a glass of tap water and put copper wire in it connected to each lead of a lantern battery, then do the same with a glass of the same water with a couple spoonfuls of table salt in it. You'll notice a lot more action in the second glass. If you can get a hold of some laboratory grade distilled water and try the same thing, you probably won't notice any reaction at all.
Well, if we were somehow obtaining chlorine and hydrogen gases, we would have detected the smell of chlorine in the oxygen. The hydrogen we burned, which was fun.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
I'm not sure I follow, you're still getting the hydrogen from the water, there's no hydrogen in salt... I'm pretty sure that commercial electrolysis (do they even do that on an industrial level) doesn't use distilled water.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
I can't even begin to fathom what's going on in this post. Are you saying that we are backwards, because we immediately discredit the invention in the OP?Quote:
Originally Posted by poopman
When he burns the water, he is basically breaking up the hydrogen and oxygen, which are both gases. As the hydrogen burns it rejoins with the oxygen to form pure water, and the salt is left behind, I assume still in a solid state. If the energy put in is the same as the energy you get out, which it should be(minus efficiency problems with creating the radio waves) the you basically have free water filtration. Even with some efficiency problems, it may still be better than current methods to remove salt from water.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
Well, that ain't really that convincing. Did you actually test for oxygen? The most common way is to get it to relight a splint.Quote:
Well, if we were somehow obtaining chlorine and hydrogen gases, we would have detected the smell of chlorine in the oxygen. The hydrogen we burned, which was fun.
I never said anything about getting hydrogen from salt. All you ever claimed was that salt water would be more 'active'. This could be because of the electrolysis of the salt. With a couple of tablespoons in there, the concentration of salt ions is going to be literally billions times higher than the concentration of hydrogen and oxygen ions in your solution.Quote:
I'm not sure I follow, you're still getting the hydrogen from the water, there's no hydrogen in salt... I'm pretty sure that commercial electrolysis (do they even do that on an industrial level) doesn't use distilled water.
I just don't see at the moment how this works, chemically or thermodynamically.
Minus efficiency problems? You don't realise how huge a factor efficiency is. To turn the heat energy back into electrical energy you'd have to use a steam generator. Steam generators generate almost all of the world's electricity, yet nobody has got them to run at more than 50% efficiency. This is because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics; heat is the most natural, diffuse form for energy to be in, and it takes energy to get it back into some more useful form.Quote:
When he burns the water, he is basically breaking up the hydrogen and oxygen, which are both gases. As the hydrogen burns it rejoins with the oxygen to form pure water, and the salt is left behind, I assume still in a solid state. If the energy put in is the same as the energy you get out, which it should be(minus efficiency problems with creating the radio waves) the you basically have free water filtration. Even with some efficiency problems, it may still be better than current methods to remove salt from water.
It wouldn't work like this anyway. Salt is a classic ionic substance; when you electrolyse the water, the first thing that's going to happen is that the metal component of the salt will build up on one electrode, and the gaseous component bubble of the other.
Yea but they are using radio waves, not electrodes. So they solve any sort of problem with salt build up on them. Lets say you are losing 50 percent of the power that is crated, you are still recouping 50 percent of the power needed. The important question is, how much power is that? You can't really argue which method of filtration is better, if you don't know how much energy it takes.
Things like reverse osmosis are pretty expensive, especially in large scale. Right now desalination is almost never used, because its so impractical and consumes so much energy. So any new technology in that area, needs to be seriously looked at.
Table salt already splits up into Na+ and Cl- ions when it is dissolved in water, it can't be electrolyzed further. The salt acts as an electrolyte that propagates the electric field of the electrodes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
And by more active I mean the cathode will be much more bubbly (i.e. more hydrogen).
I'm sorry but I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Electrolysis works by neutralising ions.
NaCl splitting up into ions isn't electrolysis, it's dissociation.
When you put a positive and negative electrode in the solution, electrons are pulled off the Cl- ions forming Cl2 gas molecules, and electrons are forced onto the Na+ ions forming Na metal.
This is why a current flows.
I don't really see the difference between using radio waves to boil the water and using other methods of heating to boil the water. This isn't new.Quote:
Yea but they are using radio waves, not electrodes. So they solve any sort of problem with salt build up on them. Lets say you are losing 50 percent of the power that is crated, you are still recouping 50 percent of the power needed. The important question is, how much power is that? You can't really argue which method of filtration is better, if you don't know how much energy it takes.
Things like reverse osmosis are pretty expensive, especially in large scale. Right now desalination is almost never used, because its so impractical and consumes so much energy. So any new technology in that area, needs to be seriously looked at.
You are not using radio waves to heat water, you are using it to separate the salt from the water, and as a by product it creates heat. The heat is then recycled to reduce the energy cost of running it.
Yes I know, I was responding to this:Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei
At this point I'm not sure what it is you don't understand... All the electrolyte is there for is to make a current flow.Quote:
When you put a positive and negative electrode in the solution, electrons are pulled off the Cl- ions forming Cl2 gas molecules, and electrons are forced onto the Na+ ions forming Na metal.
This is why a current flows.
What exactly are you arguing, that pure water will produce the same amount of hydrogen as salt water for a given current input?
No, he's explaining to you what electrolysis is, because you don't seem to have understood it quite.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spartiate
When you use electrolysis, it's the electrolytes themselves you're interested in. The electrolytes are ions, and during electrolyses they're "deionized", so that for instance Cl- becomes Cl (which then bonds with another Cl and becomes Cl2).
edit: For the record, if you're trying to produce hydrogen gas from water, having other positive ions in the solution would be a bad idea, cause they'd likely get "deionized" before the hydrogen would.
No all I've ever said is that water may conduct better when you add salt because you've just put a load of ions in to electrolyse, not because you're making the water itself easier to electrolyse. :lQuote:
Originally Posted by Spartiate
You say all the electrolyte does is 'makes a current flow' but the way electrolytes do this is by being electrolysed. How, chemically, do the ions help the electrolysis of the water?
There is no context in which this makes any sense.Quote:
Table salt already splits up into Na+ and Cl- ions when it is dissolved in water, it can't be electrolyzed further.
This is exactly what I thought... I could have sworn I was making perfect sense, I thought I was going crazy. :lQuote:
Originally Posted by khh
I don't care about that, we don't want to electrolyze the salt, we want to electrolyze the water. The salt is there to propagate an electrical field in the water. I know that if you use salt as an electrolyte you'll also end up with some chlorine bubbling around the anode.Quote:
Originally Posted by khh
Lol I don't think we've been on the same page from the start. All I've been saying is that pure water can't be electrolyzed because no electrical field can propagate in it. The water will always be electrolyzed to the same degree for a given amount of current it is exposed to (regardless of what is floating in it). The electrolyte exposes the water to a larger amount of the current that is put in, that is why I said it improves the process of electrolysis (I may have used a series of terms that weren't 100% accurate).Quote:
Originally Posted by Xei