Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water

You can only get energy out a chemical reaction by producing products that have lower potential energy than the reactants. In salt water all of the principle substances are already in their most stable state. That is how there came to be so much of it. There are two types of energy sources: Primary sources such as fossil fuels, wind, hydroelectric, atomic, etc. All of these (except atomic) exist as sources driven by energy from an outside source, the sun, and we can exploit them for a net energy gain. Secondary sources such as hydrogen do not exist in nature and have to be created. They can be useful as a method to transfer energy only. The laws of thermodynamics prevent a secondary source from delivering more energy than it took to create it. There are no possible products from this process that could have lower potential energy than the starting materials, thus, no matter how much they tweak the process, they will never achieve a positive energy balance.As for the role of the salt, sodium chloride does not burn. It is already in it's lowest state of potential energy and has no energy to release. On the other hand, it can absorb energy. The electrons in a sodium ion will absorb energy from a heat source, such as a flame, and then release it as light. This process actually is absorbing some of the heat energy from the flame and converting it into light energy, making the already negative heat energy balance worse. I suspect demos involving other colored flames come from exciting the electrons of metal salts that have been added to the water. We aspirate water solutions of metal salts into Bunsen burner flames as a demonstration of the different colors you can get from different metals in our general chemistry classes.

Closed Account Sep 17, 2007