Water + Salt + Energy = Clean!

codesmith.ca writes "CTV News is reporting about a device built at the Russian Institute for Medical Engineering that can convert standard water and salt into an antimicrobial solution. Apparently it's works on almost anything (virii, bacteria, cysts...) and it's safe for human consumption to boot. I can't find a site for the institute, but there are articles around. This one is fairly detailed, but hard to reach. Here's the Google cache. Here's one about a paper shows it's not exactly super-new technology." Any chemist care to comment on what sounds to be too good to be true?

Comments

This is SO snake-oil

[Bruce Perens]

Oh goodness, catholite and anolyte from the cathode and the anode! What a scientific miracle!

This is an experiment I did in elementary school.

It's called electrolysis. You separate salt water into

• Hydrogen a highly-reactive gas, thus antibiotic.
• Oxygen, an oxidizer (duh), oxidation is about the most commonly used method of disinfection.
• Sodium, a highly reactive chemical and thus disinfectant.
• Chlorine, a superoxidizer (see above).

Use enough voltage, and maybe you bump oxygen to ozone, a superoxidizer (see above).

None of this takes any kind of chemist to see.

Note also that these chemicals are extremely hazardous in their uncombined forms. Remember Apollo 1 and its pure oxygen atmosphere at full sea-level pressure? Skin catches fire almost explosively in that sort of atmosphere - it's truly horrible what pure oxygen can do. Combine hydrogen and oxygen in the right proportions and they will explode. Sodium is poison and explosive when combined with water. Chlorine is poision.

Some of the more recent explorations into silver as a disinfectant with good tolerance in the body might be more profitable to follow, but also have snake-oil potential because too few people recognize that as another century-old technology that has a mass-market application in swimming pools today.

Were I you guys, I'd kill the story.

Bruce

Re:Just a Swimming-Pool Chlorine Generator?

[mesocyclone]

I built one of these things (salt water hydrolizer) in a (foolish) attempt to cut my pool chemical costs. Unfortunately, it leaked chlorine gas! I don't think my lungs have yet recovered, and it's been 20 years! Done right, however (and not being a putz as I was in the way I built it), people used to chlorinate their pools this way.

The Cl- ions form chlorine gas> If you can keep it involved in the water, the whole thing works. It does, however, produce lots of NAOH, which is not a nice thing to have around either!

Oh, and the design I used (I found it somewhere around town) used asbestos to separate the positive and negative regions.

In general, it was your all around chemical warfare and carcinogenic dream!