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Making Fire From Water
LexNaturalis writes "Gizmodo has a story out about a new product that makes fire from water. Gizmodo explains how it works: 'Ordinary tap water (preferably distilled) is supplied to the fireplace through a pipe or tank, a 220 volt electrical service then separates the hydrogen and oxygen atoms through electrolysis, the Aqueon ignites the hydrogen, and ta-dah, fire! The oxygen is then added for color and brightness, while the rest is released into the room. It doesn't require venting because it doesn't produce any harmful emittents like carbon monoxide -- just water vapor.' The manufacturer's website has more information on the science behind this new product. While splitting water to get hydrogen and oxygen is not new, this product will likely make the technology more accessible to the masses and might hopefully show that hydrogen is a more attractive fuel than petroleum-based fuels."
Fire from water? Thats easy! I use to do it all the time with a block of sodium. Cats didn't like it to much though...
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
The price tag is $49,999. They only expect to sell about five this year.
Yeah, fire from water, and ... 220V.
That's like making wine out of water, and oh, yeah, some grapes and stuff.
Using electricity to convert water to hydrogen to create flame is a round-about way of making things more complicated than they have to be. There are better ways to make heat and light with electricity, after all. And there are better ways to make electricity with water. And if you need fire, burning a tree is simpler still. :)
I bet that's energy efficient.
60 Amps? To run a fireplace? Yes I know it takes a lot of power to split water - but my hottub doesn't draw that much power at full blast. Much as I'd love a clean burning fire in my fireplace - drawing 8-9kW to do it is nuts
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Real efficient use of electricity also. Most people will ogle at the fact that it doesn't produce harmful emmissions but neglect the fact the the emmissions are just further upstream.
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I think the poster misunderstood the benefit of this... this is nothing more than a fancy electric room heater!
This is NOT an alternative energy source, it's a wasteful energy consumer...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It takes MORE energy to get the hydrogen-oxygen bonds to release than you get back when you recombine them through burning.
GEEZ. You might as well take a solar powered light and shine it on itself.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
No, what this shows is that hydrogen is simply a derivative of fossil fuels, and is in fact an extremely expensive, inefficient and almost useless way to store and transport energy.
Let's see, we start with huge lumps of coal, convert them to steam, convert the steam to electricity, and then use the electricity to make hydrogen which (in a fuel cell) we can convert back to electricity. Energy is lost at every step along the way. In particular, compressing the hydrogen from atmospheric pressure to storage tank pressure loses about HALF the total energy, so even if the fuel cell is 100% efficient, you've still lost HALF the energy you started with.
But commercial hydrogen is not produced by electrolysis. It's produced from natural gas and steam. So let's see, we start with natural gas, a product which has the following properties:
- Cheap
- Easy to store and transport with widely available equipment
- Can run through cheap, widely available engines
- Fairly clean burning (compared to diesel)
- High energy density in compressed tanks
and we convert that to hydrogen which has the following properties:- Very very expensive
- Very difficult to store. The only real-world proven way to store it at a high density is to liquify it. That will never be a practical option outside of aerospace industry
- Can be burned in regular engines, with regular engine efficiency, or can be burned in extremely expensive fuel cells. There is no realistic possibility of fuel cells becoming cost competitive in the foreseeable future.
- Low energy-density for real-world storage (compressed tanks, etc). Fuel cell cars have a range of less than 200 miles usually.
- Oh, and it's clean burning! Finally after all the bad things about H2 we come to one good thing!
- It makes the whole global warming and oil dependency problems worse becomes it takes so much energy is wasted in the process of converting fossil fuels into hydrogen.
The one thing that could help is that you can make hydrogen from clean nuclear energy and from clean solar energy, but given that hydrogen electrolysis is not cost-competitive with even cheap fossil fuel electricity, why should it be cost competitive with much more expensive solar electricity?I regret that our government is involved in subsidizing this whole boondoggle, but I have no worries that it will continue in the long-term. Some small improvements in lithium batteries, and some reasonable production economy in lithium batteries will make electric cars competitive with plain old ICE cars, and the hydrogen fuel research pork programs will shrivel up and die.
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If you burn something in air, if you get the air hot enough then you combine some of the nitrogen in the air with oxygen.
Hydrogen burns pretty hot.
I wonder what steps these folks have taken to prevent or minimize emission of nitrogen oxides.
I also wonder how they're getting color in the flame, since the usual cheerful yellow comes from incandescent soot particles.
Maybe when they designed it they were under the influence of firewater.
The idea is that we can use electricity to generate hydrogen, then store it. Electricity generated from a single coal power plant will produce far less pollution than gasoline from several million cars. Additionally, we're not running out of coal any time soon, and we wouldn't need to buy it from the middle east.
Drink? I'm thinking handheld flamethrower. You know those little Super Soakers that you pump about 25 times and they shoot 30 or 40 feet? Yeah.
Well well, we can tell who's a right winger.
There are a billion and two ways to get atomic hydrogen, and this is just one of them. Sure, it's ineffecient, but so is burning carbon fuels.
Besides, electricity can be derived from anything these days. Put a few solar panels on your roof, and you've got a self contained hydrogen producer. Step it up another notch with rain water collection and filtration and it's competely autonomous.
But oh, I guess you'll argue that photovatalics are terrible and that silicon hurts the environment and that oil's the best fuel we got.
Next up, Biofuel. It's cheap! It's effecient! And if you were truly worried about the world farmlands, you'd be *advocating* this. The more biofuel that goes into production, the more the need for farmlands, and farmlands will grow in size. Thus, overall food output will increase and we will be able to transport that same food further, for cheaper than oil.
I know, I know, it's rough I don't wanna give up my old beater jeep either, but the fact is that oil is unsustainable and the sun IS sustainable. Well, unless you want to get pedantic on me and say the sun will go away in 5 billion years.
Hydrogen's a great idea as long as it's implemented correctly, which is where the research is currently going on. Oil was a terrible idea; just look at the middle east today!
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
With some mumbo jumbo about future fuels to sell it to people. In reality it's an electric heater. Almost all uses of electricity are electric heaters, and unless they affect things outside the room, they're mostly 100% efficient electric heaters. It's easy to be 100% efficient at turning useful energy into heat, after all. (furnaces are not 100% efficient because they must vent waste gas outside, along with some heat.)
This just happens to turn electricity into heat in an amusing way, at a high price. There are, of course lots of other interesting ways to turn electricity into heat. My computers are doing plenty of that right now.
If they really were pitching this as a way to heat the house, it would be as bad an idea as any other electric heater. They are way poorer in total "well to home" efficiency than gas furnaces, but often used because they are cheap to install (expensive to run), very easy to meter (for landlords), and on the positive side, can be easily individually controlled on a room by room basis, which sometimes can make them more efficient than heaters that either heat the whole building or nothing at all.
But I doubt this is meant as such a heater. It's meant as an art piece, to wow your fellow millionaire friends.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
My invention uses 220V to make hydrogen which is burned to heat water which drives a turbine that generates electricity.
Clean energy!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Some old houses have 60 Amp service -- if they use gas stoves.
Stoves and clothes dryers are commonly wired to 40 amp circuits (each), so these units are going to eat 50% more power than my stove with all burners and the oven on.
It'd probably be cheaper to buy 20 P4s as space heaters, plus 2 more to run a really nice display.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
But that's not true. According to a May 2004 article in SciAm (sorry, only available for purchase, check it out at your local library instead) says the total green house gases produced by coal plants used to generate the electricity needed to generate the hydrogen produces more green house gases than used by current gasoline engines.
They even include the supply chain side of transporting and storing hydrogen vs gasoline. They found that a fuel cell driven by gasoline actually produces less emissions than a fuel cell driven by coal.
The problem is the loss of effiency. To convert water to hydrogen via electrolysis from coal, the loss from coal to tank is 78%. After the hydrogen is used in a fuel cell, it loses an additional 43%, for a total loss of 92%.
Compared to gasoline.. pumping a gallon of oil, transporting to a refinery, turning it to gas, and transporting the gas to a filling station takes away 21% of the energy potential of the oil. For a conventional IC engine, 85% of the energy in the gas tank is lost. That brings it to a total of only 88%.
Whether or not a molecule emits energy in the form of light has nothing to do with the number of atoms. It has to do with the energy levels of the electrons in the outer shell.
As the electrons fall back from their excited state they emit a photon of light at a particular wavelenght, related to the energy drop. If you have a small drop then the wavelength will be large, ie red or infra-red light. If you have a large drop then the wavelength will be smaller, ie green, blue, violet.
Don't forget that when hydrogen reacts it produces water was well 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O, so you'll have your triatomic molecule you want.
The reason that corn brooms are used to detect flames is that the flame from a slow hydrogen leak is not very intense, made up almost exclusively with blue and violet photons. These are hard to see.
Have a look at http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hyde.ht ml
to see the spectra of hydrogen. It's got some visible lines in it.
Here's a picture of a hydrogen flame, faint but visible. http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCESoft/CCA/CCA3/STIL LS/CLH/CLH/64JPG48/2.JPG
Charles
Okay, so rather than burning a renewable source of energy like wood in my fireplace, I'm going pay $50K to obtain the ability to burn hydrogen. Hydrogne is good and pure and not oil so that's good right? Oh yeah except for the fact that in order to make my fireplace work I need 220 current which is coming FROM DEAD DINOSAURS.
*SIGH*
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You, sir "Doc" Ruby, are spreading lies.
m ission for details. Electrical power generation is very efficient, and overall pollutes far less than most small-scale energy production operations.
Electrical transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_trans
Secondly, "nothing is created, nothing is lost". When you're trying to heat up a room with electricity, waste heat is a good thing. This hydrogen fire device has multiple conversion stages, all of them inefficient - in that they release waste heat. In the end, all of the energy that goes into the system is converted into heat.
In fact, most of the heat of the device probably comes from the electrolysis rather than from the burning. But in the end, it's meant to be a room heater, and is doing a fine job as that. It is as efficient a furnace as a normal heater, or as a beowulf cluster. That's right, a beowulf cluster is a very good way to heat your room, and it's just as efficient as a purpose-made heater.
Do you know about heat pumps ? Those devices are basically air conditioners acting in reverse, taking heat from the outdoors, during the winter, and pumping it inside. At first glance, it doesn't make much sense: pumps and compressors are very inefficient devices, aren't they ? Plus, there's not much heat outside... But then you realise that the waste heat of the whole heat pump is a good thing - it's kept inside the house and used to heat it up. So all the heat pump has to do is extract a little bit of energy from the outside and spit out lots of waste heat, hence making it a tad more efficient than a device which merely spits waste heat.
Any electrical devices that doesn't move outside air around is an efficient heater. Your toaster, your computer and your electrical chainsaw are just as efficient as your room heater, when it comes to producing heat.
Anyway, your post is a travesty of science and logic. You were inspired by a hampster and your reasoning smells of elderberries.
220 V * 60 A = 13.2 kw
I don't know many places that need 13 kW of heating that don't already have it.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.