Burning Water: A Free Energy Solution?

John Kanzius at work...

Across the world wide web, which is a very wide place indeed, there are plenty of wideboys who claim to have invented zero-point energy, perpetual motion machines, cold fusion, cars that run on orange juice… you name it.

Their inventions, they believe, will undoubtedly lead to a free energy revolution and an end to the corrupt monopolies of the oil and auto industries who are out to stifle them at all cost.

Frankly though, nine times out of ten, their claims turn out to be nonsense, and both their inventions and their paranoia an unexpected side effect of their intense involvement in some legalise hemp campaign… Er-herm.

So when you read that a Florida-based former broadcast executive named John Kanzius managed to accidentally invent a machine that set fire to a vial of salt water, the first impulse is to sniff patronisingly. To make this more unlikely, he did so whilst trying to invent a cure for the cancer that killed him earlier this year.

But in all empirically verified legitimacy, the man apparently invented a way to get sea water to burn at around 3,000 degrees Farenheit, using a radio frequency generator that releases the oxygen and hydrogen from saltwater and creates an incredibly intense flame. His invention could be genuinely revolutionary.

Kanzius had made a radiofrequency generator intending to kill cancer cells; when he aimed the radio waves at a test tube of salt water, it produced an unexpected spark. Kanzius put a lighted match to top of the water (as you do); the water ignited and kept on burning for as long as it remained in the radio frequency field.

The phenomenon was reproduced on YouTube for the benefit of the local TV station. (Video below, with a fantastically excited engineer who can’t stop smiling at what he’s just seen at 1:50). Independent witnesses verified that the flame was burning at 1,500 degrees C, and the heat was strong enough to run a small Stirling engine. As the excellent Institute of Science in Society reports:

The YouTube video attracted the attention of Rustum Roy – Distinguished Prof of Materials at Arizona State University and Professor of the Solid State and of Geochemistry at Pennsylvania State University – who followed up the research, and held a public demonstration in September 2007, which was reported in the National Geographic News [2]. George Sverdrup, a technology manager at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado was impressed: “It seems like, to me, an interesting set of processes that’s been uncovered,” he said.

So for the technologically minded among you, how does this actually work? No one is entirely sure yet, but the indomitable Mae Wan-ho has a stab at it here:

The phenomenon is real, but the mechanism is entirely unknown. Roy and coworkers suggest specific resonant coupling of the RF radiation into the structure of water causing the split into “intimately mixed” hydrogen and oxygen. When ignited, the hydrogen burns regenerating water or steam. They also showed that the Raman spectrum of the saline solutions before and after exposure to Kanzius’ RF field differ dramatically in the 3000 to 3500 cm-1 region indicating that the structure of the water after exposure to the RF field has been very substantially changed, specifically with respect to the O-H bond. Raman spectroscopy is a technique used in condensed matter physics and chemistry to study the modes of vibrations of ions or atoms in solids and liquids

Electrolytic splitting of water is well-known. But, as first demonstrated by Faraday, it takes >1.23V to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The 13.56 MHz RF beam delivers at most 10-8 of the energy required. The resonant coupling into the structure of water that is proposed for the spectacular Kanzius radiation effects may also be due to the specific polarization of the beam used. Roy and colleagues have previously demonstrated in a long series of papers that polarized, very weak electromagnetic fields have profound effects even on solid state materials.

Using specific polarized radiation, radically different phases were synthesized and direct decrystallization of many solids was induced, including the most important phases in the electronic industry: ferrites, barium titanates, and even elemental silicon. In those experiments, 2.45 GHz radiation in a single mode cavity generated the dramatic changes that were documented by X-ray diffraction, scanning and transmission electron microscopy, and Raman spectroscopy.

Thus, it is possible that weak electromagnetic fields, appropriately polarized could couple resonantly to certain critical structures in the liquid water that cause the splitting into hydrogen and oxygen.

OK. Saying I understood 20% of that would be a lie… But what is very cool is that Kanzius was inspired in the middle of the night, got up and started making a radio frequency generator with his wife’s pie pans. Check out the video below… I look forward to a future of cars powered by skanky sea water from the English channel. And although GM may have killed the electric car, it has now also managed to kill itself too, so that’s one less obstreperous conglomerate to worry about that wouldn’t like to see such technology emerging…  Splifftastic.