Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

They discuss this on pages 3 to 5 of the paper if you want to read up on this. Here is an excerpt:

"Based on these data, we estimated the total electricity required to enrich 1 kg lithium from seawater to 9000 ppm in five stages to be 76.34 kWh. Simultaneously, 0.87 kg H_2 and 31.12 kg Cl_2 were collected from the cathode and the anode, respectively. Taking the US electricity price of US$ 0.065 per kWh into consideration, the total electricity cost for this process is approximately US$ 5.0. In addition, based on the 2020 prices of hydrogen and Cl_2 (i.e., US$ 2.5–8.0 per kg and US$ 0.15 per kg, respectively), the side-product value is approximately US$ 6.9–11.7, which can well compensate for the total energy cost. It should also be noted that the current Cl_2 utilisation capacity in the chlor-alkali industry is ~ 80 Mtons/year. Even in the case where all the world lithium capacity is produced from our extraction process, the amount of Cl_2 produced will be 3 Mtons, and so will have very little effect on the total market", from https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2021/ee/d1ee00354...

So it's both efficient and the electricity cost is covered by the profitablity of the side products.

Pretty amazing innovation, certainly a more sustainable solution than overthrowing the Bolivian government and murdering Native protestors.

To think that an entire mineral mining industry could be replaced by processing seawater is revolutionary.

Do you remember this guy, Kanzius, who showed that you can burn saltwater when pumping it with radio waves? Yet, the citation trail seems dead because scientists assumed that he was a crank claiming he got more power out than he put in. No, he just demonstrated a really neat approach to electrodeless hydrolysis.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....

If by "neat" you mean "inefficient", then yes.

By neat I mean "holy shit, the salt water is literally on fire"

The article contains a broken link to the paper but I think I found it on Sci Hub. It's short by the way, just three or four pages of own content:

https://sci-hub.do/10.1179/143307508/270875

Edit: it's a bit of a strange paper with a lot of talk about unrelated things (imo) but there seems to be this unexpected effect which might make it worthwhile to investigate it independently from what one thinks of this paper. The setup seems to be simple and cheap enough that there should not be huge obstacles to get easy and fast results.

Thanks for the edit. I view this all through the lens of the politics of science. Some radio technician figures out a really unexpected natural effect, it gets major news coverage by a scientifically illiterate press (claiming free energy), and the scientific mainstream pounce: "how foolish they were to think that energy could be extracted from water!" And yet (and this is the thing that makes me jump up and down), we still have a really unexpected property of nature! Study that shit, people! I might be wrong, but it seems that the reason the topic isn't studied—even to measure the inefficiency—is due to some unhealthy politics in modern science.

I expect it will first be studied by YouTubers like "the plasma channel".

> Study that shit, people!

From a practical point of view, It looks like an interesting demo, but I don't think it has too many applications. I only can imagine that it may be useful as a sterilization process, whatever virus or bacteria that is in the solution will be extremely unhappy with so much H2 and O2 around. The flame and the small risk of an explosion is a problem.

From a theoretical point of view, it's easy to model isolated small molecules. Big molecules or combination of molecules is exponentially more difficult, like in ~exp(5*N) where N is the number of atoms and 5 is an oversimplification. There are some approximations that reduce it to a polynomial time like ~(5N)^12 or ~(5N)^9 less if you use more approximations. And with more approximations you can calculate it in linear time that is very useful for biochemistry that are interested in big molecules. Anyway, most of these methods assume that atoms don't move, or don't move too much, or use a lot of simplifications.

Simulation water at the molecular level is a nightmare. You need to simulate many molecules, each one moving around, that form bounds between them that are not stable enough to simulate like a fixed length, but stable enough to be ignored. And now you need to add a strong electromagnetic field to the mix, and the nightmare is upgraded to the Freddy Krueger level.

But isn't that challenge of simulation exactly why empirical study would be valuable?

I'd want to know how the Hydrolysis effect varies as a function of EM frequency and salt composition. Hypothetically, different EM frequencies could produce resonance effects in water. Basically, I'm curious how the flame might grow bigger at different EM frequencies.

If anyone has any access to EM equipment like this, I'd definitely pay $1000 to catalyze. Seriously! I haven't been this curious about a physics phenomena since I learned about sonoluminescent bubble implosions "Mysterious Glowing Bubbles". Seriously. https://www.newswise.com/articles/mysterious-glowing-bubbles

RIP Dr. Apfel, he was a big influence on me.

I know Alan McGaughey at CMU does water modeling at a molecular level, pretty cool stuff: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HmNtygkAAAAJ&hl=en

There seem to be a lot of low hanging fruits to characterize the phenomenon, so I would not try to simulate the process yet. Dependence of the amount of produced gases on the concentration and type of salt, the temperature, radio frequency, input power seem very easy to check if the necessary equipment is available. Pick a few parameters and hand the task over to a bachelor/master student or maybe research assistant and see what results come out.

"Effects of different parameters on the efficiency of electrode-less water splitting", sounds like an acceptable topic for a bachelor thesis for example ;)

I agree, there are many interesting variables (temperature, concentration, frequency, shape of the container, localization of the beam, ...), and impurities/catalyzers open another huge amount of tweaking opportunities.

It's just that most papers pretend that the result has some practical or theoretical application, and I think it's difficult to get one.

Personally, I read it as "mostly unmodelled, difficult to calculate experiment behaves in a way no scientist ever predicted, but not very far from what simpler ones do".

If I was looking for something to research, I wouldn't pick this one. It's not strange enough to compensate for how hard it is to understand it. (But then, I wonder how I the photoelectric emission fits on that dimension...)

If I understand, you are saying you wouldn't try to empirically research this because 1. burning salt water isn't strange enough and 2. it would be difficult to calculate and model.

That seems reasonable and yet unfortunate. It seems like the kind of experiment that a scientist would try to undertake out of sheer curiosity.

The RF probably just turns the glass into a capacitor plate. The AC nature of RF helps to deal with the fact that glass is a poor conductor, so a DC field couldn't create much gas before the surface saturated with charge.

This should work without the RF stage using electrodes coated with glass, and using AC to drive it at high frequency.

http://www.rexresearch.com/kanzius/kanzius.htm Some news articles and patents.

(Rex Research is mostly crackpottery. But not all of it. The tricky bit is sorting the horse from the horseshit, eh?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com