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.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/#:~:t....
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.
I expect it will first be studied by YouTubers like "the plasma channel".
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.
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
"Effects of different parameters on the efficiency of electrode-less water splitting", sounds like an acceptable topic for a bachelor thesis for example ;)
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.
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...)
That seems reasonable and yet unfortunate. It seems like the kind of experiment that a scientist would try to undertake out of sheer curiosity.
This should work without the RF stage using electrodes coated with glass, and using AC to drive it at high frequency.
(Rex Research is mostly crackpottery. But not all of it. The tricky bit is sorting the horse from the horseshit, eh?)