Brian Prothro wrote:
I agree, thanks... and BLP will certainly be a test case. I know XOGEN
http://www.xogentechnologies.ca/ left and came back without their previous
power generation claims and is now directing their process towards treatment
of wastewater instead. Maybe that was a smart work-around? Is anyone aware
of why they moved in this direction?
At risk of being branded a cynic, I will speculate that they realized
the energy budget for their process wasn't actually positive after all.
Their current website says:
Xogen's patented technology uniquely splits the water molecule into a
2 to 1 mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gas with less electrical
current than is predicted by standard laws of electrolysis.
This seems to be a common "over unity" claim in the area of electrolysis.
Unfortunately for this claim, the laws of physics don't actually say
*anything* about how much /current/ is needed to split a given amount of
water, and conventional electrolysis commonly operates at higher than
100% "Coulombic efficiency". In other words, the claim is vacuous; the
only "laws" being broken are engineering rules of thumb.
Their process runs at 24 volts (or so they say somewhere on the site)
which is 'way higher than the minimum potential needed to split water,
which means they're certainly pumping in energy at a rate larger than
that needed to split it at the Coulombic rate. The "extra" energy is
likely to appear (somewhere) as heat, and that can -- and, typically,
does -- result in *additional* water being split pyrolytically. The
consequence is excess gas generation compared with that predicted by the
input *current* (note well: current, not power) but still no net energy OU.
OTOH depending on how they're doing it the process could conceivably
flood the electrolyte with O_1 and/or O_3 in addition to O_2 which would
certainly do a bang-up job of sterilizing it.
