Hydrogen RET?

Water molecules have a number of different modes of vibration. Think of the oxygen with two hydrogen as a Mickey Mouse face and ears. The ears (hydrogen atoms) can move towards and away from the face (oxygen). The ears can stay the same distance from the face, but vibrate towards and away from one another. The whole thing can spin like a top, along three different axes.

Each of these modes will have a natural frequency (actually frequencies, I think these come from getting the associated electrons into various energy states). The molecule will typically be vibrating and spinning in every possible way at the same time, and also zooming through space (and generally bouncing off other molecules) as well. The velocity with which all this happens is a measure of the temperature of the gas.

The energy in any given vibrational mode will leak into the other modes over time, and the time over which this happens is short, on the order of one millisecond. Also, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms are charged because of the way the bonds redistribute their electrons. When these charged particles vibrate, they emit photons with their characteristic frequency. The molecule, as well as having a tendency to emit photons of those colors, is also better at absorbing photons of those colors.

One way to seperate hydrogen and oxygen would be to heat water to many thousands of degrees K, at which point the vibrational energy in the bonds would be sufficient to break those bonds. This is a very inefficient way to make hydrogen and oxygen. Also, your hydrogen and oxygen are now in a plasma, and you'll have to seperate them before you cool it down. If this is the Genesys idea, it's a joke.

However, just because energy tends to redistribute over all the bonds doesn't mean you always have evenly distributed energy. A laser is a specific example of a system in which you use photons to deliberately pump energy into particular modes and not others. A blue laser, for instance, comes from stuff at room temperature rather than blue-hot.

If you could hit the water molecules with photons tuned to one of the bonds, with intense enough light, you could pump enough energy in to break the bond before the energy had redistributed enough to become temperature. Now you would have seperated hydrogen and atomic oxygen at low temperature. Atomic oxygen is incredibly reactive, and you would somehow have to seperate the hydrogen from the atomic oxygen without it recombining into water, maybe with an electric field. This is essentially electrolysis. Maybe they have some way of making electrolysis more efficient by stimulating the reaction with tuned lasers.

Not that it matters. Ballard long ago coined the term "hydricity" to capture his fantasy that fuel cells would be so efficient at converting between hydrogen chemical energy and electricity that the two would be interchangable. And, at fabulous cost due to the use of exotic metals and ultraclean operating environments, efficiency can be had.

But hydrogen is a terrible energy carrier regardless of the efficiency of conversion. Consider just one of many problems: the cost of capital for a steel pressure vessel containing hydrogen at room temperature, for just one day, is a little more than the value of the hydrogen contained. So assuming you could get hydrogen for free and sell it at current market prices, you could only afford to contain it for a day. That means, no hydrogen equivalents of LNG tankers. That means, no long hydrogen pipelines (those are pressure vessels too). It basically puts the kibosh on any hydrogen infrastructure.

The many methods of making a plasma (the "4th state of matter") such at the surface of the sun, here on the Earth's surface, are well known (a Google search will find many of them). Plasmas have been used for semiconductor (Integrated Circuit) processing for more than 30 years. The latest and greatest of those methods may be "Electron Cyclotron Resonance" (ECR) plasmas which are often used to break apart molecules to make them into more reactive species (atomic or molecular fragments) which then can remove areas on a semiconductor chip much more effectively (and quickly). However, large amounts of electrical power are required to operate a plasma reactor (and considerable capital costs is required to build one, although they are cheaper ways of making a plasma, including a simple inductive coil). The key question for RET is whether or not this electrical power requirement is less than electrolysis (the other way to make hydrogen from water).

The inventor went to great lengths to stress the need for steam (the energy conversion "cost" to make steam is very high and is a significant contributor to the electrical energy required for electrolysis of liquid water), for his RET (plasma conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen) process. So it is certainly reasonable that his suggestion that RET (plasma separation of water) could be more efficient than electrolysis. It is also true that hydrogen is MUCH smaller, more mobile and separable from oxygen with relatively simple membranes. So the other key to whether or not this technology is viable is the relative separation efficiency of the resulting hydrogen and oxygen in or very close to the plasma. Given the huge advances in membrane technology in the last few decades (e.g. they use membranes to separate pure water from sea water - "reverse osmosis"), and the fact that hydrogen can penetrate THROUGH solid materials (making it difficult to store), I would be inclined to believe that hydrogen separation could be practical for this application.

Hydrogen has MANY applications other as a fuel for vehicles. It main use today is in the upgrading of heavy oils into the light crude oils that are necessary for refineries (among other myriad petrochemical uses). A cheaper method of making hydrogen from waste heat and a plasma reactor would be a HUGE breakthrough. Of course, plasma chemistry and physics are at least 50 years old and this inventor is building upon the breakthroughs of the past. That doesn't invalidate the importance of this however, it just makes it more likely that it will be successful. ON balance, I suspect that the hype that he is using has made the acceptance of his work less likely but he HAS gained more attention this way. Is this the only way that he CAN get attention (hope not, but worry that it is true).

I say "Good LUCK and keep up the work!!"