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> it roughly doubled the current density at the anode without requiring any additional voltage
Do I understand correctly that the magnet just makes the anode behave like a bigger anode, and does not make the process more energy-efficient?
Sort of. It keeps the overpotential of the oxygen evolution reaction down at increased current densities. This means that a compact electrode arrangement can split water faster without losing efficiency. Normally more current would increase both current density and overpotential, so that efficiency would go down.
This discovery maintains efficiency that would normally require a larger electrode surface. It doesn't double the chemical energy output from the electrical energy input. That would be impossible as conventional electrolyzers are already more than 50% efficient. It (potentially) improves the economic efficiency more than the thermodynamic efficiency.
I think an efficiency improvement is also perhaps implied. They say a strong magnetic field doubles the current flow with no change in input voltage. Basically with V=IR and Power = I* I* R ,if the current has increased without change in voltage then the resistance has gone down.
In a perfectly efficient process all of the resistance would owe to H2O splitting, but we know that's not the case - about half the resistance energy was creating waste heat.
If its like an LEDs resistance which has a voltage drop component which produces light and a linear ohmic resistance which produces waste heat. This would be like getting twice the current (and light) across an LED from the same voltage.
Either the voltage drop has been reduced, or the ohmic resistance is reduced. Either way, we can lower the voltage and produce the same amount of light that was possible without the magnetic hack. Same current with less voltage is less power, for same amount of light or H2O split.
Good question. Energy efficiency is what’s really important.
For generating hydrogen for use, total cost is most important. Cost reductions are just as important as energy reductions since they both bring total cost down. This is a potential cost reduction.
The cheaper renewables get, the less important energy efficiency becomes.
Meanwhile, if the build-cost gets low enough then it suddenly becomes worth installing electrolysers for those occasional times when the cost of electricity goes negative and all that matters is throughput.
Since this thread is about water splitting and woo, I thought I'd share my favourite example of using radio wave resonance to burn saltwater.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2840/4271398/
Because that sounds so absolutely nutty, nobody seems to notice the published evidence that it actually works. The energy efficiency is so-so -- but the point is that the woo-connection creates a sort of forcefield around the topic, preventing scientific study.
You'd hope it would produce the opposite effect. E.g, "wow, this has public interest, let's test and disprove -- and maybe make a practical discovery"
If you want it to be taken seriously, why do you - and Popular Mechanics - describe it in such woowoo terms?
"using radio wave resonance to burn saltwater." ; "had discovered a seemingly impossible phenomenon: a way to burn salt water by exposing it to radio waves." - The salt water isn't burning, burning Hydrogen isn't seemingly impossible, separating Hydrogen from water isn't seemingly impossible. The description is nothing like what's actually happening.
the effect can be achieved with a much lower energy catalyst: radio waves are present in everything from microwaves to televisions. - ??? is this trying to imply you can mine radio waves from a television and use them for this? What a bizarre sentence.
"Nobody is claiming that you get more energy out than you put in," he says.; They even envision a future in which a vehicle can run off its radio's frequency waves.
.. is that not getting more out than you put in? A vehicle which generates radio waves, uses them to split seawater, burns the gas, uses that power to generate the radio waves, and also motion? Then the burnt H and O turn into ash (H2O) and drip back into the "fuel" tank to be burned again? That's not water as a "fuel", that's an overunity machine, perpetual motion.
If they're not claiming you get more energy out than you put in, stop claiming that. In the video the inventor is talking about how their Sterling Engine "could be a car engine if you wanted" but if you're putting in mains electric power to this, you'd be better off connecting that to an electric motor and saying "that could be a car engine" - it couldn't, it's mains electric powered.
This is a neat electrolysis without electrodes idea, but why(??) is it being presented as the woowoo idea "water powered car"?
I presented it in woo woo terms to make my point. Popular Mechanics put it in woo woo terms to sell copies.
The point here is: holy crap, radio waves can provide electrodeless water splitting and physicists don't care because it sounds like woo.
Of course the public and the press will see salt water burning and freak out -- but that excitement shouldn't be a reason for physicists to ignore the phenomena.
This is one of the magnetic field effect on radical pairs recombination.
Once you put a magnet near the site of a chemical reaction where radical pairs are formed, the rate of the reaction may be changed, due to the additional energy levels introduced by the spin-magnetic field interaction.
Anyway, in order to have such kind of effects, you need an energy intensive process responsible for the radical pairs creation.
This is a good introduction to the topic: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cr00033a001
The article says that "about half" of the world's hydrogen is made by steam reformation of methane, and only 4% is made by electrolysis of water.
Where does the other 46% come from ?
Interesting, from Wikipedia: There are four main sources for the commercial production of hydrogen: natural gas, oil, coal, and electrolysis; which account for 48%, 30%, 18% and 4% of the world’s hydrogen production respectively.
All the hydrocarbon sources are apparently processed by steam reforming.
Is there any chance a similar magnetic effect could be used to improve performance of rechargeable batteries?
I don't think those have chemistries with triplet states.
Would this make hydrogen fuel cells (the reverse of electrolysis) have double the power density as well? That would be meaningful for reducing hydrogen fuel cell weight and cost per vehicle.
I doubt it. The reason this works is that when combining oxygen atoms from two water molecules to produce an oxygen molecule, they need to have parallel spins; the magnet aligns the spins and therefore speeds up this process. However, when breaking the O2 molecule to combine it with hydrogen (in a fuel cell), the atoms are already parallel in spin and are going to an unordered state, so there's no benefit to attempting to align them.
> After testing a variety of different anode materials, the ICIQ team found that the effect depended on the degree of anode magnetization and did not work at all with nonmagnetic anodes. This suggests that the effect is linked to the electron spin states of oxygen intermediates bound to the catalyst, says Galán-Mascarós.
So how do the production rates of magnetic versus non-magnetic anodes compare?
Sounds like non-zero vs zero
This is very interesting, but at the same time it seems like something the "free energy" people would have done and found a long time ago?
Maybe they did, but were dismissed out of hand due to everything else in their woo-based world?
Or maybe they tried it and saw no (or little) difference; the article did say that the effect wasn't shown to happen with every non-magnetic anode material - and I doubt that the "free energy" researchers tried a particular nickel-coated foam type of anode...
All of that aside, I do wonder if there are any "off-the-shelf" anode materials whereby one could experiment with this effect?
Short answer: Yes.
If you take the time to trawl through Rex Research you would find this and a bunch of other stuff. Most of it is BS but the bits that aren't... there is some mind-blowing stuff that just hasn't reached critical mass in the collective consciousness yet.
For example, the device of Przemyslaw Lagiewka, which has to be seen to be believed (there are videos):
> A small Fiat 126p, going 45 km per hour, was driven into a concrete wall. The bumper was not damaged. The driver wore no seatbelts. The inertial reaction, which should have thrown him onto the hood, did not occur. The stopping distance was only 16 centimetres.
http://www.rexresearch.com/lagiewka/lagiewka.htm
so what is the actual efficiency now - ie what is the energy content of the h2 produced,
compared to the energy input??
Sibling comment has the info. This is not an increase in energy efficiency just conversion efficiency. You pump in more amperes over the same voltage and manage to split twice the amount of water with the same size array. Still great thou. Anything that reduces the infrastructure needs to produce H2 is a good thing.
So we know what happens when you put the magnet at the anode, now what happens if you put it at the cathode? Hell, what happens when you put magnets on both?
Aren't there field lines between the anode and cathode in an electrolysis system? You have current moving, so there must be. I wonder how those affect the process.
This is a fairly obvious thing to try, and indeed one of the commenters writes that he discovered this already sometime after 1982 (too bad he is not more precise).
Water splitting? Why didn’t they call it hydrolysis?
Hydrolysis is chemical breakdown via reaction with water. This is electrolysis. But it's a popsci article, so they put that in the subtitle. "Splitting" makes sense to people who don't use terms like hydrolysis and electrolysis frequently.
Your misunderstanding is a perfect illustration of why writers prefer simpler terms. That said, I’m sure you’d been ok with electrolysis, and anyone uncertain could look it up. Try looking up water splitting likely yields Old Testament stuff. In short: I agree, why not use the correct term and then explain it?
No idea, but the complaint sounds like hairolysis. :-p
Jesse would be happy.
Geez makes you want to put a magnet on just about anything to see what happens.
I wonder what effect magnets have on the production of Fizzy Lifting Drinks?
It can’t possibly be the first time someone tried this.
I walk around all day on hard concrete and my feet hurt at the end of each day. Found some ankle bracelets with little magnets in them and started wearing them, and my feet quit hurting entirely. I stopped taking pain killers altogether!
Always with the magnets.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/b0c0a501-221b-4d7b-9336-0cd0e84...
I know someone who was telling me with great sincerity about how she just puts a couple of magnets in with her wash and far less soap is needed.
I told her that I only go with things where I can look up the science behind it.
This being said science has not researched every single phenomenon either. There would be no Science if all we had was disbelief in every extraordinary claim in the first place. At one point pretending that the Earth rotated around the sun was crazy for most people.
Meanwhile I find that clothes wash just fine with 1/2-1/4 of the recommended amounts unless they're soiled.
Makes the colours last longer too.
Good thing the drums tend to be stainless steel which is non magnetic otherwise that might have had completely different effects.
not kidding here, but could this shed new light onthose homeopaths/acupuncturists who put magnets on their wrists, etc. to increase blood flow?
No, if for no other reason than the mechanism by which spin alignment increases the efficiency of electrolyzing water can’t be compared to the mechanism by which magnetism of certain components of blood would allow a magnet to improve blood flow (the latter mechanism does not exist, to be clear).
I actually talked to one of their sales people a while ago out of idle curiosity, and within five minutes felt like my head was going to explode from "that's not how any of this works".
I went into it with as open a mind as I could muster, and was told the following:
- The magnets are arranged so that there's a positive magnetic field in the middle surrounded by a ring of negative magnetic field
- Blood cells are clumped and this arrangement of magnetic fields pulls apart the clumps, making the blood cells more efficient
- The magnetic field also ionizes your blood, giving the cells a positive charge so they can hold more oxygen (!)
- They don't claim that it's a medical device because pharmacies won't let them (so as to get more money from doctors prescribing medicine)
- The sales girl's pet cat is way more friendly since starting to use one of their magnet things
I checked their website which yielded further such gems as:
- Magnotherapy has been used for centuries by humans and animals to aid healing
- It is reported that Cleopatra wore a small magnet on her forehead to preserve her beauty and youthfulness!
- Our magnets use a strong, multi-directional force of magnetism called ‘Central Reverse Polarity®’ also referred to as ‘CRP®’, to mimic the expensive professional equipment used by physiotherapists. Molecules that exit a CRP® field are more efficient than those produced by standard magnets.
- The use of a Central Reverse Polarity magnetic field therefore has a three-fold effect on the body’s energy levels (talking at a molecular level);
-- It activates the release of energy
-- It boosts the volume of stored energy
-- It acts as a catalyst by providing energy to increase the rate of chemical reactions.
tl;dr no.
The results suggest that magnetism catalyzes electrolysis by temporarily aligning oxygen electron orbits. There is negligible effect otherwise; if electrolysis happened in ones' wrists, you'd merely experience extreme agony for a while, before exploding.
There is also clear, well-documented evidence that homeopathic magnets have no effect beyond a placebo.
sort of, it'll help to shed light on the BS claims and expand the common knowledge levels to help debunk such dubious claims.
My first thought was that it works because it aligns the molecules in the anode, making it more efficient?
Remember:
At this point in our technological competency, all easy advancements are gone.
Oh wait.