Burning Salt Water

So this post really has nothing to do with Leuven, or the science I am working on in Leuven, but it is about science. Recently there has been a flurry of news stories popping up all over the web on burning salt water. An american inventor of sorts seems to have stumbled on to an interesting property of salt water. When exposed to a certain frequency of radio waves (RF), it appears that one can burn the salt water. What actually is occuring seems to be the burning of the hydrogen and oxygen gas that is liberated from the water molecules in the salt water solution.

So is this an amazing discovery? Well perhaps, but there really doesn't seem to be enough information available about it yet. From what I have found by doing a google search on the topic, there have been lots of stories but little investigation. First of all, if you run enough electricity through a salt water solution, you can create hydrogen and oxygen gas. It seems that this particular RF frequency is having a similar effect as the electricity would. But lets think about the thermodynamics of this. There must be a conservation of energy in the system as a whole, we cannot break the laws of thermodynamics. Does the RF energy therefore need to be as high as the bond energy of H-O, or is there something else at work here? If the energy is that high, would it be feasible to portabilize it and run it off a car battery? That seems to be a requirement for any combustion type engine, right?

It will be interesting to see if anything comes from this research. It sure seems like it would be a potentially safe way to have our cars run on hydrogen. If this turns out to be any sort of revolutionizing experiment, it will be like many before it, on accident and unintended!