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A Closer Look at the Genesis Technology
Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2003 @ 23:12:56 UTC by vlad
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Anonymous writes: I have not examined the GWE Edison Device. The following comments are based solely on an examination of the GWE web site description and speculation with regard to its feasibility based on that description.
At first glance the description of the Genesis Technology given on the GWE web site in the section entitled "The Science behind Genesis" seems very vague. But closer inspection reveals some very creative design work.
When we consider all the various features claimed for the Edison Device, we find that almost every one involves a well-established technology. For example, the hydrolysis of water by electricity is a simple procedure anyone can do at home with a battery, a beaker of water, and a couple of test tubes. Combustion of hydrogen is recognized as a major clean energy source. The fuel cell is a rapidly evolving technology. All else is details.
The critical feature that makes the Edison Device practical -- if indeed GWE has achieved what it claims -- is a technology for efficiently disassociating water into its component gases, hydrogen and oxygen. This efficiency means that there is much less consumption of energy in the hydrolysis process than is released by the combustion of the gases as they recombine or their generation of electricity in a fuel cell. The ability to recycle the end product water is a neat, but not critical feature, since water is an abundant resource and any water lost into the environment is ultimately recoverable as it cycles in the environment.
So how does GWE get an over-unity coefficient of performance from its Edison Device? The key is a catalytic thermo-electric process that occurs in three stages. Everything else is secondary. Let's look closely at these three stages and see how it MIGHT be done. (This essay just presents a sci-fi guess. There are probably several viable ways to do it, and presumably GWE found one -- not necessarily this one.) All we have to go on is the section entitled "Extracting Hydrogen and Oxygen from Water: the gCell Process" plus a few other comments scattered around the site.
The goal of the process is to detach the hydrogen molecules from the oxygen atoms in water using significantly less electrical energy than can be derived from a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell using only the gases derived from said hydrolysis. The clue GWE gives us is that they set up a situation where the components behave the way "magnets with opposing polarities push away from each other."
1) According to GWE, in the first stage of the process the water passes "over special catalytic reactants" and generates "voltage". A catalytic agent facilitates a process, but the catalyst does not appear among the end products of the process. Thus you can use the catalyst over and over many times, though it may degrade in effectiveness gradually over time. How does the GWE catalyst get electricity from water? Let's explore. The water molecule is a dipole. It is a little permanent magnet. The two hydrogen atoms attach to one side of the oxygen atom with an angle of 104.4 degrees between them. Actually a water molecule has a tetrahedral shape (slightly distorted from regular tetrahedral shape), with two vertices occupied by oxygen electron pairs and two vertices each occupied by a hydrogen atom. The shared electron pairs and the unshared electron pairs repulse and narrow the bond angle down from the expected 109.5 degrees. Thus the molecular shape of water, ignoring the oxygen electron vertices, is nonlinear, roughly resembling a 3-D version of a "Mickey Mouse" silhouette. The O--H bond length is 96 pm. Water has a dipole moment of 1.86 debyes. This plus the hydrogen bonding causes it to form evanescent chains and other structures in its liquid form. Thus water has high viscosity. Also, the presence of hydrogen ions (protons) in water forms "aqueous hydrogen" ions in which the proton bonds with four water molecules on the "oxygen" side. So we get a roughly tetrahedral structure with a proton in the middle with four oxygen vertices and pairs of hydrogen atoms appended to each oxygen atom. This structure has a weak positive charge. You can also have tetrahedral arrangements with the oxygen component of a water molecule at the core (two molecules attached by O to H, and two attached by H to O). There is also a corresponding aqueous hydroxide ion built from 3 water molecules and a hydroxide ion (OH). So there's a lot of interesting electromagnetic geometry to play with in a drop of water.
Suppose now that our catalytic membrane is a kind of nano-filter that "excites" passing water molecules in two ways. First, it squeezes the hydrogen "ears" closer together. To accomplish this, suppose we make the narrow "walls" of the filter strongly positively charged and shaped so the molecule can only pass, let's say "oxygen side first" in an orderly stream. The hydrogen atoms are pushed away from the walls and forced to get closer together. This causes the dipole magnetic effects of the water to increase in strength. Secondly, the filter causes the squeezed molecules to be lined up and wiggling as they pass. The lining up helps to squeeze the ears also, so you get a chain of little magnets all stuck together -- (H2-O)(H2-O)(H2-O)(H2-O).... The wiggling of large numbers of water molecules in a coherent manner (imagine the chain zig-zagging along) also generates a usable electric current. This current, plus some additional current supplied from a battery (at startup) or from recombining a reserve supply of the separated gases in the fuel cell then separates the hydrogen from the oxygen in stage two. The force that drives the water through the filter may just be ordinary gravity. Hence the Edison device may partially be a gravity machine. You feed water in at the top, and it works its way down through the system.
2) Having derived some electricity from the distortion and vibration of the water by the nano-filter (or an initial phase of the filter), the distorted molecular shape is further used to facilitate splitting off of the component atoms. The hydrogen atoms in their ion form are basically protons. They will repel each other. On the other hand, the hydrogen and electronegative oxygen atoms are attracted to each other. So when the "ears" are squeezed together and then chained, the whole geometry shifts. As the ears swing close together, we apply a tiny bit of electric current in just the right way to transform the whole situation as if by magic. For example, imagine that the chains of "squeezed" water molecules are coherently lined up in the filter as follows:
.........
(H2-O)(H2-O)(H2-O)(H2-O)....-->
(H2-O)(H2-O)(H2-O)(H2-O)....-->
..........
Notice that this gives us a coherent grid set up organized by the geometry and permanent charges of the stationary membrane. The application of a tiny electrical pulse switches the grid in the same way we can switch a liquid crystal array in a calculator or cell phone from one geometry configuration to another by a slight electrical pulse.
........
(H2)-(O)(H2)-(O)(H2)-(O)(H2)-(O)....|^|
(H2)-(O)(H2)-(O)(H2)-(O)(H2)-(O)....|^|
.........
Now look at the grid vertically instead of horizontally. Imagine that the tiny pulse reorients the grid so the components of the chains now move normal to their original direction. What was water in the filter's grid a moment ago is now instantly and totally transformed into two separate gases. The electric pulse also supplies the electron flow to facilitate the covalent bonding of H ion pairs into H2 molecules and O ion pairs into O2 molecules. The entire process occurs as a global, massively parallel transformation rather than as a serial process of one molecule at a time interacting with an electrode. The H2's are already together, and the O's are right next to each other, so they simply shift en masse into diatomic gas mode when exposed to the right geometry, temperature (thermal component), and electrical conditions. If the angles in the grid are lined up properly, just a tiny jiggle should be enough to cause a dimensional shift of phase state from liquid water to a pair of diatomic gases. This technique of hydrolysis utilizes massive parallel processing. One slight nudge does the whole job at once on all the water currently in the grid phase of the filter.
3) The third stage in the process is the generation of the additional electricity needed for stage two by recombining a small portion of the liberated gases. This is a straightforward procedure and needs no further comment. The significant point here is that the electricity needed for the feedback loop is only a small portion of that gained from the hydrolysis process.
At the end of these three stages the gCell has produced a significant excess of hydrogen and oxygen beyond what is needed to run its own process.
So the extra boost needed to finesse the separation of the component gases from molecular water while using much less electricity than the resultant gases can produce may come from several reasonable sources. These can include gravity, charges in permanent magnets, appropriate temperature in the membrane, the geometry of specially designed nano-scale electro-mechanical "switchable wave guides" similar to liquid crystal arrays, and electricity generated from coherent dipole movements of the water molecules.
I do not find any of this particularly mysterious -- just clever use of resources. Of course, all of the above is merely my "sci-fi" vision and not to be taken too seriously. GWE may use an entirely different approach. Or it could be a scam. But the Edison Device just might be for real. And, if not, we could probably make it for real with an intelligent, coordinated effort. The GWE Mission statement is a fine goal. Advanced materials science is no longer in the realm of putzing around trying this or that to see what happens. The designer deliberately calculates the exact properties of matter that he needs for a particular task and gives the specs to the material scientist who then conjures up the required material made to order using various ingenious and increasingly sophisticated technologies. My point is simply to suggest that the Genesis Technology is quite feasible and simply makes directed use of extra energy that is readily available in the environment. It is thus a modern "free energy" device in the ancient and accepted tradition of windmills, waterwheels, and solar cells. What makes it notable is that it is so compact and can run 24/7 in almost any location. If it works, I'll buy one.
Douglass A. White, Ph.D.
dpedtech@dpedtech.com
PS: A lot is happening these days, at a very fast pace. Stay tuned.
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Average Score: 4.66
Votes: 12
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Re: A Closer Look at the Genesis Technology (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Wednesday, August 06, 2003 @ 00:01:45 UTC | Very interesting!
Of course we don't know if GWE is a scam or not, but it was nice to hear someone say that the Edison device is indeed possible.
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Re: A Closer Look at the Genesis Technology (Score: 1)
by Doug on Wednesday, August 06, 2003 @ 00:58:18 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) | Unfortunately I doubt that the people at GWE are as smart as you are. Certainly there has been a great deal of snooping around by John Lichtenstein and the "inventors" are not as anonymous as the site would have you believe.
I'll wait for the "ta dah!" as they wheel out their finished product but I'll keep breathing until then.
Nano-scale electromagnetic and indeed physical effects are a worthy region of study though. I'd be the last person to say (as has been done in the past) "We've invented everything already". Nature has much more in store for us yet.
Doug |
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Re: A Closer Look at the Genesis Technology (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, August 07, 2003 @ 00:13:22 UTC | Addendum to Comments on GWE Edison Device
In my previous sci-fi "model" of the GWE low energy hydrolysis of water I neglected to explain how the hydrogen and oxygen molecules would be kept separate if they were all disassociated from the water simultaneously in the filter. One of the sources of free energy available to the device is gravitational potential. The filter could be placed in a roughly horizontal alignment with a tilt that guaranteed the proper gravitational flow of water through the membrane, though "garden hose" water pressure might be enough. Capillary action in the (carbon?) nanotubules may also assist gravity. The exiting gas also will leave a partial vacuum that draws more water into the filter. The hypothetical parallel hydrolysis process involves three different dimensional shifts. First, the filter organizes the water from an incoherent state into a coherent state aligned in one dimension of the filter. A second 90 degree shift converts all the water molecules into two gases in one shot. These two shifts occur in the plane of the filter. The third shift is theoretically 90 degrees upward from the filter's plane, but this may be distorted due to the plane's tilt relative to the gravitational gradient. The third shift is along the earth's gravitational gradient.
Hydrogen is the lightest element. A hydrogen molecule is much smaller than an oxygen molecule or a water molecule. So the filter is simply made with an upper surface resolution that is permeable to hydrogen and impermeable to oxygen or water. Thus the hydrogen leaks out upward and is captured and stored or fed to its proper fuel cell input. (Ha! The Edison Device may be to a very tiny extent an "antigravity" device!!) The oxygen continues through the nanotube channels of the filter and exits from its "horizontal" output into its own storage container or appropriate input to the fuel cell. So the process is 3D. Water enters in one dimension, oxygen exits in a second dimension, and hydrogen exits in a third dimension.
The above-described hypothetical thermo-electro-mechanical process is actually related to phase conjugation, initially developed as an optical technology but now understood to be extremely general and already well demonstrated in water.
I note that elsewhere in the GWE materials they refer to chemical reactions occurring in the catalytic gCell. So the above sci-fi scenario may be totally off the mark (though it may give some people ideas to explore).
Another approach might be that they have simply refined and further developed the existing technology utilized in the Powerball-type hydrogen pump. (One could check if Power ball has done any interesting licensing deals lately.) In that technology sodium hydride acts as the catalyst. The reactive NaH is pelletized in a plastic shell. When hydrogen is needed, the pellet is placed in water and sliced open. The sodium hydride reacts with the water, releasing hydrogen gas and leaving behind sodium hydroxide (sometimes called "lye", a common industrial chemical) plus the inert plastic shell. The sodium hydroxide is then heat treated to force out the oxygen and recycle it back to sodium hydride. The current Power ball approach separates the two strokes of the cycle, only using the hydrogen-releasing stroke as an energy source (and burning the hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen). It's a nice technology, but a lot of energy and infrastructure is then required to get through the oxygen stroke to complete the cycle and repelletize in plastic.
What if GWE figured out how to do the whole process with three new features? (1) Both strokes of the cycle are done on site so both the hydrogen and the oxygen are used. (2) A creative buffer system regulates the NaH reactiveness permanently right in the gCell, eliminating the need for the cumbersome plastic pellets. (3) a new technique allows the thermal-oxygen stroke to proceed at very low energy cost. Instead of Na, they might use a different alkali metal (Li, K, Rb, Cs, Fr) as their catalyst. This whole direction is also worth exploring, whether or not GWE uses it.
Water not only has phase states as a solid ice, liquid water, or vaporous steam, but it also has a variety of other possibilities, including a phase state as a pair of diatomic gases. The diatomic gas phase allows a single water molecule to become macroscopic and nonlocal. Also, when isolated, the individual gases can be in a very low state of excitation, but, when combined under the right conditions, they tend to pass through a rapid exothermic transition that results in water, and thus would seem to be an even lower state of excitation. Another feature is that both hydrogen and oxygen are among the most reactive elements known. So "water" in its nonlocalized form can associate with and bond with other elements and molecules in an almost endless variety of ways including the endless biological pathways.
D. A. White
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Re: A Closer Look at the Genesis Technology (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, August 07, 2003 @ 10:13:20 UTC | Very nice read Douglass! I have a question for you though -
Since the Edison device takes water, and separates it into H2 and O, isn't it basically "destroying" water?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's only so much water on this planet - If water is indeed "burned" (removed from the environment) in this process, how can it be a "renewable" energy source?
If Genisis's claims are true that you can run your house on a gallon of fresh water a year, I can forsee this to be a problem. Over time, would we would remove a significant amount of fresh water from the environment. I just wonder how long it would take to make an impact on the planet..
There is 370 billion billion gallons of water on the planet (3.7 x 10^20). 96.7% is salt water, and 2.4% is fresh water. Of that fresh water, only 13% is in liquid form. The rest is tied up in ice, snow and gas in the atmosphere. 95% of this liquid fresh water is groundwater - the other 5% is in lakes, rivers, and streams - which I imagine would be the most convenient source to get used by Edison devices (if people are using their garden hoses to feed them).
Currently, agriculture uses 75% of the available fresh water supply. The Edison device will now be thrown into the mix, and have a major impact on the available fresh water supply.
Let's say that eventually, there will be at least 1 Edison device operating for every 2 people on this planet. There's over 6 billion people right now. If we stick with 1 gallon of water used per year, that's over 3 billion gallons of water removed from the planet each year. I think this is a pretty conservative estimate, as there will be many applications of the device in various forms that use much more than a gallon a year - not to mention the use of these machines in automobiles. I'm not sure we can handle removing that much fresh water from the environment each year, and not have a negative impact.
I think in order for the Edison device to exist without making a large impact on the fresh water supply, we're going to have to tap the most abundant supply of water - the oceans - and desalination is going to have to be a must (I don't recall the Edison device claiming to run on straight salt water?). From here, I can forsee that you'll eventually be required to only buy and use desalinated water from official "fuel" suppliers.
Please feel free to blow me out of the water (pun intended ;)) if I'm way off base here..
Thanks for your comments!
-Ryan Dinan
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more cartoon chemistry on GWE (Score: 1)
by chipotle_pickle on Thursday, August 07, 2003 @ 14:15:03 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://freehydrogen.blogspot.com | The speculative write up of the g-cell by "Douglass A. White Ph.D.” is cartoon chemistry. Gravity is not going to push the “Mickey Mouse ears” of water through a filter so hard that ions start popping off. The forces involved are all many orders of magnitude off. To pull 2 electrons right off a water molecule (at room temp and atmospheric pressure) requires much more energy than you can ever get back from any chemical reaction. To propose centimeter level differences in (Earth’s) gravitational potential as a force that drives chemistry is completely out of proportion. Additionally, this model of the g-cell is a type I perpetual motion machine, while GWE claims explicitly that their device is not a perpetual motion machine. Anyway, claiming that something is a type I perpetual motion machine is not an “explanation” of an extravagant claim, it’s an extravagant claim that itself requires explanation.
Of course, the “White” model of the g-cell does not address any of the points raised at my site about the preposterous business structure, wacky design, or ever-changing story of the GWE. So even if this model were not completely off-base, the conclusion that GWE might not be a scam is unwarranted.
Since this was posted simultaneously at two places (zpenergy and www.greaterthings.com/News/FreeEnergy), with anonymous booster replies immediately going to zpenergy (presumably from the author), and the author does not answer my mail, I tried to look him up. Oh boy. The author’s website is filled with mindless GWE boosterism of the sort that Guy-Rome is always posting anonymously to zpenergy. It also has references to the usual suspects of wacky physics (Evans, Bearden, Bugh, …). The author’s trying to sell a book. “Douglass A. White”Ph.D., the author’s domain name, the book title, and the publishing company are all unknown to Google. He’s taking orders out of this office in Taiwan:
2F #38, Lane 52, Yung-yuan Rd., Yung-ho, Taiwan 234
If the address was in the States I would figure out what type of building it is, but I’ll leave this one as an exercise for any correspondents in Taiwan. (Mailboxes ROC?) The domain was registered just after the GWE pages. It seems to be too much effort to be just another GWE appendage, but it’s not impossible.
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Re: A Closer Look at the Genesis Technology (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, August 11, 2003 @ 10:43:48 UTC | Dr. White: I found your comments about GWE
to be the most informed I have read since this
technology was revealed. True or not, I enjoyed
your explanation.
Gaylen |
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It's August 41st in Toronto. What's the date in GWE land? (Score: 1)
by chipotle_pickle on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 @ 00:45:51 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://freehydrogen.blogspot.com | Lately, all they seem to do is change server IPs. There haven't been any updates to the site since June 10. And back then they said Genesis Team to unveil a new version of the Genesis technology in August 2003. Where is it still August? |
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