Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-l] COLD FUSION (was dirty water)

I suspect it is the same thing that keeps electrons inside metals ordinarily. If an electron leaves, the metal has a net positive charge and is attracted back to the metal. You can fancy this up with energy arguments and qm if you wanted to begin to think about tunnelling and field emission, but basically that is what is going on.
I seems to me that if you try to remove an ion from the solution, the solution would have a net charge. This is also the issue of ions in solution not being the isolated ions we imagine, but rather bulky hydrated things, so for the ion to evaporate, it would have to shed all those molecules.

cheers,

joe

Joseph J. Bellina, Jr. Ph.D.
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556

On Jul 12, 2006, at 8:37 AM, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:

On Jul 9, 2006, at 2:37 PM, Michael Edmiston wrote:

. . . If "dirty" means inorganic chemicals with negligible vapor
pressure
(such as desalination of water) then a single distillation can get
fairly pure water, . . . This is typically considered "physical
chemistry"
and is fully described in college-level physical chemistry texts.

Salts, such as K2CO3 and NaCl, do not sublimate intensively. Otherwise
the vapor pressure of their molecules in air would not be very low. But
once dissolved in water these substances become mostly mixtures of
positive and negative ions (cations and anions). What is the "vapor
pressure" of ions? Something is preventing ions from being present in
bubbles of the escaping steam, when the electrolyte is boiled.
Otherwise distilled water would probably be salty. What keeps ions out
of the bubbles? Electrolytes are macroscopically neutral.

Ludwik Kowalski
Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good.
_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/mailman/listinfo/phys-l