[Phys-L] Sodium+water as fuel?

[Ludwik Kowalski <kowalskil@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU>]

Referring to this:
> > "Dr Andrija Puharich reportedly drove his motor home for hundreds
> > of thousands of miles around North America in the 1970s using only
> > water as fuel. At a mountain pass in Mexico, he collected snow for water."

 Chuck Britton wrote:
> There have been cars driven on water reported previously.
>
> The one's that actually perform as claimed use metallic
> sodium or potassium in addition to the H2O.

*  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As a high school student, more than five decade ago, I saw a demonstration in which a tiny bit of sodium was dropped into water and reacted violently. But I did not know that sodium can be used as an automobile fuel. Looking into a chemistry textbook now I see that hydrogen is released from water by the following reaction:

2 Na + 2 H2O --> 2 NaOH + H2

In other words, to produce one mole of H2 (2 grams) one uses two moles of Na (46 grams). The heat of combustion of H2 is 495 kJ per m
ole  (247.5 kJ per gram) while the heat of combustion of gasoline is close to 50 kJ/gram. This shows that one gram of hydrogen produces about five times as much heat as one gram of gasoline. It also shows that one gram of sodium must be used to generate 5.39 kJ of heat (released when hydrogen is burned). One kilogram of gasoline (little more than one liter) will produce 500,000 kJ of heat. How much sodium is needed to produce the same amount of heat? The answer is 92.9 kilograms. (Feel free to replace the word heat by thermal energy).

Suppose the distance covered by Pucharich was only 200,000 miles. A car covering 20 miles per galon of gasoline would use 10,000 galones of that fuel. This is equivalent to 929,000 kilograms (nearly 230 tons) of sodium. Note that NaOH is a dangerous polutant. It is not hard to figure out  that a lot of nitrogen hydroxide would be produced during the trip. How was the NAOH disposed of? How often was the vehicule “refueled” with sodium? A questio
n I am not asking has to do with energy needed extract 230 tons of sodium from NaCl.

Hydrogen cars of tomorrow are expected to be enviromentally friendly. Production of hydrogen should also be environmentally friendly. Getting hydrogen out of water with sodium does not satisfy this condition. The iESi device for extraction of hydrogen from water, on the other hand,

see: http://www.iESiUSA.com

is said to be not only environmentally friendly but energy efficient as well. I do not think that such claim is valid. But I will be happy to be wrong. Nothing will be more convincing than long-lasting commercial success of their already existing devices, and subsequent scientific papers explaining them. That topic, as some of you probably know, is addressed in units #216 and #226 at my cold fusion website:

http://blake.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/cf/

I have no idea why one of the the iESi devices is referred to as a cold fusion reactor. How do they know that nuclear cold fusion reacti
ons take place in the device?

Ludwik Kowalski
Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good.
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