Posted on 03/25/2013 3:27:53 PM PDT by Kevmo
The desalinization properties put it up there with sustaining life. Efficient and cheap desalinization is one of those grails innovators have been pursuing.
TiO2 is decades old stuff that was promoted for destruction of hazardous material like PCBs and other organics. It works on small scale but has never been practical. The way it works is to absorb UV energy and use it to create radicals from water which are highly reactive ions that combine with organic molecules to destroy them. The need for UV limits its application. There are formulations of TiO2 called low band-gap that can work with regular light instead of UV. As some have said you have to be skeptical about research from some parts of the world. I dont know about singapore but India is rampant with BS research.
There’s also this recent development
http://www.domain-b.com/technology/2010/20100505_discover_inexpensive.html
[quote]The molybdenum-oxo complex that Karunadasa, Chang and Long discovered is
a high valence metal with the chemical name of (PY5Me2)Mo-oxo. In their
studies, the research team found that this complex catalyzes the generation of
hydrogen from neutral buffered water or even sea water with a turnover
frequency of 2.4 moles of hydrogen per mole of catalyst per second.[/quote]
What is a turnover rate? If I wanted a specific number of liters per minute
and converted this to moles per minute the ratio they mention
Of 2.4 moles of hydrogen per mole of catalyst doesn’t include a time rate.
This university is in Singapore not the mainland PRC. There’s good reason to be skeptical of anything that sounds too good to be true. And if this was out of the PRC you could multiply that about a thousand times. But Singapore is a very westernized and advanced little island country where the principal academic influences are the UK, Australia, and the USA. So this may be worth taking more than a glance at.
Yes, and boy can it catch fish!
Yes, Singapore. My bad.. Still, and all, Chinese scientific literature is extremely untrustworthy. I read a lot of it and this is true. They recognize this as well.
BRW, this is still hype of the first magnitude.
yeah, hydrogen could also power pumps— to pump water inland from the ocean—especially if the price were cheap enough. Wouldn’t it be neat to use water as a fuel? We’ll just have to see how the new catalyst works out.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.