Energy Loss and Hydrolysis

name         Nathan
status       student
grade        9-12
location     AZ

Question -   I was looking through the Internet when I 
stumbled across this link,
  
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/eng99/eng99022.htm.
 
It was a question that you had answered about using water as a 
source of energy by separating then combing the Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules.

In your personal opinion you state that, "Such a scenario sounds 
too good to be true, and it is, indeed, not true.  To think 
through if any perpetual motion machine will work, you need to pay 
attention to the energy requirements in every step of the cycle. 
Inevitably, any energy you can extract in one stage of the cycle 
you will have to pay back, with interest, to complete another 
stage of the cycle."

I am personally curious as to how much energy you would have to 
"pay back" in order for the reactions to continue in a cycle. I 
would also like to know if there is any good sources of 
information about Hydrogen energy that I could possibly get my 
hands on. I am very interested in this subject and I would very 
much like to research this further.
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The second law of thermodynamics (which is the basis of the 
principles that prohibit a perpetual motion machine) states that the 
efficiency of any thermal device that resolves into obtaining work 
from transferring heat from a hotter object to a colder 
object/environment is: work/heat energy = (Th-Tc)/Th,
where Th and Tc are the temperature of the "hot" and "cold" 
environments respectively. As you can see this efficiency is always 
less than "1" (temperatures are measured in kelvins). Empirically, a 
better estimate of the efficiency is obtained by taking the square 
root of each temperature, but this does not change the final result.

This "simple" relation, which no one has ever found wanting, is not 
a matter of "personal opinion" but rather a recognition of the 
result of thousands, maybe millions, of experiments that have not 
found a counter example. Should a counter example be found, the 
whole of physics and chemistry would have to be revised.

With regard to "hydrogen" chemistry, there is a wealth of 
information available from a "Google" search.
However, realize that the product of the combustion of hydrogen by 
oxygen is water. And water is the most potent "greenhouse gas" 
because it has three infrared active vibrational absorptions as well 
as a rich pure rotational spectrum that extends into the infrared 
region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The challenge is to make 
hydrogen from a resource (trash) that is a "free" or "cheap" raw 
material -- that is a material that can be recycled into a useful fuel.

Vince Calder
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