Power Consumption (Dr Evil Style)

[vulgarian]

If 1000w is enough power to generate 170 litres/hour of hydrogen from saline water and the UK has a power production capacity of 77.4GW how quickly could we blow the world up? Sure it would be a lot easier to release our arsenal of warheads but thats boring.

 

I reckon if we put the wires in the channel near france, within the hour we'd have something like 131 580 000 000 litres of hydrogen to play with. How much explosive power is this? Standby buttons alone probably account for enough to wipe out london.

[insane_alien]

well having the hydrogen on the surface is already a bad idea if you want to blow up he world, it would compress it rather than shattering it (unless you mean just wiping out all life).

 

you should convert the volume of hydrogen into a molar quantity and then use an enthalpy table to get the amount of energy released on combustion.

[vulgarian]

well having the hydrogen on the surface is already a bad idea if you want to blow up he world, it would compress it rather than shattering it (unless you mean just wiping out all life).

 

Oh well, I'll put this one on the back-burner then on second thoughts wiping out all life will do fine.

Seriously though, I was more interested in figuring out the explosive power of our electrical consumption.

 

you should convert the volume of hydrogen into a molar quantity and then use an enthalpy table to get the amount of energy released on combustion.

 

I found getting my head around moles a bit vexing when at school. Though 1 gramme of hydrogen contains 6.02 x 10 to 23 atoms and Heat of fusion for hydrogen is 0.05868kJ/mol. So how many grammes of hydrogen are in a litre at atmospheric pressure?

[insane_alien]

well 1 mole molecular hydrogen is 22.4 litres @ STP so thats 2 grams per 22.4 litres. don't know why you have heat of fusion in there(its not fusion as in nuclear fusion). i can see you ain't so hot with chemistry so i'll go dig my chemistry book out and do the calculations.

 

additional: ok so my chemistry book is AWOL and i can't be bothered looking for it.

 

so we'll go for input=output and assume zero losses.

 

so the usual method of defining explosive power (on this scale) is in tonnes of tnt. this happens to be 4.184 giga joules(GJ). we have an input of 77.4 GJ/s so the theroetical explosive power is 18.5 tonnes of tnt per second.

 

we'll assum that you need 1 teratonne of TNT to wipe out all life on earth(complete estimate so don't quote me on it) so we would have to run it for 54054054054 seconds

thats 1713 years.

 

unless you want to fuse the hydrogen where the amount of energy you could release per second would go up by a shedload but i have some crappy fluid flow work to get done so tata.

[vulgarian]

Err is this right?

mol H2/g = 6.02 X 10e24

Kj/mol H2 = 0.05868

g/L H2@273K = 0.0899

((6.02 X 10e24) x 0.05868) x 0.0899 = 2.072892124 X 10 to 23

 

multiplied by our hydrogen production capacity gives

2.7 x 10e34 Kj/hour ???

[vulgarian]

well 1 mole molecular hydrogen is 22.4 litres @ STP so thats 2 grams per 22.4 litres. don't know why you have heat of fusion in there(its not fusion as in nuclear fusion). i can see you ain't so hot with chemistry so i'll go dig my chemistry book out and do the calculations.

 

lol thanks nope it's not my strongest point!

[insane_alien]

Err is this right?

mol H2/g = 6.02 X 10e24 nope 1.204*10e24

Kj/mol H2 = 0.05868 thats not the energy released

g/L H2@273K = 0.0899 something like that

((6.02 X 10e24) x 0.05868) x 0.0899 = 2.072892124 X 10 to 23

 

multiplied by our hydrogen production capacity gives

2.7 x 10e34 Kj/hour ??? uhhh no! your mixxing moles and number of molecules i think

 

my comments are in bold

[YT2095]

yer Both wrong, the avogadro number is 6.02 X 10^23.

that`s how many Atoms of ANY element used to make 1 Mole.

for Hydrogen, that many atoms = 1 gram.

[vulgarian]

yer Both wrong, the avogadro number is 6.02 X 10^23.

that`s how many Atoms of ANY element used to make 1 Mole.

for Hydrogen, that many atoms = 1 gram.

Thanks only one order of magnitude out though!

 

Ahh but i got it right first time round.

[insane_alien]

YT, i was reffering to molecular hydrogen not monatomic hydrogen. and i'm hungover give me a break