Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

is it possible to purify water by splitting it into pure hydrogen and pure oxygen by electrolysis and then somehow reverse the process to make pure H20? I was planning to split non purified H20 and then burn hydrogen in order to make pure water, and i had solar energy in mind and to have this experiment solar powered, but how would this be able to intertwine with burning the hydrogen? when splitting hydrogen and oxygen, it creates alot of energy and i want to somehow turn that energy into the burning of the hydrogen or something like that? Please help!

Hi!

This is an excellent question. As you probably already know, it is definitely possible to split water into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis. However, according to some research I did - perhaps other experts can back me up on this, since I'm not fully sure - but it doesn't seem very feasible to "manufacture" water from hydrogen and oxygen, which you would have to do after electrolysis.
Check out this site: http://science.howstuffworks.com/enviro ... -water.htm
It may help you find a more definite yes or no answer to your question.

In case this idea doesn't work out too well, I do know there are many other extremely interesting projects in the area of water purification you could try. Perhaps even a minor modification to this idea would be perfect. The Science Buddies Project Ideas, of course, harbor much relevant information, but Google searches on Google Scholar or news articles could spark your imagination as well.

Good luck!

Hi,

Do you have a specific project or hypothesis in mind? Water is simple to make from hydrogen--all you have to do is burn it. The H2 combines with the O to make H2O.

Are you thinking of ways to purify polluted water? Electrolysis followed by burning of the H2 gas evolved would give pure water, but i don't think it would be very efficient unless you could use solar energy to do the electrolysis. I don't know enough about solar power to know if that is possible, but maybe you could find out.

Repost to this thread with more questions and ideas and we will help to guide you to a great project.

Best wishes,

Scibee