• Question: How come we can't burn water?

    Asked by beckymonster3 to Kate, Kieren, Nicola, Rowena, Roy on 16 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 16 Mar 2014:

      A couple of reasons. First, burning stuff requires fuel – water isn’t a fuel and it extinguishes the fire because it insulates from oxygen in the air whih would help fuel a fire. Also, we know hydrogen and oxygen release energy when thy combine to make water. This is how hydrogen fuel cells work and hydrogen energy storage. This means to bemreak water up to oxygen and hydrogen you have to put a lot of energy in. It doesn’t spontaneously combust and in fact vapourises first. So water is an energy sink! sink

    • Photo: Nicola Rogers

      Nicola Rogers answered on 16 Mar 2014:

      When something ‘burns’ we usually mean that it will react with oxygen in the air if we ignite it to give the reaction the activation energy it needs to get started – these materials are organic materials that consist of carbons and hydrogens mainly – which we call fuel – eg: paper, oil, methane, wood, coal .. Water, H2O does not react with oxygen in this fashion upon heating.

    • Photo: Kate Nicholson

      Kate Nicholson answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      You can’t burn water because it is a product of combustion(burning), it can’t be oxidised further and still give out energy, so it can’t be burned. If we split is up into Hydrogen and Oxygen by passing a current through it, the hydrogen will burn – making water again like in rockets. There is a cool youtube video of an american bloke who uses radio to burn salt water – really he is heating the water up so fast and intensely that it is breaking up into Hydrogen and Oxygen and the flame is orange because of the sodium from the salt. Looks cool though 😉 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGg0ATfoBgo

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