*nods* The ones you can't kill by boiling anyway at 1 atmosphere. But what survives above 170 but dies below 212?

I ask becuase IIRC commercial pasteurization usually just has to worry about hitting 170, but it's been a while since I worked in the bottling plant.

"Boiling water without a heat source... Using compression/
expansion (pressure differential)... or, similar to the hot side of an air conditioning unit. No fire needed, just the ability to compress the liquid."

I'm assuming that this was just a rhetorical, toss-it-out-there idea. After all, which are you most likely to be able to do in a survival situation, dredge up debris to make this iffy contraption, or make a fire with almost anything else, by comparison?

Sue

In all honesty, I think you'd find that the air you were compressing was getting kinda liquidy first. And liquid hydrogen and oxygen will kill anything- either from the cold or from the kaboom.

Hey, some guys have skills, they can make you a shopping mall with a q-tip and a pocketknife...

You need to watch more MacGyver. I bet he could do it with a paperclip and turkey baster and of course, duct tape.

I was Googling for something and I stumbled across this invention that is kind of similar in concept. I don't know much about it, but I just thought I'd throw the idea out there if anyone was interested in it.

It's called the Hydrosonic Pump, invented by a heating engineer out in Georgia. Basically, it heats water through turbulence or shock waves. Imagine a single car engine cylinder and piston head. Scale it up bigger and turn things on their side. Attach a motor to the piston head so that it spins in place (not travels back and forth). The sides of the piston head have a bunch of holes, and there's a bit of a gap between the piston (actually, I guess I should call it a rotor) and the cylinder wall. Fill the cylinder with water and start spinning the rotor. The caviation or turbulence generates heat, which then heats the water up. Even makes steam.

Here's the kicker, which makes the Hydrosonic Pump controversial--it apparently generates more energy than it uses. I know, I know, Law of Conservation of Energy and all, but I'm not sure if anyone has been able to discredit that claim. There are a few actual commercial installations running this thing, mostly for generating steam heat, and apparently their energy bills have all gone down.

Anyway, putting aside the energy issue, this thing really does heat up water without any combustion involved. OK, so out in the bush, you could carry one of those old manual egg beaters/mixers, with the hand crank, and crank that thing really, really fast, and then you'd be able to boil that river water and make it safe to drink...well, after you've recovered from all that faster-than-humanly-possible cranking.

All I'm going to say is, I hope the inventor got the patent before going public.

Oh, if anyone is interested in watching a video about the Hydrosonic Pump, I stumbled across it by watching this video. The video has several segments about interesting--unbelievable, actually--energy-related inventions.

Note that the video is mislabled. I was looking for a video on the Federal Reserve that someone suggested to me, and I stumbled on this video instead. Very interesting if you like science shows.

Arney, you might want to hold off on buying stock. Let's see their electric bill for $0 first.

What they have there is no better than, and much more expensive than, the $5 resistive heating element in standard electric water heater. Which, by the way, is and always was 100% efficient in converting electrical energy to heat.

If, and that's a big "if", they are measuring the energy of the steam correctly, most likely they are making what Don Lancaster calls "Freshman EE Student Lab Mistake #1" - Incorrectly measuring AC electical power input.

Why don't they just route the steam back to a turbine which turns the pump. Spin the whole thing up with the electric motor, then pull the plug - it should keep running, right? C'mon guys, if you won't bother with the science, just convince all us skeptics by doing a simple demonstration.

Ditto for the other "inventions" in that video. Any time you hear that they are "pulsing" the electric current, it is a dead giveaway. People, even "scientists" invariably under-measure the true power in pulsed current.

Oh, and by the way - Water is not a fuel - its an ASH.