Mechanosynthetic water splitting
Use cases
- Gaining hydrogen for the hydrogenation of carbon after mechanosynthetic carbon dioxide splitting
- Splitting into dioxygen and dihydrogen and storage in high pressure microcapsules for energy storage
- gaining oxygen when the hydrogen is needed too (seldom case) otherwise mechanosynthetic splitting of atmospheric dioxigen is a better choice
(TODO: How does the basic diamondoid mechanosynthesis toolset (consisting of nine tools) need to be extended to be able to reversibly rip H2O apart?)
Diffeculties (error rate)
According to the book Nanosystems oxygen is one of the more difficult elements to handle at room temperature due to its weaker bond strengths. (TODO: check for correctness and add chapter)
How can something be placed that has only two bonds to "hold" it
Also oxygen (like its group companion sulfur) normally forms only two bonds under average conditions. Electron deficiency bonds (e.g. with boron) that grab the lone pair of oxygen (effectively as a third bond) may be usable but this has not yet been analyzed (2016). Either way it has been proven (*) that even hydrogen which normally forms only one bond can reliably be mechanosynthetically transferred, so there should be no fundamental problems.
