John Ellis claims that water has a "hydrogen bond angle" ranging from 104° to 114°, and that his patented distillation machines can produce water with a permanent hydrogen bond angle above 113°.
Does water at standard temperature and pressure have a stable "hydrogen bond angle?" And can that angle be permanently modified to the range between 113-114°?
The linked site mentions that this has been validated by the USPTO. Not true. John Ellis has a few patents on distillers that do not mention hydrogen bonds (from USPTO patent search site with search string IN/"Ellis, Jr; John C"
PAT. NO.
Title
6,409,888
Method and apparatus for water degasification and distillation
5,203,970
Method for water degasification and distillation
4,612,090
Water degasification and distillation apparatus
4,420,374
Water degasification and distillation apparatus
4,339,307
Distillation apparatus
Another search at google/patents "hydrogen bond angle and distiller ininventor:Ellis" produced 39 hits none of which were about this inventor.
He does have a pending application US 2020/0095136 that makes a claim about changing the angle of hydrogen bonds. Contrary to the implication on the linked web site within the question, this is not a granted application. In fact it received a rejection 7/6/2020. It is non-final rejection but it does argue in one of the several grounds of rejection:
- Claims 1-13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the enablement requirement. The claim(s) contains subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to enable one skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and/or use the invention.
- The claimed limitation in claims 1 and 9 that ”water flowing out of the condensing channel has a hydrogen bond angle of greater than 110°”; and in claims 8 and 13 that it is from 113° to about 114° isn't enabled for one having ordinary skill in the art. The equilibrium hydrogen bond angle of water is generally understood in the art as being 104.48°; see abstract of Hoy et al. The following factors, from in re Wands, lead the conclusion of the undue experimentation required to show how the invention was not enabled at the time the invention was made:
The translation is that it can't possibly work unless the inventor presents a lot more proof. It is out of the ordinary that an examiner essentially says an application violates known physics other than perpetual motion cases. I think this is the Hoy paper.
There is a lot to unpack from that site; the majority of it seems to have little basis in reality. The short answer is that you cannot permanently change the hydrogen bond angle (104.5°) in water.
EDIT: Free H+ binds to water molecules to form H30+ hyrdonium ions which do have a bond angle of 113°, these are small in number even in very strong acids and would not be more common in purified water.
What is the bond angle determined by?
Water is based on a tetrahedral structure, where 2 of the 'corners' are instead electron pairs, giving it an overall "angular" structure. It is useful to visualise how this looks in 3D compared to the 2D visualisations we may be more familiar with:
https://socratic.org/questions/what-is-the-bond-angle-in-a-water-molecule
Tetrahedral structures have a bond angle of 109.5°, however, water has a smaller bond angle due to repulsion between the two electron pairs. This can be determined both theoretically using molecular orbital simulations and empirically using x-ray crystallography.
This would ordinarily result in a tetrahedral geometry in which the angle between electron pairs (and therefore the H-O-H bond angle) is 109.5°. However, because the two non-bonding pairs remain closer to the oxygen atom, these exert a stronger repulsion against the two covalent bonding pairs, effectively pushing the two hydrogen atoms closer together. The result is a distorted tetrahedral arrangement in which the H—O—H angle is 104.5°. https://www.chem1.com/acad/sci/aboutwater.html
What about vibration?
One of the modes of vibration of water molecules is "bend" where vibration of the atoms does indeed cause the atoms to wiggle about and the bond angle to change. However, this is not a permanent state that can be "locked", all molecules vibrate and the vibrations happen at well characterised frequencies which can be measured by spectroscopy.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/cp/c9cp07042g#!divAbstract
ETA: What about pH?
Hydrogen ions in water readily form H3O+ Hydronium ions, which, once again, do have a different bond angle (113°). However these will be vanishingly small in number and purifying water would certainly not make these more common.
