Prime Ideas

Well, after a lot of learning and a lot of testing I think that we are finally solving a lot of questions about types of plates, number of plates and so on.  This will be a rather long post, as I want to be sure that I describe my test setup as well as possible and then the results. 

I used my 4 Cell Plexy-glass container so that I could test all cells with water already filled and sealed without having to take everything apart to setup for each test.  I had a neighbor come over and write down results to allow me to keep things cooking as quickly as possible.  The cell setup is pictured below and I had cell GH-E001 consisting of 2 plates, cell GH-E002 consisting of 3 plates, cell GH-E003 consisting of 5 plates and cell GH-E004 consisting of our 6 tube sets.  Keeping in mind that subtracting 1 from each of the above number of plates tells you how many electrode sets we had in each cell.  With the exception of the GH-E004 cell which actually has 6 sets of electrodes. 

For a brief background, the goal of the tests were to try to determine if the number of plates or use of tubes improved output, or if the output is strictly a measure of current.  If it turned out to be a measure of surface area, we hoped to determine if there was some critical point at which things stopped improving. All tests were performed while hooked to my running F150 and voltage readings were verified constantly at the cell connections.  There were no changes in voltages within each test, however, voltages did change slightly as we increased draw due to larger and larger cell surface areas. Current readings were read through a separate meter to allow constant checking and recording of changes as they occurred. Water temperature as well as outside temperatures were recorded at the beginning and ending of each cell test, however, as mentioned above, the tests were performed rolling from one right to the other so no real temperature changes were recorded. 

Gas measurement was recorded in a 400mL Glass Jar.  This was chosen because it worked a lot better than trying not to squeeze a plastic bottle while performing the capture test.  The Jar was marked from bottom at 100mL increments and all tests were performed between the 100 and 200mL lines.  Line was fed into Jar without getting any water inside it, allowing for immediate and consistent test results.  200mL line was placed at the exact water level as the water in my bucket to allow consistent readings at room pressure.  All capture tests were performed after allowing cell a couple minutes to get started and each was performed twice to insure proper measurements.

Bucket used was a 3 gallon square cat litter bucket, allowing me to pin the jar square in the corner of the bucket to prevent it from moving or becoming unlevel.  200mL line held at water level throughout each capture. I took my time with the setup to be sure everything was consistent between each cell capture and I feel pretty good that these results could easily be duplicated if needed.  Earlier test results I couldn’t say this because I wasn’t paying as much attention to jar placement and such. So, on to the exciting part: We have all but proved that cell output is related to the amount of current running through the cell and nothing to do with plates, spacing or tubes.  In all tests, the 2 plates which gave you 1 anode and 1 cathode performed better than all other cells.  It was nothing to write home about but was consistently around 15% more efficient.  I suspect that this is the case, due to less loss due to the extra joints and surfaces, but will continue to investigate.  Water level above the cell was proven consistently to be more efficient, by around 13%, with a 10mm height above the top of the plates versus a 1mm level above the plates.  As for my last test, I tested my theory about the cell continuing to heat up until it reached a short circuit state.  The test consisted of me boiling water and using it at 212 degrees as my cell water.  The thought was that as the cell ran the water would continue to heat up, pulling more and more current from the system.  This test was also run on the truck and surprisingly, heating the water some 70 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous tests, only increased the current by 22%, but did not increase the cell efficiency at all. After a period of only a few minutes the temperature in the cell began to decrease until it finally stabalized at around 68C.  All test results between all cells were within 5% of each other with the exception of the single cell unit being around 15% better.  It currently appears that adding KOH to a single cell device will result in the most productive output over all the designs that call for a great number of plates.  Now that we’ve ruled out all these complex designs, my next tests are going to be using electrolyte to see what we can get out of the cell and whether it improves efficiency.  I also want to see if using electrolyte with the timing circuits will allow me to increase efficiency, but not expecting much. 

In the end, its currently looking like we can increase the surface area to a huge size in order to split water with no catalyst, or we can use a catalyst with a very small cell design and be slightly more efficient.  So far we have not found the magic formula however. 

Oh, I almost forgot, cross hatching your cell as well as cell conditioning, also do not show noticeable increases in calculated output.  Keep in mind that I’m not comparing physical volumes here but rather mL/W/hr.  Of course in my tests the tubes output more gas in less time than any of the other designs.  However, once you calculate current draw to output, everything leveled out to the same, or pretty darn close.

Here are a couple images and I’m working on a video that I’ll be posting in the next few days.  These were taken with the top of the cell off after the tests were performed.

–glenn hancock

It appears that my earlier thoughts of capturing gas using a water displacement method in order to determine quantity of gas produced was in error.  After experimenting and thinking through the process I’ve come to realize that it also contains too many points of possible error.

For one, the jar/bottle used to capture the gas must be a glass or hard plastic that can’t be squeezed for obvious reasons.  Secondly, the depth the bottle is placed in the larger bucket of water has a lot to do with the amount of pressure placed on its internal air.  This pressure therefore makes it easier or more difficult for our hyrdogen gas to push its way into the jar.  So if I were to push the jar to the bottom of my bucket it might take an hour to fill it, where if I left it at the very top of the bucket it might fill it in 50 seconds.

Another problem is the insertion of the hose itself.  If you push the hose into the water and start counting you will not get a consistent reading.  The reason is that you’ve added extra resistance to the hose by adding water to it.  While its true that over time, the same amount of gas will exit the hose, it is not true as to when.  So as a result, you will get a reading, then 10 seconds later another reading and so forth.  Depending on how much water you’ve allowed to enter the tube you could be looking at a massive amounts of gas escaping every 10 minutes.  If you are only taking readings every 60 seconds you will be lead to believe there is no gas when really it just hasn’t pushed its way out yet.

As a result, the hose has to be inserted and maintained inside the jar while its filled with water, and while making sure that none gets into its end.  For the test to be consistant and accurate you will need a hose with absolutely no water to resisit the gas exiting.

The latter portion of the problem has been easily solved and I’ve been able to test without the water getting into my hose.  However, I am now in search of how to get the jar at a certain pressure before performing the test.  I’ll let you know if I figured that one out.

My next possible solution is getting a flow meter and having it calibrated for Hydrogen.  However, before going that route I have to determine how and what the meter will be measuring.  Oxygen is 8 times larger in mass than Hydrogen and if the meter is calibrated for Hydrogen, does that mean that we’ll be measuring a volume of 8 Hydrogen atoms everytime 1 Oxygen passes by the meter?

Using a battery by itself can not be used to test anything that we want to compare.  Even hooking a battery charger to the battery won’t work because it doens’t stay on at the same level.  Depending on the load on the battery or current charge the charger might turn off and on making your results wrong.  Tonight I plan to hook the test cell to my truck in order to determine if I get a fairly constant output to the cell.  If so I’ll test from now on with it hooked to the car, if not, I’ll have to build or buy a power supply that I can use for my future tests.

So while we accomplished quite a bit over the weekend, it has only led us to the fact that we need more accurate measurements if we’re going to start comparing the results.  It also means that for those of you trying to test along side me, that we need to be very critcal in the way we record or results.

–glenn hancock

Just wanted to be sure everyone knows what is going on.  I have been building up new cells to test, including a new one to test the serial capacitor theory to see how it performs.  Should be interesting.  I also plan this weekend to test boiling water compared to cold water to see how the two perform against each other.  We already know the heated water is going to pull more current but sorta curious as to how it does on the actual production of hydrogen.

I’ve also added a new link called Patent Docs that contains a lot of different pdf files of different patents and information.  Documents were sent to me from one of you guys and I pulled them off another site to make sure we always had access to them here.  There are already too many dead links out there.

Well, keep your eye out for new test results around Sunday if all goes well.  Until then, have a good day.

–glenn hancock

I have to admit that this electrolysis stuff is very easy to do, but not so easy to understand on a technical level.  I’ve been studying it and reading what people have been saying about the water molecules breaking apart when an electrical current is applied to a tank of water, yet it never really sunk any deeper than that.  But here lately I’ve been thinking more on the matter because I wanted to understand what is going on more completely.

As a result, I’ve determined that my original thoughts were all wrong.  The Hydrogen and Oxygen that collect at the cathode and anode respectfully, do not break apart at those locations.  Oxygen has a more negative charge to it and therefore is attracted to the anode, where a Hydrogen atom has a more positive charge and therefore attracts towards the cathode.  The fact that these are the only two places you see bubbles when performing electrolysis of this nature, is only because of the migration and not because of any specific reaction at those locations.

Adding an electrolyte such as KOH to the water, only means that more electrical current is capable of flowing between the two electrodes and therefore with more electrons to add to the water molecules, more break apart.  So increasing electrode sizes or current through the cell, will obviously increase the output.

The new Design:

Now lets discuss a new cell that I’ve recently become aware of.  There is a device designed where instead of having plates or tubes wired together you have the following.  A plate, a divider of some sort lets just say a square U shape plastic 3mm thick that is glued or otherwise attached to the first plate.  Then the second plate is glued or attached (sealed) to the second plate.  Then another divider is attached to the other side and the process repeats for as many times as you like.  Lets just stop at around 10 plates for our example.

Now, instead of dropping our plates into a tank of water, we poor water into each sealed compartment between each plate.  Careful not to overfill because we don’t want to allow the water to get into other compartments.  Therefore we don’t fill them all the way to the top. 

Now, instead of connecting each cell in series, + - + - + - and so on, we only connect the two end plates to our power source.  One end becomes the anode the other the cathode.  The center plates are only floating plates in that they do not directly receive any current from the power source.

So backing up and thinking about this, we have basically created a series capacitor of sorts that instead of simply passing current from one plate to the other, actually charges one cell, then discharges to the next and so forth down the line.  Obviously using water as our dielectric. So due to the fact that we’re charging the entire cell, instead of simply passing current through the water between each plate, we’re actually able to add more electrons more completely to help seperate what we’re after.  Then H atoms migrate to the cathode side and O atoms migrate to the anode side.  And plates act as anode on one side and cathode on the other due to the flow of electricity through each cell.

This scheme also does away with the huge currents you see when using the “Drop the plates in the water and hook um up” scheme used in all the other electrolysers I’ve seen.

So while I still have a little more studying to do on the subject, we’re moving forward with what I believe to be the most promising device yet.  I plan to start building such a device as soon as I get a design in my head that I think would be easy to assemble and test.  Stay tuned for more information on the subject.

Also, stay tuned for corrections on the capacitor thought in case someone shows me the error in my ways…  will it be you?

–glenn hancock