Over the last few days I’ve been conducting tests on the new cell and container.  I’ve made a few changes from the original design, but overall, it’s the same.  See below for some updated shots of the cell or see the following link to read about the individual tests. 

http://www.primeideas.info/forum/viewtopic.php?t=51&sid=eb513fc1aacae18a9471b9c3cb809f55

From what I’ve seen so far, we are over 350% more efficient with this series capacitor design than with any other design I’ve tested so far.  However, efficiency doesn’t necessarily speak volumes for output.  Before we continue, lets clarify exactly what efficiency is and what it is not. 

When I perform my capture tests, I record all sorts of data such as the current being pulled during each capture, the voltage and whether or not it changes during the tests, the actual gas amounts, temperatures and so on.  All of these small pieces of information add up in some way to a mathmatical way of viewing each cell.  Without the information we’d be stuck giving opinions as to what works better than something else and I’m sure we all know what opinions are worth.  So whats the math you ask?  Well here it is in a quick easy to follow method.

First we need to know the amount of current and voltage being used during the test.  These two numbers multiplied together will actually show you how many watts per hour something requires.  The watt is a measure of power consumption, much like miles to the gallon in your car.  So the first thing we need to know is how many watts per hour is our cell consuming, and these two pieces of information help us see this.

Secondly, we need to know how much gas we are creating.  So far I’ve been sucessful in doing 100ml capture tests using water displacement.  At some point I’d like to get a flow meter calibrated for hydrogen gas in order to compare what I see using a meter, to what I get in the jar, but until I can afford such a device, I’ll stick to the jar.  Something to keep in mind when I tell you that I displace 100ml of water in X amount of time is that its not all hydrogen.  In fact, the vast majority of it is actually Oxygen.  In order to understand this, you would need to view your Periodic table (one happens to be attached to the right) to see that oxygen happens to be 8 times larger than hydrogen.  Now, while it is true that we have 2 times more hydrogen atoms in our gas than we have oxygen,  you can see that it still can’t make up the difference in volume.

Also note that a flow meter, calibrated for hydrogen, is going to actually show much more gas being sent through the meter than is actually moving past the sensor.  In fact, 6 times more gas, taking into account that two units represent true hydrogen atoms.  So to get any true test results for only hydrogen you’d either have to do the math, or seperate the gases at some point and only measure the one.

When I start my capture tests, I start a stop watch, and watch for the gas to push water out of my glass jar from between the 100ml line to 200ml and then I stop it.  The time measured is then divided into 100 which gives us how many ml we create per second.  I then multiply this number by 60 then by 60 again in order to get to hours.  The number we end up with is the number of ml of gas we create per hour.

Finally we divide the ml per hour by the watts per hour to get how many ml of gas we create per watt hour.  All of our earlier tests were showing an average of around 70ml/W/hr no matter what you did to them.  Adding more KOH into the water only made them produce more gas faster, but it didn’t make them more efficient.  Because, with the extra gas came much more hunger for those little electrons.

Now, onto our new test design recommended by Bob Boyce.  This design is showing numbers consistently over 350ml/W/hr using the exact same jar and methods above for capturing off the other test cells.  So it is more efficient to the tune of some 350%, than earlier models could ever dream of reaching.  However, as with everything good, there may be things that are a bit negative to offset.  So lets go through this a little deeper to see what happens.

With the older cells, it was possible to increase KOH solution and dramatically increase gas volume output.  As mentioned, it also increased current flow but it was possible none the less.  Because the new design uses a series capacitor type design, you are actually breaking the voltage down between plates.  This means that instead of running 13volts through each cell plate, we are only running approximately 2 volts.  And because we are also using distilled water in this design, the KOH is a necessity to even have anything at all happen.  Which means, that even at a 15% KOH level, we are still only pulling 1.9amps of current between each cell plate, and the only thing we can do to get more voltage is to move to a larger system or modify our current system to increase the voltage output.  Either process is not so hard to do, so its not a dead end, just something necessary to keep in mind.

But wait,  if we simply increase the voltage and change nothing on the cell,  will we loose our efficiency?  It’s known (supposedly) that around 2 volts is the most efficient voltage per cell.  So this might tell us that in order to improve output and keep the cell in the same order of efficiency we’d need to increase voltage and then increase the number of cells in order to keep the voltage to 2 volts per cell.  So with this design, it appears the answer to creating more gas is to continue to build larger and larger cells.

What makes this even more necessary however, is the fact that we are only producing 100ml of gas in 40 seconds.  At this level we couldn’t run a weed wacker, much less our cars.  So we have to figure a way to get more gas out in less time.  We’ve already established the fact that this method is much more efficient, however, now we need to figure out how to increase its output in a shorter period of time.  I suspect that our 300-350ml/W/hr that we recorded is going to hold true no matter what we do to output time, however, its our next big step.

I’ve also been conditioning the plates and hope that this will increase efficiency like everyone claims it will, however, to this point in time, after over 12 hours of running this cell, I have seen absolutely no evidence that the efficiency or output of the cell has changed at all.  This could as usual change as testing goes on, but I’m trying to write this blog as an entry into my current testing, not the end result.  So you’ll have to stay tuned to see what happens.  After all, its possible this blog entry could go down in the “wish I didn’t write that” pile…

–glenn hancock