Prime Ideas

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

Well, today is the day.  I finally finished the sealing project and things look really good.  As mentioned before, pressurizing the system is not going to be possible due to the flexing of the plexy glass but bubble tests and volume tests should be just fine.  At first I thought I still had a problem with it leaking but later realized that the hose was full of water so I’d get one huge series of bubbles and then nothing for another couple minutes while it pushed all the water back out of the test.  I then built a water bottle to view the bubbles in and it worked much better.

1 minute bubble test was not possible to get.  I even tried to video tape and then slow down to try to count bubbles but they went by too quickly to capture between frames.  Also, after playing around I’ve yielded the bubble count idea useless due to the fact that the size of your hose, depth inside water vessel and so on, all determine how many and how quickly bubbles come out of the tube.

So the next thing I did was setup a volume test.  The test consists of a bottle marked off in 100mL increments and then filled with water.  As the gas is pushed into the vessel and the water removed I time it.  I start at the 100mL line and count off to the 200mL line.  Then again between 200 and 300 to make sure we are consistent.  Each test was run 4 times a piece and almost within the second results were recorded.  Oh, the results…  47 sec for 100mL of gas.  And it makes no difference whether the anode is inside or outside for the electrodes.  Exact same measurements were taken both ways.  We were running 6.23A and 12.4V.  When testing the 5 plate design we got 100mL in 1min and 40 seconds and pulled 2.32A and 12.4V.

A FEW INTERESTING FACTS:

Looking at the math from the other day that I posted, we calculated the differences between the 2 designs in order to try to determine which is performing the best, given its current surface area/amperage combinations.

Here’s the math:
  Tube Design:
    100mL Gas / 47 seconds = 2.13mL/sec
    2.13mL/sec * 60 seconds = 127.66mL/min
    127.66mL/min * 60 minutes = 7659.58mL/Hr
    6.23 Amps * 12.4 Volts = 77.252Watts/Hr
    7659.58mL/Hr / 77.252Watts/Hr = 99.15mL/Watt/Hr

  5 Plate Design:
    1 minute 40 seconds = 100 seconds
    100mL Gas / 100 seconds = 1mL/sec
    1mL/sec * 60 seconds = 60mL/min
    127.66mL/min * 60 minutes = 3600mL/Hr
    2.32 Amps * 12.4 Volts = 28.768Watts/Hr
    3600mL/Hr / 28.768Watts/Hr = 125.14mL/Watt/Hr

So the plate design appears to be 26% more efficient than the tube design at this point.

Now for all the video footage…

Test-039: This video clip shows side by side comparisons of the anode and cathodes being switched from inside to outside.  Also shows the cell from the top and side views during each test to show what is going on.

After doing the above tests it appears that the anode being inside does in fact yield the best results.  At first it appears the anode on the outside works better, but after time the other scenario yields more bubbles where the anode on the outside just stays the same over time.

Test-041: Here are anode inside and outside Top View results after 10 minutes.

Test-042: Explosion Test for you junkies…

Test-040: This test shows our 5 plate unit running.  While its output is less than the cell, you’ll notice the bubbles coming out are a lot faster.  I am at this point thinking that the flat cell may very well out perform the pipe design in side by side comparisons but we’ll have to wait until I finish the 12 plate layout required to get us the same surface area of the pipes. 

Test-043: This test shows what the cell does when it has less water over the top of the pipes/plates.  It appears that it actually creates less gas in this configuration as it generates  bubbles at the same level within the water.  Less water, less bubbles… Need to do gas volume tests to see for sure.

Test-044: This test shows the cell configured and capped and ready for its first real measurement run.  Also tried to explain an earlier comment about the electrodes themselves appearing to be making hydrogen.

Test-045: This test shows the discoloration in the water and how it sits on top of the cell and works its way down.  So whatever it is seems to float.

–glenn hancock

Well, we are making a little progress in that the cell is sealed now.  I built an assembly of clamps and placed aluminum angle around the outside edges to help it stay flat and not flex.  I found out when doing tests using air, that pressure tests are out of the question.  The cell walls actually expand almost immediately upon adding the air and the wall dividers seperated from the outside edges of the tank.  So while we should be sealed well enough to do our bubble tests, I don’t think we will be able to do any real pressure tests.

A couple observations and then I’ll show the video clips. 

Plates versus Pipes:

I’ve done the surface area calculations on my pipes and here is the math.  Please check and make sure I’m not doing something wrong here:

Anode: 1.25 OD 5″ long: 2(pi) * (1.25/2) * 5 = 19.63 per pipe * 6 pipes = 117.78 square inches

Cathode: 1.42 ID 5″ long: 2(pi) * (1.42/2) * 5 = 22.31″ per pipe * 6 pipes = 133.86 square inches

If you remember from an earlier post, the plates have a surface area of 12.48 square inches per plate.  Doing the math it would appear that I need a 12 plate unit to have the same surface area as my pipe design and I plan to start building that in the next week or so.

So, here are the videos of the completed cell along with a few small tests.

Test-033:  This is a cell construction video to show the finished cell with its lid and connections.

Test-034:  This video shows the cell connected normally with anode (inside) and cathode (outside ).

Test-035: This video shows the cathode connection bolt and how its creating hydrogen itself.  Which is rather confusing to me as to how or why its doing this.  It would appear that we should be generating off the outside of the tubes as well if its reacting to the bolt like it seems to be.  But we don’t see this…

Test-036: Now we’ve reversed the anode and cathode connections to see if there is any difference as to which tube ends up being the largest.  Can you tell?

Test-037: View from the top of the cell (bubbles) with the first being normal hookup with cathode being on teh outside tubes and the second half of the video with the outer tube being the anode.  One thing to note however is the water color.  You will see the water almost instantly start turning a darker yellow when I reverse these connections.  I don’t know if the water reaches a point where it does this on its own, or if it has something to do with the connections.  Will need to do further testing…

I’m not sure which configuration performs the best between the inner and outer tubes being anodes or cathodes.  Here is a short video clip that cycles back and forth a few times but I didn’t do a very good job of keeping the same perspective so its hard to tell.  I’ll try to do a better job of video taping it later this weekend and see if we can tell which is best.

Test-038: Cycles back and forth between anode and cathode being the outer tubes.

–glenn hancock