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