Prime Ideas

Throughout my experiments with electrolysis processes, I’ve run across time and time again where people are calling the extracted gas “Brown’s Gas”.  I’ve been doing a little research lately as to why exactly we had to name the combined Hydrogen and Oxygen mixture after a Hungarian, that doesn’t seem to have even invented the generator, which is said to be using an “advanced alkaline electrolysis process”.  The gas is also touted as imploding instead of exploding and the methods used to make this determination don’t seem to be stated anywhere.  Also, it’s stated that the gas is extremely stable, ummm ok…

As usual, my disclaimer:  I could be completely wrong with my viewpoint here, but will share it nonetheless since this is my blog…  Water is water, and performing electrolysis on water, results in Hydrogen and Oxygen breaking apart and therefore combining.  It was not Brown that determined or developed this process as its been known for well over a hundred years.  Hydrogen alone, is a very stable gas, as long it’s alone… :-)  You mix it with oxygen and you have a bomb, not a stable gas.  No matter what process you use to break apart water, you will still end up with a very minimum of Hydrogen and Oxygen, maybe a little more if you have dirty water with Chlorine or something in it.  It’s physically impossible to get some other mixture of elements from water.  Brown claims that his gas (not sure why its his gas) only contains hydrogen and oxygen, but I guess he mixes it up special?  It is also physically impossible to mix up a solution special, its either mixed or its not.  If you have 2 hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom, then they are just that, they are both in the same environment, mixed.

In fact, here are a few of the claims made: 

“There is no other method capable of producing such a gas. Brown’s Gas is a new product and there is no literature describing its properties, which are sufficiently different from a combined molecular hydrogen and oxygen gas mixture, in 2:1 proportion, to be significant in industrial and commercial applications. ” Brown, 1979

Yet, look at what they say here: Brown’s Gas is water separated into its 2 constituents by an advanced alkaline electrolysis process in a way that allows them to be mixed under pressure and then be burned together and safely in a 2:1 proportion. The process results in a gas containing ionic hydrogen and oxygen. When sparked, the gas recombines safely, by implosion, into water, collapsing in a vacuum/water ratio of 1,886.6/1.

So on one hand they claim it’s different than the 2:1 mixture, but a few paragraphs later, describe it as being exactly that.  Yet somehow they lend magic to its list of qualities in that it implodes instead of exploding.  They also state that its stable under pressure, but then so is everything else.  If you put something under enough pressure and don’t relieve that pressure you won’t get a bang out of anything. 

So, we have determined that Brown’s gas is a 100% mixture of hydrogen and oxygen and per their own claims is not made up of some other compound.  So the last thing we need to determine, is the claim of implosion.  They seem to make this claim based on the gas being special, however, they don’t provide any examples as to how it was determined that the gas implodes. 

Here is the statement supporting their claim to implosion: “The ratio 1,860:1 refers to the fact that when the gas is electrically sparked, it immediately returns to water. If the amount of gas sparked, and thus imploded could fill 1,860 units, then the amount of water produced by its implosion would then only fill one unit. The resulting space instantly becomes filled with a very high and particularly clean vacuum.”

Thinking about this, if I were to somehow burn hydrogen and oxygen inside a closed container (which wouldn’t burn, but would most likely explode under these conditions), wouldn’t I have a vacuum?  Because there would be nothing to fill the volume since we’ve converted the gas to liquid, loosing most as heat.  Explosion or Implosion is not important in this case because of the fact that we had a volume of gas, and now we have a smaller volume of water as well as loss due to heat.  So the resulting process would yield a vacuum.  But without some detail as to how they performed this particular experiment, it’s hard to say what the real facts are.  If you were to somehow light a match inside of an oxygen tank under pressure, and you contained that pressure which you’d have to in order to see results in the end that these people are claiming, you wouldn’t get any type of reaction.  Because if the tank was held at pressure and didn’t blow apart, nothing should happen.  Explosions happen when the oxygen tanks leak into the air, or explode apart.

After studying this, I see absolutely no way to lend credibility to these statements about Brown’s gas.  The statements don’t seem to have any scientific credibility to back them up and Brown’s gas would be better named: “Lazy Man’s Gas”, because in fact, it is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen because we are all too lazy to develop a means of separating them…

–glenn hancock

I wanted to take a few minutes to write down some thoughts I’ve had lately concerning electricity and possibly light.  Some things that are probably well known to most of you but something that has always confused me when I think of radio waves, electro-magnetic waves, light waves and so forth.  Its very possible the thoughts I’m about to list are in error and if I find this to be the case then I will post another article to make corrections.  However, this site is mainly for sharing thoughts so I wanted to share a few.

When anyone talks about radio frequencies they always include the cool sounding word  “wave”.  We have radio waves floating all around us and know all there is to know about how to determine the actual size and amplitude and so forth, of them all.  However, for those of us trying to learn what is really physically going on, it seems that some of the verbage may actually be confusing matters.

For a simple example, I want to talk for a minute about AC electricity that we all use in our offices and homes.  AC electricity is generated at the power plant using huge generators that utilize the magnetic field of spinning magnets to generate the power.  The power it generates due to these spinning magnets is a type of energy that transforms from a negative to a positive charge 60 times a second.  That means that where DC electricity simply flows from one point on a battery to another point, AC electricity doesn’t really flow, or at least, not in the conventional sense of the word.  It rather vibrates back and forth between a positive and a negative charge.  As a result however, it doesn’t need a complete loop for it to start to flow, which makes it great for sending electricity across long wires that eventually reach our homes and computers.

Now, while I don’t want to get into a long discussion of AC electricity, lets think about how we talk about it.  It cycles 60 times a second and doing just a little bit of studying we will discover the proper way to say this is that it pulses at 60 Hertz.  To get an idea of what this means we begin to map out the flow from positive to negative charge over time and what we end up with is a Sine “wave”, that can be displayed on an Oscilloscope screen to help us look for problems.  This is in fact where I think the confusion of what is really going on, got started.  People saw a wave on the screen and started talking about radio waves flying through the air.  People listening, heard waves and associated them with the ocean and naturally think of the electrons in these waves as flowing up and down as they move from my house to yours.

However, I don’t think this is really the way they flow.  I think that what is really happening is that they are cycling back and forth from the radio transmitter between a positive and negative current at whatever rate we requested.  These charges are emitted from an antenna and continue to migrate across the open sky in straight lines, only changing their charge every specified amount of time.  On the receiving end, the receiver and antenna are properly timed and have the proper length to receive the total amount of the cycled charge in order to display it for our eyes or ears on the other end.  This is why an Antenna has to be a certain length to receive certain signals.  If its length were too short to receive an even amount of the charged electrons flowing through the air, then it would essentially be cutting off the signal and wouldn’t receive its nice even chunks of positive and negative charge streams.

So the word wave, is really meant to help us see the waves on paper over time, not the actual path taken by these streams of energy as they propagate our world.

 –glenn hancock

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

We are getting close to doing capture tests on the new cell.  Below you’ll see a couple pictures of the cell and where we are at.  Today I am doing conditioning runs on the cell with a 5-10% Mixture of Distilled water and KOH.  When plugging the battery in the cells only pulled about .11A but after only 5 minutes they’d gotten up to 1.53A.  So far it looks like it works a lot like a capacitor in the sense that if I unplug the juice it continues to operate as if it still has power.  Other cells just stopped immediately when you unplug them.

The activity we’re seeing is not anything to write home about, however, my solution of KOH is very weak compared to what we are looking for.  We have around 1.9V per cell running off my 12V battery and charger.  At this point I’m not running off the truck as I don’t really care about anything staying consistent.  I’ve been told that the cells need to get conditioned so we’re going to go through that process first.  glenn_aircooled on the forum has built cells like this and according to his measurements he’s reported, the cell does get more productive the more he runs it.  As a result we’re going to do what he’s doing and hopefully see the same results.

I’ve never mixed KOH anywhere close to 5%, so the fact that we have huge 8″x8″ plates and are only seeing 1.56A is impressive, although the output is very weak at present.  I’m a little concerned that things are going to heat up quickly when i start to approach the 27% mixture that I’m headed for.  But we’ll see what happens.

Here are a few video clips you might find interesting.

Test-046 This video clip shows how I capture my gas volume for those interesting in trying to be consistent with our comparisons. 

Test-047 This clip shows the 4 cell unit setup and describes some of the tests and things captured.

Test-048 This video clip shows what happens when you add KOH to the solution with the 3 plate cell.

Test-049 This video shows the initial construction peices of the Series Capacitor Cell.

Test-050 Here is the new Series Capacitor Cell being conditioned with 5% KOH solution.

Test-051 Here is the new Series Capacitor Cell being conditioned with 10% KOH solution.

Test-052 Some final thoughts and a few extra tests that I thought were interesting on the Series Capacitor Cell.

Here is a picture of the cell inside the container I built.  The top is not sealed here but just sitting on the top to show what it will look like.

Here is a picture of the cell at work showing the bubbles on top with 5% solution.

Here is a picture of the cell at work showing the bubbles on top with 10% solution.

–glenn hancock

I have just finished the 3rd biography of Tesla’s life.  To say the man lived on the very edge of excitement would be under estimating his very existence.  He did things that even today no one has dared duplicate.  His shop was lit with bulbs that had no wires and no filaments.  He allowed millions of volts to travel across his body to light bulbs he held in his hand.  He invited friends and media on numerous occasions to visit his shop where he awed them at every moment with his tiny electric friends.  He even did these things in front of the very scientific community that spent so much time ignoring him. 

Tesla never married and to the best of anyone’s knowledge never even had a girlfriend.  He claimed that to have one would remove his very ability to think and create and he dare not meddle in such a sacred area of his life.  Tesla understood his abilities and worked as hard as possible his entire life, trying to get as much done as possible.  He socialized when possible, mainly for raising more funds for his experiments, and had only a handful of true friends.  Even with them however, he spent very little time. 

In every biography I’ve read, you don’t see him mention a single family member, nor do you read any letters written to them after the death of his mother.  He had what some would consider close friends in Robert and Katharine Johnson, yet he hardly ever spent time with them, despite numerous letters from her requesting he come and visit.  All of his spare time was spent in his workshops experimenting. 

As time went on, he grew more and more leery of everyone,  yet he never turned his back on the media.  Every year on his birthday, he’d hold a big press conference to describe his latest inventions.  Some of which were so far out, that one questioned why he uttered the words.  Death Rays, Talking to Marians, destroying planes and ships from hundreds of miles away and creating great barriers around the country to protect it from attack. Yet with all these claims, not a single mention of free electricity.  Even to his death he was trying to perfect the ability to delivery electricity to the masses without wires.  He made several attempts to do just this, but all failed due mainly to noone being interested enough to give him money.  Why he would spend so much time trying to build a monstrous device to send electricity to remote parts of the world without wires, when he knew how to dig it from the aeither itself would make one wonder. 

Yet, none of the talk of the electric car seems to have originated from Tesla, who everyone knew, spoke of wondrous inventions in all areas of science.  It is said that he became sick of everyone and didn’t want to share any more inventions with anyone, yet there is not a point in time this is true.  He did become tired of being used and never having funds to do his real experiments, but at no point did he stop talking about what he was doing.  Also, at no point did he talk of any communications with his immediate family. 

The story goes as such: Mr. Sava, Tesla’s nephew who reportedly lived in New York in 1931, was contacted by Tesla to participate in an experiment involving aetheric power.  He traveled to Buffalo with Tesla and Tesla would not speak to him during the trip.  That once arriving in Buffalo, Tesla had a Pierce Arrow waiting that’s engine was replaced with an 80HP electric motor. The car had no batteries and had its engine cables sitting freely in the air.  It should be noted that Tesla wrote thousands of letters to all sorts of people requesting funds and describing his creations.  There are no papers mentioned in any of his serious biographies that describe him requesting a Pierce Arrow, or an electric motor from GE.  In fact, they had all but cut him off from any further funds long before this time period. 

The story goes on to say, that a 6 foot antenna was positioned in the rear section of the car, and that Tesla went and purchased 12 special tubes and some wire and built a box of some 1ft x 2ft x 1/2ft high.  Another story says he brought the box with him and that he had simply assembled the tubes in it.  The two stories vary quite a bit between each other but the point is, he inserted this box, which had 12 tubes, and 2 metal contact rods that stuck out of it.  Once the rods were pushed in, the car had electric power and they traveled for days. Once finished, Tesla took the box out and they traveled back home, with not a word said and nothing ever reported of the tests again.  Only his loving nephew who was never mentioned in any letters or communications was allowed to participate.  And he himself kept his mouth shut until after Tesla’s death. 

Now, while I will leave a very small door open for this being true, here are a few things that I think show it to be absolutely false. 

1) Tesla never included people in his experiments that he did not absolutely trust.  The chances that he’d include a young man that he had no obvious connections to other than blood, seems very strange to me. 

2) There are absolutely no records of Tesla ever going to Buffalo during the time mentioned, nor him purchasing an electric motor and car.  Tesla had very little money most of his life, so any experiment that would have been this expensive would have required financing.  Therefore, it would have been accompanied by some sort of letter requesting the funds, the car and the motor. 

3) Tesla was very much in with the press.  If the man spoke of death rays and building protective barriers around the country, why on earth would he hide the possibility of free electricity? 

4) Tesla spoke constantly about his ability to provide electricity to the masses without cable, but he never once mentioned that he could do it without a power plant. The facts seem overwhelming to me that what really happened here, is that Tesla was a genius, his nephew was not.  His nephew perhaps made the story up to get attention, or more likely had nothing at all to do with the story and it was manufactured by someone else.  I find it very interesting that his nephew’s name is never mentioned in any of the reports.  He’s always referred to as Mr. Savo throughout the stories. 

So in my opinion after a good bit of studying the man named Tesla, I conclude that this story about the electric car is fiction, but I leave a small door open for the possibility nonetheless… 

–glenn hancock