Electrolysis Project Page 30

You can see that the water is starting to change color from the wire being eaten away from the negative terminal.

I found out some very important things from these experiments! -The frequency adjustments appear to be VERY VERY sensitive. You may say, "So what, I already suspected that." -But there is more... read on.

I built my bottle and then rigged up my function generator to a single diode. This gave me square waves, as you see in the one picture on Page 30 of my electrolysis project. In that picture I'm using SINE waves just to take a better picture, but I switched to square waves for the test. -So with the 1 diode I was now getting 50% duty cycle pulsed DC current.

I took this and ran it through a transistor to boost the power output from the function generator. I was testing with 6v 245ma as my main power source. I almost gave up after about 2 full hours of playing with the frequencies because I couldn't really see any difference in the gas evolution. Then I decided to disconnect the transistor from my setup and see if the function generator alone, could produce any gas. I figured it was far too weak to produce anything visible.

So basically at this point I had the function generator tied to a single diode, and then from there, directly to my electrolyzer (test bottle). I turned it on and to my amazement... I saw bubbles. Actually I saw a surprising amount of them! I thought ..."Holy Shit, I wonder if this is far below the theoretical limits of conventional electrolysis?" -So I started messing around with the frequencies.

Almost immediately, the bubbles stopped. I put the frequency back to the spot I thought I was at before... nothing. I continued searching for nearly 1 hour now. Was I going nuts? Nothing at all! Not a single bubble. What on earth!?@?!?

Then after about 1.5 hours I almost gave up again. I took a moment to compose myself and decided I would try again tomorrow ...Suddenly I saw something! -Oh my god! Bubbles. Then it hit me.

I did a few tests, and yes I appeared to be correct. The frequencies appeared to be so very sensitive that the reaction would ONLY start in a very narrow area. That area proved to be about 10 - 20 Hz (cycles per second). Pretty damn low! -Once you sat on this range for about 8 seconds you would start to see the reaction taking place. This was why it proved so very hard for me to find. The reaction took a LONG time to produce bubbles. Further complicating things, you had to be in a very tight range for this to start. Once started you could move up or down a bit, and the reaction would continue. If however, you moved too far out of the range, nothing would happen, no matter how long you let it sit.

This led me to understand something VERY VERY IMPORTANT. My function generator was the dial kind. My dial goes from 0 - 10 ...so that number is multiplied by the other switch. When I had the second switch on 10 I was able to product frequencies between 10 - 100 Hz. That's a pretty large range. It gets worse as you go up. For instance setting the switch to 1k, I'm now in a range of 1k - 10k. You can imagine how enormously difficult it is to achieve accurate frequencies with such poor adjustment.

I ended the night on some very positive items. I had made some important discoveries with regard to my electrolysis research. I realized that I was going to have to come up with a very precise function generator, one that could crawl up the frequency ladder, at a very slow and precise rate. I would also have to set something up that would allow me to carefully monitor my gas evolution as the frequencies were increased. This testing is going to take a very long time especially if you remain on each frequency for 10 seconds. Doing the math, I see that one could cover 8,640 frequencies in a 24 hour time period. Obviously a human could not sit and watch all of that time, so I'm going to have to come up with some automated procedures here.

The first trick will be an automated function generator to climb the frequencies very slowly and accurately. The second challenge is a method of recording the results to find the sweet spots. I'm already working on the function generator aspect of the tests. The second point is going to be tricky. Let's toss some ideas around, shall we?

3/25/2003 - More testing with a 556 timer circuit that I made to produce square wave DC output. I found it very helpful to utilize both channels on my oscilloscope to ensure that my timer was pushing my final current properly. Everything worked quite well so now it's time to build that PIC Chip pulse generator. With that I should be able to slowly crawl up the frequency ladder, until I find just the right frequency to crack the water at a greatly reduced energy level. I will be sure to post those results when I finally get around to testing that.

As I promised in the forum this evening, I did some tests on my 120v electrolyzer. I had increased the amount of NaOH (Lye) in the solution the other evening. It was strong enough to draw about 8 amps of current off of rectified AC house current. This translates to about 960 watts and was a lot more than I wanted. I was also getting a considerable amount of heating within the electrolyzer. This caused a number of problems. First, I was worried about destroying my full wave bridge rectifiers. I was also getting a heat buildup on the 2 main terminals that go into my box. This caused me to loose the seal on the inside of the box where those wires come through the poly-carbonate. I had to use some heavy duty glue on the outside to re-seal the leak.

I removed some electrolyte and now I'm back to drawing about 4.5 Amps after the cell is running for a bit. I noticed a yellow tint to the water this time. I'm pretty sure that's due to the very strong amperage I was forcing through my box the other night. Sure I got more gas, but the down-side was not worth it at all. What good is more gas if you in turn destroy your electrolyzer in the process? So I'm going to try to keep things under 5 amps from now on. At least in the 120v electrolyzer. In the 12v version I would expect that I could go up to 50 amps with similar results. I'll soon find out.

So anyway, I did some measurements as per my promise on the forum. I was getting about 1 liter of gas per minute at 4.5 amps. That translates to (120v * 4.5a) = 540 watts. Now we divide by 1000ml by 60 seconds to get 16.67 ml of gas per second per 540 watts. The final calculation is 16.67ml / 540 watts = 0.03087 ml of gas per watt per second. It's a bit less efficient than what I thought I was getting when I posted my message yesterday on the forum, but it's still very good if you consider that .015 ml per watt per second is supposed to be very good electrolysis results.

4/4/2003 - Tonight I did some very important tests to confirm something I read on our forum. I was amazed when R.K told us that voltage did not matter. That you would in fact get exactly the same gas production with 2.5v @ 1a as you would with 1000v @ 1a ...This literally blew me away. It meant that you could achieve increadible electrolysis effeciencies if you could just get your cell down to the absolute lowest voltages possible.

I read somewhere that the lowest voltage possible for electrolysis is 1.2v ...that it was due to something with the valance state of the Hydrogen atom. Well I didn't have anything set up to try to go below the 1.2v range, but I was able to do some awesome tests to try to verify what R.K. said on the forum.

What you're looking at in this picture is my 3v tests. I used 2 D cell batteries in series. Because the batteries were not very fresh they did move down in amperage with operation. I caught this snapshot while they were just turned back on and registering 144 ma (.144a)

Here we see that the voltage was registering as 1.364v while it was in series with the electrolyzer. That is very interesting. It was around 2.98v when I measured the voltage straight off of the batteries. So to be safe, I did all of my calculations based off of the battery voltages and not the voltage measured with the cell in series.

Here we have the amperage of the 12v battery. I needed to use some resistors in series with this, to keep the amperage down. We see 124 ma here (.124a)