Submerged Cell Project Project Page 16

Here is the picture from when I just got home this evening. I left this running striaght from about noon. There does still seem to be some discoloration in the water, but I'm going to wait until the morning to be sure in better lighting. I did just get 24 more plates from Kevin Satterfield, THANKS. All I had to do was give up 2lbs of KOH and a bottle of NaOH. Oh well, lol. I just hope that I'll be able to get most of those plates ready to go into the tank by the time I leave for my new job before the 30th. I have been periodically checking the amps on the battery charger and they have been consistently around 2.6 amps. I would really like to add some NaOH, or some KOH, but I know that if I do I'll waste it when the assembly overamps when I put the next 24 plates in. If nothing else I'll add just enough to get like 5amps, IF I can do such a small number.

Here is a picture taken this morning - about 1030AM CST - and you can see that after almost 24 hours of operation, this is all the discoloration that the cell shows. When I looked at the battery charger this morning it showed more amps than when I left it last night. Just to be sure what it was pulling I disconnected the setup from the battery and the cell itself is pullin about 22.7 amps. The only way I can see the being possible is because I sandblasted my plates to try to duplicate what one of the research centers did. Most of the people on this website only scratch the surface a little with sandpaper which I don't is very effective. However, with sandblasting you do get an increase in surface area, so that's why I decided to go with that. The only way I could improve performance would be to also acid etch the plates and then have them electroplated with nickel. We all know that nickel is a natural catalyst, so that would help considerably, but my only concern would how much surface area I'd lose by putting the nickel on the plates.

Here is a picture of the unit in operation right now. I don't see this pullin 22.7 amps like the bettery charger is saying so I'm going to buy an ampmeter to put in series to find out for sure. It may not look like it, but there is certainly a lot more production than there was before when it was only 4.x amps shown on the battery charger. I really would like to leave this thing together and just let it run all day, but Kevin Satterfield gave me 24 more plates and I want to drill them out and put them in the assembly. Only thing is that I won't be able to add them until after I find a shop to shear up the 1" x 1.5" tabs for the plates. But I'll try to get most of the work done that I can today.

I took apart the cell and this is what the cathode looked like. Nice and slimy, and I think that the discoloration on these plates is from when I had the tap water in it. I did notice that there was some coming up from the stainless washers that I had in place between the plates, so I'll be using those only if I HAVE to when I put it back together.

Here is the anode, it does have the white-ish coating on it. A little slimy, but not much.