Electrolysis Project Page 55

The rubber bands held the plates about 1mm apart.

Pic of the top flared out ends.

These are some pictures of the 2 new boxes that you've heard me hint about on the forum. I will wait until tomorrow to post the details on these boxes. I'm tired now and just need to get to bed. For now they are here for your enjoyment. There is a LOT of careful planning that went into making these and I'll detail all of that for you as soon as I get a chance.

OK it's a new day and I'll start detailing some of the finer points of these boxes for you. Several months back I got a curious e-mail from someone named Bill. He read about my work from my website and decided that he wanted to apply some of stuff that I was doing, to work that he was interested in. As he put it, I had the front end and he had the back end. Bill came from a lifetime of work in the boiler industry. He has pretty much seen and done everything with boilers and burners for huge companies. So he brought a lot of expertise to the table in the area of pressure, sealing, containment, connections, outgassing... I could go on and on. Suffice it to say that it was evident almost immediately, that it was a "mad scientist match made in heaven." :)

So we talked for many, many days about my work, his work and how to combine the two. We talked about cell designs, about problems with my cells, about tests I had done and about work that I wanted to do. We focused on the best case scenario. What if we could do this. What if you could make that. --Well about 6 months later here we are. You're seeing the first pictures of many hundreds of hours of combined planning, talking, working and hoping.

OK this box is 1 of two identical boxes. They measure inside 6.25 inches wide x 30 inches long x 7 inches high. The bottom inner 30 inch edges are square. You'll see why this is important in a moment. The box is designed and rated up 200 degrees F at 60psi. It has a removable lid and 4 special holes.

These ports are at the moment, nothing more than holes. The bottom hole is for a drain / fill port. The top hole is for the gas delivery. The two side holes are for the power input.

Now why is it so important that the box be designed in this manner. Well lets start with the 6.25 inches wide measurement. The plates going into this box will be 6x6, just like my last cell. The problem is that without spending thousands of dollars to have the plates cut, you get some error in the plates. Error translates to leakage. So to fix this I came up with a fix that would address not only the leakage problem due to imperfect plates, but it would also allow for perfect plate spacing in the process. The solution was to make spacer plates. These spacer plates will do the job that my "weed wacker cord" did in the first box. Remember it kept the plates separated from one another. These spacer plates will be made out of 1/4 inch polycarbonate measuring 28 x 6.5 inches. These plates will slide in along the sides of the box and be standing upright. They will have a .047 inch slit cut in them every .150 inch. This will result in a ton of vertical slits in these plates. The slits will allow us to slip our plates down into each one. The slits are about .140 inch deep. This means if you recall, the plates are about 6 x 6 (with imperfections), they will fit down in the slits and create a nearly perfect seal along both sides. The bottom of the box will provide a nearly perfect seal with the bottom of each plate since they are cut well enough to do that job quite nicely. So I have the sides sealed off and the bottom. Woohoo! Obstacle 1 overcome.

If you are not sure what I mean, look at pictures of my old box. But instead of weed-wacker cord, picture that I had cut a bunch of slits into the sides of the box so that the metal plates could be slid down into these slots. Well that's the basic idea, accept for the fact that I didn't deface the boxes to achieve this end. I simply added enough room (1/4 inch extra) so that we could use these removable spacer inserts to hold our metal plates. That way we could change out the spacer inserts any time that we wanted to mess with plate spacing or plate materials. --For instance if we wanted to try graphite plates, we would simply make new spacer inserts to have slits that would accept the graphite plates and bingo we're ready. --No need to make new boxes or anything nasty, just make new spacer inserts with new slits and you're all set. Now you see why the bottom corners needed to be square. So they could accept these spacer inserts properly without leakage.

Here you see the lid on the box. I'm not sure I like the hole in the center. We may have new lids made for us, with the hole on the side to allow for better strength, but it doesn't matter for the moment. We may reinforce the top of the boxes, but that's up to Bill since it's much more his area than mine. Don't we make a good team!? heh :)

OK the hole in the bottom. You see it's off to one side. That's because the plates will be on one side of the box for the most part. Starting perhaps 1 or 2 inches from the left side of the box (in this picture) you'd have plates in there, all spaced perfectly thanks to your plate spacer inserts. You can get over 170 plates in here with .100 inch spacing between each one. Running this from 120 volts that would allow you to achieve a voltage of of around .7 volts if you wanted to go that low. I fully expect to be around 101 plates which should yield about 1.2 volts per cell (120 / 100). Remember there is always 1 less cell than you have plates. Look at your 5 fingers on your hand and count the spaces between your fingers ...those represent the individual sealed cells in this case. 101 plates = 100 cells. So 120 volts divided by 100 cells = 1.2v per cell.

Based upon reading I have been doing, the theorhetical lower limit of 1.2 electron volts per Hydrogen atom is supposed to yield the lowest possible voltage for electrolysis. Recent work by some people challenges this lower limit. Some claim to have reached .9v electrolysis. Well Bill and I have 128 plates each, so we can get damn close to .9v per cell if we want to. I guess time and experimentation will reveal just where our voltage limits are.

OK so if we get down to the absolute lowest voltage possible per cell, now we're dealing with an equation in which amperage is doing all of the work. Therefore our wattage expenditure will be at the most efficient rate possible. In other words, if you could get this to run at let's just say 1 volt per cell (121 plates), and draw a constant amperage of 10 amps, current... you're looking at 1200 watts. That's less than a hair dryer people. But based upon all of my research and my work to date, if you have 100 individual cells, each drawing 10 amps ...that's one freegin massive amount of gas production! People, you all saw what 10 amps was doing in many of my single cell tests. Now imagine each of these 100 cells producing that much gas all in this one box. We're talking production here that I can't wait to see.

My old box had 80 plates so I was very inefficient at about 1.5v per cell (120 / 79). These new boxes will be able to push the absolute lowest possible extremes of voltage during our electrolysis experiments. To test voltage limits, we simply add plates and turn it on.