Low energy Input, mass hydrogen output methods in use.

[TechJohn]

Does anyone know if a device like a "salt bridge" could be used to connect 2 seperate cells in place of using a membrane? If so, would it be efficient?
I also want to say thanks to all of you that are not afraid to express your ideas.

[thrival]

TechJohn:

What is a "salt bridge?" If you mean NaCl, that will break apart into its own ions in the water, would contaminate other reactions. Or do you mean something else?

(Na is very positive, almost 3+ while Cl is 1- ; theoretically you could make hydrogen with just those two elements and some electrodes. But separating them would leave you with pure sodium, which doesn't take kindly to water, and chlorine, a poisonous gas) whereas mixing them can be equally tricky. If you come up with an equilibrium reaction that makes hydrogen using simple salt as an electrolyte, that would be significant! )


AntDavison:

Thanks for the tip about ceramics. Modern material scientists call them zeolytes, which has become a refined specialty, to control porosity and substances allowed passage. Too damned complicated if you ask me! Bring on the terra cotta membranes!

Also thanks for the tip on "shim stainless." Where do you obtain it? Is it the same as tool wrap? The latter is pricey.

[AntDavison]

hiya thrivial
finding shim stainless is easy if you live in the u.s. , just type that into google and heaps of stuff comes up. i live thousands of miles away, so it was a bit more of a mission to find. it's used in the automotive industry, and if you have a man near you who makes gaskets etc by hand for old odd ball cars they will use it ... they punch it out into a washer type shape for taking out the end float of crankshafts, etc.

i found a place that wholesaled automotive parts, who had big rolls of the stuff 100's of yards long. they wouldnt sell it to me directly, so i had to find a metal broker who took my credit card no, faxed them an invoice, then i picked it up and took it to a laser cutters who cut out my complex design. my spiral cell was wound around a 1.5" pvc pipe, with lots of rubber washers i punched out separating the plates, which were held in place by 4 nylon rods, threaded at their ends. rather than working out the maths where all the holes were to go it and then geting those holes laser cut, it would have been easier to space the plates with nylon fishing line / weed eater nylon ....
winding up 4 plates each 1.2 metres long with 2mm spacing between them gave me a cell whose diameter was about the same size as a 5-1/4" cd-rom, but in the end that design didnt have enough plates to run at more than 4-5 volts

from memory it was about us$50 metre for 30cm (12") width

yes it is much more expensive than stainless sheet, but soooo much more pliable and you electrodes can be all one piece, rather than bolting plates togeother...
the thinnest stock ss sheet i could find was 0.5mm thick, and even that was quite hard to bend by hand ....
going below 0.25mm shim is lilke working with an aluminium beer can, it deforms and creases too easily ... so try 0.25mm to 0.35mm (sorry used to metrics rather than 1/1000 of inches)
----------------
reading about the old daniell cell battery he intially used unglassed ceramics as his ionic membrane, but a salt bridge seems to have a lower resistence, so better performance, then he went to a gravity setup as the CuSO4 is heavier than ZnSO4, the zinc sulphate solution could float on top of the copper sulphate ... but dont think that gravity setup would be the right one for us

ant

[AntDavison]

http://www.toolsandsupplies.com/stainlessshimstock6.asp
http://www.newmantools.com/precisionbrand/shimstnl.htm

is the shim stock like i used, look around and you should be able to find it in all sorts of grades ss304 ss316, etc, and thicknesses

ant

[Orange_Crusader]

Theoretically, the regenerative process (oxides to sulfates and back) can work for an extremely long time, if not "forever" with little outside input.

Few problems... electrical storage devices (batteries, capacitators, etc.) aren't perfect. They always have losses between electricty put in and electricity taken out. Even is it is only a little bit, it will continue to wear down, and the regenerative reaction will slow down gradually, eventually stopping.

Also, it'll take a highly concentrated acid (sulfuric) for this to work on a larger scale. You can get up to 98% sulfuric acid, but it'll be hard to get in large (liter to several liter) amounts, if not impossible. It's do-able, though. Water is needed, though, so I'd say that about 50% acid should be a decent, if not a bit high, concentration. The reason for the higher concentration is to bump up the gas production per unit (mL, L, quart, etc.) of fluid. I still don't know if this can produce enough gas to run an engine (needing to regenerate in cycles before producing gas again, requires 2 cells min. for constant production. Also, these acids would need special containers that aren't eaten away, or can contaminate the acids or metals. Glass is best with acids, but dangerous in a fast-moving vehicle, around klutzy people (myself, occasionally), and/or small children. Also, it's a pain to make a glass box without using something to join the plates (unless you can get a pre-made box) that won't be affected by acids. Quicklime is easily available, and pretty cheap.

When the acids and oxides are regenerated, it, again, won't be a perfect reaction. We'll either have a bit of H2 and O2 produced, or some metal sulfate left over. Water is easily replacable, no problem there.

Ionic membrane... CaSO4 is "neutral" (Ca is 2+, SO4 is 2-), Fe(II)SO4 is neutral also, which is the one we're dealing with. Electronegativity differences shouldn't matter in this, but I'll check. Solubility rules say that CaSO4 is insoluble, so we have a precipitate. Easy to keep that in one compartment. FeSO4 is soluble, so that's harder. The sulfuric acid should be able to circulate freely. I'll do some research on this bit as well.

Thrival, great job on figuring it out. Congradulations.

The proportions should be easy to figure out, All that's needed is molar ratios, concentrations and purities of the substances, and tests to figure out losses. I hope this can work, since it doesn't use simple brute-force to break bonds, but stored chemical energy, which can be regenerated. Like a catalyst that's used up (oxide to sulfate) but restored for another reaction.

Higher concentration acids have a very fast reaction (very exothermic, and good gas production), and I hope we can regenerate the metal oxides quickly enough. A large amount of oxides with enough acid means we should have high production for a decent amount of time.

[thrival]

OrangeCrusader:

Yes, well I had a lot of help from others on this board. Whoever posted Linnard Griffin's patents, someone else mentioning fish bones, and chrissnz for mention of offgassing. Let's not forget website owner Chris for making the discussion possible, AlaskaStar for all his clues, and everyone else who chipped in their thoughts and ideas. It really helps when people can brainstorm together.

Linus Pauling mentioned Wendell Latimer's book: The Oxidation States of the Elements... that has 8 pages of tables covering over 85,000 possible reactions. There are probably a fair number of other equilibrium reactions that could work. That should keep a few of you chemistry lovers busy!

No FE idea is perfect, there are always losses somewhere, but as long as we get more out than we put in or lose, who cares?! Let the perfectionist bean counters continue to pay $3.00+ per gallon for our lack of perfection!

I have a design I'd like to throw out there for comments (actually shown on p. 530 of L. Pauling's General Chemistry.. What about rolling shim stainless (AntDavison's contribution... or 40 mesh stainless screen, which isn't too expensive, from Darby's) ...into a vertical tube with loose separators to prevent the metal from touching itself (large surface area.) Two such rolls serve as electrodes. Drop the ss rolls into pieces of burly PVC pipe (4" dia. or bigger) with end caps, joined by T or L fittings to give the shape of an H or U. The connecting element is of course where the bipolar sulfate ion exchange membrane goes, like a ceramic disk. Granted that won't have anywhere near the surface area of say, a box compartment divider, but i really don't know how big a membrane is necessary to sustain a reaction that makes enough H2 to run a car. Brass gas fittings could be plumbed into the top endcaps, and of course electrical terminals. Clear pipe would be best to monitor water level. Then again a simple walmart box with a central divider is good too. But hey, any one of you could figure that out. Anyway like AlaskaStar said, EVERYONE HAVE FUN!

[Orange_Crusader]

[chrissnz]

Perhaps the SS electrode design that Chris was using with the plates welded to a common buss would work as Alaskastar suggestions of electrode resembling a heatsink but not of aluminium. This would give a pretty decent surface area and not cause too much restriction to the movement of chemicals or H2.

I am not that up on chemistry but on the topic of membranes does there have to be a actual flow through the divider? Would a SS plate to provide an electrical connection work? Maybe 2 of Chris's electrodes back to back would work?

[chrissnz]

Perhaps the SS electrode design that Chris was using with the plates welded to a common buss would work as Alaskastar suggestions of electrodes resembling a heat sink but not of aluminum. This would give a pretty decent surface area and not cause too much restriction to the movement of chemicals or H2.

I am not that up on chemistry but on the topic of membranes does there have to be an actual flow through the divider? Would a SS plate to provide an electrical connection work? Maybe 2 of Chris's electrodes back to back would work?

[johnh]

[Orange_Crusader]

Sorry if this sounds like a silly or stupid question, but...

If the electrodes (SS mesh or foil) are very close to one another (about 1/8"), and each (+ and -) regenerates either an metal oxide or acid, then what's stopping the regenerated acid from eating away the metal oxide right when it's regnerated?

There's no instant (that I know of) on/off switch to a chemical reaction that doesn't require another chemical being added. Does, by any chance, the presence of electricity keep the 2 substances from going at it? As I see it, as fast as we can regenerate the oxides and acids, they'll react again. This makes for a constant reaction, and sounds a lot like perpetual motion, no input past starting it (to the acid and oxide), and either equal or excess (H2 and O2 production) energy. Crud. Not saying it's not possible (on the contrary, I really believe we're at the door of a past-due breakthrough, or at least one to be largely accepted. AlaskaStar has (from what we know) got this running, and very well. On one hand, it will stop when the water is gone).

Looks like we have a pulse-style system, molecule by molecule. The energy from one reaction by 2 molecules (acid eating away oxide) is used to regenerate 2 other molecules, which in turn react and release energy, continiung the process. Really, it's a controlled chain reaction, just using electricity in conjunction with chemicals. It's a true on-demand H2 delivery system. It needs a bit of electricty to start it (enough to break the bonds in the reacted chemicals, equivalent to the starter cranking a car engine to set it spinning, and start the other (gas injectors or carb, valves, etc.) parts going.

In theory, this is a perfect idea. Energy is neither lost or created (H2 and O2 are released) in this process. The chemicals react, and give off energy (electricity) which is collected, and with minimal losses (ideally, a room-temp. superconductor, but that's not around yet), used to break the bonds created with the reaction, and start it again. But (sorry, but I don't want to blindly start experimenting with this, but I probably will ) electrical energy isn't the only energy created. If we need a larger portion than just the electrical energy created to break the bonds (unless the bonds of the products (metal sulphates) need less energy to break them apart than the reaction created. Again, I'll look it up, and figure out how many Joules we'll need to break bonds, and how many we create. Needing a small electrical input once in a while (capacitator) isn't bad, and probably can't be avoided (unless there are 2 metals in the tank that create a charge, and are either largely left alone by the acid (or can easily/cheaply be replaced periodically)

I hate to be the pessimist (in real(er) life, I'm actually very optimistic, which is part of the reason I'm on this site) or bearer of bad news, but I still see losses in this. Any wire (silver, aluminium or copper) has small losses. Very small, but they can make a gap big enough so that one "block" of energy created isn't quite enough to break the bonds on another. Part of why I reccomend a battery to help with this. Eventually, the reaction will slow down, the electricity sent back in not being enough to break all of the bonds. Every once in a while, have the battery send in a bit of energy, to re-break the bonds that couldn't be broken by the remaining electricity. Ideally, the small spark would be provided by a alternator run by the hydrogen-burning engine (or fuel cell, or turbine), but would also be delivered by a solar cell, windmill (think a 2" fan, hooked to a capacitator), or other source. Heck, maybe even the heat generated (acid and metal make for a lot of heat) could be used to create power.

What this is, basically, is reflecting the energy created back to the products, which breaks them apart. More or less a rubber ball that never stops bouncing, and keeps going at the same height all the time. Might need a small input, but I like it.

[Telemetry]

[Aspectus]

[thrival]

[Telemetry]

For glass construction email jim@cal-glass.com. I should have left that above.