Electrolysis, how and whys?

[curjones]

Terry please check out the site.. Smack gets 20 plates in 4" pvc and you don't need the coil. How to build the coil is probably in a file there as well. There are all kinds of Ideas out There. I have taken the route of building a simple proven design. I have spent too much money on fittings and materials as it is.

[TerryG]

Originally Posted by curjones

Terry please check out the site.. Smack gets 20 plates in 4" pvc and you don't need the coil. How to build the coil is probably in a file there as well. There are all kinds of Ideas out There. I have taken the route of building a simple proven design. I have spent too much money on fittings and materials as it is.

I have studied Smacks design and it is very ingenious, but I want to try some other things before I settle on a design. His design is interesting because he has two parts of the cell in parallel with several pairs of plates in series in each part. I see how some are getting confused because with the series plates the conduction is happening right through the electrolyte (this is always the case but usually more obvious). It does make sense to me, but I think there are even better ways of producing even more HHO at higher quality. If you read my last post, I have discoverd that lower voltages and higher current seems to produce better HHO than the same current with higher voltages by higher I mean 12vdc.

Just so you don't misunderstand me, I have READ the site, almost all of it.


Terry

[GasSavers_Lurch]

the main reason for the heat caused by a cell is the fact that stainless steel is a very VERY bad conductor and therefore burns up a lot of energy through heat.

[Dalez0r]

No, it's due to the energy lost due to the overpotential it takes to kick the electrons out of the electrode, and due to resistive heating of the water. The steel's resistive losses are small in comparison. "Proper" electrolysis cells use platinum electrodes both to reduce corrosion and because it has a very low overpotential requirement, from what I understand. But since most of us can't afford platinum, stainless will have to do. Seems to work for the small amount of HHO needed to boost gasoline combustion efficiency.

[TerryG]

From my experiments, so these are tested results, the lower the voltage has everything to do with how much heat is generated in the cell. If I run 4 amps with 12vdc things will get very hot, but if I run 3vdc with 4amps in a cell the electrolyte will stay room temperature, in fact if I double the amperage it doesn't even heat up. I appears to me that at 12vdc and 4 amps you will have 36 watts of energy, so to have the same amount of wattage with 3vdc you would need 16 amperes. I haven't put that much amperage through the cell because of the limitation of my bench top power supplies, but my cell would start getting warmer with much less amperage at 12vdc, and now it doesn't even start to get hot and I get a lot more HHO production, for less wattage.

At this point I am trying to reduce the electrolyte resistance by increasing electrode area and KOH strength of solution. We will see how this all works out, but if I can find someone to wind high frequency transformers for the PWM power converter I want to make then I will be in business.

Terry