OT: Electrolyis of Water question.

Trying to remember back in my days of being dangerous at the bench I was recently asked a basic question that I dare not to give an answer.

A colleague of mine wants to know what happens if the effective applied energy for electrolysis of water was multiplied in several orders?

In other words, he wants to use 10x required voltage that is normally used in what ever vessel the process is being done?

My thoughts on this was that it would act as boiling water and recombine if not properly extracted. But I think he is looking for violent side effects if any.

If you think he's an idiot for even asking, I'll let him know your views on it tomorrow. :)

This is apparently something he is doing at home base.

Jamie

There's lots on this subject in the free energy forums. Google "Brown's Gas". Don't remember the exact number, but I recall something like 2.3V being the maximum voltage for electrolysis of water. Anything more is wasted.

But you can superimpose an AC voltage on the DC electrolysis voltage. Done properly, you can access the "DARK ENERGY" that surrounds us all and is just waiting to be tapped. YMMV!! ;-)

Electrolysis produces Hydrogen and Oxygen in the optimum ratio for an explosion. Any reaction is gonna be a violent one.

lly

Electrolysis is the process of driving a current through water. The amount of hydrogen and oxygen produced is determined by the current that flows.

Increasing the voltage should make more current flow along the conducting path, and might - for example - produce ohmic heating in the solution between the electrodes. If you pushed the cell hard enough you might produce gas at the electrodes at such a rate that there wouldn't be much solution between the electrodes to carry the current, thus increasing the ohmic heating along whatever conductive path remained.

It sounds like a pretty silly idea.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Jamie presented the following explanation :

A primative way to build a test load for a generator was to immerse 2 electrodes in a tank of water and add some salt to get a big enough current to load the generator. I vaguely remember one case where the sequence was wrong and the electrodes were just plunged in and overloaded the generator (50 KVA or so) stalled the generator and damaged the shaft.

Electrolysis is endothermic below a critical voltage and exothermic above. As much as one sixth of the endothermic region energy can come from ambient heat. Endothermic production rates are ludicrously low and thus cannot possibly amortize.

Plots at <

Electrolysis is also utterly and totally and laughingly pointless because of its monumentally staggering loss of exergy. Because the value of a kilowatt hour of electricity is ridiculously higher than the value of a kilowatt hour of unstored hydrogen gas.

Electrolysis is pretty much the same as 1:1 exchanging US dollars for Mexican pesos.

Much more at <

Lots more waste heat until the water boils and cavitates which then limits the current. You have to add some ions to allow current to flow in the water. Really really pure water is a surprisingly good insulator!

We once designed an insane piece of kit that maintained 8kV across admittedly an *very* pure cooling water circuit to prevent the plasma

To get around the patent another maker produced one where the plasma was at ground potential and the rest of the large machine was at 8kV!

At a DIY store? Why?

nch

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I think I said the same thing more concisely.

The "endothermic/exothermic" distinction isn't helpful. A more useful discussion - in terms of Gibbs free energy - would emphasise that you have to supply energy to break the hydrogen-oxygen bond, and extra energy to get any significant rate of hydrogen production.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Brings back memories of a graduate student whose water-cooled X-ray source relied on the same scheme. He used a commercial high-voltage generator which had been assembled on the basis that the anode would be a ground - it took us a day or two to work out why the system wouldn't work when he first put it together, and about a month for the generator to get back to the manufacturer to have its polarity switched.

Presumably only a double-insulated section of it - double insulated so that you had an intermediate conducting shield that you could make sure was not connected to either ground or 8kV as frequently as you liked.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It seems to me that the effect of having a higher potential on the electrodes will be to accelerate the ions as they approach. This energy will then be dissipated in the electrodes when the ions hit them.

So the net result will be that the electrodes warm up. At a high enough voltage, they'd get hot enough to boil the water.

Doesn't seem very useful.

Sylvia.

Thereby demonstrating a design fault, insofar as the shaft would not withstand the available torque.