I would rather have it be a separate system. Nothing wrong with the big charger, but I am more comfortable with reduncancy.
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Dan
1999 F550 4x4 ZF6 pulling a Cedar Creek 36RLTS. Lotta mods.
1999 VW Jetta TDI 5speed stick, all stock.
1996 Audi A4 Quattro. Unstoppable in the snow and ice. God and Dog
Dan, you don't need tons of amps to do this. Some of the pre-built kits talk about pulling in the 15 amp range IIRC for generating enough gas for our 7.3's. I would keep the generator bult very small and simply have a refill tank that could hold the water supply. The one unit I saw that had a specific model for our diesels 7.3's had a not too large of a stainless tank and said that the generator would run for about 600 miles before needing a re-fill.
If you send a ton of amps through a very large generator, you'r going to be making much more hydrogen that you can safely take advantage of, unless you can get the oxygen separated with Joe's approach using two buckets -- vent the oxygen, and the hydrogen is much safer. Downside is that you loose the benefit of having the excess oxygen present during combustion in the cylinder.
As interested in this as I am, I, too, am being stretched pretty hard by some tight deadlines on an $8.5 million project for a customer where there is a lot of long-lead time exotic pipe and equipment, all of which has to get installed this coming May... I'm even talking to some of the other engineers (electrical, instrumentation, petroleum, chemical, process controls, etc.) here in the office about helping me come up with a truly safe design concept that can be easliy built and installed from home. This is NOT anything I want to be involved with from a build & sell standpoint... I simply want to do a lot of work to make sure that none of us do anything stupid and either get hurt or damage our vehicles while we're trying make things better.
Thanks for the input, Pete. Do you know how much water the commercial version held? Nothing specific, but was it like 5 or more like 20 gallons? If we do this in a 5 gallon SS tank, it could be the negative "plate", and you could isolate the other (positive) one using plastic stand-offs. I would then install an ammeter inline with the power lead, turn the system on, then add baking soda until the current read ~15A. Sound like a doable set up?
Man, I'm thinking that this is something we need to write in to Mythbusters about. Right up their alley!!
Good post F250.
I started the materials gathering last night. I will document each step, each item cost, and part numbers if appropriate. Once I've tested, I'll take it apart, and photo each assembly step.
I'm still left with my most challenging point: where's the best point to introduce the gas into the air flow?
Good post F250.
I started the materials gathering last night. I will document each step, each item cost, and part numbers if appropriate. Once I've tested, I'll take it apart, and photo each assembly step.
I'm still left with my most challenging point: where's the best point to introduce the gas into the air flow?
Thanks for doing the legwork. Please don't generate a big fireball!!
I've been thinking about that as well, and for us with 6637s, it means in the tube between the turbo & filter. For those with a filter box (stock ((YEAH RIGHT!!)) or AIS, etc.), you could inject there.
EDIT: My plan is to tap the replacement CCV coupler I have and inject there.
If we do this in a 5 gallon SS tank, it could be the negative "plate", and you could isolate the other (positive) one using plastic stand-offs. I would then install an ammeter inline with the power lead, turn the system on, then add baking soda until the current read ~15A. Sound like a doable set up?
That brings up the question do the + & - plates need to be the same size (surface area) for efficient operation. You may be in luck Joe. I've got a small sheet metal shop. We can fab up almost anything you can think of with the stainless. I've probably got enough stainless drop material already for your "plates" You just need to figure a design and surface area required.
That brings up the question do the + & - plates need to be the same size (surface area) for efficient operation. You may be in luck Joe. I've got a small sheet metal shop. We can fab up almost anything you can think of with the stainless. I've probably got enough stainless drop material already for your "plates" You just need to figure a design and surface area required.
ooooo... I like it....
Here's what I think about the plate size. Obviously if the tank is the negative plate, as the water gets used up, there is less in contact with it. On the other hand, the one shown at the beginning of this thread had wires dropped vertically in there, so as the water gets used, there is less contact area with the electrodes. The difference is that one would still have equal (but less) of each exposed to the water. My idea would have the same amount of positive, but less negative exposed. Seems to me that would mean less H being generated, but the same amount of O. I think it would be best to stick with equal plates independant of the tank. Tank should be plastic then, or not grounded if metal since it will act as a negative plate if it's metal and grounded. Then it would be unbalanced -- more H if the tank is full, getting less & less as the water gets used up. Could be bad...
I think Dan's original plate idea would work the best, but with more space between the plates. If you guess at the surface area of the coat hangers then 1" to 2" wide strips of metal could easily produce much more surface area, but keep your plates small enough to always be completely submerged. I would suggest using something like Dan's design but making + out of one sheet of metal and using the second sheet for the -. You can bend the metal to form his basic design.
Joe, I believe that the marketed version I saw was in the order of a 5-gallon magnitude.
Regarding the plate sizes, I believe that the surface area of the plates are so much greater than that of parkland's coat hangers that you may not be able to see much of a difference in hydrogen and oxygen generation unless you're working with some really big voltage levels. I could be wrong about that, though.
If we could even get Mythbusters interested anough to run through this for us, it would probably be a year before it ever got publicized, and maybe even that long before they could work it into their program planning.
I think we need to spend a lot more time researching what's available on the web in terms of existing documentation. Parkland is already successful, but I honestly don't know how close he is to "dancing with the devil" with his current setup and "in the works" plans.
Here's one more thing I want to toss out to you guys.
Everyone has talked openly and readily admitted that this is potentially very dangerous. I have seen first hand results from an industrial incident that resulted from a "spontaneous decomposition" of peroxide in the presence of heat and caustic (NaOH, high pH, same direction we're talking about generating with baking soda).
The pump that exploded shot pieces of pump casing and 1.5" ball bearings through peices of 1" plate steel like it they were hot knives in butter. Portions of the pump landed some 300 yards away, embedded in a contractor's front dash. One piece that was about the size of a baseball and weighed about 2 lbs shot through a brick and concrete block wall over 100 feet away, then through three bathroom steel wall partitions, and finally shattering a porcelain urinal at the opposite end of the bathroom. The pump's 250lb rotor assembley was sent skipping accross the concrete parking lot, leaving little skipped gouges out of the concrete, and finally came to a rest some 125 yards away from where it started.
All the above happened because of an imbalance in peroxide concentration (about 50% commercial grade peroxide) with process heat (only about 150 degrees F) in the presence of caustic (pH not known). When I did the hazard investigation for this incident and traced the event back to that root cause, I then searched through the plant's computerized process data historian and found that the plant had been within just a few seconds of the exact same conditions over half a dozen times in the year leading up to the incident.
If any of you get froggy and leap into this thing carelessly, especially if you're working with metal containers.... I think you can imagine the potential. Fortunately, only one contractor sufffered a very minor shrapnel injury from the incident I described above, but the incident took place just 5 minutes before dozens of maintenance employees were going to be walking through that area on their way home at the end of their shift.
Oxygen and Hydrogen and Heat can be really, really good... if managed properly.
F250_ You bring up good points. If I were to build a metal tank it would have a blow off valve on it. For the plastic buckets I was thinking more along the lines of the snap on lids as a safety device. It would probably be a good idea to install a primary blow off valve along with a secondary. Something like one of the rubber plugs they put in the firewall or floor snapped into a hole in the lid that would blow first, with the lid popping off second.
The problem I see is trying to quantify the amount of hydrogen produced with different plate sizes or amperage, and then understanding how much is enough.
Pete thank you for your input, it's the type of expert advise that is needed here.
If you make it a two-bucket design with one electrode in the H bucket and the other electrode in the O bucket, then vent the O bucket to the atmosphere.
That would leave pure H in the other bucket with no O for it to burn and then explode.
Is that easily done? Or is two plastic buckets and some plates in each too crude of a design for this to be "relatively foolproof".
__________________
Dan
1999 F550 4x4 ZF6 pulling a Cedar Creek 36RLTS. Lotta mods.
1999 VW Jetta TDI 5speed stick, all stock.
1996 Audi A4 Quattro. Unstoppable in the snow and ice. God and Dog
That's a good question, Dan. According to the diagram that Joe posted earlier with the two columns of water, one with the anode and the other with the cathode, the two were still joined together at the bottom so that the electrolysis process could take place.
One thought I've had is that if we want to go the pure hydrogen route, it might be simpler to get a small hydrogen bottle from a welding supply house, regulate the flow from it, and get it refilled once empty. I don't know, though, how much that would run in terms of cash, nor how long a bottle would last. It, too, would be a potential bomb if it ever got caught in an impact and was ruptured with any flames or significant heat nearby.
To be honest, I've been so snowed under since this thread got started that I haven't had any time for any real research beyond my casual "looking around" that I did several weeks back when the issue first came up under the "25 foot black streak" thread.
I do know that "bucket chemistry" can and does work, and can often be much simpler than one might think. I've had fun watching one of my sons use his 9volt batteries to generate Brown's gas for his little plastic hydrogen rocket... and it can really get up there pretty high for a little toy (over 100 feet).
I'm hoping to dedicate some sincere research time into this issue this weekend. It really seems to have a very high potential benefit for all of us.
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