Serge & Paul & Greg’s visit to our workshop made me to sit to my laptop and do a bit of thinking on where to go next. I am also waiting for that graphite sheet so there is nothing much to experiment with / work on till it arrives.
The thing is that I was complaining about all that Hydrogen gain from all our experiments so far and thinking where I go wrong? I’ve started Googling and reading some more papers and came to multiple texts clearly stating that “Hydrogen Heat/enthalpy value is 144 MJ/kg.”
So let’s say 1W = 1J (1 Watt-second is 1 Joule) in this case we need to run the 1W – electrolyser for 144 000 000 seconds to get 1kg of Hydrogen. With our 450W PSU (Power Supply Unit) we’ll be able to do 450 x 3600 J every hour -> 1 620 000 Joules. To get to our 72MJ (0,5 kg should be sufficient to get our Phase 1 going) – will take 44 hours! But that is ok, we are not in a rush here.
Anyway, reading more and more and more something appeared even more – no one mentions using table-salt as an electrolyte. Long story short – using a classic table salt (NaCl) in a concentration of a typical crust on a typical Brazilian picanha was to put it mildly – naive. The thing we need is called Potassium Hydroxide aka caustic potash aka KOH. And we don’t need just a bit, but all that solution needs to be 25%-30% to be the most efficient.
Interestingly there is a shop in South Brisbane where they have it, unfortunately it is in the liquefied form and comes with interesting pictograms like these:
… so they hesitate to send it through the Australian Post. At the end I’ve ended up ordering 0.5kg of KOH flakes from Sydney for $14.95 + $16.00 shipping :D.
This delivery should be here in next 7 days, so we’ll see. I can just hope that that graphite is going to make it here soon so we can at least move on with readying the box. There is still few more things to be done, which I am not too sure about… like some efficient Electrolyte storage / refill.
Stay tuned!
