With all the ingredients, material and the box ready, I’m eager to give it a real go. We’ve prepared about 25%-30% KOH solution / electrolyte. Oli is in the picture below pouring water into the generator, while our audience watches to see how this is going to work out.
The KOH reaction with the water was to our surprise … exothermic! It wasn’t too violent, more like a bubbly – warm milk.
Little slaves are very good as a blender replacement. If you’re wandering why they weren’t wearing any protective gloves or googles it is because at this stage we sort of didn’t know that that liquid is level 2 ACID which can cause some serious skin burns or blindness. (Please don’t tell Paul! 😀 )
All setup and ready to go!
Well – and now there is whole set of pictures missing when all that beauty led directly to a disaster. We saw a beautiful reaction, but didn’t take into account that with the Hydrogen production being only 70%-80% efficient – the rest is .. heat! Our nice box warmed up to 40C in about 10 minutes and all those hot glue joints started leaking and getting loose.
Electrolyte was everywhere and it didn’t look good at all. Veronika came with a bunch of spare cloths and we were able to save lots of electrolyte in a quickly provided bucket. Still being dedicated to seeing some Hydrogen, we used a serious amount of duct-tape to seal the whole box together again. Veronika also sacrificed one of her baking trays to prevent future disasters (which, as I writer this, has paid off many times already).
Second go on the “Duct-Hydrogen-Generator” started:
That seem to be doing well (ignoring minor leaks) so we went to the second stage to check if we are actually getting any hydrogen. We’ve attached a food-bag to capture something and started a stop-watch.
We did some measurements to check what voltage and amps we are actually getting.
Yep, 12V. That’s good. That’s what PSU specification says on yellow wires.
0.296 Amps! No way! We should be getting ~25A! No idea what’s wrong. We’ve been still getting some nice bubbly effects anyway. So 2hrs later …
Sebi was super-excited that after all those months we have some real results.
We had some serious fun with this bag and as I’ve sort of soaked some decent amount of wine while waiting for this … we’ve named it … Blimpy!
Here is a final picture of the day, where Blimpy went to sleep with Sebi 😀
