Blimpy 2

Growing list of failing records let me to think it all through again. All this thing is obviously not that primitive as I’ve initially thought, but it simply can’t be that difficult when Blimps have been here for more a 100 years now!

Seeing all that last failure I’ve reviewed all lessons learnt to come with some more “unorthodox” solution. Crunching it through the night, thinking how to improve that partitioning, I’ve ended up asking myself why do I actually need it? Partitioning is needed to separate Oxygen and Hydrogen, but I don’t need Oxygen at all! And when I don’t need oxygen, I don’t need any special chamber for it -> no partitioning needed! It all seems to be so obvious now, but as always, you need to start asking right questions first.

My heureka moment materialised in a new design … I’ve lost counts .. can it be Mk. V already? I am sorry, but I’ve been so eager to progress on this that I sort of have just the final picture here.

So what you see here is a single 3l container, filled with electrolyte, where there is another Systema container in it, which is missing its bottom. Also you can notice that we’ve reverted back to our stainless-steel electrodes as those graphite-ones were literally being eaten (on cathode). See picture below which shows how 4mm looks like after 4hrs.

Sebi kindly volunteered to remote those and replace them with our stainless ones.

Before another run, we’ve stocked up with some new things. My phone seems to have problems to recognise my finger-prints lately so we’ve followed some good advice and bought box of glows set of protective goggles.

Also we’ve started running out of Potassium Hydroxide so I bought additional 2kgs.

I am sure it will make you all happy to see us being much more careful now when replenishing electrolyte before our next run. See – my left hand is all safe!

Dog inspection went well … all ready to go.

Actually it took us a little work to have it all running this time. I think that we made the electrolyte too dense and current was too high so we needed to elaborate a bit to make the thermal fuse in the PSU happy. Later this revealed not to be a good decision at all.

Experiment went on and we’ve been all surprised by the amount of Hydrogen we are producing. It was at least twice more efficient then ever before! System started heating a bit so Sebi volunteered to bring 10 crates of ice every hour to support its cooling.

While about 40 minutes in the experiment we’ve heard a loud sound, followed by an intensive smell of burnt electronic. PSU didn’t survive. Apparently we’ve pushed it just to the limit, when tuning the electrolyte density just below the thermal fuse. Theory is that the Hydrogen production is the most efficient in temperature range 70C-80C, that also means that current is highest at that stage. Our electrolyte was set to be ok during the room temperature, but as it started warming up current got slowly higher and it by-passed the thermal fuse and killed the PSU.

Still, we’ve got enough Hydrogen in the bag to have out Blimpy 2!