In a previous article I’ve demonstrated that the idea of having a Blimp won’t fly without having some reasonable source Hydrogen. Why Hydrogen and not Helium and why to produce it and not buy it in a canister? I’m leaving these unanswered now as those are topics on their own, while now I need to move on to catch up with our current situation.
I’ve decided that something is wrong and we need to get back to basics and scale down & simplify whole thing (Hydrogen generator). Reading heaps of articles on this topic, I’ve got quite lost and not having a good source of Platinum (tried Steffen’s family, but it would be unfair to blame them for a production failure 😉 ) – we’ve came back to the old-school galvanized nails. As a canister we’ve used an empty can from Gippsland Diary yogurt.
Zone partitioning done from a thin plastic sheet, while Sebi improved our PSU connectivity with soldering its cables together (12V).
When ready, we’ve filled in salty water (electrolyte) and attached a plastic bag in expectations of huge things happening.
Bubbles were bubbling and we’ve started measuring time. Sebi’s been taking a picture every 5 minutes:
2hrs later we had again sort of 3ml of Hydrogen and all looked ok, except water being black like a mud. Comforted by a situation I’ve got a beer and had a long chat with Rob, watching a fire-pit.
Coming back to our experiment (another 2 hrs later) – plastic can melted and all that black stuff spilled over the table and soaked through the chair and messed up the terrace floor quite nastily. Plastic bag with Hydrogen got released and leaked everything out. Seeing all that disaster, I went to have a nap and cleaned it next morning. Unfortunately I haven’t taken any picture of that, while good thing here is that there is no evidence of this grand failure now. 🙂