1256 Urea Electrolysis For Hydrogen Production

[Music] now that you can electrolyze water at 1.2 1.23 volts you can electronize urea at 0.37 volts so a 70 percent lower voltage and that's fascinating it's really easy to form an electrolysis seller is very basic but quite difficult to form one that's pretty efficient and i came across this one it was actually a nighthawk light did this and i thought it was actually really cool he did water electrolysis and i was thinking hey could we use that for you you you know about urea electrolysis because that is more energy efficient and for me far more interesting now what it did was use this it's an egg whisk and in that egg whisk he stuffed a stainless steel pan scourer and i thought ford a clever way of making a large surface area electrode and that was the basics of what he made how simple is that if we stuck that in some urea and attached a couple of electrodes it would bubble off a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen if we want to separate those gases the best way to separate them is to the point in which they're created so he took a clear plastic bottle and i've got this winnie the pooh drinks bottle there's old winnie with the balloon floating away i thought it was most appropriate we stick that in there then when the gas is formed it's going to go up inside the bottle and we put a tube on there and we'll have separation of gas so to do that we need to chop off the bottom drill out the top stuff this in here and we get that which is exhibit a and we need two of those so here is our stainless steel span count baby so here is our stainless steel pan scarab stuck inside a stainless steel egg whisk there's our cut off bottle there's our bottle top with the handle of the egg we're stuffed through the cap what we need to do is this wire which has been attached to the whisk there by twisting it on and putting under some solder feed that in feed the wire through you'll notice there's a hole in the side feed it through the hole and you get this it's fed through the hole because this is where the discharge gas will come from and that's where we want to collect it so we can put a pipe on there and collect our gas that goes to our power supply and i've bunged a whole lot of hot glue on there to seal that hole but of course you could use beautiful rubber self steel rubber tape anything really that's going to seal that hole when you've made two of those you're actually ready to go and you need to put it in some kind of container and we've got this food container that they rather nicely fit into you notice a little loop in the bottom there that's how the electrolyte can pass i could always just hang them off the bottom obviously in which case it wouldn't really matter but there is our food container now this remember separates the gas for you so the hydrogen comes off one side the nitrogen comes off the other if you don't include this bottle then you'll get mixed gas out and you'll have to do something about sealing the top of here and putting in a pipe into that whole thing but like this it doesn't really need a top we're going to put a top on it because word about safety i mean safety well i think that basically if you don't know what you're doing you really shouldn't be messing around with this stuff if you are messing around with this stuff a lot you already know what you're doing you know what the safety rules are if you want to learn how to do it you really should be reading but you're going to be using a caustic sort of solution filled with urine so you really don't want to spill that on yourself for a number of reasons one it's socially inconvenient and two you'll get some pretty nasty buns so it helps to put a top on the container even though you don't need to the other thing of course is it's hydrogen which is amazingly explosive and we all know that while popping sound like a gunshot that it's going to make when we get some hydrogen so do it in a well-ventilated room put a bubbler on your output and you're going to be jim dandy but if you've never done it before make sure you have a read around on the safety tips because i tend to be a bit glib about them and i'm telling you what to do not what it is that i'm going to do so don't follow me follow the safety tips anyway all we're going to do now is bung these in here put a couple of holes put that top on although that's completely unnecessary and then we're ready to go once you've mixed the electrolyte okay so there's my electrolyte solution now in there i've got four liters of water and a third of a mole of urea what that translates into in four liters is 80 grams so it's 80 grams of urea four liters of water now the potassium hydroxide can be anywhere between one and five moles after five molar it begins to tail off so you don't really want to go above that but as you increase the molar concentration it's going to electrolyze more efficiently now that means in here there's 112 grams of potassium hydroxide so four liters of water 80 grams of urea and 1120 grams of koh now we don't need to have a sealable lid on this but it has got a sealable lid and the reason we don't need a sealable lid is because it's all captured in these two bottles we've got a sealable lid to prevent it spilling on us now as you add the koh to this it will heat up the water and the electrolysis process also heats up the water so though i'm using plastic because i don't don't plan on it going too far if you're going to do this you might want to do it in glass if you do it as a long-term project okay we're ready to go we just need to connect that to electricity now the hydrogen has a positive charge so it's going to be attracted to the negative and the negative is going to be the one that's spewing out hydrogen the nitrogen is going to be spewed out by the positive so we want to capture the stuff that comes out of the negative and basically just vent the positive now then you run this at 1.4 volts and that guarantees that it's only the urea that's been electrolyzed it's not the water because with the internal resistance of the cell it's lower than 1.23 so the water can't electrolyze and what you'll see is it drawing about 50 milliamps or so and that draw will go down and when the urea is exhausted it won't draw anything at all maybe a milliamp or two something like that so you can keep a check on how well it's actually generating hydrogen from the urea only and of course when it's exhausted you chuck some more urea in there the thing that i really like about nighthawks design actually is the replaceability because because these things wear out and they kind of get corroded and once it's corroded all you have to do is lift the lid unscrew the bottle take out your egg whisk and your scouring pad and replace it with another edge with some scarring pad so really easy to actually keep up to that and make sure that it doesn't get too corroded at any particular time and if you're making more complicated ones then it's quite hard to get those corroded plates out and replace them with this one it really is a piece of cake i also liked how it separated the gas out of the sauce so here's my hydrogen which is the negative and there's my venting to the atmosphere for the nitrogen so awesome design very simple very easy to make loved it dearly and i thought i'd replicate it for your rear electrolysis instead of hydrogen electrolysis now if i put this on a 1.4 it will begin to bubble and you'll see that the nitrogen the hydrogen being produced unfortunately it isn't as dramatic as when you electrolyze the water because when you electrolyze the water you get a ton of gas and it looks really cool when you're electrolyzing the urea you don't get so much but the thing is you have to store it because it is tremendously more efficient and it's also meant for things like cleaning up waste water and it also is meant to use a huge resource that we essentially just flush away because of our social conditioning anyway i thought i would do all of that i thought it would show you how to build a cell talk some more about your rear electrolysis and what the conditions are i hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching and please remember to like and subscribe

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 11,535

Rating: 4.9460917 out of 5

Keywords: hydrogen, economy, production, electrolysis, robert, fwg

Id: LaT5PZixcV0

Length: 7min 57sec (477 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021