Cheap And Easy Hydrogen (Brown's Gas) Generator

[Music] so what you can see here is a hydrogen generator it's actually an electrolyzer and you can see giving off lots and lots of hydrogen gas which is what all this bubbling in the liquid is about and I'm fascinated by these but the challenge with these is actually making them because you have to make those plants out of stainless steel and to be honest all that mucking around with stainless steel cutting the plates and drilling them it's really quite challenging to do with home tools especially with stainless steel so I came up with this little method of making an electrolyzer a super super easy and it uses this stuff which a stainless-steel expended metal glass and the reason this is so much easier is because you could cut this with a pair of tin snips no worries at all so you can cut sections of that make an electrolyzer and electrolyze it now traditionally what you electrolyze is water and i'm not collecting water in here you can see is this strange color it's this strange color for two reasons one the stainless steel is dirty because I just made this and the other one is it's not water in there it's this stuff this stuff is urea in solution so it's actually urea solution that we're electrolyzing and we're electrolyzing urea for a very good reason water electrolyzers about one point two three volts your rear electrolyzers at point three seven bottles so the voltage requirement for it is very very much lower well that means is when we burn that hydrogen that's been given off there the net energy is positive in our favor we get more energy amps than the energy we've put in to actually electrolyze the urea that's really significant now if you have a look around you will find stuff about your real electrolysis and backing up what exactly what I just said but you won't find much in the way of meat and detail of how to go about doing it it's just people saying hey look at this so this is about how to build that electrolyzer what kind of solution of urea to you and then generate that hydrogen for you so let's get on with it to do this I've got a great big glass jar and some of this stuff this stuff is expanded metal laughs extend the steel it's really easy to get hold to the stainless steel version where I live because I live near the sea but you can buy this stuff really easily now I have tried stainless steel plates but to be honest to find them a bit of a pain to work with so all you have to do with this stuff is cut a section off and roll it up it's really quite easy then you roll it up to fit the size of your vessel it will just slot in there it'll spring out a little bit to cover the inside so that's one electrode you need to make the other electrode now I'm just going to do that by cutting another section of this last off with an angle grinder [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so cuts incredibly two of them off because we now know Danna cathode and as you can see they're just a little bit smaller than the jar they're about to go in so that one of them is going to be in the center the other one's going to be round the edge I'm guessing that if you wanted to you could interleave them and roll them up as a single coil that sounds like a hell of a lot of trouble to me so I'm just going to roll them up as I suggested so roll one up tightly and that will slot in there as the central electrode now obviously the minute you finish with that it's going to want to unwind so secure it with some cable ties okay so that's the center one secure two can handle it handle it a bit now we can't just drop it in there and leave it because it'll remove just these things always want to move so what we want to do is put something on there to stop it touching the other electrode when we put that electrode in the easiest thing to do is to put some plastic spacers on these our kitchen cabinet spacers that blocks sorry they're the kind of blocks you use when you're making kitchen cabinets and they do the corners if you've positioned those three around it like that and then you've got your cable ties pulley cable ties tight No and that will act as a spacer to prevent it touching the other electrode I'm going to do the other one then I'm going to wind that up and drop it okay so there it is wound around as you can see we've got the inner core spacer blocks outer core and you can see this blue wire this blue wire is actually 1.5 mil twisted strands household wire and it's rated at something like 20 amps so plenty of current kept carrying capability on that wire if you need more put more wires around it boy just strip the wire back so you got a good length find yourself a reason to pull hole somewhere around that you can twist this in feed you through a few of them if you can give it give it a twist until it's nice and tight and then put a dollar for this stuff around it which is all-purpose sealant and that will stop you sopping electrolyte getting to it so I'm just going to call this around and do exactly the same thing with the central wall there it is it's bit like sewing actually hey go and incredibly fast and easy to make electrolyzer hurt on that tedious mucking around with stainless steel plates it's pretty much ready to go actually but obviously the reason you would do this would be to collect the hydrogen gas that it's gonna generate so this thing came with a lid let's get a little seal around it but it might put ash to seal on there but obviously if we put the lid on we want some way of collecting the hydrogen now this is a specialist part it's a seal it's a valve seal that takes some tube which is lying around somewhere don't know where it is I'll find some tube it takes a blue tube that exactly fits in there and forms a gas seal so all I have to do is drill out some holes which I've done pop that in there and then bolt it on put a bit of PTFE or sealant around that and then I'm ready to stick my blue tube in there you'll notice two more holes and there to take the wires so the wires can then come through and again we can pop a little bit of sealant on there so that we can see the whole thing and the only escape point is here so the hydrogen gas of course we'd want to refill it so we might want another hole in there with a valve on it so we can put some more water in there but I'm not that worried about it if I do I don't want them do it then I'll just suffer the stresses on these joints here until I see how well it works and whether it's going to be a bit more of a production type or not but basically that's all there is to it and there it is generating lots and lots of gas so vaguer perhaps the easiest hydrogen generator you can actually make you know it's running at 21 volts 3 amps or 62 watts so it's not taking a huge amount of power and I just threw that together for the video obviously you could play around with those plant geometries maybe interleave them they'd be make the best ships maybe do your column together maybe multi-point wire attachment is a lot of playing around with the geometry but the main thing is how easy it was to make I've tried the other electrolyzers and to be honest cuz they all has stainless steel plates drilling them and bolting them and using those nylon drops people all separate I found just an absolute pain so this is certainly a much easier work to make an electrolyzer than using stainless steel plates now the thing to do obviously is to get a flow rate for the amount of energy that we're putting in and the reason it's this color incidentally it's not a clear color is because obviously the stainless steel was dirty I just cut it off the sheep you saw me do it so there's a bit of dirt in there but this is not water this is urea this is in fact a urea electrolyzer which is this stuff in water this is the urea urea is a fertilizer it's a single early greatest waste product on the planet water electrolyzers at one point two three volts urea electrolyzers 0.2 zero three seven volts and that's a 33% solution of year so it should take a hell of a lot less energy to generate the hydrogen than it would do to use water and Koh which is your traditional hydrogen electrolyte that you find in these electrolyzers your rear electrolysis has been investigated quite extensively although it's quite difficult to find the facts of the matter you can find an awful lot of urea electrolysis going on if you search for it because you can get a net positive out of it that is the amount of energy you put in there for getting the hydrogen and it's lesson you would get back for burning the hydrogen and that's because the bond energy in urea is slower than the bond energy in water so preferentially the urea breaks down first into nitrogen and hydrogen you get the hydrogen we can burn that in an engine and it would produce more energy doing that than it took to actually get the hydrogen counted that so I thought that was cool and I thought the only reason people weren't investigating knives because these electrolyzers are just a paired to make so I thought I'd show you a really quick and easy method of how to make electrolyzers and how to generate hydrogen from urea and then hopefully encourage you to investigate that so that we have a look at this and have a possibility of on voyage hydrogen generation where we get a net positive power output anyway I hope that was of interest and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 183,064

Keywords: hydrogen, brown's gas, electrolyser, electrolysor, hydrogen generator, electrolysis, robert, fwg, murray-smith, generator, chemistry, science, fair, project, gas, electroliser, electrolizer

Id: cNTMWhMWQAA

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020