Super Efficient Graphite Dry Cell Hydrogen Generator

[Music] hi so in a previous video we told this to pieces had a look at the inside put it back together and used it and it was pretty awesome actually um but it sparked off quite a bit of interest and my interest too in these hho generators and torches now that one that's a really simple design it's just a canister but a lot of people pointed me at something called the dry cell now the dry cell reminded me tremendously of a bipolar plate um so i had a look at the price of these things and these things are expensive eh for what they are but i'm kind of not surprised because almost universally they use stainless steel and stainless steel is a nightmare to work with it's difficult to cut if you're going to drill it you have to watch out for your drill bits and you can just eat the way through the drill bits if you have them laser cut actually ends up costing probably a bit more than if you just went ahead and bought one and so it seemed to me for a second like a bit of a dead end really that i'd even spend an awful lot of time and money making one or i'd buy one to play with it but then i read a research paper called um a systematic study on electrolytic production of hydrogen gas by using graphite as an electrode i thought oh that's interesting so they did a study where they used stainless steel uh mild steel copper they tried aluminium but it destroyed it almost immediately graphite and carbon as the electrodes in a dry cell and they got the best results with graphite which i thought was really interesting because because people are kind of worried about stainless steel most stainless steels contain about 11 chromium and of course chromium being released into the um environment's not a good thing um and they do rot which is why your electrolyte goes that muddy brown color that's that's the stainless steel rotting away and all the chromium salts are in there as well mild steel obviously doesn't last very long and copper and aluminium just get eaten away but graphite apparently did really really well and when they looked at the volume rate of production graphite was the top one and i thought wow that's so cool because we have a ton of this stuff which is graphite foil and i thought okay well if we can use graphite foil then we're on a real winner so what i did was i prepared 10 neutral plates at a graphite foil and they were a piece of cake i mean i cut those out with scissors and then i used these hole punches here to punch the electrolyte hole and the gas holes made ten of those probably i don't know 20 minutes something like that absolute piece of cake made ten of them and then i made two end plates which are here and i buried a bit of copper into the end plate so that i could have a current collector and then i'm going to do two cells in a dry cell configuration so i made a midpoint plate as well which i'm looking for there it is where the midpoint plate has a electrolyte hole and gas holes the end plates only have electrolyte hole on one and a gas hole on the other then we laid them up in dry cell configuration so i cut myself a couple of acrylic plates put a load of bolts in it and there's a gas out on that side and electrolyte in on that side waiting to be assembled i used these things you just buy these online they're little gas nipples um this is brilliant it's a drill and thread so i drilled and threaded that screwed that in bit of super glue again i don't know 20 minutes or so to put this whole thing together the longest thing was the neoprene gaskets that took a little while to cut out the rest was a breeze with scissors and a carpet knife so i thought wow okay and that was really cheap as well so i think that given this is according to the research is supposed to be the best material it's also the easiest to work with which is astounding so i've cut all those bits out i'm now going to lay them up so i'll give you a close-up of the layup process so there's the hole punches that i used that's the large one eight millimeter and the small one four millimeter and that's what i used to make these gas holes here and the electrolyte hole at the bottom there those are the little gas and water nipples that i used and that was the drill bit that i used the tap ring yourself a tapping drill bit so obviously i've drilled out the screw holes on the acrylic plate pop that in the um this is the outside so the gas will go out so first of all you put a rubber seal on there and then we take one of our end plates the actual end plate and that goes let's even get this the right way around that oops that way so that goes that way where the gas out is at the top it's a bit thick this one so it's a little awkward then we put another seal on and then the gas facing to the top with the electrolyte hole there another seal gas facing to the top but the electrolyte hole the other way around and we keep laying that up like that until we get to the mid plate when we get to the mid plate that obviously has a gas and and it points the other way on that copper tab then we continue with our seal plate seal plate until we get to the other end plate in which case it goes that way around with the copper facing there and obviously the electrolyte inlet the other side and then that goes on top and gets bolted down so i'm going to do that and get back to you when that's all arranged neatly so there it is all bolted together and complete now what we've got here is effectively two cells back to back so we've got two here if i connect both of those to negative and that one to positive what we effectively get is two cells with 12 volts across each now it doesn't matter that can be negative and they can be positive doesn't matter which way around in between each of those power plate sets so between this one and this one and this one and this one are five neutral plates creating six cells so each one of those has two volts across each cell with each unit having 12 volts two units at 12 volts so it's two units at 12 volts and that's what we've created there now all i have to do is fill that with electrolyte and turn it on and it will generate hydrogen okay this is a real lash up so please forgive me i'm just checking if this thing works before doing much more work on it all i've done is stuck the out pipe into some water so we see some generation here's a little cell now remember it's five by five despite this massive over build there's the hydrogen out the water in i've actually lashed up to the original machine that we pulled apart yesterday i've just put it on that i'm using that as a reserve tank i've also lashed in the power supply here from this original machine and i've put it into the power plates of this and then it's on there so i'm going to turn that on there it is producing hydrogen let's that's quite a stream of hydrogen from that little cell hho rather okay now i know i've lashed this all together i mean really it needs its own power supply could do with its own bubbler it needs um a feed tank so it needs a fair few things but what i really wanted to do was demonstrate that that all carbon cell and remember it's graphite really works well i mean we had to put an original 15 solution in this thing this is four percent that stream of hydrogen that was coming out was a pretty significant i thought uh it ran on about 12 amps previously it ran on 15 amps so it's telling you really that the conductivity is is down by about a third of what it was and yet the amp draw is round about the same so it's roughly three times more efficient than this thing that we had in here that's kind of impressive hey but like i said this is pulled from the research it's not me and my wild fancy ideas it's pulled from the research of using carbon in this setup now the benefits of it really are talk about easy to build i mean i made this with a carpet knife and scissors very easy no mucking around with stainless steel which is a nightmare if i'm brutally honest very much cheaper i mean these things aren't cheap they're going to start around about a hundred dollars i think and just go up just for this bit so it's very much cheaper to build very much easier to build very much more efficient what do you want really um so i'm gonna probably build a power supply for it tomorrow i'll build the other bits um from it and the idea is to get the torch running and replace this entirely with this dry cell i'm very pleased with how that went and i'll keep you up to date with the progress on it i hope it was of interest and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 182,071

Rating: 4.9255815 out of 5

Keywords: hho, dry cell, hydrogen dry cell, hho dry cell, hydrogen generation, hho generation, battery, cell, fuel, hydrogen, generation, power, electricity, engineering, lab, workshop, equipment, science, dry, robert, murray-smith, fwg, off grid, disruptive, alternative, technology

Id: CuZ5WxYwl4g

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TotesMessenger]

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[u/SentientPinetree]

Funny, I'm literally just taking a break from making one of these (based on the one from this very video) except using thin graphite blocks rather than foil.