Jones; Nice, but I personally do not feel that the issue is that of OU H2 production to seal a Hydrogen fueled environment.
I have stated on vortex before that the problem is not in getting the Hydrogen (nullifying Faraday), but what do you do with it when you get it? I will stick my big fat foot in my mouth here, but lets assume I can provide Hydrogen from water in excess of COP>1. Now what are we going to do with it where the conversion does not eat up this gain? ICE engine is out!, at least in present configuration and will take years to change once they start, unless we turn it all over to Toyota or some other off island company. Fuel Cell is out, poor recovery, waste in general. Now this may be because no one wants to make a good economical cell (like solar cells, always promised and never seen) of it is again years off. Bottom line is if Hydrogen could for pennies be produced (forget Faraday), how do you get back the energy without dropping the COP<1 during the conversion? I have looked at just burning the stuff to boil water for a steam engine running a generator, what a loss indeed. If some one would give me an off the shelf way to use the Hydrogen that would power a generator and not dump the gain, I want to talk.... -----Original Message----- From: Jones Beene [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2007 2:02 PM To: vortex Subject: [Vo]: High efficiency electrolysis This is the only valid scientific way that I know of, to use ambient or environmental heat, to achieve (arguable) overunity. Any school kid can do this on a very small scale (few bubbles), but if you are only looking simply for a single example for that contention, for whatever purposes - then this is it ;-) About every 6 months or so (used to be yearly), this subject keeps reappearing on Vo and other sites. Ah...Ultra high efficiency electrolysis - so close and yet so far away -- as it is involved tangentially in LENR / CF, and also in the Thermacore-type cell (hydrino). Anytime protons are involved, ZPE also comes into play, in the minds of some theorists. Without high efficiency electrolysis, there can be no valid "hydrogen economy" but with it, there can. It is that simple. There are always better uses for storing or using electricity - than splitting water, unless you can do that at about double the normal Faradaic rate. Ultra high efficiency electrolysis is the least controversial solution to so many geo-eco-political problems involving transportation fuel, or renewables but unlike other schemes, there is already in place valid scientific evidence for this "extra" or free-energy source. Not saying "uncontroversial" just "valid" to the point of view of the writer. Fusion or hydrinos may not be OU in any scientific sense, but they are clearly "free energy" in the sense of being exploitable on a small scale at higher efficiency than combustion, and without the toxicity of nuclear energy, as we know it. Never mind that the LENRers don't trust the Hydino-Heads, and vice versa... The answers are out there, and they involve both camps. And for that reason, there are probably more water-splitters on this forum per capita than anywhere else on the net, short of the blind-leading-the-blind Joe-Cell participants. Between all the water splitters and all the hair-splitters, we could set up a chapter of Slitters-Anonymous on Vo - 12 steps to easy OU recovery, so to speak [tried that quip a few years ago, but got no LOL's]. "Electrolysis via pH differential" is the new paper in question. This was posted on another forum, and I haven't got hold of it yet, but the paper seems to have implications for hydrino exploitation, and for getting a peroxide by-product and hydrogen out of an electrolysis cell, instead of H2 and O2. This is highly advantageous. It is almost identical to the work in India of Prof R. P. Viswanath of Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, covered in a thread hear a couple of years ago. He was successful in using a compartmentalized electrolytic cell - and splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen at a lower potential of around 0.90 V compared to the 1.23V theoretical minimum. This is a fairly high and proven COP, derived from ambient heat -- but catch-22 the reaction rate is snail paced. But - he did not fully exploit the highest pH differentials. Anyone, even me, can accomplish this dual-cell thing on a small scale, but doing it commercially on a large scale is another problem altogether. The present paper dates back to 1981, and may have influenced Viswanath. Omar Teschke from Brazil found you "should" get even better effects when you separate the anode from the cathode & alter the pH much more strongly. The paper is accessible (for a price): http://www.springerlink.com/content/p6t486k838q11784/ Theoretically you can do overunity electrolysis of water at STP with 1.23V, if heat is continually added (i.e. the process draws heat from the surroundings & cools down). With no heat the thermoneutral potential (i.e. voltage you actually require) is 1.47V. All of this is muddled by the situation of getting peroxide as an intermediary, which makes everything look better that H2/O2 (both the manufacture and the conversion efficiency is increased with H2/HOOH as the end products) Omar Teschke worked out theoretically that oxygen comes out of a dual electrolyte cell when the voltage is only 0.8V IF (big if) the pH is 14 (i.e. totally alkaline)leaving peroxide and little O2. Whereas, at pH 0 (i.e. totally acid), hydrogen is theoretically released at the same low half-cell potential. Anyway, he "predicted" but did not experimentally confirm that it should be possible to decompose water with only around 0.4V if you can separate effectively the anode from the cathode BUT keeping each in highly differing pH solutions, and heated, and with adequate charge transfer (via protons). A self-powering situation for automotive would need to be around this level, and that is so advantageous that the addition of radioactivity should [and will] be contemplated in the future. Few can rationally object to using radioactive waste for this purpose, rather than storing it in a cave. Like it or NOT, we have this sour-lemon radwaste problem now, and perhaps we should be turning lemons into lemonade. The main problem, as always, is in finding a suitable separation membrane. The problem is a function of dielectric strength, and partly in corrosion resistance. For that reason - and with all the new emphasis on batteries theses days (EEStor) and the emphasis on ultracapacitors and dielectrics, one might suspect that a technical solution to the membrane-problem may not be far away, in the form of barium titanate or boron nitride. It should be noted that boron fibers are available now (used in high-tech golf equipment, believe it or not) and that a thin tightly wovern fabric of boron fibers, when nitrided and then coated on the acid side (cathode) with a thin proton conductor, might be an ideal solution. Teschke made a prototype cell, with an available (less than satisfactory) membrane to separate the solutions, but he didn't get a decent rate of gas production until around 1.2V. This is in keeping with the results of Prof R. P. Viswanath - who in fact did better. Neither used radioactivity, such as plated thorium for the electrodes. So, at this stage, it is one more small step in the progression to what may be a back-door into a hydrogen economy. The problems of keeping two solutions of massively different pHs in virtual contact with each other is daunting. And for getting a boost from alpha emission (or rad-waste) the problem is political... or getting a boost from LENR or the hydrino, the problem is technological and funding. But the only way that a hydrogen economy can ever take hold is that you make the fuel "on the fly" -in situ- in the automobile using parastic energy refluxing and ultra high efficiency electrolysis. In that case, your main ecological detriment is the heat. Jones
