Edmund Storms wrote:
Stephen, I would like to suggest that the electrolytic cell will never
be used to make commercial heat because it operates at too low a
temperature and is not stable. Commercial application will, I predict,
involve gas loading. Consequently, such calculations have no usefulness.
OK, I can't really argue with that, beyond saying such calculations are useful for showing
exactly what you just said: wet cells operate at too low a temperature.
With a gas loaded cell one can, in principle, run T_high/T_low up to a much
higher value.
Of course, the same exact calculation applies to any cell which is electrically driven and
which produces energy in the form of excess heat. For example, Jed recently posted a
paper by Yoshiaki Arata which used gas loading. I glanced back at it just now, though,
and it appears that, since he's using electrolysis to generate the gas at high pressure,
his high temp is somewhat limited. Looks like he was operating at less than 200C. I
don't know how high a temp his technique could be pushed to.
