On Jun 10, 2007, at 12:40 PM, Michel Jullian wrote:
Electrolysis by AC through insulators when no separation of the
products is required, a very ingenious and elegant idea Horace, if
it's not been done before it's definitely worth investigating IMHO.
With this idea you could electrolyze water through a test tube!
Not sure about high frequency though, maybe some delay should be
implemented between positive and negative pulses to give the
products a chance to diffuse/evolve so they don't get mostly undone/
recombined immediately? Otherwise I don't see why it wouldn't work
on the principle, imagine you send one pulse of one polarity and
then another of the opposite polarity several seconds later when
everything has settled, it will be strictly as if you had sent two
pulses of the same polarity won't it?
Yes, if the bubbles can be made to evolve. The bubbles typically
collapse due to recombination in an AC cell. This may be an
interesting variation on cavitation based cold fusion because the
bubble collapse is concurrent with the recombination reaction, and if
the current is high enough it causes the plates to light up with
activity.
Some years ago here I posted a bunch of ideas along the lines of
capacitive AC linking of power to electrolytic cells. A couple of
them are very relevant to your comment. One was to use scraper
blades on the plates that would scrape the bubbles off the plates,
enough blades to ensure most bubbles from one polarity are removed
before the next polarity begins. Another was to use plastic bubble
scraping particles in the electrolyte, which are pumped by narrowly
separated plates and then into a de-bubbler, or the particles are
suspended in a solution stirred past the plates by a stirrer and then
degassed (de-bubbled) by action of the stirrer with stator blades.
I also suggested a number of variants involving rotation of external
DC charged metal plates (or electrets) which would create the effect
of AC without expensive high current equipment, and which could thus
directly turn mechanical motion into electrolysis.
Another variant I suggested for electrolysis is to use a hybrid
triode cell. Large plate anodes and cathodes would carry the bulk of
the current based on large changing external potentials due to AC on
fixed plates, or moving external DC plates (see Fig. 1). Small bias
electrodes B could be included between the plates (though shown to
the side for convenience) to maintain a potential bias on the plates
which selectively affects the percentages of anode or cathode
products produced, or plate anodic erosion, by selectively overcoming
the initial 2 molecule interface layer bias potential of one of
either the plate anodes or plate cathodes, as determined by the bias
electrode B potential chosen. The resistance R1 of the bias circuit
is much higher than the resistance R2 + R3 of the plate interconnect
circuit. The DC bias used might be about 1.5 V for a cell operated
at about 6 VAC.
- - - - - - - - - - - - + + + + + + + + + + + +
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
X X
X + + + + + + + + + + + + - - - - - - - - - - - - B X
X | | | X
X =======R2==============R3======= | X
X | | X
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX|XX
| |
R1 |
| |
| |
(-) (+)
Key:
=,| Wires
Ri Resistance
XXX Dielectric cell wall
+ + Metal Anode
- - Metal Cathode
( ) DC Power supply lead
Fig. 1 - Top view diagram of AC-DC hybrid electrolytic cell.
Some other ideas for electrolytic cells I collected into:
http://mtaonline.net/~hheffner/Electrolyser.pdf
Regards,
Horace Heffner
