HHO Welder

can you post the link?

I beleive it's new age speak for the electrolysis of water,

and it's recombination in a flame.

It's hogwash, son, hogwash I tell ya. Ain't no such thang as HHO. Hogwash I say.

no, it is true, they electrolyze water with AC,and do not separate the gasses.

They then take those gasses and burn them at a nozzle. They have to use thick walled narrow piping and they do not store any gas, just the small amount them make on demand. They also have flash arrestors of copper mesh in man places to stop flash backs(the popping sound you hear when a torch is turne off is a flashback).

Some people pipe the mixed gasses into a tank. These eventually explode, with risk to life and limb

HOGWASH?? really

OK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGz5X1hB3Nw

Youtube is entertaining. Take a look at this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTAETA1IvMI

HHO welders are well understood and used in the jewellery industry. They give a good, very hot flame that is clean of impurities. I don't know why you would want to add a coolant, though; the whole idea of a welding torch is to be hot! I have seen some more impressive larger units for welding larger structures but getting enough production and flow is difficult.

Almost all replies have been accurate. Oxy-Hydrogen torches have been around for at least 50 years. They disappear for a while and the rise again like the phoenix from their own ashes. By the way, Phoenix, AZ is where the Henes Water Welder was manufactured. The flame is normally invisible, but if the gas is bubbled through alcohol before it is ignited, it burns with a nice blue hue. The trick with these gas generators is to always maintain positive pressure at the torch end. If the pressure falls below atmosphere while the torch is burning, the flame will travel back into the gas resevoir and explode. Remember to always extinguish the flame before you turn the unit off. There is currently a Water Welder listed on eBay - #160190458988

Someone asked for link. Just type H2O 2000 on Google and you will find a lot of info. Hydrogen will most probably be one of the main power sources in near future(atleast on my oppinion). If any of you have tryed somthing related to that, please provide some info.

The use of hydrogen will not make it here. The cost is excessive. Fuel cell combustion of alcohol from biomass will win in the long run...unless fusion is conquered and we have the cheap power to make hydrogen

I would not recommend Hydrogen welding for steel.

I believe it leads to hydrogen embrittlement of the steel.

Now, for a bunsen burner it may be interesting. General heating application.

Suffering succotash, son. I mean, hold it right there. I say, there ain't no HHO. No such a thing. It's downright false, I say.

However, let me tell ya, my brother-in-law is director of the Nigerian space lottery and he has a work-at-home program where you assemble magnetic monopoles and can make up to $7500 an hour. Did I say ya could get rich, boy!

Seriously, I live within a few minutes of several large commercial gas suppliers. None of them sell HHO. There are a ton of weld shops within 10 miles and some large steel fab shops. None of them use HHO. I've read most of Omar Blodgett's books and he never mentioned HHO. Why in heaven's name wouldn't you just use something like oxy-acetylene? Everybody sells that. It's got standard regulators and torches. People know how to use it. It's safe. It's cost-effective. If you can get AWS to write a procedure for HHO welding, I'll get off my soapbox.

you cannot sell HHO because you cannot bottle it and ship it, it may explode. It is real and cannot be stored because it is the product of electrolysing water. H2O goes into H2 and O2. This is the optimum explosive mistures. Pound for pound far more explosive than TNT or dynamite, but with a lower velocity of detonation.

People generate it locally and the machinery has copper mess flame arresting built in to stop flash backs and it will contain the few cubic inches of the max stored gas.

Professionals do not use it as it costs a lot more than oxy acetylene or oxy propane.

The machinery is self limiting so only a few cubic inches are made and the pressure forces the water down from the electrolysis zone until you use some gas and it wets it again, much like a Kipp generator.

I assure you, it is real and you can buy the machine and it will work.

HHO is just a way to write the brone up H2O molecule in amateur style.

Let's say it is real (and not just wet oxygen + hydrogen). Why would anyone want to use it? Why on earth would I ever go near steel with a hydrogen rich torch? OK, maybe I want embrittlement, but it would be cheaper (and safer) to do it with an ordinary oxygen-hydrogen torch.

It appeals to fringe users who do not want the cost of an acetylene system of tanks etc. Frankly I thing acetylene is better and cheaper for business uses.

I googled http://www.alternatefuels.com/h2o1.htm

$7000 = a waste of money.

Only a fool would buy this.

I think it is a racket as this thing costs less than $200 for the bill of materials(my estimate)

I would be very interested in this device. if you could design on paper along with the parts list a torch that I could build for around $200, I will pay you $100 for every torch I build for $200.

I can buy a perfectly OK (not great, but it'll do) oxy-acetylene kit from Northern Tool for $180 (USD).

If you are going to make a machine to electrolyze 100 CC of HOH/minute, you can do it in a small low cost machine. Might be $50 worth of parts.

All you need is a pipe and an electrode with insulated feed through, a way to add distilled water and a petcock and a gas out tube.

Pack the gas out tube with stainless steel filings that allow gas through and wil not corrode and will act as a flame break. Copper is better, but will soon corrode, as you need a little salt in the water to help gas production .1 % should do

The system to produce HHO is the important thing, then we can transport water, not HHO. Water is nice and safe, readily available and of course cheap. Would you believe that there are huge companies already using HHO, in robotic welding applications. I can't remember which ones, maybe Toshiba, have to check. So people are already buying machines made using the tech. The point is, they claim to save 98 percent of their welding fuel cost. Not something to brag about, just keep it to yourself, and keep the money too. lol Theres another thing we see everyday on TV, its the space shuttle. It runs on a recombined Hydrogen Oxygen flame. If its good enough for that, then the skys the limit, as they say. Monopoles are great too, its a shame Faradays best stuff got buried huh?

these systems that electrolyze water to a stoichiometric mixture have an inherently low efficiency, since they use electricity. The mixture does indeed burn hot to water if nitrogen is excluded from the oxidizing zone to prevent NOX formation. In the real world you would entrain some N and form some NOX. The only way to avoid this is to use an excess of hydrogen which minimzes NOX formation.

I have news for you. No large manufacturers use this HHO system. It is far too costly as well as dangerous as it has to be used in a copper/brass wool filled piping system to prevent reverse flame propagation. The copper/brass wool wool extinguishes the flame front, like a Davy lamp. What they do use is propane and oxygen for some welds, TIG for others and a lot of spot welding

do you also believe the world is flat sir ?

without change there is no progress .

update yourself

Most of the negative replies are theoretical. I have owned and used water welders for over 40 years. If it was the only piece of welding equipment in my shop, I would have gone belly-up years ago. However, there are cetain jobs for which it excels. It uses a standard inexpensive hypodermic needle as the torch, is probably the most compact source of high temperature flame that I own, and it never runs out of fuel. If you perform a cost analysis, you will discover that electrolysis is an expensive method for producing hydrogen gas. We don't use equipment like this because it is efficient; we use it because it gets the job done. Jewelers wait in line to use the water welder because it does things they cannot do with any other piece of equipment. The flame is absolutely clean and the gas mixture is always stoichiometric. The only other piece of equipment I have that comes close to the HHO welder is the non-transfered micro-plasma. The plasma torch is much less efficient and far more complicated than the HHO welder.

Hydrogen - Oxygen welders were common in the jewelry industry. Since I am no longer a hobbyist in the industry I am not up on the latest. Its small flame is one of the few that is hot enough to do platinum repairs. these torches have a completely clean flame that will not leave residues on the rest of the jewelry being repaired.

The issue of "hydrogen enbrittlement" is a non-runner.

Perfectly stoichiometry, as was mentioned above.

============

For those of you who are looking for a real "blast",

fill a weather balloon with the correct blend of H2 and O2,

enclose a remote ignition squib,

let the balloon drift up to 5,000 to 10,000 feet

(undiscernable on radar...)

and press the "magic" button. Nobody will know who made that HUGE BOOM,

and even if they did, they couldn't prove it. "What weather balloon? OH You mean the one that drifted off yesterday.. I don't know WHAT happened to it..."

That sounds like fun, but I live near a military airbase. They take things like that very seriously - don't ask me how I know. The other problem with your scheme is that if you use a latex baloon, the hydrogen will diffuse out fairly quickly because it's a small molecule. I suggest the use of a metallized mylar baloon.

hydrogen molecules are diatomic, not as small as helium, which diffuses out through aluminized mylar.

you could make this and make a banger...if it did not bang as you inflated it...

Well well, I did not expect to receive any reply at all, but it turn to be interesting.

To: TVP 45 - You have your point about costs and all that, but when I started the thread I just wanted to share info with people involved in that as a hoby.

It just sound as something exciting to play with as I have plenty of spare time. And as I notice on the net, there is a great volume of peope probing and asembling whatnot in theyr garages

Thank you everybody for reply.

P.S.

If anyone of you lives in South Africa and is interested in further research, please reply.

hey there, i was reading this as research since i want to build one, i happen to live in pretoria, south africa

To the Guest who lives in South Africa: My Cell: 0782525405, if you interested of what I do.

Did you come right with plans for a hho welder? I live in Nelspruit, South AFRICA, pls contact me via email address: sheikh@global.co.za or 0825604187. THX. Does anyone have PLANS to build an HHO welder please?

Hi there, I am in Nelspruit, and interested in building an HHO welder. My contact number is 0825604187.

Hi there, I live in Nelspruit and am very interested to develop a HHO welding torch and electrolyser to produce the HHO. Please contact me at sheikh@global.co.za

My tel 013-7533365 ofice , or cell 082 5604 187

Look forward to hear from you,

Rahim

Well, never being one to quit beating a dead horse....

I have close to no experience with any kind of jewelery, so I'll take your word about the oxy-hydrogen being good. I have worked some with small platinum wires (54AWG if I remember right) and they welded OK with oxy-acetylene.

I don't doubt that water welders exist and that they work. But I have a fair amount of experience (and even a little theoretical knowhow) about gas combustion and I will swear on a stack of Machinery's Handbooks that there is no such thing as HHO - only oxygen-hydrogen being disassociated in water.

I have burned most fuel gases at stoich-sometimes I didn't like the results-and there's nothing magic about it. I suspect the water welders can run that way due to the entrained water vapor.

As to hydrogen embrittlement not being a problem, it is the one of the most significant tube leak causes in the nuclear industry. Westinghouse and B&W spent small fortunes on this problem.

Normally, I would just say to do whatever turns you on with the water welders, except that I've also made and tested flame arresters and the ones I often see described for water welders scare the bejabbers out of me. They often mention a turn-off sequence for safety and that says to me that the arrester depends on gas flow to help fight flame propagation, and that's plain wrong. A proper flame arrester works whether you turn off the torch first or the gas.

Of course, I've done some really dumb things myself. And, blown up a few things. And have a couple small scars. So...

The flame arrestors are a packing of fine metal granules that prevent a detonation wave or flame front from propagating by cooling the flame fron. They are much like the Davy safety lamp the miners use.

The other safety feature is there is no bulk storage. Just the small amount in the tubes and above the electrolyzer, and they make these strong enough to hold the blast.

as for HOH or whatever. These gasses exist as diatomic molecules, H2 and O2, so the proper way is to say H2 +1/2O2. They are just using thet notation to differ from reacted product we call H2O

Thank you gentelmen for participation on the subject and no matter to some scepticle

oppinions I will go on as I already have purchased all the parts nessesary for initial experiment I will keep you posted as the experiment progress.

Let us know how it works out!

The rental on my oxy-acetylene tanks is not insignificant for "hobby use".

I also notice many welding manuals stress keeping the work piece and welding rods dry. Water contamination = Hydrogen being dissolved into the iron. Some suggest for critical welds warming pieces in an oven for several hours.

Thre is a lot a info on the net. At this stage I have downladed a full manual called: Stan Meyer Replication- from site: www.waterpoweredcar.com

I am seriously determined to make that cell and see how it realy work in the course of next week and I will keep the forum abrest as I progres.

Festrive and happy holidays to you all!

Just for clarification, a mixture consisting of 2(H2) and O2 will not spontaneously recombine, nor will UV light set it off. Needs a spark..

Also, like "flash powder", although it goes boom with a vengeance, it is not technically an explosion, since the combustion products are not gaseous, but rather (in this case), a liquid..

I would appreciate if any/all of you reply with a coment on all that resent info about hydrogen boost to gasoline running vehicles using pulsing DC.There are whole lot of diagrams,patents and claims on that matter. Most popular could easily bie found on the net, surching: Bob Boyce, Stan Mayer and Dave Lowton? Thank you

It seems that Stan Meyer secured a patent for improved electrolysis of water by using a certain frequency to dissociate the Hydrogen and Oxygen from each other. It seems that it hits a resonant frequency of water (somewhat similar to how microwaves heat food) that breaks the molecule apart. From memory, the frequency is around 17–24kHz. His unit produced much more Hydrogen and Oxygen ("Hydroxy", "Brown's Gas", "HHO", whatever you want to call it) than DC electrolysis and the cell did not heat up in the same way that DC electrolysis cells do.

In over-simplistic terms, traditional, DC electrolysis is like a resistor and requires a conductor (a dissolved salt of some kind) to allow current to pass. Meyer's device is like a capacitor and hence can even operate with distilled water (which baffles some folk).

stan meyer has died

Stan did stumble onto a frequency but had difficulty in replicating and stabilizing it - resonance frequency shifts!

He instead used water injection which is also a good idea - there are now many high pressure water injector systems available for using water as a combustible fuel.

The water/hydroxy gas mix would also be a good fuel, but how well it would behave under compression and in what ratio is unknown. Fuel for thought.

The hydroxy gas needs a back flash arrestor - best I have seen is one made from a cylinder packed tightly with fine bronze wool and more importantly having a very fine stainless steel mesh at the ends. The fine mesh will not allow the passage of a flame and it will not decompose such as Cu and steel mesh will do.

I have also seen that nickel is a good metal for using as the electrodes and may not suffer from passivity issues such as stainless steel does.

But one thing is for sure - make the flame arrestor first and perhaps even fit two in series - well before bothering to muck about with making the generator/pwm box - these are relatively easy although time consuming. Parallel plates are more efficient as there is a much greater surface area due to using both sides of an electrode in the chain - keep the plate distance small and use clean water with regular flushes.