Electrolysis Units

Hello nahj9,

You will want DC. AC will give you mixed highly flammable gas. Have you tried to google oxygen generation? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=oxygen+generation&start=10&sa=N That should keep you busy for a while.

Brad

www.waterpoweredcars.com

the cheapest simplest wayis get an old 6 volt,or new,6 volt lantern battery, take it apart and gethe 2 carbon rods out that are connected to the terminals, maka u shaped container out of 3 pieces of pvc pipe and 2 pvc 90 degree elbows. place a rod in each opening and hook up any dc transformer to them. a battery charger, an electric train transformer,etc. fill it with water and turn on the current. i forget which side gives off hydrogen and which side produces o2.you should see small bubbles almost immediatly start forming. this should cost you less than 20 bucks. or you can just hook up a 12 volt batery to the rods.leave the terminals attatched to the rods for an easy connection.as for efficency, they are not efficent.if you figure out an efficent extraction method, you will become rich and famous.the higher the voltage and amrage, the faster your gas will produce.

Add a pinch of salt to start your electrolyte, after that use distilled water or if you run it very long you will get a buildup of water impurities.

Brad

You can make one at home, it is pretty easy. Are you required to store any of the liberated gases? How much storage is required?

You didn't say how much oxygen you need. If the above posts won't do it, try a molecular sieve. Medical units are available for under $1000 (I think about $600-800 US) Larger units are used by the USAF to fill oxygen bottles on aircraft.

O₂ is also used in oxy-acetylene welding. It might be cheaper than doing it yourself if you need a bunch of the stuff, and available at welding supply stores.

DC ONLY!! This does not HAVE to be a battery. It can be a DC power supply (say 12 volt) powered from the wall socket. I have used a small auto battery charger for this purpose. In my case, I was using this with a sulpheric acid solution to anodyze aluminum parts.

H₂ is attracted to the negative side and O₂ is attracted to the positive side. Also, you will generate twice as much hydrogen as oxygen. Look at the molecule H₂O.

Distilled water is a very poor conductor of electricity thus the pinch of salt (mentioned above) is used to get the current flowing.

Hope this might help

Bill

Distilled water is a very poor conductor of electricity thus the pinch of salt (mentioned above) is used to get the current flowing.

Salt (NaCl) is the wrong choice of electrolyte since water electrolysis requires a voltage of at least ca. 1.5 V, and the chloride ion (Cl^-) oxidizes to chlorine gas (Cl₂) at 1.36 V, thereby interfering with oxygen production, and corroding the electrodes. Electrolyzers generally use either sulfuric acid or potassium hydroxide (or sodium hydroxide) as the electrolyte. In sulfuric acid solution, use platinum or glassy graphite electrodes (Pt catalyzes the cathode reaction). In hydroxide solution, nickel metal is an efficient electrode, but less expensive and almost as good is stainless steel. Of course home-made electrolysis is very dangerous if done on a large scale -- both due to the corrosive electrolyte and the explosiveness of H₂/O₂ mixtures. Use a commercially available electrolyzer instead?

Good to know, I had not thought about better alternatives to make your electrolyte for (2)H₂+O₂ production. Only that the water leaves as a product and suspended solids remain. Salt works but the end product I was making was the electrolyte not the gasses.

GA

Brad

UV,

Interesting that you used electrochemistry to prepare electrolyte ions. I experiment with these sorts of reactions for fun. I've heard of attempts to make copper hydroxy-chlorides by passing DC current (about 2 V) through copper wires immersed in aqueous sodium chloride (NaCl) solutions. Something I plan to play with. The chemistry is a little tricky.

At the anode (positive electrode), copper gets oxidized to copper(II) ion:

Cu⁰ ---> Cu²⁺ + 2 e^-

Another reaction also occurs at the anode, oxidation of chloride ion to chlorine gas:

2 Cl^- ---> Cl₂ + 2 e^-

Some of the chlorine gas escapes (don't snort it unless you want to be knocked on your ars!) and some of it attacks the copper electrodes to form copper(II) chloride:

Cu⁰ + Cl₂ ---> Cu²⁺ + 2 Cl^-

At the cathode (negative electrode), water gets reduced to hydrogen gas and hydroxide ions:

4 H₂O + 4 e^- ---> 2 H₂ + 4 HO^-

Notice that oxygen is not formed when copper is used as the anode (need something more inert). Next, the copper(II) ions, hydroxide ions, and chloride ions form a colloidal precipitate that eventually settles out as (among other byproducts) a pretty blue-green mixture of copper hydroxy-chlorides trimorhps (isomers) known as "atacamite", "paratacamite", and "botallackite". These are some of the minerals that give the hard green patina seen on old copper and bronze statues and artifacts that weathered near the sea. Can you tell that I love electrochemistry and obscure minerals and their old names?

2 Cu²⁺ + Cl^- + 3 HO^- ---> Cu₂Cl(OH)₃

My equations aren't balanced overall because other products are formed too due to the presence of carbon dioxide in the air, e.g., copper(II) hydroxy-carbonate, Cu₂CO₂(OH)₂ aka malachite, and Cu₃(CO₂)₂(OH)₂, azurite.

Actually I was making nano metallic oxides. Salt was may starter but soon (relative term) the electrolyte was full of small metal molecule clusters that the oxygen would bind with. I may have been able to condensate them that small out of a plasma but this was much easier.

Brad

Actually I was making nano metallic oxides.

For use as a catalyst? That's the application I've heard about for nano metal oxides.

Some but mostly just to see if I could do it. Certain reactions are highly accelerated by surfaces that are covered in a specific sized nano texture, even condensation.

Also certain minerals are more readily absorbed by cells once they are small enough to pass through into the cells.

Brad

Hey, good argument. Just wanted to say change the electrolyte to NaoH! With NaCl the chlorine forms at the cathode and not oxygen! Very dangerous on those hydrogen assisted projects! Go to www.idiotit.com for more...