New Dry Cell Idea

[Bassman]

I was testing my Dry Cell today and I was checking the temperature with a Heat Sensing Gun and a thought came to me that if I had made a 6" X 6" cell with extra plate length on the sides, like an 8" X 6" with the gasket still being a 6" X 6", that it would leave an inch of plates on each side like cooling fins.

Has anyone tried that?

[Carolinablue]

Sounds good.....

[coffeeachiever]

That's good thinking.

[Dave Nowlin]

If you bring the plastic end plates out far enough to protect the edges of the plates from making contact and shorting out, then the cooling effect may be lost due to poor air circulation. If you don't protect the edge of the plates and something shorts across them you will be a very unhappy camper.

Dave Nowlin

[BoyntonStu]

I was testing my Dry Cell today and I was checking the temperature with a Heat Sensing Gun and a thought came to me that if I had made a 6" X 6" cell with extra plate length on the sides, like an 8" X 6" with the gasket still being a 6" X 6", that it would leave an inch of plates on each side like cooling fins.

Has anyone tried that?

Amoeba Cell Air Cooled Parallel 6 Cells



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x_AFXu9q9k

BoyntonStu

[Bassman]

If you bring the plastic end plates out far enough to protect the edges of the plates from making contact and shorting out, then the cooling effect may be lost due to poor air circulation. If you don't protect the edge of the plates and something shorts across them you will be a very unhappy camper.

Dave Nowlin

Not necessarily, Air flows through the fin slots, not across. But that doesn't mean that the plastic end plate couldn't extend past the plates and have a slot cut in it or holes drilled through it in the extended area. Probably, some kind of mesh grill could be added around it for further protection.

The plates would have to have a hole cut through them, large enough for the compression bolts with an insulator around them to pass through. There could also be a deflector added that would make the air flow up through the fin slots.

If you needed more cooling, just extended it wider.

My next idea was to cool the liquid or solution. A piece of stainless tubing with fins attached behind the grill of the vehicle with the output of the cell connected to it by hose and then a hose connected to the other end of the tubing and connecting to your storage tank.

[Gforce]

The one thing I would be concerned about is starting to get a voltage drop across the plate. I believe the reason we are limited to 6" x 6" cells is because going beyond that the voltage would drop and so would production. You may be able to minimize this by only growing the plate in one axis.

The other thing is excess heat is waste heat. If you are generating too much waste heat then you are wasting energy. The thing is to optimize the cell so heat rise is a minimum.

[coffeeachiever]

I did not know we were limited to 6x6. This is the first time I have read that.... Am I missing something?

I thought most used 6x6 for it's smaller size (easier to mount). My cell is 8x8 because I have a ton of room and the surface area is nearly 2x that of a 6x6 (64 sqin compared to 36 sqin per plate)

Ive never heard of a size restriction on the plates either. EBN sells an 8x8. Semi trucks have been known to use some pretty big plates.
If one were to use plates so large that voltage drop became an issue, wouldn't you just decrease the number of neutrals?

[H2OPWR]

Your voltage drop between the plates should not be affected by your plate size at all. I have tested from 4X4 up to now 6X8 plates. The voltage drop is a constant formula of source voltage devided by plate gap. What drops is the amp's per square inch of plate surface. I am still not sold on the supposed fact that there is an optimum number of amps to run per square inch. The only difference that I have noticed is the cell temp. Seems to me that the lower the amps per square inch the lower the heat gain. Maybe that is just because of the extra electrolite solution that the extra space holds. I am not sure but I would like someone to explain this that has done some good testing on the subject. I feel that the extra HHO production gained with raising the amps per square inch comes from the electrolite and HHO heating up and expanding causing higher measured HHO but no more real gas. If I am off base would someone explain how this really works.

[SmartScarecrow]

one thing to keep in mind regarding heat is that we are not really performing electrolysis here, we are doing electroplating ... the release of hydrogen and oxygen is a by product of the electroplating process ... heat is generated by the metallic salts, either potassium or sodium (depending on KOH or NaOH) being plated to the positive plate as part of the reaction ...

once a sufficient layer of potassium or sodium is deposited on the surface of the positive plate it will get a golden patina color to it ... at this point the plate is considered to be "conditioned" ...

heat is a byproduct of the chemical reaction caused by KOH being broken up and then recombined ... because of this, heat is pretty much unavoidable ... get used to it, you will generate some heat ...

heat can be your friend ... tests would indicate that the efficiency of the production of hydroxy increases significantly as temperature increases ... tests under pressures up to 15 psi and temperatures up to 250F have been conducted and it looks like some modest gains in performance might be possible ...

BUT, KOH boils at about 140F and many of the materials we use for gaskets and hoses start to break down at temperatures about 150F ... so in most cases, its best to do something to control the temperature of you system and try to keep it under 130F or so ...

In a dry cell, we use a fairly large volume of fluid in a combination reservoir/bubbler ... if configured and mounted properly, convection flow will move fluid through the device and provide adequate cooling to keep the temperature in check ... in some designs, a pump and radiator is employed force fluid through the device and dump excess heat ... but in most cases, this extreme should not be required ...

bottom line, the biggest cause of excessive heat buildup is over voltage ... you really need to design your system in such a way that your per plate gap voltage is as close to 2v as possible ... if you drop under 2v per plate gap, your efficiency will drop like a stone ... a little over 2v per plate gap will slowly drop in efficiency ... so in general, its better to use 2.4v than 1.8v ... but as you start getting close to 3v per plate gap, you will be making more steam and excess heat than hydroxy gas ...

another big cause of over heating is trying to push too many watts at a device that doesn't have enough surface area to support it ... in general, you will want to have 4 square inches of surface area for every watt of energy you apply ... so if you have a device with 1000 square inches, you really want to keep your applied wattage to no more than 250 watts ... in a 12v system, this would be about 20 amps ... if you over amp a device with too little surface area, the result will be heat, steam and foaming ...

anyway, this is a very long post that I suspect very few will find interesting so I will get off my soap box now ... hope this helps someone move forward ...