A Hydrogen Generator 

Haha! The power supply could definitely do with a nicer case. I've been using that janky cardboard box for a long while now. I'll make it look nicer one day... hopefully.

@@ScrapScience hey if it gets the job done lol!!! Its not the paint brush.. but the artist.. and your a dam good artist !!:)

Thanks for the tip!

@@ScrapScience mylar, potato chip bags. 😀

KOH is actually ideal for water electrolysis, around 5-10% will be good

KOH is much better but it's also more corrosive and dangerous, also baking soda gives off CO2 at the anode not oxygen. The resistance of NaHCO3 is muchh higher than NaOH

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed. There are many electrochemically inert electrolytes that will work for water electrolysis in principle. Sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate, sodium sulfate, sodium hydroxide, and all of their corresponding potassium salts will work if you have unreactive electrodes. This is because they are made up of ions that are completely electrochemically inert under normal conditions (which means your products will always be H2 and O2, provided your electrode materials don't react in any way). Of these main options, the potassium salts are better, since (as you've said) K+ is more mobile than Na+. Additionally, the mobility of the anions follows the trend: OH- > CO3(2-) > HCO3- > SO4(2-), so the hydroxides are most ideal. NaOH and KOH also give the benefit of being extremely basic, which allows you to use a nickel anode without any significant corrosion over time. Other electrolytes usually require more expensive anodes like platinum in order to avoid corrosion. In general, KOH is a clear winner as the electrolyte, but it's a little tricky for me to find any, so I've used NaOH (which is the next best thing).

I have been using lead electrodes and sulphuric acid as electrolyte (30%) And a microwave transformer I modified it for 6.5volts and 30 amps And it works excellent It gets hot (30 ducking amps duh) but if I make an electrolyte circulating system that could fix that

@@koukouzee2923 what is the current density with lead electrodes?

I'm afraid there really aren't many ways of making sodium that are easier than electrolysing molten sodium hydroxide, especially not ones that involve electrolysis. There is, of course, Nurdrage's 'menthol catalysed magnesium reduction method', which is about as easy as it gets for making sodium (this doesn't involve electrolysis). Beyond that, you could conceivably electrolyse sodium perchlorate in a propylene carbonate solvent at room temperature (probably under inert atmosphere and very dry conditions) to make sodium. However, if you can't get sodium, you probably can't get propylene carbonate or an inert atmosphere. Other than that, the electrolysis of molten sodium hydroxide is about the only way to do it. Molten sodium chloride is also a possibility, but that's even more difficult generally.

Yeah definitely. Volume is always pretty difficult to judge just on sight. When I was filming that bit, I was pretty convinced that the oxygen had more than half the volume of the hydrogen (I was doing my best to judge the cubic relationship between diameter/volume). But now that I look back on the footage, the ratio looks a lot more like 2:1 than I thought...

If it's a good plating, then yes it will do fine.

I've looked into this a lot in the past. The electrolysis stage (to generate persulfuric acid) doesn't seem too tricky, but it's the vacuum distillation step afterwards (to convert the persulfuric acid into peroxide) that's a little bit beyond my ability at this point in time. One day I'll hopefully have the setup to be able to pull it off, and I'll give it a go, but for now it's a little bit too difficult to try.

fluorescent glow tube from a light

based on that, the plate capacitor with electrolyte is the best generator

as much plate surface area you have, the better you have total conductivity, amps

carbon to hydrogen forced electrolytic oxidation below 1.23, at 0.2v

destructive distillation of biomass into carbon and hydrogen, water, all co/h2 to c/h2/h2o

Awesome explanation, thanks! I've always loved the zener diode representation of electrolytic cells, it's a very elegant electrical representation of the whole process.

It's the first step in a very very long term goal where we'll be making hydrogen peroxide from the hydrogen/oxygen output. I haven't made any progress with it at this stage, but I'll get there eventually.

​@@ScrapScienceThats sounds interesting do you have more information on it?

Thanks! Yeah, I'm afraid the nickel anode can't be used to make chlorine, it'll just form nickel chloride in solution instead. Even if the electrodes were inert, the poor quality separator means we'd be generating mostly chlorates on the anode instead of chlorine gas. It's funny you mentioned peroxide though, since that's the major reason I made this generator in the first place. Eventually, the H2/O2 gasses from this thing will hopefully be used as inputs for the fully catalytic anthraquinone process for making H2O2 (I've given up on the direct electrolytic production). That's a long, long way away though, so don't get your hopes too high.

Definitely! I bought some urea specifically for testing this not long ago, so I'll be trying it out at some point in the future. To be honest, I'm most impressed by the opportunity to make nearly pure nitrogen gas...

@@ScrapScience True, especially for home organic chemistry it can be godsent.

How can nitrogen be made with this contraption? Imagine how much money can be saved not buying gas canisters if you're doing reactions with inert gas

@@bobsagely812 In case of urea electrolysis, on one electrode you are producing hydrogen and other mixture of N2 and CO2. And with lower voltage than splitting H2O. True is that even cheaper nitrogen source are medical oxygen concentrators: in their case enriched nitrogen is byproduct of oxygen concentration. And because they use just molecular sieves it is even cheaper source. Everything depends on amount of nitrogen that you need, small scale, electrolysis, medium, oxygen concentrator can be great, even bigger scale, nitrogen bottle or special separation membrane. Technology depending on your needs.

Ah yes! I've been a fan of NightHawkInLight for a long while now. His hydrogen/oxygen generator video was excellent (though the corrosion of his electrodes did make me a little nervous).