Alan Smith's HHO Experiment Report #1

Here’s an initial report from Alan Smith at Leap Forward Laboratory who has begun work on the HHO/’H-Cat’ experiment that has been commissioned by E-Cat World readers.

I started running system tests outside the calorimeter using the simplest system, the catalyst block to ‘burn’ the HHO gas produced by the electrolyzer. Since this was an early test, the concentration of KOH in the electrolyzer was deliberately low (2%) in order to limit the current draw and the HHO production. Obviously too low, since despite havving 150A @12V available I was only drawing about 10A (120Watts) and the gas production is too low to do more than get the ‘burner’ end of the system warm.

Pure water has quite high electrical resistance. The higher the resistance the less current the cell draws, and the less HHO is produced. Since I have quite large plate area and a lot of power available, I started out working at a low concentration. It is easy to change the electrolyte and put in stronger stuff which conducts more current and makes more HHO.

I increased the KOH level to 5% -about right, electrolyzer pulling 300 watts total which produced plenty of H2. As expected the catalyst started to get nice and hot, but sadly, after about eight minutes of starting the HHO production what happens to everybody in this game happened — I had a flashback that blew the safety valve assembly completely off the top of the electrolyzer and cracked a few bits here and there; but there was no serious damage. The blast ran back through the system all the way through the gas drier and into the copper condensation tube on top of the electrolyzer.

It also blew the catalyst slug out of the top of the holder. It quite an impressive bang, but all the safety precautions pretty much did what they should. I think I will have to put more ceramic wool in the small glass chamber underneath the catalyst holder to try to prevent flashback. I’ll do another run later — I have epoxied the safety valve (the black thing on top of the big copper tube) in place- waiting for it to go off.

On a positive note, the electrolyzer works very well. More to come in the near future. Below is a photo of the setup I am using (before the explosion). The copper cylinder between the catalyst and electrolyzer is the gas drier.

ECAT HHO 1 002

Alan Smith