Meyer WFC Replication Project

The Electropolished WFC Replication Project

Report of project results

TODO: work this out;

Short outline: For this project, I received quite a lot of generous donations, for which I am still very thankfil. However, I feel, felt, like I let these people down.

And, in a way, I have.

Nonetheless, it were their donations, which made it possible at all to learn enough about Stan Meyer's WFC, that I can eliminate one possibility: electropolishing. That is: WITH A STANDARD ELECTROPOLISHING PROCESS

Also I got into quite a ride regarding my personal situation, like having to deal with being blessed and cursed with #autism (Asperger's).

So, I have been unable to report on my findings and keeping the project documentation up to date.

Fortunately, all this work did help to make significant steps in our scientific knowledge, so let's look forward instead of backward.

Thanks,

Arend Lammertink, MScEE.

Old page contents.

This project is aimed at providing experimental proof for my theory about Stan Meyer's "car on water" by means of building a working proof of concept prototype, based on one the most succesful replications thus far, the one by Dr. Scott Cramton. The most important change will be to exchange the standard RVS pipes with electropolished ones.

Now that I have received some donations and already covered the required funds, it is time to go from theory to practice and setup the project in such a way that as many people as possible can replicate this stuff.

This is a work in progress and the page is under heavy construction, so it's a bit shaky at the moment :)

I made a project directory at my server: http://www.tuks.nl/WFCProject/ In it, there is a preliminary shopping list made a couple of months ago for a friend of mine: http://www.tuks.nl/WFCProject/shopping_list.xls

And I started a thread at the open source energy forum for discussion and reporting about this particular project:

http://open-source-energy.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=1401

At the time of making the preliminary shopping list, we did not know of the electropolishing yet. The total amount for that was € 307,51, which was based on a Dave Lawton kit.

Because the Scott Cramton kit appears to be of a higher quality than Dave's, I want to go for that one.

Costs for a Cramton electrolyser kit without the tubes and a Dave Lawton PLL amount about EUR 295, excluding p&p. These are described further down.

There are quite a lot of quotes in this article.

Quotes are formatted by indention and italic font like this.

Basic plan

The ultimate goal of this project is to replicate a production version of Stan Meyer's Water Fuel Cell, of which the design has surfaced and CAD drawings have been made of, which can be produced in Asia:

high res

In order to be able to do that, an open source POC (proof of concept) is needed. So, the first goal of the project is to build something that works for as little costs as possible. The idea for that is to replicate one of the existing replications and replace the stainless with electropolished stainless, either by having standard tubes electropolished or by buying of the shelf electropolished stainless.

The first problem to solve is the most difficult one, which is to replicate the cell itself. When that is done, the engine will have to be chosen and it will have to be investigated what adaptions are needed to the engine. One particular problem with a lot of engines is the so called "waste spark" problem, which is caused by the fact that the timing of the engine will have to be adjusted for it to properly work on hydrogen gas.

Patrick Kelly described a lot of details in chapter 10 of his "A Practical Guide to Free-Energy Devices", which is hosted at my site:

http://free-energy-info.tuks.nl/Chapt10.html

In principle, both square plate electrolysers as well as tube based electrolysers can be adapted by exchanging the stainless for electropolished. Actually, Stan experimented with square plate versions first:

high res

In Kelly's book, a number of successful replications are mentioned, which all use "conditioned" pipes. This is essentially a poor-man's version of electropolishing. Patrick writes:

The first significant replication of which I am aware, came from Dave Lawton of Wales. By using very considerable tenacity, he discovered the practical details of how to replicate one of Stan Meyer's early designs which is called by the rather confusing name of the "Water Fuel Cell". Dave's work was copied and experimented with by Ravi Raju of India who had considerable success and who posted videos of his results on the web. More recently, Dr Scott Cramton of the USA has adapted the design construction slightly and achieved very satisfactory rates of electrical efficiency, producing some 6 lpm of hydroxy gas for just 3 amps of current at 12 volts.

Dave Lawton's replication can here be seen in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpu3zgSeLSo

Electropolished tubes

Electropolishing is a process used for passivating stainless steel. The big difference between other passivation methods and electropolishing is that it grows a much thicker layer of Cr2O3, which is an insulating dielectric layer with very similar properties as aluminum oxide used in most electrolytic capacitors.

It is possible to do this yourself, but the aim is to make use of off the shelf electropolished stainless, because the quality is likely to be higher and replications are also easier to make.

I have placed inquiries about the possibilites at a number of companies in The Netherlands. Ideally, off the shelf stainless is used and welded with mounting material, so the whole construction can be electropolished AFTER the welding work. However, off the shelf electropolished pipes can also be used, but then one has to take care of insulating the non-polished parts of the construction.

A company in the area has offered to do the electropolishing for friend's price of EUR 75,-. for my prototype. Replicators are on their own on this part.

That means we can do with the tubes kit offered by the same supplier, which are about EUR 450,-. for a set of 2x9 pipes (price listed on website is for just one set of two pipes, we need 9 of these).

The idea will be to first weld the mounting strips or threaded stainless rods to the tubes, before having them electropolished. For the construction, we consult Patrick Kelly's chapter 10:

The pipe arrangement is shown here:
The outer pipes are drilled and tapped to take either a 6/32” nylon bolt available from Ace hardware stores in the USA, or alternatively, drilled and tapped to take a 4 mm nylon bolt. Three of these bolt holes are evenly spaced around the circumference of each end of all of the outer pipes.
These nylon bolts are used to adjust and hold the inner pipe gently in the exact centre of the outer pipe. It is very important that these bolts are not over tightened as that would hinder the vibrations of the inner pipe. The bolts are adjusted so that a feeler gauge shows that there is exactly the same 1.2 mm gap all round, both top and bottom. The weight of the inner pipe is carried by a 3/4 inch (18 mm) wide strip of stainless steel bent into a Z-shape, and none of the weight is carried by the nylon bolts. Dr Cramton describes this Z-shaped steel strip as a “spring” and stresses its importance in constructing a set of resonating pipe pairs. The arrangement is shown here:
The supporting springy strip of steel is shown in blue in the above diagram as it also forms the electrical connection for the inner tubes. The outer tubes are held securely in position by two plastic discs which form a tight push-fit inside the 6” (150 mm) diameter acrylic tube which forms the body of the cell. The cell is sealed off with plastic caps (ideally, the upper one being screw threaded for easy maintenance) and the electrical connections are carried through the lower cap using 1/4” (6 mm) x 20 stainless steel bolts. The bolts are sealed using washers and rubber O-rings on both sides of the cap.
For clarity, the diagram above shows only the electrical connections for the inner pipes. The electrical connections for the outer pipes are shown in the following diagram. The connections are made at both the top and the bottom of each outer pipe by attaching a stainless steel hose clamp with a stainless steel bolt welded to each clamp. The wiring is then carried across inside the cell so that all six connection points for each set of three pipes are carried out through the base of the cell with just one bolt, again, sealed with washers and rubber O-rings. The nine pipe pairs are electrically connected in three sets of three, and each set is fed with a separate phase of a 3-phase waveform. This sets up an interaction through the water and produces a complex pulsing waveform with each set of pipes interacting with the other two sets. The sets are arranged so that the individual pipes of each set are interspersed with the pipes of the other two sets, making the sets overlap each other as shown in this diagram:
For clarity, the diagram above does not show the electrical connections for the inner pipes and it omits the pipes of the other two groups of three, the water-level sensor, the gas take off pipe and the gas-pressure sensor.

Which tube to polish?

As I posted on the forum, there is a very important video made by Prof. Gerald Pollack, which actually (almost) explains how Brown's gas is being formed at the anode of our WFC and what Brown's gas actually is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS4PkR_BkRo

Gerald Pollack - This paper largely comprises a draft chapter of my forthcoming book, The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid and Vapor (Ebner and Sons, 2012). I preface it by providing some background. School children learn that water has three phases: solid, liquid and vapor. But we recently uncovered what appears to be a fourth phase. This phase occurs next to water-loving (hydrophilic) surfaces. It is surprisingly extensive, projecting out from the hydrophilic surface by up to millions of molecular layers.
A principal attribute of this phase is that it excludes particles and solutes because of its liquid crystalline nature. We have therefore labeled this phase the "exclusion zone" or EZ for short. Of particular significance is the observation that the EZ is [negatively] charged; and, the water just beyond is oppositely charged. This creates a battery that can produce current. We found that light recharges this battery. Thus, water can receive and process electromagnetic energy drawn from the environment - much like plants. The material below outlines the evidence that water acts as a battery.

While Prof. Pollack's work does not explicitly explain what Brown's gas is, his findings appear to be closely related to the research performed by Chris Eckman on Brown's gas, which you can find in this post.

Based on this material, we can deduce that a Pollack "EZ" layer is forming in the water, whereby we get a negatively charged zone or layer forming the interface between the metal/dielectric and the bulk water. Meanwhile, the "bulk" water becomes rich of H+ ions, thus becoming acid. This has been measured and shown by Prof. Pollack and is thus known to occur under certain circumstances. The most important criterium for this to happen is when a hydrophilic substance forms the boundary for the water, which can be as thin as one atomic layer thick deposited on some other material IIRC from Pollack's presentation.

Now this EZ layer is negatively charged, because it consists of ice-like honeycomb crystal structure whereby the H+ ions that bind the layers together are absent and have moved to the "bulk" water. Now when there is an electric field present, because of the positive plate being nearby, this positive charge attracks the negatively charged "EZ" chrystals, thus enabling the EZ zone to grow much thicker than without the presence of an electric field.

However, when you remove the positive charge on the metal plate (fast enough), you are left with a layer consisting of many many sheets of negatively charged crystalic structures, which repell one another. It does not take much fantasy to realize that this will not result in a stable layer, especially because the field of the (still) polarized dielectric, which has an opposit direction as the field which caused it, pushes the negatively charged crystalic structured layers away from the interface as soon as the charge on the metal plate is gone.

In other words: the negatively charged EZ layer is pushed by force into to "bulk" water by the polarized dielectric layer whenever the "capacitor" is discharged fast enough. And while we don't know how this works in detail, we do know what the result of this is: Brown's gas. And because we also know that these crystalic sheets consists of many, many atoms in alignment, it is clear that acoustic vibration is benifitial in breaking up these sheets, so bubbles of "Brown's gas" can be formed.

So, we get Brown's gas forming at the anode and up to a certain distance in the "bulk" water, when using pulsed D.C. to rapidly charge / discharge the capacitance formed by the metal plate itself.

However, we also get H+ ions in the fluid, which we need to get rid of. Fortunately, these are attracted by the negatively charged cathode, so it would be a good idea to have these pick up an electron, so H2 gas can be formed at the cathode.

This way, we get Brown's gas production at the anode and H2 gas at the cathode, provided the H+ ions can pick up an electron at the cathode. In other words: it would not be a good idea to electropolish the cathode, because that would make it more difficult for H+ ions to pick up electrons and thus would restrain the H2 gas production at the cathode.

And therefore I will only electropolish the anode and NOT the cathode.

Which tube should be the positive or anode?

Well, one can choose.

I was thinking of making the inner one the positive, but I haven't fully decided yet. It may be beneficial to take the outer tubes as positive, since these have a slightly bigger surface area. If you want a visible glow, then you would want to take the outer tubes as anodes, which *might* also show the glow at the outside. Might be cool, especially in a demonstration unit as I am planning to build. :)

Lawton used the outer tubes as positive and connected all the inner tubes together as cathodes, according to Kelly's:

http://free-energy-info.tuks.nl/Chapt10.html

Cramton did it the other way around and just wired all outer tubes together:

With the Cramton kit, one will have to drill and tap the outer tubes, which will have to be done before the electropolishing for optimal results. So, when using off-the-shelf electropolished, one might opt for using the inner tubes as positive. OTOH: one will need to make a connection and some support either way, so the small holes filled with nylon bolts might not be such a problem too. In the case of using off-the-shelf electropolished, one might consider insulating the contacts with some epoxy raisin or something anyway.

I was thinking of welding a threaded stainless rod to each tube before electropolishing, so the tubes have support at the bottom and each electrical connection is taken to the outside individually. This makes it possible to place the tubes in series, as Stan also did:

high res

It will also allow experimenting with two or three phases, such as Cramton did.

So, I think I will take the outer tubes as positive/anode, because I'd love to observe "the glow". :D

Electronics

For the electronics, Dave Lawton kits are very attractive, because there is one with PLL auto tuning feature, which is needed to maintain the acoustic resonance of the cell. Two versions of his electronics are available, though:

1) The Dave Lawton PWM PWM (pulse widh modulation) Kit;

2) The PLL auto-tuning kit, which can also be manually controlled.

One can choose for full kits, just the PCB, or a PCB kit.

Both of these require coils, which means we also needn at least one of these:

Dave Lawton Bifilar Kit - a simple kit consisting of a 100 x 10mm ferrite rod and 15mtrs of 21SWG ECW.

For experimenting with this, one can consider to take a few more of these.

This is the schematic of the PLL kit:

On this YouTube video, it is said that it is a good idea to replace the 200V mosfets with 600V ones:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhT9oF_2kek

In the video, they used a SPW47N60C3. I can't find that exact one at my supplier, but they do have the SPW 20 N 60 S5 N-channel, which is 20A instead of 47A.

I am also considering the STP 80 NF 10, which has an RDS(on) of 0.01 Ω, while being capable of handling 80A at 200V.

Diode placement

In the Dave Lawton circuits without PLL, the diode around the Mosfet is shown to connect to 12V to which also one of the coils is connected, while in the PLL circuit shown above it is connected to ground:

In the arrangement with an alternator also diodes are employed in a similar way. I suspected the diode needs to be in the position as in this picture, which makes sense because then it would allow the coils to discharge into the cell, so I asked Patrick Kelly, who replied:

"Dave called me this evening about your query on the FET diode in his PPL circuit. He says that it is there because some of the old FETs do not have an internal diode and the extrenal one is to address that situation. He says that you can put a diode from the FET to the positive rail if you want to."

Consider this schematic of a Bedini "Schoolgirl" variant, which is similar to our Mosfet driving circuit:

This circuit generates "spikes" with considerable voltage and Bedini calls these spikes "radiant energy", which he uses to charge batteries. If we add this extra diode to the PLL circuit, we not only protect our mosfet for high voltages, but we also enable the coils to discharge into the WFC. And then, we can opt for a pretty low voltage rated mosfet, which are much cheaper.

Electrolyser Kit

The easiest way to make a cell is to use a kit. The one by Scott Cramton appears to be very complete indeed. All that is missing is the tubes:

Scott Cramton Complete Electrolyser Kit consisting of the 1 x 150 x 750 x 3mm acrylic tube, 2 x HDPE end plates, 2 x tube mounting plates, 2 x gaskets, 1 x SC Plastic Fitting Kit, SC Fixings Kit, 4 x 1mtr x 10 studding bars, 16 x 10mm nut and 16 washers.

This is what the kit looks like:

high res

Feasibility of running a small 1 cylinder engine on the proposed cell

For an estimation of the feasibility of running a small engine on the proposed Cramton replication kit, we consult Patrick Kelly's Chapter 10:

In the UK, three men managed to do the same using just simple things which are within the scope of the average handyman in his workshop. They bought a standard petrol-driven electrical generator off eBay and managed to run it without using any petrol. They used a hydroxy gas flow which they measured at just 3 lpm and they test loaded the 5.5 kilowatt generator with 4 kilowatts of equipment. Afterwards they abandoned the generator and moved on to a much bigger engine as their plans are to sell electricity to the local power company.

[...]

The first significant replication of which I am aware, came from Dave Lawton of Wales. By using very considerable tenacity, he discovered the practical details of how to replicate one of Stan Meyer's early designs which is called by the rather confusing name of the "Water Fuel Cell". Dave's work was copied and experimented with by Ravi Raju of India who had considerable success and who posted videos of his results on the web. More recently, Dr Scott Cramton of the USA has adapted the design construction slightly and achieved very satisfactory rates of electrical efficiency, producing some 6 lpm of hydroxy gas for just 3 amps of current at 12 volts.

[...]

Much of this is not very important as it has been demonstrated that a gas production rate of around 3 lpm (180 lph) is sufficient to run a generator which produces 5,500 watts. Let us assume that the measured figure is 100% wrong and that it takes 360 lph of hydroxy gas, plus cold water fog, plus air, to run the generator, then:
Faraday would need 843 watts
Boyce would need 400 watts without pulsing
Boyce would need 72 watts with pulsing
Cramton would need 36 watts

Since we are building a Cramton replication with electropolished tubes which should at least perform equally well, we should be able to produce at least 6 lpm of gas for an input of less than 100 Watts, which should be more than sufficient to run a generator of over 5 kW under load. My generator is about 2.5 KW and my lawn mower engine is comparable in size, so it appears to be totally feasible to run one of these engines on the proposed Cramton replication kit.

Note that these numbers are related to HHO or Brown's gas systems, whereby addition of water fog to the gas mixture helps the burning process. We don't know yet for sure whether or not the electrolyser will produce H2/O2 gas or Brown's gas, or a mixture of the two. While in main stream science Brown's gas or HHO, as it is most commonly known, is ridiculed, this is a real phenomenon. See the "update" section in my article for more information.

However, this should not be any problem. For now, I assume that the electrolyser will produce a mixture very similar to the other electrolysers described by Patrick Kelly, who also describes exactly what needs to be done in order to run an engine on the gas produced by most electrolysers, which comes down to mixing the gas with "cold water fog":

There are three different ways to generate the spray of very fine water droplets which are a key feature of the success of this way of running the engine. One way is to use a Venturi tube, which, while it sounds like an impressive device, is actually very simple in construction:
It is just a pipe which tapers to a point and which has a very small nozzle. As the engine draws in the air/hydroxy mix on it's intake stroke, the mixture rushes past the nozzle of the Venturi tube. This creates an area of lower pressure outside the nozzle and causes water to exit through the nozzle in a spray of very fine droplets. Some perfume spray bottles use this method as it is both cheap and effective.

What is needed to make this work in practice?

As I posted on the forum, I have been lucky enough to be in contact with Frank Collaris, who did a lot of research on how to run engines on "brute force electrolysers". There's an article out in Dutch now about him and his company and there are quite a lot of people involved within and around his company. One can use Google translate to get a rough translation in English of the whole article.

I hand edited some of the more interesting parts:

In our laboratory we have been able to develop an improved cell which not only uses less energy, but also produces a higher quality gas. You heard it right. There are differences in the quality of the gas. These differences are even very large. Thus, it is not only important to look at the amount of gas, but also to the quality and to what you want to do with it. So we have learned how to make the gas do what we want it to do. We can make the gas more or less explosive this way. It is also possible to optimize the flame temperature by smart controlling and informing [measuring, data acquisition I guess].
We know the cells which have been around for many years in the trade [industry] which have holes in the plates. These holes have disappeared in our new cell. The water is brought into the cell in a different way and the gas is quickly discharged. As a result, there is no short-circuit current in the cell anymore. The result is that the cell is less hot and consumes less [energy]. Herewith, the explosive force has also increased sharply. Where we needed 30 liters of gas per minute before to run a motor 100% [on a water gas mixture], this now only consumes 20 liters. That's a nice difference. We have never tested this higher quality on fuel saving systems, but only at 100% [water gas mixture]. In addition, these new cells can be put under pressure and no longer have bolts going through them. The result is a cell that remains completely closed and causes no problems with possibly leaking rubbers. Also, an endurance test shows that there is no wear on the plates.

[...]

The Cawa engine
This is a so-called CHP-installation. This stands for cogeneration or combined heat and power. There is a petrol engine which is slightly adjusted for water gas, which is powering a dynamo [generator]. The heat from the engine can optionally be used to heat a home or a business premises. The electricity can be supplied back to the network, or can be used as a stand-alone system. The only thing the Cawa engine needs for this is tap water! The first Cawa engine is almost ready. It is a fully computerized system with unique solutions. The Cawa engine is calculated on 8500 operating hours. Various capacities can be realized from 50 to 6000 kWh. The system generating 50 kW electrical power costs € 85.000, - and has a payback period of about 1.5 to 2 years. The first model has an electrical capacity of 50 kWh[sic] and a thermal capacity of 65kWh[sic].
The Cawa engine is the breakthrough which has been worked on very hard within EvoMotion. The market will be turned quite upside down, since because of this abundance is created in a world dominated by scarcity. Not only do we do that with an adequate capacity, but the Cawa engine is also technically the most ingenious what can be offered in the CHP technology.

As is stated in the article, the first commercial system is not yet ready. Frank has done a lot of research on this stuff and he told me he needed about 6 kW of input power for the system mentioned in the article. He started with a small generator, which I have seen running on water gas two years ago in April 2012 at a free energy gathering in France, where we both attended and spent a couple of days together, although there was no closed loop or any demonstration of excess energy at the time.

In May 2012, they were to demonstrate their stuff, but quite a lot of things went wrong and the demonstration was, well, a disaster. The original critics site appears to be down, but I have a mirror.

Needless to say, Frank became a bit more careful with his communications with the outside world, as was also mentioned in the article above:

So, a lot of experience has been gathered in the course of time. Experience those who want to can draw from, because we believe in openness. We know that there are several manufacturers of watergascells which will run into the same problems. They will not communicate about this, however, because their starting position is to make a profit. This is of course everyone's right, but we have a difficulty with that when it comes at the expense of the customer. HHO is an alternative to fossil fuels and should be brought to the market with the utmost care, in order o avoid people not taking this alternative seriously because of unpleasant experiences. In our opinion, HHO deserves all the positive attention it can get. This has been a very important reason for us to stop the communication to the outside world for the time being until the moment that many questions are answered.

To come back to the question: What Frank and his team did was to make an existing (old) generator with a Mercedes engine completely computer controlled. Not only the ignition timing, but also the control of the electrolyser and water fog system. This enabled them to do a lot of experiments on-the-fly with a running system and also allowed them to tune the system to the application.

When we are talking about these kinds of "brute force" electrolysers, both the voltage and pulse frequency applied influence the kind of gas being produced. While we do not yet fully understand the exact physics involved, we do have enough evidence to support the hypothesis that HHO or Brown's gas is a phenomenon whereby water is transformed into a form consisting of crystalised sheets with a honeycomb structure, very similar to ice BUT without the H+ ions which bind the crystal sheets together as in ice. We also have reason to believe that the formation of gas bubbles somehow containing this particular shape of water involves the formation of a Pollack "EZ" zone, characterized by a negatively charged region forming the interface between the positive plate and the "bulk" water within the electrolyte.

The voltage across this "EZ" region appears to be a very important parameter controlling the thickness of this layer, because of the electric fields involved. It also appears that when the voltage across this interface is suddenly removed, we are left with an EZ layer which is unstable because the negatively charged crystal sheets repell one another. It appears that pulsed D.C. across this interface at the anode is the main mechanism for creating this "Brown's gas" which has a number of very strange properties, while acoustic resonance of the fluid column in the electrolyser adds additional instability to this EZ layer and thus appears to also influence the amount of Brown's gas being produced.

Besides this phenomenon, there is a considerable current being driven trough the electrolyte, which appears to be responsible for the creation of H2 / O2 gas along the normal electrolysis process.

So, you end up with a system that has a number of parameters which can be used to control the type of gas being produced:

1) Voltage across the plates. Higher voltages than 2V appear to increase the amount of H2/O2 gas formed along normal electrolysis, while voltages around 1.8V per cell appear to result in mostly Brown's gas being formed.

2) Total current trough the system. More net current trough the system appears to increase the amount of H2/O2 gas being formed along normal electrolysis.

3) Pulsed D.C. appears to enable the production of Brown's gas. The pulse width, on/off timing and frequency appears to control the thicnkess and instability of the EZ layer and thus influences the amount of Brown's gas being produced.

4) The frequency of the pulses also appears to connect to acoustic resonance of the fluid column in between the electrolyser plates and thus appears to influence the amount of Brown's gas being produced indirectly.

So, controlling and tuning all these parameters make it possible to control the quality of the gas being produced by the electrolyser and adapt this to the application, which is also what Frank has done.

And these are only the parameters related to the gas production. Other parameters which also need to be controlled are:

1) ignition timing (and "waste spark" suppression when applicable);

2) amount and quality of "cold water fog" injected into the air stream.

There appears to be a difference between "fog" and "mist". I haven't looked at this in detail, but the size of the droplets being injected appears to be yet another parameter which influences the result.

To cut a long story short: just about every parameter you can think of has to be made adjustable and then one can tune the system to find the "hot spots" which give the desired results. For each of these parameters there appears to be an optimal setting. Get one or two of these too far from their optimum in your particular system and you can forget about getting a working system.

Tuning of the pipes necessary?

Patrick Kelly stresses that it is necessary to tune the pipes in a Lawton/Cramton type of cell:

It needs to be stressed that Dr. Cramton’s cell is very close in construction principles to Dave Lawton’s cell and the quality of construction is very important indeed. The first and foremost point which can be easily missed is the absolutely essential tuning of all of the pipes to a single, common frequency. This is the equivalent of tuning a musical instrument and without that tuning, the essential resonant operation of the cell will not be achieved and the cell performance will not be anything like the results which Dr. Cramton and his team are getting.

However, I don't believe that is necessary, because it's the fluid which is supposed to vibrate and NOT the pipes themselves, just like it's the air that vibrates in an organ pipe or an oxen horn (the instrument I "play") and NOT the instrument itself.

And even when tuning of the pipes themselves would be helpful, the fact that Cramton's pipes are put into place holders after tuning, which restricts the tube's vibration and thus changes it's resonance frequency, would totally ruin the whole tuning effort.

So, because Cramton's cell worked fine, even though he tuned the pipes "in the air" before mounting which would be totally useless because of the mounting of the pipes in place holders, I am pretty sure there is no need at all to do so. So, I disagree with Patrick in this respect.

Also consider this image, wherein you see this PLL circuit along with a test cell in the upper part of the picture:

http://www.free-energy-info.tuks.nl/Chapt10.html

The two air-core coils are wound separately rather than bi-filar wound, and some experimentation with different types will be undertaken to see the effect on overall gas production. This circuit is shown in the following video, driving a 2.6 inch long pair of electrodes with a 2 mm gap between them, sitting in a test cell. The electrodes have seams and are made of an unknown quality of stainless steel and can be seen at the top of the photograph above. This video shows considerable gas production with almost no current draw and the cell staying completely cool.

The video shows that it works just fine without any tuning of the pipes whatsoever:

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

To me, that makes it pretty clear that the tuning method proposed by a/o Kelly is most likely a total waste of time and effort. Just make sure the length of the fluid column in the pipes is the same for all pipes and it will be just fine, as far as I can tell.

Engine and modification

Engine 1

I first intented to use my old lawn mower engine, which I intended to equip with an automotive alternator. The engine I intended to use is a Briggs and Stratton Quantum 35, which is rated 3.5 HP or about 2.6 kW:

More images here

Some diagrams about this engine can be found here and here. The engine is equipped with so-called Magnetron ignition, a solid state ignition system without contact breakers, further explained here. The ignition modules are still available.

From these diagrams it became clear that this engine is a so-called flat-head engine, whereby the valves are placed alongside the cylinder, which makes it pretty challenging to get rid of the waste spark problem. Irondmax posted some video's about this, wherein he shows a construction with gears and a chain:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9qtCWyxwng

This one shows the valve timing of a Briggs and Stratton engine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu9LosA7s8c

Change of plan - a Honda engine

Because of the waste spark problem and the fact that an automotive dynamo needs a considerable steering current for voltage regulation, which means it can't run without a battery, I decided to look for a reasonable used Honda engine with overhead valves (OHV). I have picked one up in the area, complete with generator:

For these, it is relatively easy to get rid of the waste spark problem:

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

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

With this engine, the waste spark problem can be tackled much easier, and the generator can deliver output without the need for any battery, which means it should be possible to eventually self-run the system without a battery connected to the system.

Engine adaptions

The engine itself will require a number of adaptions, which have been described by Patrick Kelly in detail:

http://free-energy-info.tuks.nl/Chapt10.html

One of the most important adaption to the engine itself is to adapt the spark timing and suppression of the "waste spark". Another important ingredient to the system is the mixing of "cold water fog" with the gas.

Kelly's "manual" includes a section "Running an Electrical Generator without Fossil Fuel", which explains the theory and basic steps:

In Broad Outline
In order to achieve this objective, very much like Stan Meyer, we need to feed the engine three things:
1. Air - this is fed in as normal through the existing air filter.
2. Hydroxy gas - how to make this has already been explained in considerable detail.
3. A mist of very small water droplets, sometimes called "cold water fog".
Also, we need to make two adjustments to the engine:
1. The spark timing needs to be retarded by about eleven degrees.
2. If there is a "waste" spark, then that needs to be eliminated.
To summarise then, a good deal of work needs to be done to achieve this effect:
1. An electrolyser needs to be built or bought, although the required gas production rate is not particularly high.
2. A generator of cold water fog needs to be made or bought.
3. Pipes need to be installed to carry these two items into the engine.
4. The engine timing needs to be retarded.
5. Any waste spark needs to be suppressed.
6. Water tanks are needed for the cold water fog and to keep the electrolyser topped up.
7. Ideally, some form of automatic water refill for these water tanks should be provided so that the generator can run for long periods unattended.

Getting rid of the waste spark

In order to eliminate the waste spark, we first of all need a signal which tells us whether or not the valves are open. One way to get such a signal is to mount a small magnet on the exhaust rocker and use a hall sensor to tell whether or not the exhaust valve is open or closed.

I used a very small magnet, around 5 mm in diameter, and fixed that to the exaust rocker using Magnum Steel Epoxy:

For a hall sensor, I used the TLE 4905 L, which I mounted on the engine using a piece of copper tube:

I soldered the tube on the rocker cover:

I have adjusted the exact position of the sensor / tube has been a few times, before I got the optimal position, such that the sensor is activated / deactivated when the valve is about half way pressed.

The finished sensor construction:

I tested the sensor using an oscilloscope, wherby I also measured the voltage on the spark plug using a home made probe, essentially a 1:1000 voltage divider, which I would not advise using with a digitial scope:

This way, we can clearly see that this engine does produce a waste spark while the exhaust valve is open:

More images here: http://www.tuks.nl/WFCProject/img/Hall_Sensor/

Making the "cold water fog"

Kelly's guide includes a section "The Step-by-Step Conversion of a Generator", including detailed photographs and explanations how to make water fog using a venturi tube, which is not hard at all to make:

The Cold Water Mist
Getting the fine droplets of water into the engine can be done two different ways. The first way is to use a Venturi tube which generates a fine spray of droplets when air moves rapidly past a small water-filled hole. You may not have noticed, but this method has been used extensively in perfume sprays and it is very effective. Selwyn describes how he constructs a Venturi tube:
A short length of 1/4” (5 or 6 mm) diameter copper tubing is used. This is generally available as central heating supplies and if there is any difficulty in finding some, then your local garage can probably direct you to a supplier (if they don’t just give you a short length from their own supply).
The copper pipe is then heated with a plumber’s gas torch and bent very slowly and carefully to the shape shown above. Some people find it helpful to insert a length of suitable flexible material into the pipe before starting the bending – something like the coiled steel spring material used to support net curtains – as that helps to keep the copper pipe from kinking when being bent.
Next, the end of the copper pipe which will form the nozzle, is filled with silver solder and the end filed flat. Then, a small hole is drilled through that silver solder plug. The smallest possible drill bit should be used for this, although the hole may need to be drilled out to a slightly larger diameter, depending on what the engine requires (which is found by successive trials):
This Venturi tube is to be inserted into the last brass fitting before the engine, so a 1/4“ hole is drilled through the brass and then the drill is removed very slowly at a slight angle, the angle of drag being down the axis length of the brass fitting. The copper Venturi tube is then inserted through the hole and positioned so that the Venturi hole is aligned up exactly with the centreline of the brass fitting and positioned exactly in the middle of the cross-section of the brass fitting and then soldered in place:
The method which Selwyn uses to block off the end of the copper tube with silver solder is to seal the far end of the tube with tape and fill the tube with fine-grained sand like this:
And then the tube is heated with the gas torch flame and the solder run into the tope part of the tube. When the solder has cooled, the tape is removed and the sand removed by tapping the tube. When the hole has been drilled through the solder, air is blown through it to dislodge any remaining sand, and then water is forced through the hole. As the tube is short, any remaining sand can be removed with a pipe-cleaner or any similar slender cleaning device. The installed Venturi tube can be seen here:

Yet another technique for making the cold water fog

I mailed Patrick the following question:

Have you ever heard of people using a carburetor for creating water fog?
I was just looking at the venturi principle in chapter 10 for creating the cold water fog for my home made lawn mower engine powered generator under construction, and I thought this will be very hard to tune.
So, I thought of using a carburetor nozzle for the purpose. But when I looked a bit further, it turns out that a carburetor is supposed to make gasoline fog, so it could be perfect for making water fog, provided the parts in there are not negatively affected by using water instead of gasoline. And since there are carburators with adjustable nozzles, that would make tuning of the amount of water fog fed into the system much, much easier.
What do you think of this?

His answer:

Yes, that is a technique which has been used very successfully and I would not expect there to be any issues with using water instead of a hydrocarbon, certainly, the GEET people who use miniature carburettors have never mentioned any problems.

Well, that sure would make life a lot easier. There are carburetors available with adjustable nozzles, such as this one:

So, with one of these one can not only make the cold water fog with an off-the-shelf component, one can also adjust the amount of cold water fog being injected into the air stream while the engine is running and thus tune the system on the fly.

Needless to say, my first attempt will be with a carburetor with adjustable nozzle. In fact, I placed a bid on the one shown in the picture above already.

Notes

Just some notes which might come in handy.

Dump & edit from: http://open-source-energy.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=1168&pid=15808#pid15808

The idea at that moment was to use aluminum tubes, because with those we know how to grow a suitable dielectric layer. Now that problem is solved by using electropolished stainless things are a bit different, but it gives some considerations.

Essentially, what we plan to do is to do what Dave did, but only exchange the normal Stainless Steel pipes for Electropolished ones. Then, we don't have to grow a dielectric layer ourselves, but it is good to study electrolytic capacitors and understand how these are made and how these work. There is an excellent book about that:

http://www.faradnet.com/deeley/book_toc.htm

For those who are not convinced yet that there is more to a dielectric than meets the eye, I wholeheartedly recommend watching this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ckpQW9sdUg

To quote Eric Dollard on this one:

http://www.tuks.nl/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnergeticFormPosts

There are some very serious misconceptions in the world of Electrical Engineering today. (The writings of Oliver Heaviside and Proteus Steinmetz gravely warned about this...) Let us start with the YouTube MIT Physics Demo video that Armagdn03 posted a link to on 11-10-2009 on page 2 of this thread.
This is a good demonstration for several reasons.
1.) Glass is a [b]dielectric[/b] which can [b]store electrical energy within its physical form[/b]. This should be common knowledge and not a surprise to anyone today…
2.) That this simple fact and reality “blows some people’s minds” clearly illustrates that it’s just all gone way, way, too far… The Einsteinian Lie has succeeded in instilling a mind virus in most everyone and also in confusing Main Stream “Scientists”, who today waste billions of dollars of funding each year, only to chase their own tails in a canonic sequence.

All right, the shopping list:

[Note: this part still talks about aluminum pipes]

First, the tubes. Stan used 16" or 40 cm. Lawton used 1" outside diameter for the larger tubes and a gap between the tubes of about 1-2 mm. In the Netherlands, tubes can be bought here:

http://www.ijzershop.nl/280-buizen

It should be noted that there normally already is a dielectric layer on the tubes, which will most likely have to be removed. We still have to figure out how to do that, because the tubes will have to be roughened in order to increase their surface area, but we will probably go for cleaning and etching, since that is the most easy with round pipes.

We plan to go for 25x20 for the outer tubes and 16x12 for the inner tubes, so we get a gap of 2 mm.

We still have to decide about the number of pipes, which will either be 6 or 9. Lawton used 6, but Dr Scott Cramton used 9, which gives the option of running with three phases.

However, as it looks now, I prefer to stay as close to Lawton as possible, because that gives the best comparison with available results and the available kits we plan to use are also designed for that configuration.

So, we would need 6 x 40 cm of both tube sizes.

For the housing of the cell and other components, we are looking at this site, which sells almost all the needed parts and electronics under one roof:

http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton.html

For the use of 40cm tubes, we need 1 plastic tube of 50 cm length: http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton/dave-lawton-electrolyser-110-x-500-x-3mm-acrylic-tube.html

And 2 end caps: http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton/dave-lawton-electrolyser-110mm-end-cap.html

Further, I would consider using plastic bolts instead of rubber slides, so I would also opt for a set of these: http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton/scott-crampton-plastic-srews-kit.html

See this drawing: [align=center][img][/img][/align]

For the electronics, there are two options available, as far as I understand:

1) The manual controlled PWM version: http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton/dave-lawton-pwm-kit.html

2) The PLL auto-tuning kit, which can also be manually controlled, *but* also has an auto-resonance tuning circuit: http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton/dave-lawton-pll-full-kit.html

Of course, the PLL kit has its advantages, but it is more expensive. For these, one can choose for full kits, just the soldered PCB or a bare PCB.

Besides that, one needs a coil. Perhaps buy a couple, because they are not expensive and the wiring and such may be handy for further experimenting:

http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton/dave-lawton-pattern-bifilar-inductor-kit.html

And, a "fixing kit" is also worth considering:

http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton/dave-lawton-electrolyser-stainless-steel-fixings-kit.html

The only thing that is missing in the shop are the place holders. There are these:

http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers/dave-lawton/dave-lawton-electrolyser-150mm-diameter-mounting-plates.html

But these have 9 holes of 19 mm diameter, which could be drilled up, but then you still have 9 holes instead of 6. So, we haven't decided on this part yet.

Update: These are for 150 mm pipes and DO NOT fit in the 110 mm version!!

What is left from the shopping list is at least these items:

1) bubbler and other safety material for mounting on a test-engine and eventually perhaps in a car.

2) Gas production meter.

3) Insulation material around the outer tubes and the inner side of the inner tube. This is optional, but it is advised by Kelly to be used.

This is what a friend of mine ordered some time ago from:

http://www.courtiestown.co.uk/index.php/electrolysers.html?limit=30

1 x Scott Cramton complete electrolyser kit

4 x Dave Lawton Bifilar Kit - a simple kit consisting of a 100 x 10mm ferrite rod and 15mtrs of 21SWG ECW.

1 x Set of 54 x M4 x 8 mm nylon bolts c/w nuts for centralising 9 prs of 18" tubes in a Scott Cramton/ Stan Meyer pattern electrolyser

1 x A pair of 144mm diameter HDPE plates pre-drilled with 9 3/4" holes for use in a Scott Cramton replica electrolyser.

1 x Dave Lawton PLL Full Kit - Allows the buyer to assemble and a fully working and boxed PLL to be assembled.

2 x Dave Lawton Stainless Steel Fixings Kit - sufficient bolts, nuts, washers and wire to build a Dave Lawton pattern electrolyser with 6 pairs of tubes.

Be aware that this supplier is a part-time business and it may take some time to deliver large packages (more than 2 kg) outside the UK. My friend then also ordered the pipes there and that took quite some time.