[AR] Re: Fw: Hydrogen / oxygen news
- From: Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2013 12:16:28 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 31 Oct 2013 qbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Like I first posted right after the original post this is just a
> marketing stunt for a system that has been in the half baked category
> for years. It's been touted as everything from a way to increase MPG for
> you car to creating the next health miracle by bubbling it through
> water. It's been called HHO and all sorts of other names but it just an
> electrolyses the does not separate the H2 and O2 that comes off the
> anode and cathode.
I think you didn't read it carefully. Yeah, there is a lot of snake oil
about Brown's gas, but this is a different and more refined form of snake
oil. :-) Note that they explicitly refer to generating the H2 and O2
*separately*, and to control of mixture ratio. This is a more ordinary
oxyhydrogen torch supplied by a more ordinary electrolyzer. Which is not
a ridiculous idea, if you overlook the elephant in the room, that being
the huge electric power requirement.
> But at 60psi you would need an awful big container to run any type of RCS
> system so storage is out and even the jewelers unit which produces 30L of
> gas an hour is heavy 18kg and requires 24V at 4.5amps to operate. That's
> just a little big for a Cube Sat.
As I noted, people have successfully fired such thrusters, from storage
(with the GOX and GH2 stored separately!). And at least the Tethers
Unlimited system specifically *is* aimed at nanosats. The key is that the
GOX and GH2 don't mix except in the thruster (in fact, the key is making
very sure of that...).
> I do have a question after all of that, Since they have been running these
> things at 60psi with safety precautions tied in, Is there a pressure at which
> the gas becomes unstable and or just turns back into water?
No, if you're sufficiently suicidal, you can put GOX/GH2 mixtures under
quite high pressure without causing a reaction to start. There have been
some serious accidents that have started with accidental production of
high-pressure GOX/GH2. The problem is that you're then dealing with a
horribly sensitive high explosive; on at least one occasion, simply trying
to vent such a mixture slowly resulted in a fatal explosion.
Henry Spencer
henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
(regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx)
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