Water Fuel Cell - HUGE ELECTROLYSER EXPLOSION

Sometimes mistakes can be the death of the artist. In this case I got closer to it than desirable: after building a tiny bubbler for testing sustained combustion I hooked it up to the electrolyser (aka: Water Fuel Cell) - one tube going from the electrolyser to the bubbler and another tube from the bubbler to the gas exit, where combustion would be tested.

The bubbler was working fine, air tight as necessary. After approaching the output from a flame, small explosions along the tube would occur, without affecting the WFC.

Water Fuel Cell - inductive load added

Just as refered by several people doing this type of research, adding and inductive element to the load would create a resonant LC circuit, with the WFC as a capacitor. I used as an inductive load the secondary coil from a 220 V / 12 V transformer which was added in series with the WFC. The most notable effect was the suppression of the high frequency signals at the WFC, along with a voltage dropout of nearly 5 volts. The curious thing however is the fact that the gas production doesn't seem to be affected for the same input voltage/current conditions. As the transformer becomes hot after a couple of minutes of operation, this shows that there is less energy going to the WFC.

This sample video shows the cell in operation under these conditions:

Water Fuel Cell - fixes and more tests

The container is now air tight. This allowed me to start doing some electrolyser efficiency tests. By attaching a small hose between the container and a small flask containing some water I could see how fast the bubbles would form, by varying pulse width and frequencies (both the carrier signal width/frequency and also the gating signal width/frequency).