Water Fuel Cell - cleaning the mess and repairing the electrolyser

After yesterday's mishap, and of realizing how lucky I was to still be in one piece, it is time to take a deep breath and after looking into what went wrong, follow all the safety measures to prevent one such event from ever happening again.

I started by getting a new lid for the electrolyser and putting a new seal rubber in it, this time with two clamps instead of one. Now only the clamps are used for holding the lid. The original ring around the lid was discarded. By itself this doesn't provide extra protection against an explosion, apart from the slight probability of the lid popping out in one piece instead of fragmenting into several pieces (today I still found fragments of the lid in distant corners of the room).

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: