# There's More to Electrolysis Than I Thought.

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** NightHawkInLight
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw
- **Дата:** 03.06.2026
- **Длительность:** 41:20
- **Просмотры:** 166,663

## Описание

Ad: Check out my sponsor and remove your personal information from the web at https://JoinDeleteMe.com/nighthawk and use code NIGHTHAWK for 20% off.

In this video we explore the many uses of electrolysis unlocked by inexpensive ion exchange membrane technology.

Check out Robert's channel here to thank him for his generous sharing of knowledge, and to learn more about membrane electrolysis/electromining: https://www.youtube.com/@Rowow

Items used in this video can be found through the following affiliate link: https://www.amazon.com/shop/nighthawkinlight/list/141FLGZ86STM1?ref_=aipsflist

An interview I did with Robert on my B channel: https://www.patreon.com/NightHawkProjects?ty=h

A special thank you to my top patrons:
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Thank you for watching!

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

I have learned how to make homemade flow batteries that use just the cheapest ingredients you can imagine. With the same chemistry, we can create acids that dissolve metal ores out of rock and then just as easily deposit the metal again in a pure form. We can generate and pressurize hydrogen in a single step and produce all manner of expensive chemicals from nothing but a solar panel and salt. All of this uses the same core technology and can be done using items purchased from a local hardware store. My goal is for this video to be the best introduction to the incredible practical applications of electrochemistry that you will ever watch. Hi, I'm Ben. Thank you for being here. Electrolysis is the basis of every project we will put together in this video. A word which literally means to break stuff with electricity. The basic experiment that most people will have seen on this topic is when electricity is passed through water, it splits into oxygen and hydrogen gas. Oxygen bubbling up from the positively charged electrode called the anode and hydrogen forming on the negative electrode called the cathode. This confused me very much when I was a kid. Have you ever thought about how this works? If this is truly just a reaction where water H2O cleanly splits in half when you add electricity, how is hydrogen ending up way over here on the cathode and oxygen anode? Does a water molecule split in the middle of the tank and just shoot off the individual gases at lightning speed toward whichever electrode they're attracted to before they can bubble to the surface? That does not make a lot of sense to me, but it's the best explanation I could imagine with the information that I had. H2O plus electricity equals oxygen and hydrogen. I want to show you something that will reveal that this experiment is a little more complicated than the explanation you might have learned in a middle school science class. And I promise this information is relevant for making our homemade flow batteries and all the other technology mentioned earlier. This will pay off. So I have a shallow container of fresh water here with my two electrodes sticking into it. I have added a pinch of sodium sulfate to this water to make it conductive, but ignore that for now. We'll talk about how salts interact later. To this water, I'm going to add a liquid pH indicator. This is a liquid that turns green when it's at neutral pH and it changes to red in acid and blue when it becomes alkaline. Now, I'll turn on the electricity and watch what happens. Interesting, isn't it? We are generating acid at the anode and base or alkaline conditions at the cathode. This is obviously not a simple one-step reaction where H2O just cleanly splits in half. There are two different chemical reactions going on here. At least one of them is making acid and the other is making base in addition to the gases that are produced. And in fact, this is the key to understanding how water electrolysis really works. It consists of multiple reactions that are occurring simultaneously. At the cathode, the addition of electricity or technically just an electron to H2O kicks off one of the hydrogen atoms as gas, leaving the other hydrogen behind stuck to one oxygen. This is an O ion which remains in the water. If you look up some of the most costic alkaline chemicals in existence, you'll see that this O ion is the thing that makes them so very basic. For example, this is lie, this is ammonia, and this is lime. All of them very strongly alkaline. So this side of the solution accumulates these alkaline O ions and turns blue. At the other side, the positive electrode rips electrons off of water molecules that are nearby. Now, the reason that hydrogen and oxygen like to stick together in the first place is that oxygen is the most stable if it has two more electrons stuck to it. And hydrogen atoms have one electron each. If those electrons are ripped away by the pull of electricity through a power supply, well, then the hydrogen loses the one thing that made it stick to oxygen to begin with, and the water molecule just falls apart. Oxygen bubbles away as gas. But the hydrogen is now in a very unhappy state. It is so unstable without its usual electron that it immediately sticks to anything that it can. In this case, just a nearby water molecule. So it never bubbles

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

away. This forms H3, a hydrronium ion, which is maximally acidic. So that side of the solution turns red. But if you mix both sides of the chamber together, you can see that the acid and base fully cancels out, leaving the solution its original neutral green. The end result is that H2O plus electricity does equal oxygen and hydrogen gas. That's not a completely inaccurate summary if you ignore the side reactions that cancel out. But for me, knowing that electrolysis causes these completely different reactions at each electrode, well, that explains why oxygen and hydrogen bubble out separately. They didn't originate from the same molecule of water being split in half. Now, this pair of distinct reactions at each electrode is where the magic is that allows flow batteries, metal refining, and a whole host of different chemical processes to be possible. Let's consider metal refining, which is just an awesome application of this technology. When you have some metal ore, say a rock that is high in iron, like this magnetite, which is iron oxide, you need to strip off the oxide part to leave the iron behind in a metallic state. This can be done by mixing it with coal and firing at extremely high temperatures. So, the coal binds to the oxygen part of iron oxide and floats away as CO2, leaving iron to come out of the furnace as relatively pure metal. or we could use electrolysis. The first step of which is to dissolve the rock in acid. And that we've already seen can be supplied by the positive electrode of an electrolysis device. So this is a very simple electromining setup designed to produce acid on this side of the cell. Use that acid to dissolve metal ore and then also process the dissolved metal into a purified solid state. There are a few aspects of this cell that we have not yet explored. This barrier that surrounds the positive electrode and the central barrier which separates the two sides. These prevent the liquid in each compartment from mixing with the others. So the chemistry that occurs at each electrode no longer cancels out in the middle. These barriers do not conduct electricity which is very important or they would just act like a third electrode in the middle of the tank. Instead, this material only allows dissolved atoms or molecules that are carrying the correct electric charge to pass through while blocking everything else. These are called ion exchange membranes, and I will be showing you how to make them. Examples of ions that can travel through these membranes are the alkaline O groups that are generated at the negative electrode which have a strong negative charge and the acidic positively charged hydrogens which form on the opposite side. Actually everything that dissolves in water splits into ions when it does so. For example, table salt splits into a positive sodium ion and a negative chlorine one. This central membrane only allows negatively charged ions to move through it. So chlorine gets a pass, but sodium would be blocked. The opposite is true for this membrane, which allows positive ions like acidic hydrronium through, but denies O chlorine, which is precisely why it's there. The first thing that this cell needs to accomplish is to generate an acid that can dissolve my ore. and hydrochloric acid is the option that works best. If I dissolve table salt on this side of the cell, the chlorine in the salt should react with the acidic hydrogens that are generated at the positive terminal to form hydrochloric acid. But there's a problem. In pure water, the reactions at each electrode take place exactly as we've discussed previously. But when you start involving extra chemicals like table salt, sometimes those chemicals are the ones that more easily participate in the reactions at the electrodes than water itself. If a negatively charged chlorine ion steps in at that positive electrode and has an electron ripped off of it, it stops being negatively charged, which is the thing that made it an ion to begin with, capable of being dissolved in water. instead of making acid. That difference in one electron transforms harmless dissolved table salt into chlorine gas, which is not the thing that I'm looking to make. So, this second barrier has the one and only job of keeping chlorine ions away from the positive electrode. In this little compartment, I put a pinch of sodium sulfate and fill it with water. There's no chlorine in sodium sulfate and therefore no risk of

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

chlorine gas. The rest of the chamber on both sides of that central membrane gets filled with a dissolved solution of table salt. I'll add a few drops of pH indicator just so we can more easily see what happens and then turn on the power. Fairly quickly, we start seeing acid form on the positive side as acidic hydrogen ions are produced in the tiny compartment and being positively charged are allowed to pass through the positive ion membrane. These react with the chlorine in table salt in our secondary compartment to form our desired product hydrochloric acid. In fact, any salt that we dissolved in this compartment will form its respective acid. Sulfates make sulfuric acid, nitrates produce nitric and so on. Now on the other side, as alkaline O groups are produced, these join with the sodium part of table salt to form sodium hydroxide lie. For this iron refining setup, we actually want both sides of the cell to be acidic because alkalinity causes dissolved iron to fall out of solution as iron hydroxide and we don't want that. So these alkaline O groups need to go. To fix this, we just let the cell run for a while until acid and base build up and then we empty the alkaline side, refilling it with fresh salt water. This removes alkalinity from the system while leaving the acid untouched. So acid continues to build. And after doing this two or three times, we have an excess of very strong acid in the positive compartment and very little alkalinity left to fight it. The final step is to just transfer a few drops of acid across the membrane to make both sides of the cell acidic and ready to refine some metal. In case the wonder of what we just did was lost on you, we just made hydrochloric acid from table salt and water. Now we get to use this acid to dissolve rock. My magnetite sample is crushed into a fine powder and placed into a second dish where acid from the electrolysis cell is piped over. After a few hours, the rock will be mostly dissolved and the ironrich liquid is now transferred back into the cell. This time on the opposite side. This solution contains the result of hydrochloric acid's reaction with magnetite, which is iron chloride. Now, remember what I said about adding new chemicals to an electrolysis cell that sometimes those chemicals will be the ones that react instead of water. And that is exactly what happens with iron chloride at the negative electrode. Instead of water receiving extra electrons and giving us hydrogen gas, the iron chloride receives an electron, releasing negatively charged chlorine ions into the water and metallic iron plates onto the electrode. And here's the best part. At the same time as pure iron is being extracted, the chlorine ions that are released in the process are able to cross back through that central membrane into the other chamber where they are regenerated into more hydrochloric acid. This is a closed loop system. The only thing that needs to be added after the initial input of water and table salt is electricity and fresh ore to be refined. Just look at this beautiful sample of pure iron that I plated out earlier. Now, there is some nuance in making this setup work optimally. And those who already know something about electrochemistry will have some questions. And I'll put more detail about how this process works on screen. Now, what I'd like to point out is just how many things we were able to do with this one little cell. We started with water and table salt and made hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, oxygen gas. We refined magnetite into pure metallic iron and made a little extra hydrogen gas on the side. That is a lot of stuff to get done. And I'm only running this cell at a third of a watt of electricity. Just imagine what you could do with a system scaled up to use the power from a 200 W solar panel. By the way, now that this has run for some time, if I disconnect the leads of the power supply and instead poke at these electrodes with a multimeter, this cell is now actually producing some voltage. On top of everything else, this simple, incredible metal refining setup is also a battery. I've been using Delete Me, my sponsor for this video, for nearly 3 years now. Since then, hundreds of data brokers that were once selling my personal info have taken it offline. Give this a try. Type your name and then info into a search bar and see how many results have

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

your address, phone number, and who you're related to visible for anyone to see. These are data brokers, and data broker sites are the easiest way for scammers to find your information. Delete Me helps to make it so that you are not such an easy target. Delete Me finds data brokers that have your information and does the work to submit takedown requests on your behalf. To do this yourself might take you 20 minutes per site and new data listings are popping up all the time. I don't have to think about that because Delete Me is monitoring for new listings of my information and submitting more takedowns whenever they're found. If you'd like to make it a lot harder on telemarketers, scammers, and identity thieves to get your information and that of those you care about, check out Delete Me. You can get a 20% discount on consumer plans by using my link joined me. com/nighthawk and by using the code nighthawk on checkout. I'm holding myself back from continuing to talk about flow batteries and all the other applications we could dive into right now. I'll put that off until later in the video because I think it's time that we learn how to actually make the key to all these technologies, ion exchange membranes. Commercial varieties of these cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars per square foot. These ones cost maybe a dollar and can be easily made from common hardware store items. Because these are so accessible, before I show you how to make them, let me give a brief word of caution. Obviously, what we've just seen is that electrolysis can make very strong chemicals that will cause severe injuries if mishandled. It can also produce many toxic chemicals like chlorine gas, lead, and chromium salts that will contaminate the liquid if you use the wrong electrode material or if you dissolve metal ore that contains anything toxic, which is almost guaranteed to be the case. So doing anything with electrolysis that is beyond your understanding is very likely to make unintended toxic waste that you are not equipped to handle or dispose of. Be cautious. Learn everything you can about an experiment before trying it and ideally find real human beings that have chemistry experience to help you do things safely. The person responsible for this particular membrane recipe is Robert from the YouTube channel Row. On that channel, Robert has been developing professional electro mining equipment using these membranes in the hope of seeing them change the mining industry as even the tailings that are discarded by conventional mining could be easily extracted for all the valuable materials they contain. Simultaneously, the warning that I gave in the safety disclaimer about extracting toxic things becomes an advantage if it's being done intentionally. The mining waste is depleted of toxicity so it's safe to return to the environment and in the right context that toxic material like lead and cadmium becomes a valuable resource. The membranes that make this possible are based on this paper published in the year 2000. Robert spent two years learning how to replicate the results of this paper using simplified materials and methods and as of this year has published that improved process under the public domain. So everyone is free to benefit. These membranes are made using offtheshelf PVC cement and resin beads which are a common component of water softeners. These beads can be easily purchased or even removed and recycled from an old water softener that is being replaced. The two basic types of resin which most membrane electrolysis projects call for are cation resin exchange beads and annion resin exchange beads. Cation beads make a membrane that allows positively charged ions to move through and annion beads do the opposite allowing negative ions to pass and blocking everything else. The membranes are as easy to make as grinding the resin of choice into a powder, mixing it 50/50 with PVC cement by volume, and spreading this liquid onto a silicone or polyethylene sheet to dry. That's it. This variation is super easy to make, but the membrane does come out a little bit fragile. So, an upgrade is to paint the liquid onto woven fiberglass. The fiberglass greatly increases the strength. To go a little more in-depth on this process, there are a few important details for success. Grinding the resin beads can be difficult, and a large part of Robert's efforts went into finding an appropriate method. This is the style of grinder to use, a high-speed spice grinder. You can pick one of these up on Amazon or eBay, and I'll have some affiliate links in the description below. A word of caution, these are a dangerous tool. There is no safety on this grinder to prevent you from bumping the on switch while the top is off. And it's as powerful as a lawn

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

mower. I always unplug mine from the wall before opening the lid. It is not a toy. With this grinder, the caton resin is easy to process and basically just involves filling the grinder halfway and letting it run for 5 minutes. You don't want to let these resins ever dry out or they will lose functionality. So, it's best to keep them in an airtight container with a little bit of water at the bottom. If the resin is too wet, it will stick to the sides of the grinder and you'll have to tap it with a mallet to get it to fall into the blades. Annion resin can be prepared in almost the same way, but it's stickier and will not grind properly unless you add about 2 tepoon of telk powder for each half cup of resin in the blender before turning it on. This lowers the stickiness and allows the annion resin to reach a fine powder without clumping too badly. Both resins once fully powderized should be sealed in airtight jars. So once again, they don't dry out. The cation resin easily mixes with PVC cements just as described. Just mix it 50/50 by volume and stir it together. But the annion again requires just a little more care. For each heaping teaspoon of annion resin, I find that it helps to add 3 milllers of PVC primer to turn the resin into a paste before adding the cement. Otherwise, the resin is a little too thick and it's really hard to mix into the cement without forming clumps. Premixing with primer solves this issue, and it also colors your annion membranes purple, so you can remember which is which. The membranes should all be stored in a plastic bag with a spritz of water inside. So, with the membranes in hand, let's get back to battery technology. We've already seen one method that can be used to make a surprisingly effective battery. The little iron refining cell is in no way optimized for power storage, and yet it delivers a very respectable 1. 6 6 V and 35 or 40 milliamps. It does this because the iron plating chemical reaction is reversible. You put electricity in to extract the iron and you get electricity back if you let it dissolve again. If we want more power, the only thing that needs to be done is to bring the electrodes closer together and make everything bigger. So, let's make a big one with a few modifications to optimize for a battery instead of metal extraction. To make things simpler, I'll avoid using any chlorine in the cell. So, we don't need that extra little compartment to surround the positive electrode. And in fact, we can use just a single cat ion membrane in the center of the cell, which is the type that only allows positive ions through it. And it's the easiest kind to make. So, I've cut out a little piece of membrane here. And we have a few options to hold this in place inside of our plastic container. The best, if this container were also made of PVC, would be to use PVC cement since that is exactly what the membrane itself is made of, and it's very chemically resistant. Second place would maybe be RTV silicone. And then third in terms of chemical resistance, but first in terms of practicality is hot glue. Hot glue actually stands up surprisingly well here, and it's definitely the easiest to quickly glue a membrane in place. It technically does start to break down in very high and low pH, but in practice, it takes many months before needing to be repaired. It may never break down in this case because the battery chemistry we'll be using is quite mild. A long-term solution for harsher conditions would be to hold the membrane in with hot glue and then smear RTV silicone over top of it as a protective layer. For this project, I bought a hot glue gun that has this extended nozzle on it to make reaching into tight spaces much easier. If you want one of these, again, I'll have affiliate links in the description. To make sure you get a strong connection with a plastic surface, just make sure that the hot glue is very hot when you apply it, and you'll be sure to have a secure and waterproof connection with the membrane. Bonus tip, if you ever want to remove hot glue, just apply a little rubbing alcohol, and in a few minutes, it'll peel right off, even from a rough and textured surface. Well, we have a bigger cell. Now, we just need bigger electrodes. For both electrolysis and battery tech, the more surface area that the electrodes have, the more amperage or current a battery will be able to deliver. The best off-the-shelf electrode option for most DIY projects is graphite. It's non-toxic, it's conductive, and it doesn't easily react with harsh chemicals. Graphite rods can be purchased for welding purposes sold under the name of gouging carbons. Most of these will be coated in copper, which

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

can be removed chemically or physically with sandpaper, but both of those options are a messy process. So, it's better to buy unccoated carbons to begin with if you can find them. Another option is graphite foil, which you're less likely to find in a hardware store, but it's very easy to find online. This stuff can be cut with scissors into any shape that you'd like, and it makes an excellent electrode. Not however as good as this. This is conductive carbon felt which is the gold standard for battery electrodes because it has an enormous surface area for its size. But I didn't purchase this as is. Conductive carbon felt is way too expensive. So I was forced to figure out how to make my own. And this, it turns out, is better than the stuff you can buy anyway. To make this, I start with carbon felt that is sold as fireproof welding blankets. And this stuff is cheap, about $25 for a fourpack of giant sheets. Now, I wish this would work as electrodes right out of the box. But sadly, this felt is not conductive at all. To make it conductive requires two steps. First, we blast it with a torch or throw it into a fire to burn off all of the disgusting volatiles that are left over from however they make this stuff. Do not breathe this smoke. It is certainly unhealthy. Using an open flame really helps keep this process clean because most of the volatiles fully burn away instead of being released as noxious smoke. Once the felt has been thoroughly cooked, it should be handled with gloves and breathing protection because it's kind of like fiberglass. It will get irritating little needles into your skin, and you of course would not want to inhale any of that as dust. At this point, it's still not conductive and requires a final step of cooking it to about three or four times hotter than a torch could hope to achieve. And this is done in a microwave. I made this microwave kiln specifically for cooking carbonfeld electrodes. This is ceramic fiber blanket, which is surprisingly cheap. This roll cost about $15 and is rated for 2,700° F. I rolled this up with a big enough cavity on the inside to slip in my carbon felt and tied it together just with a bit of twine and used a few scraps to plug the ends closed. This goes into a microwave outdoors. Good gracious, do not do this inside your house. And I turn it on for 8 to 10 minutes. The carbon felt becomes absolutely white hot in that time. And then before it fully cools off, I pull it out and submerge it in water. This does two things. It cools the carbon down before it reacts too much with the air. And it also stops the felt from throwing off those fiberglass-like needles as dust. Once it's made, I always keep this wet so that dust is no longer an issue. And this is the best electrode material you are ever likely to see. It has extremely low electrical resistance, extremely high surface area, and is very resistant to the strongest chemical solutions. With this for our electrodes, let's turn back to our battery project. This is what I came up with as an electrode design for my bucket battery. Here I have a piece of scrap wood with some holes drilled through it that fit my carbon welding rods. And these stick down far enough to dip into the bucket on either side of the membrane with attached strips of carbon felt. Opposite to the carbon rods on each side is a fiberglass rod cut from a reflective driveway marker. To attach the felt between the graphite and fiberglass on each side of the plank, I use zip ties. And for extreme chemical resistance, you could also sew them on with PTFE dental floss. So, I place this assembly into the bucket. And now we just need to fill it up with an electrolyte solution. For a chlorine-free ironbased battery, the best option as an electrolyte is iron sulfate. This is a common fertilizer and also a waste product of iron manufacturing. It is extremely cheap in bulk. We can dissolve about 200 g of this in one liter of water and then add about a teaspoon or 10 g of citric acid, which can be purchased in the canning section of most grocery stores. Citric acid is a stabilizer that prevents the iron sulfate from turning into rust or other insoluble compounds when the battery is cycled. Once dissolved, this liquid can be added to the battery. And that's all there is to it. Let's hook it up to a power supply and give this a charge at about 1. 6 vol. After about 12 hours, the battery starts drawing less current, which indicates

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

that it's charged. In an iron battery, you can also tell the state of charge just by looking at the color of the electrolyte. The positive side will be much darker than the other. This time, we're not plating iron off as solid metal. The citric acid added to this solution prevents that from happening. Instead, we're splitting the iron sulfate into two different iron compounds, both of which remain fully dissolved. This is again a reversible chemical reaction where the two iron compounds want to be balanced on both sides of the membrane, but the input of electricity has forced them into a very unbalanced situation. Undoing this imbalance generates electricity because ions have to move through that central membrane to restore equilibrium, taking a positive electric charge with them. And you can't just move an electric charge like that without completing a circuit. So if we attach a wire between our two electrodes, when the ions move, they have to force electricity through this wire to balance the charge that their movement creates. And look at that, we have electricity. That is awesome. Using our multimeter, this battery gives us a reading of about a quarter amp at 1. 2 volts. Increasing the amount of iron sulfate in the electrolyte to 300 g per liter, will double the amperage, as long as you keep the battery warm enough for the extra iron to stay in solution, about 70° F. You can push the amperage even further by adding sulfuric acid to the cell, which greatly increases electrolyte conductivity, but doing so, of course, requires more safety in how these batteries are designed and stored. This is a single cell, meaning there's only one membrane dividing two electrodes. Commercial batteries use multiple cells chained together to reach a higher voltage. If I connect this in series with another identical cell, we should end up with twice the voltage. Now, this should be able to make our little motor here spin significantly faster. 10 of these cells would make a 12V battery. Not quite equivalent to a car battery because the amperage is much lower. But these cells have one significant advantage. The total amount of power that they can store is basically unlimited because this is a flow battery. In a standard chemical battery, at least one of the reactions involves chemicals that plate onto the electrodes in a solid form, like metallic, lithium, or iron or lead. And that means if you want to store more power, you have to increase the size of the entire battery to make room for more solid material near the electrodes. But in a flow battery like this, the charge carrying ingredients are all completely liquid, which means you can store more power by simply adding larger liquid storage tanks. The size of the actual battery, meaning this part here with the electrodes and the membrane, can stay exactly the same size. Just connect this up with a few aquarium pumps to some pickle barrels full of more iron solution to pump through the cell during charge and discharge and suddenly this little bucket battery will have multiple kilowatt hours of capacity. Now it can only give that back to you at a few volts and half an amp but it can do that for a very long time. Increasing those volts and amps is where scaling up the actual electrode area and especially the cell count is still probably necessary. Thankfully, there is an easier way than just stacking more of these buckets next to one another, and that is to put multiple cells in the same bucket using dividers. Something like this little container is a great way to get about 4. 8 volts out of four divided cells wired in series. And to deliver more amps, we could increase the size of this design to something like a plastic storage bin. Now, I'm not going to go into detail of how to set up the plumbing for the external tanks of a flow battery in this video. So, if you want to see more on that topic, let me know. Maybe I'll continue building on this flow battery project in the future. Now, hydrogen production is another project that this membrane technology offers a massive upgrade to. Years ago, I made a video about water electrolysis and made several designs that offer various benefits and downsides. The biggest challenge to solve is how to produce a lot of hydrogen efficiently without allowing it to mix with the oxygen that is produced at the positive electrode. The closer the electrodes are to each other, the more efficient the gas production, but also the more

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq7fR9ISuCw&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

difficult it is to keep that oxygen and hydrogen separated. If the gases are allowed to mix, the result can be extremely dangerous. As even a tiny bubble of this perfectly balanced oxygen and hydrogen mixture is enough to make your ears ring, my solution years ago was to place the electrodes in separate plastic hoods far away from each other so that when the bubbles form under the hoods, they float up and out of the container without mixing. But because the electrodes were not only far apart but also the path between them was blocked by plastic, this required a lot of power to generate the gas. An ion permeable membrane changes things significantly. By separating the two electrodes with this, we can stop the gas from mixing without blocking the flow of conductive ions. This way, the electrodes can almost be touching one another as far as the power is concerned, but the gas is divided. There are multiple ways we could build a cell with this concept, but this is what I've put together for now. This uses an ion exchange membrane hot glued into a cylinder with an electrode extending into the center from above. Onto the carbon welding electrode. I've zip tied a strip of carbon felt which uncoils inside the membrane chamber so it presses as close as possible against the outside wall. The threaded pipe which attaches to the membrane assembly has a gas outlet on the side to collect the hydrogen as we produce it. And a threaded cap tops the whole thing off with a hole made for the carbon rod to poke through. Sealed in with hot glue. The external electrode which connects to the positive lead from the power supply this time is not made from carbon felt. I'll be using a solution of sodium hydroxide as my electrolyte which is one of the rare things that's pretty tough on carbon when you pass a positive current through it. The carbon felt would dissolve fairly rapidly as the oxygen made in this process facilitates the hydroxide in converting the carbon into carbonates and other organic gunk that can clog up the membrane. This is not a problem at all for the negative electrode, but for the positive one, I'll be using a nickel sheet, which is more inert in these particular circumstances. Nickel sheet metal is easy to buy online because it's commonly used for electroplating. To use this hydrogen generator, I dissolve as much sodium hydroxide as possible in a container full of water, being careful with eye protection and gloves because this stuff is very corrosive. And then I take some of this solution and fill the inner compartment of the electrolyer. The whole thing then gets submerged in the container and I can connect up the leads of my power supply. This is now generating hydrogen gas which can be collected from the end of this tube. What we're looking for to determine the efficiency of this setup is for the amperage delivered by the power supply to be as high as possible with the voltage set as low as possible. At 4 Vs, that is a lot of amps for such a small setup. And you can see that the gas is flowing fairly nicely. One way to tell that this is pure hydrogen is if you make a bubble and knock it free of the tube, it should float to the ceiling. It's a little easier said than done. Let's see if I can do it. Try again. There we go. Maybe the biggest advantage of all that this type of hydrogen cell offers is that the gas output is automatically pressurized as it's generated. The membrane causes the central chamber to be fully sealed. So, however much pressure that membrane can take before bursting is the pressure that can be provided at the gas outlet. This is the first cell I've made that can fill a balloon straight from the outlet with no compressor in between. Now, I only trust my hot glued membrane cylinder to stand up to a few PSI at most. But with the right structural support, this type of generator can theoretically achieve almost 3,000 PSI without a compressor straight from the hydrogen outlet. That could be quite useful to say the least. Well, I think that probably was enough to peique your interest in membrane electrolysis. Check out Robert's channel, Rowal, and thank him for sharing his membrane formulations. If you're interested in more information about using this technology, especially for mining purposes, he has an excellent library of videos, including this one, which is a great high-level overview of the core principles of the closed loop system he's working on. There's also a very casual interview posted on my second channel, where Robert and I talk about all manner of electrolysis topics. Well, if you followed my recent

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community posts, you might have seen that I was not in great health through this past winter. And thank you to everyone who continued watching these videos and supporting me, especially through Patreon in the meantime. I think I'm much better now. In any case, I'm feeling great at the moment, and that's something to be thankful for. This was a monster of a video to research and I had to learn about electrochemistry at a much deeper level than I expected. Several unmentioned experiments that I worked on for this video turned out to be dead ends because somewhere I started with an incorrect understanding that required weeks of intensive research to unravel. I hope that paid off somewhat in being able to better communicate these pretty difficult chemistry topics in a way that's digestible and inspiring to make you want to learn more. If I pulled that off and you found this video valuable, you can support my future efforts again on Patreon. If you can't afford it, no worries. Please don't send me money if you're having a hard time yourself. Only if you have extra and you like what I'm doing here. I'd appreciate it. Thank you so much for watching. Leave me comments below. It's been too long since I've posted a video and I miss hearing from you all. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52210*