New Discovery

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I did a test today that made me drop of the chair...

with my new small prototype i poured a small flake of potassium hydroxide with the power on at around 7,5 v and the thing started a chain reaction! the bubbles were vigorous and it started to get hot and generate even more gas....

however the most strange thing happens after power is shut off


if you power it off it will stop the reaction and turn the solution or electrodes in something that wont generate gas

very strange indeed

my guess is that when the potassium hydroxide is ionizing the water stability gets broken somehow as there was already a little gas stream coming out of it

the thing is being powered by a variac that feeds a step down isolation power transformer toroid... than it goes to a full wave bridge rectifier... having a 2uf capacitor filtering and a 10mf 70v capacitor too

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I can even make a video after i see some comments on this..

have anybody tried this?

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Ive done alot with KOH....film it....lets see wat ya have
What have you done in terms of cell construction with your new prototype?

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it is all in acrylic....

 i used the same electrodes as stan the inner and outer.. the water fill it basically... when i dropd the potassium flake it droped in the middle of the inner electrode...

i need to repeat some more times to see if is not boiling like you said.. but the strange thing is how the reaction stoped and dont return...

i used to work with very concentrated sodium hydroxide back in 2007 but never found such behavior,,,,

i will film it soon..  dont want to get the chance for lurkers to see it hahha

i will tell you the reaction seems like a different thing

i will plug the labview and make some graphs of temperature rise and currnt and voltage applied in respect to time

if i had a flow metter would be nice.... i thinking about getting one since a while now


the water i´m using is rich in vanadium..

called agua ibira a commercial alkaline mineral water..  i would not drink it... dont seem good for health...


the water had initially 230ppm before the potassium was added and with 7,5 volts some few bubbles were already going before i drop the small flake.

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Yea thats what pretty pure KOH will do ,if you add to much to fast it will boil out ,splash out and make a huge mess.... its the initial reaction of the water ionizing the KOH,once its disolved and left to sit a lil bit the tempetature will calm down...its best to let it sit in a container till it gets to room temperature bwfore you add it to your cell.It will turn the cathode side blue and the anode a copper color after you run the cells a while.

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looks like you have some fun!
Way to go!

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  Lot of fun here!

but need some hard work to get some more info about whats happening... somehow i think there is something else happening...

in my opinion is too little a little flake to make the water to burn however it can be that there is so small amount of water in the cell that it already boils...  sodium hydroxide would not do this from my experiences in the past..

oh the inner rod was negative and the tube was receiving the positive charge...

i was guess if the hydrogen bubbling into the flakes were not maybe recombining with the hydroxides being liberated somehow while the flake dissolves....

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KOH dissolves alot faster than NaOH