I found this patent which is public for a while, but it's still not much reference to it.

Method and apparatus for an efficient Hydrogen production by David Haitin.
http://www.google.com/patents/US20100126846

It uses a high voltage static electric field with a deionization surface. I know that these inventions may or may not work, but the concept seems fairly simple. Do you think this concept would work to produce hydrogen efficiently?

IF I understand the principle correctly,   (that is a big IF)

at any one time a very small proportion of H2O molecules have enough energy to form OH- and H+
(I suspect that would almost immediately combine with another water molecule to form OH- and H3O+ )
the electric field separates these ions, very little energy required but very low concentration.
so far sounds good, if a little slow.
So it's virtually identical to normal electrolysis but the energy to ionise the water molecules
is supplied by heat rather than the electric field

each mole of gas removed in this method could give 5 kJ of heat output
and would also reduce the energy of the remaining water by about 5 kJ
reducing the temperature of the water until it freezes.

Ambient heat could be used to replace the energy loss, slowly. so maybe ok.
so we have a sort of heat pump working.

BUT there would be a small but unavoidable electrolytic current,
multiplied by 50 kV that would be significant power.

SO I guess that ultra pure water would be required, which needs energy to 'purify' the water
and conductive layers that do not contribute ions to the water would also be required.

would the potential thermal energy of the hydrogen produced be greater than

(leakage current x voltage x time) plus
(energy required to purify the water) plus
(work done attracting the ions to the conductive layers)?

I don't know !

P.S. thinking about this with regards to S.Meyers WFC
if the WFC operates above ambient temperature (impatient for huge volumes of gas)
then electrical input energy is being wasted.
It seems we really do require 'cold electricity' to be efficient ;)

Consider that the electrodes are insulated using PBN ceramics according to the patent, which has a 10¹⁵ ohm*cm resistivity. That means there would be a very low power dissipation due to electron leakage: 3*10¹³ resistivity for the 0.3mm PBN layer, that's 8.3*10^-5W (per electrode pair). In this case we don't need highly purified water in there.

Forget about for a moment that this is just an ordinary heat pump which produces hydrogen byproduct, maybe it's a misdirection. Otherwise how would this be efficient as it's stated if all the energy of the produced hydrogen need to be invested to heat the water inside?

What is also interesting is that this patent refers to Han Tay Hee's patent, which uses a container made of something (barium titanate?) with very-very high dielectric constant. In Han's patent the water receives electrical field strength of 22 kV/mm, in the current patent it's about 6 kV/mm (the PBN ceramics has dielectric constant 4). So it seems that this patent uses less electrical field strength applied to the water, maybe it's enough using the deionization surfaces inside.

I'm wondering if a more commercial (and cheaper) substance could replace ther PBN ceramics as dielectrics, like Mylar. It seems that resistivity and dielectric strength is higher (!) than PBN ceramics, while the dielectric constant is almost the same (3).

I had a read of the patent, he is using about 25kv, in the region of car ignition coils voltage.
The similarity with meyer is the pos/neg high voltage unipolar plates, but there is no pulsing, no use of the water as a capacitor within the circuit.
Its appears to be somewhat different approach, the graphite layer on the inner surface of the dielectric plates is electrically connected, somewhat like a battery, so current can flow from one inner electrode inner surface to the other via a shunt. The idea is interesting. He does give some
values for production based on calculations,  he doesn't give any values based on experiment.
You could use air ioniser plates to test the idea, they are cheap and already have ceramic and metal surfaces as he describes.
His method and calculations are based on the number of free ions of h+ and oh- present in the water at any given time, rather than splitting the water molecule as far as I can tell.
Its certainly easy to replicate the experiment if you already have a 25kv unipolar supply and air ioniser ceramic plates on hand.
A shame he hasn't given any data on actual production rates from experiment, but then again
stan never supplied a detailed study on that aspect either.

Thanks for the hint, I ordered two of them and we'll see. It's 1.5mm thick with the HV electrode embedded into the ceramic according to description. These are rated up to 5kV, but maybe the insulation will be thick enough to withstand higher voltages.

Actually the patent states 50kV potential difference using two +-25kV supplies, one + and one -, so it's bipolar. I think this can also be done with a flyback transformer (modern, diodes included) driven with full wave.

interesting two power supplies, was a pretty long paper only skipped through it.
The shunt he does give description of it, it might have some resistive properties.
Will be interesting to see what happens, I would imagine the air ioniser plates will go way
over 5kv before arcing.

Yes, I think the shunt in this setup would slightly restrict current so it couldn't melt the wires. Anyway it's really hard to imagine this connection between the plates in the figure, since it's ~1mm gap between the plates. How this 1mm connection would be shielded? You can only connect a shunt in between the plates if a pair of wires or plates (continuing the inner coating) are going upwards, then you connect them there through a shunt. But after a few cm above the plates the HV field should be weak (at least it's stated), and the current perpendicular to HV plates is not restricted by the electric field. Then why a shielding is needed up there?

What about the other setup? In the other figure it grounds the inner coatings at a specified interval so the ions can get/give electrons from/to the ground. This interval stated 16ns while the coating surfaces are saturated with ions to produces 20V between the inner coatings. This results 62MHz frequency which is really high, so this cannot be done with relays but it's not easy to construct with FETs either (I read you have to get 5-600V FETs for this. But maybe something would happen on lower frequencies, but I don't know how much voltage would build up during this larger "off" period and if it could destroy FETs.

My question is in general how much voltage is building up on a conductive plate between two insulated HV plates if we don't connect the central plate to the ground? Will it be near voltage of the outer plates? Does it depend on the insulation dielectric properties? I haven't found any practical information anywhere about this (maybe I don't know what to search for).

Maybe we'll get some answers by experimenting, I've found +-30kV power supplies (using cascades) respectively for fair price so I don't have to bother with hacking an FBT. However the plates will take a few weeks to arrive. If I get two sets of these supplies I could even test if Eccles's Fracture cell (which is also using insulated HV plates) is actually do something. Someone tried to replicate it in another forum without success, but I think the key here to remove charge from plates before reversing polarity.

I got the ceramic plates and the high voltage generators (-30KV and +30KV from 12V, +-15KV from 5V) and I did a few test runs with them. I tried three different aproach detailed below.

1, Ceramic ozone generator plates. Insulator plate with an embedded metal layer, and another metal layer on one side. I think these are made of alumina, and it didnt's last long. Even +15KV is arced through the ceramic. It was weird to see that only the HV cable was connected to the central layer, and it arced to the metal on the side (air became a conductor to the ground because of capacitance I assume).

2, Two concentric PET bottles (cut bottom and top) glued together, ~2-3mm gap. I put sticking aliminum foil to its 4 surface in a few cm² area. It was really hard to construct it to contain water without leaking, because I used hot glue, and the PET is started melting when I glued the layers. It was sloppy but finally could contain water. I tried to apply HV (+-15KV) to the outer alu foils, connect the two deionization surfaces / periodically ground them. The only thing was happened silent popping, then it is overarched after some time. This was the moment when I decided to leave this and buy some insulation PETF foil which is thinner and has a way more dielectric strength, however PET was also good to a degree.

3, The insulator foil has higher melting point (can be hot glued without melting), specified dielectric strength, the dielectric constant is about the same (3) as the PBN material mentioned in the patent. I got 2 types: 50 micron (8KV) and 125 micron (15KV). The 50 micron has 160KV/mm dielectric strength, which is really high! However I couldn't glue two together correctly and with thin glue layer enough so I used the 125 micron sheet and hot glue, put some also on the edges, before that I sticked alu in the middle of the PETF foils. Put a small hole on one side of this thing to connect HV cable, sticked alu to the other side as deionization surface. Made two of these (pic 1). Then they turned together with alu surfaces inside, I put two short wires pointing upwards connected to the surfaces, wrapped around with alu for shielding (pic 2). Then put this in a glass (pic 3). Filled with distillated water to about half, I could see between the plates about what's going on. The gap was around 3mm, unfortunately I could not adjust it. I applied HV (-+15KV) and I didn't see any bubbles coming from water, despite I tried to connect the two free wires together, ground the foil, ground the wires and different permutations of these. Sometimes, but not always was a voltage buildup in the wires and shielding, because I saw sparks less than a mm when I connected them to the ground periodically. Other interesting thing happened is water started to stick to the outer surface of the plates, it was "moving" slowly upwards about 1 mm (went back when HV plates discharged). But between the plates nothing happened (might be the same moving, but the gap was too narrow to see it exactly). The insulation was good and I think that because I connected the 0V side of the two generators together through an ampmeter and I couldn't see even microamps. I could also hear a very silent popping sound every few seconds from the plates, and the current was still 0 so basically no leakage. I thought it couldn't withstand if I go from 5V to 12V (generates -+30KV), but before I saw it arcing through the water surface was started shaking near the outer plates, I think that was ionic wind which vibrated the water, at least sounded like that (dense cracking sound). After two seconds, bam. These HV generators are impressive. Not much current is involved (5W each), but when the 60KV potential difference strikes from a plate capacitance to a distance of 6-8cm that's loud and really scary. And of course lethal, I always keeped the distance and discharged the conducting surfaces with ground cable several times, because the charge is recovering a few times after the plate is discharged. When I tested the max withstanding voltages of the foil I got a light shock from the insulator foil itself when it became charged by HV.

Possible reasons why nothing has happened:

• Something is missing from the patent (or not working at all)
• The voltage was not high enough (-+15KV), or need more insulation to try with -+30KV
• Need the mentioned ceramic material
• Plate distance was too high
• The graphite plays some kind of a role and alu foil is not enough as deionization surface

Maybe I could try a laminator machine to see if these foils can be laminated to a thin metal plate (I don't have plates yet that's why I used sticking alufoil), however I don't know the exact melting point of the PTFE foil. If that works then I could use the 50 micron foil in multiple layers which has higher breakdown voltage/mm. Then the distance can be also more adjustable.

Whoever may concern, let me know your suggestions, ideas and thoughts.

Quote from codwell on April 2nd, 2015, 12:57 AM

Whoever may concern, let me know your suggestions, ideas and thoughts.

Actually your experiment went pretty much as I would have expected.

Early on in my Stan Meyer high voltage experiments, I used some of that dip-it material that is used for making handles on pliers and such.  I dipped a copper tube with a wire soldered to it and placed it along with a larger undipped copper tube in a jar of distilled water and charged it up to around 20kV.  Absolutely nothing happened other than to make a powerful Leyden jar capacitor.  No bubbles, nothing.  So I wondered, "What would happen if I put a tiny pinhole in the dip-it insulation?"

To my surprise, it made a bunch of gas for the size of the hole.  Unfortunately, the expanding gas continued to open up the hole until the voltage dropped and gas production ceased.

This little experiment got me thinking about membranes.  If you had the correct size holes with a framework material that was strong enough to not be distorted by the gas production, I do think using just high voltage DC power could do the trick.  I didn't pursue this any further as it seemed completely different from the way Stan was doing it.

In retrospect, it does seem likely a material made from carbon nanotubes or similar, might just be the ticket.  A lot of research has been done on water exclusion zones (EZs) and somewhere in there lies the key to simple electro-chemical decomposition of water.  Certainly there is a mechanical part to this too.  The dimensions of the material lattice must be correct and appropriate for a water molecule.  I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn some laboratory has already figured this out.