Water On Fire By James Goss      If you have been into radio-controlled airplanes for any time at all, you have learned that water in your fuel is not a good thing. Methanol will soak up water like a sponge. This is why we must keep our fuel container closed at all times. By the time our fuel gets down toward the bottom of its container, we have acquired a good bit of moisture in the jug. A lot of our poor run conditions are a direct result of this unwanted moisture. I was thinking a while back that it would be really nice if we had an inline moisture trap to remove moisture and pass the fuel. I just haven't gotten around to experimenting with this project yet. If we can't get rid of the water in our fuel, why not use the water for fuel. Now I know you are going to laugh at this idea, but it really does have some possibilities.      About three years back, I believe it was in 1998, I was working on the idea of using water for fuel in a gasoline engine. I built a system that would indeed produce fuel from water. The idea has been around for many years and is known as an electrolyzer. The electrolyzer is a device that you can put water in and get hydrogen gas out. Hydrogen was discovered around the year 1500 and was generated when sulfuric acid and iron were brought together. Hydrogen is the lightest of all our elements and is very flammable. Remember it was used in the German dirigible “Hindenberg” that exploded in 1937 and killed about 60 people. At that time the United States was the only producer of helium gas, which is the second lightest element on earth, and would not provide it to Germany. So hydrogen got a bad name after that accident and anytime we hear the word hydrogen we think of explosions. And rightfully so, hydrogen will explode, I have had some first hand experience with hydrogen gas exploding, just ask my wife Mary.      The early airships were driven by huge diesel engines turning props. As the diesel fuel was used by the giant engines, the ship would become lighter and tend to rise up more readily. Some hydrogen gas would be allowed to escape to counter this extra lift. The German engineers got to thinking that the hydrogen was being wasted so they started venting the hydrogen through the engines. This gave them about 30% more range on each flight. Since then this concept of using hydrogen to fuel an engine has became a reality. Believe me, there will be no energy shortage in the future as long as we have water. Of course if we had no water, we wouldn't need energy anyway. As our oil supply slowly diminishes, we will see hydrogen take over the role as the energy king. There is too much profit in oil at this time and water is almost free for the taking. Believe me, if a fellow such as myself can produce hydrogen in his home workshop, you know it can be manufactured in industry much cheaper than gasoline. With all the research, locating, drilling, pumping, hauling, refining and distribution, needed to maintain our gasoline supply, hydrogen can be generated for 1% of what it costs for gasoline production. Not much profit there for the big oil companies, so it will be a while in coming. So let me say again, don't worry about us running out of energy in the future, water will burn.      Can you imagine us being able to run our model engines off of water instead of the fuel we now have? I am getting ready to start back with some experiments to do just that. Let me tell you about the electrolyzer I have built. Most electrolyzers operate from pure dc power at low voltage and high current. The concept here is to use unfiltered dc, known as pulsating dc, to power the unit with low current and voltage. I am not going into long details of how to build the electrolyzer. If anyone is interested I will gladly furnish this information. My system is pretty large as far as electrolyzers go. It will produce eleven gallons of Brown's Gas per minute. Noticed I called it Brown's Gas, not hydrogen gas. Brown's Gas, named after Yull Brown the inventor, is different from regular hydrogen gas. In a regular electrolyzer the water is split into hydrogen and oxygen atoms with most of them reforming or recombining with each other to make water again. This recombining is changing the individual atoms back into di-atomic molecules. So in a regular electrolyzer the hydrogen and oxygen must be kept separate of you will end up with water again. This is hard to achieve in the simple electrolyzer that uses pure dc for its power.      By using pulsating dc voltage to drive the electrolyzer, the separated gases do not tend to recombine into diatomic molecules; they remain in a monatomic state. This makes it really easy to capture the gas. The output gas from my system carries both hydrogen and oxygen in a ratio that burns quite well. An electrolyte must be used in the electrolyzer to increase the conductivity of the water. I use sodium hydroxide, which is not expensive or hard to come by.  Once you place the electrolyte into the electrolyzer, you never have to put anything into the electrolyzer other than water. One gallon of water will drive a torch for forty hours, one week of welding, and then simply add another gallon of water and you are ready to go again.      Unlike oxygen and acetylene welding systems that need two hoses, Brown's gas only need one hose because it already has the hydrogen and oxygen mixed together right out of the electrolyzer. I run the electrolyzer tank pressure at about 50 psi and use a regular oxygen and acetylene number 1 or 2 torch handle. The pressure on the tank is self-generating and I have a pressure switch to keep it constant. The first time I tried to light the torch I thought it was not going to light. I was holding it close to the ground at the time and I noticed a shadow of heat rising. The torch was burning and I didn't realize it. I had forgot that you can't see a hydrogen flame. The same with an alcohol flame. I brought a piece of paper over to the torch and the invisible flame set it on fire immediately. I then knew for sure that I was burning water. It was so fascinating that I just set there for about an hour watching the shadow on the ground. This much energy from water, just think of the possibilities.  I then used the torch for melting pieces of metal, silver soldering, and brazing metal together. I made a video of the machine in action and showed it to my students at work.      It's good to know that our children and grandchildren will have an unlimited supply of energy so their life will be as convenient as ours. Can you imagine what life would be like if all of a sudden we had no oil, natural gas or coal for fuel? Well one day it will come to pass and it probably will be sooner than you think. By that time the transition will have already occurred, and the future generations will be using hydrogen , the sun's energy, and many other things that we have not even thought of at this time.      Some problems encountered while trying to run our model engines with Brown's gas will have to be solved, but I think they can be overcome. The first and most obvious is how do you lubricate the engine. You can't mix an oil with a gas vapor. The oil will have to be injected into the engine by a separate means, a pressurized oil pump for example. The next question is will the glow plug ignite the hydrogen gas and will the hydrogen react with the glow element to keep it hot? With the fine electronic ignitions we have today, changing to a small spark plug, about the size of the glow plug, will be simple. Brown's gas is about seven times more ignitable than is gasoline.  Actually the gas engines will be easier to convert over to hydrogen. Timing will probably have to be changed, but with the electronic ignitions that will be no trouble at all. The next question is how do you store the hydrogen fuel on the plane? Look at it this way, it will make your plane weigh less. We may be able to have a system that will generate the hydrogen on demand. This method sounds the best because you would not have to have a large pressurized storage tank onboard.     By the way, with one gallon of water you can fly your plane for one year or more. Also there is absolutely no byproducts coming out of the exhaust other than water vapor. After the Brown's gas goes through your engine, the hydrogen and oxygen recombine to form water. Capture this water and use it again. Another interesting fact I noticed while my torch is burning is that you can touch the side of the torch tip and it is not very hot to the touch. Maybe our engines will run a lot cooler! One of the weirdest things about this fuel is the fact that the torch flame will not heat water very well. Also different metals cause the flame to be at different temperatures. This has been a really interesting project to experiment with and I look forward to reactivating it when I retire in June. So let me say again that seeing water burn is one of the most unbelievable things you will ever see. The Beginning PS. I have now retired from teaching, but I am so actively engaged in building and flying models I don't have any time to experiment. I guess I will have to retire again in order to finish the projects I have started.