 hydrogen and oxygen as I have made no attempt to separate the two gases. The reason for this is that Meyer claimed that it was of the correct stoichiometric ratio for an internal combustion engine. In later patents he fed back some of the exhaust gas to increase the latitude of engine speed control.
Electronic excitation of the water capacitor.
According to Meyer, at resonance the voltage developed across the water capacitor .... ripped apart the water molecule. It was further suggested that thousands of volts AC were required at the resonant frequency as opposed to tens, or even hundreds of volts. No problem, if that was what the man wanted then I would produce an electronic pulse generator that could be tuned in the range 1kHz to 1mHz !. If some magic resonance existed ... I wanted to find it !. I still had no idea at that time whether the resonance Meyer's was talking about was in the water or the equipment. He simply said that when excitation of the water capacitor (and the external series inductor) was correct then the amount of gas produced would greatly increase and the excitation power greatly decrease. How could this be ?. One possible way was that when the gas rate increased, more of the gap between the capacitor plates became filled with insulating gas and not water, so the impedance of the cell would increase drawing less power from the excitation source. It also follows that as the water between the plates of the capacitor was displaced by gas, the capacitance value would change because gas has a much lower dielectric coefficient than water. This would in turn change the resonant frequency of the series cell and move it away from the excitation frequency. So in a practical circuit one would have to make the excitation frequency track the changing resonant frequency of the series water capacitor / series inductance, in order to get maximum power transfer. So my confidence in Mr Meyer was considerably enhanced when he obtained a patent to do just that !. He used a CMOS phase locked loop to do the tracking and all the other functions in his new circuit were exactly the kind of things an engineer would expect to see in a working circuit. The only problem is that resonance eluded me !. Yes my replica setup did produce prodigious amount of gas using almost any excitation frequency but not a peak anywhere between 1 kHz and 1 mHz. I was beginning to wonder what I was doing wrong. After all, Meyer was supposed to have demonstrated his equipment to both the American and European patent offices. In addition the BBC had sent highly reputable scientists to see his equipment working. Everyone said it did exactly what he claimed it would do !. I think I decided to give up at that stage because I was running out of ideas. It was a sad moment for me, because like everyone else in the world ... I wanted it to work in order to save the planet. It was that important to me.
It is very difficult for an engineer to drop a problem after failure. So it was with me and I felt sure that perhaps I had missed something important in the pile of patents. Then one day I was reading through one and came across the phrase "idealised capacitor" and cursed, because with conductive water between the capacitor plates, it was far from being an "idealised capacitor". The reason is simple. The conductive water effectively shorts out the plates and it ceases to behave like a capacitor. It will still produce gas but only at a conventional electrolysis rate. To become an "idealised capacitor" one would have to insulate at least one of the plates. Then I wondered if our Mr. Meyers had done just that, perhaps by varnishing one of the capacitor tubes, thereby insulating it from the tap water. The casual observer would not be able to see a clear varnish coat when the tube was immersed in the water. The water capacitor and series inductance could now operate in a high Q resonance mode and a whole new world of possibilities would be open.
Another thought was that somewhere I had seen something similar .... and eventually remembered a short article in the "