ction gives off heat.
The Bang Triangle.
In a normal car engine we create a controlled explosion by mixing petrol vapour (fuel) with air (oxidant) and then ignite it with a spark (fire). So our 'Bang triangle' consists of fuel, an oxidiser and fire. Remove anyone of those components and you cannot have a bang. The best bang depends upon mixing the fuel and the oxidiser in the right ratios, under the right pressure and setting light to that mixture at the right time. Congratulations, you are now a rocket scientist !.
Stan Meyers claims.
Well, we already have hydrogen powered cars and they also use air and spark plugs, so it appeared to me that it was perfectly possible that he was cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen and then using a mix of those gases to power his car !. What was questioned, was simply whether the way he cracked the water, was an over-unity process or not. Or to put it in another way, did he get more energy out of the process than he put into it ?. Trying to prove him right became a very popular endeavor. The appealing thing was that the science involved was something you do in your own workshop and it was true .... anyone could generate hydrogen and oxygen gas with a very simple setup in their home workshop. In fact you can do it with two spoons, a jam jar and a battery !. However proving the over-unity claim required a more complicated effort. Basically Meyers was claiming that his process ripped apart the water molecule using much less energy that was required for electrolysis. Meyers used the word 'resonance' often in his patents and as an electronic engineer will tell you, resonance can do wonderful things ..... so there!. From my point of view the question was where was the resonance ?. Was it a proton resonance at molecular level in the water ?. Was it resonance within the fuel cell capacitor and load inductance,, or in the applied excitation currents. I could find no natural resonace frequencies in the tens of kHz and hundreds of KHZ that Meyer was supposed to be using ..... except the proton precession 'wobble' freqency as it realigns itself between new magnetic fields. At the UK latitude this wobble frequency is about 2 kHz. It did not look very promising.
The Capacitor fuel cell.
Myers basic fuel cell was basically very simple and consisted of a stainless steel tube inside a slightly larger one. Each two tube assembly formed a capacitor with plates insulated from each other. In order to increase the gas output of a cell he used several of these capacitors wired in parallel. This effectively multiplied the total capacitance of the cell. So far so good !. The next thing he did was to fill the cell with tap water, which he claimed had a high dielectric coefficient. Never having played with water capacitors before I was surprised that water has a dielectric coefficient of about 64. This has the effect of multiplying the effective capacity of the water capacitor by 64 ... very useful if we want to construct a cell that resonates at tens of kilo-hertz. The thing that really puzzled me was that he claimed to use tap water and not de-ionised water in his cells.
In order to experiment, I decided to make a copy of a Meyers fuel cell, infact I made four utilising different ideas. Here is one of them below.
I realised that if gas was being generated within a closed cell then the cell would become presurised, so I fitted it with a 0 - 30 PSI pressure gauge, so that I could measure what was happening. Since I would have to vacate the gas from the cell, it was also fitted with an on off tap and an output connection. The hydrogen oxygen mix in the cell would be explosive and I had in mind remotely burning it off. To prevent flame flash back into the cell, the output valve was fitted with a 0.8mm flash back arrestor orifice. In order to increase the capacitance of the cell it was fitted with six co-axial capacitors made of stainless steel. The two electrical terminals that connect to the capacitor plates are underneath the cell. You will notice that the gas that forms in the top of the cell, is a mixture of