Generate hydrogen for filling SOME balloons? (electrolysis)

[audioguru]

Scientists say that all the helium will be gone soon. Then we will use hydrogen and blow up like the weirdos over there who like to blow themselves up (and nearby people).

I wonder how many weirdos tried to blow themselves up (and nearby people) with inflammable helium?

How can we blow up the weirdos before they blow us up?

 

[()blivion]

I heard a story of a kid with a balloon riding in a car minding his/her own, when the balloon suddenly exploded and blew out the windows and such. I guess the vender was being a cheep ass and filling the balloons with hydrogen and some air/oxygen got in there.

Don't know if it's a true story or not, but I want one too mommy!

Helium, good stuff. I guess it all comes from natural gas reserves, extracted by fractional distillation. It's the second most abundant element in the universe, but not all that common on earth really. Most all of it is made by radioactive decay. Some ejected alpha particles pick up two electrons, BING! you get helium.

Radioactive decay takes to long to make enough for my balloon though :-(

 

[audioguru]

When I was a young teenager I made bombs that went up high in the sky and I made rockets that all blew up.
I purchased the chemicals at the local drug store. I am lucky that I survived.
I never made hydrogen.

 

[3v0]

I just want to point out that the Hindenburg did not so much explode as burn.

 

[jpanhalt]

The scarcity of helium is a real problem for equipment that uses superconducting magnets. There really is no good substitute for it.

@Audioguru,

As for nostalgia, I salvaged one of these from our chemistry department. Used it as a desk ornament and to keep loose change for years, until someone tried to pick it up and didn't realize it was in two parts. It's called a Kipp generator and was a staple in laboratories for generating various gases.

View attachment 65960

John

 

[()blivion]

So, just because I'm impatient, I tried to make some Hydrogen using good old chemistry.

I took some copper chloride based PCB etchant I have and put some into a 2 liter bottle. Then I dropped in a bunch of pop can tabs and quickly put the balloon over the mouth.... It was more or less a disaster. It made so much heat that the 2 liter bottle melted and shrank to about the same shape and size of one of the old glass coke bottles, and it spewed out so much hot steam into the balloon that the balloon partly melted. The balloon didn't get fully filled, and after a few minutes the steam cooled and condensed, making the balloon shrink even farther. It was so full of water and so under full of Hydrogen that it never had lift.

I'm not entirely convinced I was making only Hydrogen either, probably some chlorine in there also. Should have used the right chemistry. But the gas that was made burned quite well when I lit it on fire. So I was making SOME Hydrogen.

But, I think I want to keep with the idea of using electrolysis after all.
-()blivion

 

[dougy83]

Isn't weak sulphuric acid normally used as the electrolyte, and carbon or graphite for the electrodes? Using salt should produce chlorine gas in the oxygen reservoir too I guess

 

[()blivion]

OK. I can use a sulfuric electrolyte. I have just the car battery to steal it from too.....

Should I be using the apparatus that colin55 mentioned? I'm going to have to make one...

 

[dougy83]

Hummm.... I like that apparatus. To bad it's glass. But then again, I suppose it doesn't have to be.

You can use plastic bottles if you wanted (provided the solution doesn't get too hot), and then you could perhaps use the bottle as the 'pump' to fill balloon from.

But then again, I suppose it doesn't have to be. The problem I see with that is that I'm going to have to use large voltages to get the before mentioned ~27 Amps to pump out, do to the large spacing of the electrodes. I suppose I could use direct off-the-line power, then I can add electrocution to the ever growing list of dangers.

That's not a good idea. Using a high voltage is inefficient and you'll end up boiling the water instead of making hydrogen. You can increase the current by increasing the surface area of the electrodes, increasing the number of electrodes (e.g. having 10 hydrogen collection bottles w/ electrodes in each) and decreasing the distance between the electrodes. Have a quick look at the following wikipedia articles. You'll see the amount of potential you need to break water is less than 2V. Any extra voltage (albeit required to increase current in a poor set-up) goes to heat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficiency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis#Electrolysis_of_water

 

[strantor]

I just read through this whole thread and I think you are over complicating things. IMO the answer lies in post #6 & post #15. Just get a hose and bend it into a horseshoe with the 2 ends facing up, and fill the hose with salt water. take 2 leads from a battery and put one in either end. tape a trash bag over the end with the negative electrode. wait for bag to inflate, then squeeze the hydrogen out of the bag and into a balloon. or just use the full bag lieu of a balloon.

I was on a submarine and we used electrolysis to create oxygen. the hydrogen was pumped overboard. it's not a very complicated process.

 

[johansen]

If you want to take a bit of risk, just drill two holes into the vent cap of a car battery and use the car battery to fill the balloons with both hydrogen and oxygen.

they will have about half the buoyancy of helium.

the effects of igniting such a stoichiometric mix are best left to personal experience

 

[()blivion]

That's not a good idea. Using a high voltage is inefficient and you'll end up boiling the water instead of making hydrogen.

Zing... The sound of the lame sarcastic joke going over your head. (It's the Internets fault)

No, I of course won't be using wall power for various reasons. I'm probably going to hook some PC PSU's together since I have a mountain of them.

take 2 leads from a battery and put one in either end. tape a trash bag over the end with the negative electrode. wait for bag to inflate, then squeeze the hydrogen out of the bag and into a balloon. or just use the full bag lieu of a balloon.

But what if my whole apparatus gets lift and floats away? :-(

LOL, no... I have tried something like that when I was a kid with little success. Garbage bags leak 9 times out of 10. I also think my problem was that I wasn't generating enough Hydrogen though. I was using a Computer PSU. But I think your on to something. If I could fill a garbage bag, I might just use that instead of the supplied balloons?

Also...
One of these days, What I'm gonna do is I'm going to take and buy A CRAP TON (one exact "crap ton") of garbage bags OK? Then I'm going to get a giant fishing net.... right? And I'm going to fill bag after bag after bag with Hydrogen. Putting them all under the net, (with the net of course tied down on all corners). When the Net starts to fill and lift off the ground. I'm going to close up the net and tie it to a chair. BANG! supper cheep personal air craft.

I realize that similar has almost certainly been done before. The irony is it's probably not that unreasonable to pull off.
-()blivion

 

[Dr_Doggy]

that will definately burn your wiskers

they say to do 2v/plate so 12v=6plates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMFnf_41Iys

i think this would be MY prefered method
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L75ESD9PBOw&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL8461D966A080A8A1
or this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjtLdnFkTEg

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

I guess you;ll have to use hydrogen. I went to a store yesterday and the note on the door said no Helium balloons because of a national shortage of Helium and you can't even buy any for party use.

 

[strantor]

Pardon my complete void of chemistry knowledge, but how does the earth run out of helium? I thought it was a noble gas; it can't react with anything, so how could it be consumed? Or has it all just floated up to the top of the atmosphere? Do we need to go up there and get some?

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

Apparently politics?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/story/2012/06/18/wdr-helium-shortage.html

 

[ClydeCrashKop]

This is the piece of equipment you need:
**broken link removed**

**broken link removed**

Seal off the tube so the gas will enter a balloon.
Keep letting out the oxygen.

You can make this with PVC pipe cheap. Use a 12 volt car battery. Add baking soda to plain water until you get 10 or more amps. The garbage bag trick sounds good. Be careful.

 

[()blivion]

"Helium is so light that it floats into space,"

Yeah. They need to stop venting it and start recollecting it instead. You can reliquify it, you can't scrub it back out of the upper atmosphere. Well... you *COULD*... Not easily. We could try forcing alpha particles into some electrons. You can make helium in small amounts that way. And by "we" I mean humanity of course. (You're not getting me near alpha particles.)

You can make this with PVC pipe cheap. Add baking soda to plain water until you get 10 or more amps. The garbage bag trick sounds good.

Sounds doable. I plan on using a PC power supply. So the Amps are there, 5v rails regularly go up to 20+ Amps. And I have more if need be. To get it to draw 10 amps though, it's going to have to be one of three things....

(1) Very close electrodes distance.
(2) high water conductivity.
(3) (Relatively) high voltage.

How and where do you think these things should be optimized? That's whats getting me because....

(1) Close electrodes makes it harder to separate the two gasses.
(2) Too much electrolyte creates chemical problems, bad gasses, corrosion, the environment, hard to source.
(3) High(ish) voltage creates dangers at some point. Both fires and electrocution.

Of the three. I think higher voltage has the best benefits all around. If I can get a resistance of 4 Ohms, I can use 40 volts at 10 Amps. But that's going to be hard to do right, or safely.

Be careful.

I'm always careful.... OK, no I'm not.... Not at all.... Meh...