2020MAY15

Well, it failed but at least I can be reasonably certain that I actually extracted hydrogen from water with my most recent electrolysis experiment.

I started with the soda bottle of a little bit of potential hydrogen and water that I got from my previous experiment.


Then I made this handy dandy fluid pipe system gas mover:
It consists of a bunch of different-sized straws and one half ink-pen tube (to fit the soda bottle cap straw), pushed together with scraps of paper and some silicone caulk. Caulk does not preform very well when submerged in water, I need a better sealant.

My gas mover works by water being forced into the soda bottle and the long narrow straw pipe goes up inside the upside-down bottle to where the gas is above the water, so gas comes out of the narrow straw pipe when water goes in to the thick straw pipe.

You might not be able to see it in the picture but there is a small gap around the narrow straw pipe inside the thick straw pipe and that is where the water is pumped in.

In this case I used a small electric submersible water pump to power my gas mover, although I wish I would have used a gravity fed system (I didn't want to take the time to make one).

There is a small rubber hose attached to the end of the think straw pipe so gas comes out of the rubber hose. The reason for this is to make the flame located farther away from the bottle of gas, because I was not entirely sure how by the flame would be, and I didn't want my soda bottle combusted.

When I first connected the water pump to the apparatus it made the gas come out faster than I wanted, so I poked some holes in another straw to make a water pressure limiter and stuck it on the pump.

Now I had a nice medium sized stream of bubbles coming out of the rubber hose and I put a household fire lighter to it.

I was careful to make sure the hose was submerged barely beneath the water so that the rubber would't catch on fire.

It make repeated "pop" sounds noticeably louder than the lighter by it self but when I removed the lighter's flame from the stream of bubbles there was no persistent flame.
That's why I say this experiment failed, because I was trying to make a small flame of burning hydrogen gas above the water, but I couldn't get it to light.

That "pop" sound makes me reasonably certain that It was actually mostly hydrogen gas in the top of my soda bottle and not plain old air.


I noticed during this experiment and some other electrolysis experiments that bubbles of hydrogen in water when they reach the surface of the water where there is plain air above the water, the bubbles tend to stay longer without popping than bubbles of regular air.
I think this is a natural physics phenomenon (about two dissimilar gases separated by a liquid) but I don't know what it's called.

That concludes this experiment, which was awesome even though it was a failure.