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Battery Water (revisited)
Does anyone know how this miracle works? How does hydrogen passing
platinum produce water at room temperature? Where does the oxygen come from? Air vents out of the cell as soon as hydrogen displaces it, leaving pure hydrogen. Now let's look at batteries....... Run down your deep cycle battery to 11 volts. Put the charger on at 10 or 20 A and wait 20 minutes for it to charge a while. Open up the cells and look inside. Notice it's not "perking" away? Why? A long time ago, lead plates in lead-acid batteries was supported by a grid of antimony built into the plates. Lead is too soft to hold itself up in thin sheets. During charging, the antimony reacted with the water, splitting up the hydrogen and oxygen and causing the hydrogen to vent out of the batteries in LARGE amounts, causing an awful explosion hazard as it had to be vented out of the batteries. WW2 subs had bad hydrogen problems in their battery compartments and many died from the explosions. Modern batteries no long use antimony to support the lead dioxide plates. The alloys used now react much less and produce almost no gas. (Notice the maintenance-free battery in your car? Why doesn't it gas like hell and use lots of water?) Great information is available on: http://www.vonwentzel.net/Battery/00.Glossary/ http://www.flex.com/~kalepa/technotes.htm http://www.4unique.com/battery/battery_tutorial.htm http://www.ctts.nrel.gov/BTM/pdfs/evs_17paper.pdf Most of the outgassing is caused by CHARGING TOO FAST...charging it faster than it can chemically react. Charge them as slow as you can.....with the latest pulse technology is nice, too! On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 23:18:26 -0400, Glenn Ashmore wrote: They do work and work well. We use them on our floor polishers because the custodians are bad about checking water levels before putting them on the charger. These L16s (28 of them) get discharged below 50% every night and the chargers are heavy duty Triplite 3 stage commercial units. The maintenance supervisors check the level every month and acording to their logs only add water occasionally. Before we went to Hydrocaps he had to check them twice a week. I believe there is a little strip of platinum in the cap that acts as a catalyst to recombine the hydrogen with oxygen before it vents. You do have to remove them before equalizing or they will get overwhelmed and you have to take care not to get acid up inside them. Cost wise I believe they were well worth it. We paid right at $600 for 90 of them and our battery replacement costs have been cut in half over the 3 years we have used them. BTW, we use Kroger and Publix distilled water. :-) BOEING377 wrote: Do those so called catalytic battery caps actually work? The are supposed to use a catalyst recombine outgassing molecules back into H2O which drips back into the battery cell. I am sceptical. -- Glenn Ashmore I'm building a 45' cutter in strip/composite. Watch my progress (or lack there of) at: http://www.rutuonline.com Shameless Commercial Division: http://www.spade-anchor-us.com Larry W4CSC 3600 planes with transponders are burning 8-10 million gallons of kerosene per hour over the USA. R-12 car air conditioners are responsible for the ozone hole, right? |
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