http://wiki.engr.uiuc.edu/display/ae498mpa/Assignments

Be sure to explore the whole website because there are plenty of cool things to see and do – I will be restarting to post on THIS blog soon.

So with version 2 of the hydrogen circuitry complete I decided to give it a whirl on my dad’s old oscilloscope (from the 80′s).  It had a missing grounding plug, but I figured it would still be okay.  It was extremely nice and worked amazingly – for the first 15 minutes.  While I was running a test to check for overheating on my circuitry, I had the scope connected to make sure that I was putting out a proper wave function.  As it turns out I was (hooray!), and then without warning the back of the scope blows out and smoke starts billowing from it along with a pretty foul smell.  Some quick thinking kept this from getting out of control and in about 30 seconds I had cleared off my desk and was standing with a fire extinguisher in case things got way out of hand.

I got lucky.

Anyway, I decided that this post will be dedicated to analyzing possible causes of the oscilloscope’s failure, which was easily worth more than all the money I’ve made this summer:

1.  Faulty (missing) ground plug.  Grounding is important.  Apart from a tool to discipline abnoxious teenagers and keeping people level headed, grounding would probably have discharged any rogue electrical buildup in the scope caused by the square wave pulse generated by my circuitry.  I suspect this was the root cause since it took so long for the scope to explode instead of right away.

2.  Age.  While this in my opinion should never, EVER make a difference if you’ve properly taken care of your equipment, it is totally conceivable that due to years of unuse, the scopes parts may have just rusted or lost the properties that the scope would have needed to operate properly.  Or maybe bugs were crawling around inside.

3. Operator error.  As much as I hate to admit it, I am human and so it is reasonably conceivable that I may just have no hooked something up properly.  I’m looking really deeply into this one, primarily because I don’t want to blow up another scope, but also because this would be a basis for me in deciding how old my tools can be before I replace them.  If it was my fault, then older parts should work just as well as new parts as long as they can be tested for working conditions.  My dad’s solution was for me to try this in an ECE lab (which I have no choice but to now) or on my $6 oscilloscope.  But if I hook it up to my $6 scope and power feedbacks into my computer, I would have just lost my computer.  The point is, if another one explodes we know whose fault it is.

A final note:  I noticed that there was an unusual amount of power drain for the circuitry before the overload.  I hadn’t hooked them up to any plates, but the current passing through the circuit was at tenths of an amp (0.22Amps +-0.03A, far higher (I think) than what it should be for what I thought was pretty much no-load operation.)  I wonder if the scope has a megaohm or 10kohm switch that I needed to hit.  Any ideas?

Luckily, as far as I can tell the hydrogen circuitry is okay, and I’m thinking about generating a square wave pulse using the Arduino interface instead of analog circuitry.  This will let me have a cleaner square wave function and more precise control over the frequency so that I can get it just right.  I can probably install some sensors too so that the Arduino can automatically tune itself.  With a USB interface, I could fine tune the car via laptop until I hit that sweet spot.

Also!  Since I have some investors now, I have decided to try opening up a donations ability on this site.  So if you see a project that you would like to support or see taken further, please take the opportunity to press the donate tab at the top of this page.  It’s done with paypal, so I never see your information, who you are, etc.  But you can send a message when you donate telling me which project you would like your donations to go to.  If you don’t specify, I’ll put it towards the project that needs it the most.  I’ve been doing these projects entirely out of my own pocket so far, but there is only so far I can get before my bank charges me an overdraft fee.  So, thank if you do donate, and thank you even if you don’t donate.  If you are reading this, you have already supported me, and I thank you very much.

Anyway, life goes on and I will be working a bit on Project Alpha so I can start testing that hopefully without blowing things up.

More posts soon!

At 0.2 amps, the electrolysis works, the current is proportional to the surface area of the electrodes in the water.  I’ve gotten this up to 0.45 Amps and it is create what seems to me to be a significant amount of hydrogen.  I’m using polished aluminum because I don’t have access to stainless steel at the moment.  The hydrogen and oxygen mixture in these bubbles burn aggressively, so at least that way I know that this is not just making steam.  The tap water I used is remaining ice cold, and I can touch the electrodes and the water all while this thing is on with no problem.  Also, I’ve used galvanized steel and aluminum as electrodes and both corrode like nobody’s business and release a precipitate (the galvanized steel does).

I may try standard electrolysis using the same input voltage and current as this circuit and compare my results to see if this is in fact more effective than DC electrolysis.  These results are good enough for me to continue working on the rest of the generator, but I’m going to try for a more cost-effective solution than the manual instructs.

So, it is conceivable that there may be a method to breaking down molecules into their individual components that uses less energy than other methods.  Electrolysis isn’t “charging up” the particle with energy, it’s just separating them from each other (but it happens to typically require more than the energy they release when they are combusted).  So, if there truly is a way to separate these particles without using as much energy, then the combustion reaction can still happen and energy can be conserved (if anything that I’m saying is possible, which I have no proof of yet.)  The only problem I see here is why can’t I just use a condenser and reclaim all the water I’ve burned?  This would turn into a perpetual motion device which is a big no-no.  Maybe that answer will come to me, or maybe after all you can only supplement fuel with hydrogen, not replace is completely?  We’ll find out in a week or two.

Tonight curiosity may get the best of me and I may grab a few nails and try the electrolysis in water just to see if it works at all. I caught some last minute wiring mistakes I had made. I’m not using exactly the same components as the design calls for so I’ve had to remap a bit of the wiring to make it work properly. I also need to figure out if I can get this on a nice compact circuit board so it doesn’t take any room in the car. I also feel much better about using a butterfly valve to control hydrogen input as opposed to using the gas pedal to control hydrogen production. After watching a few more video I think this is the better route, and designing circuitry to control that shouldn’t be too difficult and it would be nice to add my own touch to this thing.

I’m going to have to work hard now to not lose my thunder and keep the ball rolling all the way up until the end of summer. I’ve already come this far, it would be a waste to not finish what I started. Tonight I will finish the oscilloscope, tomorrow I will finish designing the wiring for the control module for Alpha, and probably start on the final wiring too (and hopefully finish). Tuesday the second component of the hydrogen module should be complete and maybe we can go out and buy the parts for the generator itself. This friday is do or die for project alpha, and finishing the oscilloscope means that I have succeeded in turning my room into a well-stocked ECE and Physics laboratory, or as one friend put it, an Aerospace laboratory (on a budget of about $200-$250). These tools are not bad at all, and for general applications they are more than enough to get the job done. With a little tweaking I’m sure I can make them even better. Oh I also need to do the wind tunnel too, but I don’t have a need for that right now – so I’ll put it together during some spare time.

1. Oscilloscope
I decided to go ahead and try the 5 volt oscilloscope using my computer until I can get my hands on an actual factual oscilloscope. I’ve gotten the plans and bought the parts which came out to about $6, and I’ve also got an idea (and parts) with which I can bump up the voltage it can handle to 120 so that I can measure line power, but I need to do some math before I start plugging things in. I’ll finish the oscilloscope tonight and test it on the hydrogen generator’s output in a day or two probably. It’ll be a simple square wave, and while it’s 12 volts the circuit has 50 V protection, so I won’t burn anything out.

Here’s the link: http://scopeonpc.googlepages.com/

2. Hydrogen generator
I was thinking about the plans I was reading for the hydrogen generator and I thought “why the heck can’t I get the car to run on full water power?” Of course, the answer was that the response time of the generator isn’t fast enough to give the car any reasonable amounts of power. But then it hit me – why I am doing things where my foot controls gas production? Shouldn’t it control gas input into the engine? So now I am working on using circuitry that will control the generator for constant pressure in the generator and leaving the foot pedal to control the butterfly valve into the engine. The max press it shows is 65 psi off the top of my head – if I can keep the system running at 55 or even 60 psi based on the response time of the water and the circuitry, then I can probably run the car at 75% or even 100% water (if any of this even works in the first place). I still haven’t solved the conservation of energy problem, but I do think that by burning the hydrogen and oxygen, I still need to put more oxygen into the system which gets heated up by the combustion which expands the piston etc etc. But even then I could still reclaim the water easily and it would be perpetual motion again. Something doesn’t add up but I can’t figure out what it is yet, so I’m going to keep building. I also don’t know if AC pulses use less energy than DC current, but I’ll find that out too soon enough. Also, instead of using concentric pipes I’m going to try making the generator like a rolled capacitor – that way I get maximum surface area and 98% of the generator won’t just be empty space. I could probably quadruple the surface area if the plates only need a fraction of an inch distance from each other. There was also a mention of roughing up surfaces – I’ll try it smooth first and then rough it up to see if there is any improvement.

3. Wind Tunnel
While workingon a cooling system for a very VERY hot component of project alpha, I remembered something I had come up with last year – a portable (albeit a little inaccurate) wind tunnel. I can use a boxfan and using compressible flow/fluid mechanics I can create a nozzle using cardboard and a test section with glass and using an interface I discovered (written below) I can measure pressure, airspeed, calculate Reynold’s numbers, and try out different airfoils and probably use a couple pipes and chalk dust for streamlines. It shouldn’t be too hard to do – a weekend project at most. I’ll make a materials/price list later after I finish the circuitry to do the measuring.

4. Arduino
For those of you that don’t know http://www.arduino.cc/ is the homepage of an awesome interface named arduino. From what I’ve read, Arduinois invincible – and for a poor college student with self-funded experiments, this would be the perfect way for me to start recording data in a more digital manner and even control some of the circuits I’m using. In reference to above, I can use arduino to control the generator pressure in the hydrogen tank and also use it to measure and calculate some of the variables in the wind tunnel. I also am thinking about using it for project alpha to automatically control some devices or keep an eye out for me in case I can’t keep my eye on certain gauges. I’ll also probably create an Arduino interface to do the oscilloscope job if I don’t get an actual oscilloscope because it seems easier for me to govern high voltages and interpret them with the arduino interface rather than trying to figure it out w/ my parallel port (I’ll find out in about a day or so). I haven’t totally read everything in Arduino, but it looks like it’s based on C, which I already know so I can hit the ground running.  Correction 7/14/2008: Arduino is based on the Processing/Wiring programming language, so it looks like I’ll learn something new!

5. Alpha
Hopefully by the end of this week I can fire this thing up. Everything is built and ready for action, but I am waiting for a few meters to arrive so that I can keep this experiment safe. If this works, I can move on too phase 2 which is going to have a very aggressive schedule. I think I can keep up with it, but I definitely have to finish everything by the beginning of August and write on all my finding and everything because then RA duty starts and the students start moving in and it will be time to take care of my school business. I spent the first have of summer building the tools I needed to build this thing and finally I built part of this thing too. Wish me luck.

6. Other: I need to get my self much more familiar with programming interfaces like Matlab and continue learning more C and pick up Java too because a lot of companies are using them. Also, I’ve begun to work on Microsoft Access inside and out, which isn’t rocket science but I’m finding it in use, so I’ve got to stay prepared.

Oh one more thing, lately and suddenly my Remote Desktop on Windows XP hasn’t been working and it’s because of rdpdd.dll which controls remote desktop’s display service. The solution I found online was to revert to an older graphics card driver which I did… and bsodedmy computer. I had to leave for work so I didn’t get a chance to fix it – but I’m glad to know that it’s not because I’ve forgotten how to fix up my firewalls.

I also thought about building a computer to manage all the media I need to get to when I go to other places, but that’s cost prohibitive right now, and it’s not a need, it’s a want. Once I automate my room with arduino (lights, TV (if I ever get one), anything else). Then I may build a low power computer to just govern and coordinate everything overall and then use this loud powerful computer for all my work. I also thought buying an Acer Eeelaptop would be useful just to have withme so I can do some work on the go. For $300, it’s pretty good for a short term, very basic needs workstation, and once I get to my room it can synchronize withmy big computer. I’m working on organizing my files so everything is nice and easily accessible once the school year starts again. All the stuff I’ve done in college and for the new year is ready, I just need to go through everything I’ve accumulated before college.

CYMA
An organization very near and dear to my heart, CYMA-WD 2008 is currently on a two-week pilgrimage in Armenia, under the leadership of one of my interns from CYMA2007. They are on a whirlwind schedule for the next two weeks, so I’m sure writing entries in their own blog will be difficult. I have faith though that they will have a blast over there and will want to return. Some of my friends have asked me to go on CYMA09 as a coordinator again. I really REALLY want to, but my first duty is to secure entry into grad school or to get an aerospace internship here in the U.S.. Aerospace and CYMA are both very important to me, but I feel like I have succeeded with CYMA, and Aerospace is something that I really want to excel in and so I’m going to have to make that sacrifice. I hope that in the not so distant future I will have a chance to go again, or even help out here with CYMA. Seeing as most Aerospace jobs are in California anyways, I’ll probably end up over there, which wouldn’t be so bad. I would be by my family, and a lot of my friends are over there too.