Why did I make this video?

I am interested in making my own power using magnetic fields.  Magnets are such a mystery to me and I have yet to fully understand why they work.  How are magnets made?  Where do magnets come from?  What are magnets made of?  These are some of my questions.

Neodymium magnets

I was reading up on magnets, trying to understand better how they are made.  I read that the element Neodymium makes up the world’s strongest permanent magnets.  I wanted to know more about Neodymium and came across a site that had pictures of the Rare Earth Metals being exposed to air over a time period of 4 years.  I was very surprised that Neodymium corrodes so readily in air, which explains why Neodymium magnets are plated or coated by another non-corrosive material, like epoxy or Nickel.  I decided to make a quick video showing how Neodymium degrades almost completely in two years.  (Experiment and photos found at http://www.elementsales.com/re_exp/.  They show all the Rare Earth Metals there – interesting stuff and great experiment.  I have no affiliation with their website.)

Permanent Magnets

How long do magnets last?  Are “permanent” magnets really permanent?  Apparently, even permanent magnets lose their magnetic field over time.  [ source:  magnetechcorp.com ]

Other References

Picture of magnets from:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/10240853@N08/

Some information from: http://www.whatareneodymiummagnets.com/faqs.html

I found it humorous and couldn’t resist trying to make a remix of it. I wish I could have been in the room when it happened. I also like to experiment with Hydrogen, so I admire this group for trying something new. They also have other successful experiments.

Here’s the remix:

And here is the original video:

To give the experimenters credit, they did come up with some corrective actions to prevent future disasters. Luckily, all is well and they learned a lesson from the experiment.

They said that this fuel cell ran well at 12V, but then exploded when they increased the voltage to 150V.  The wires couldn’t take the extra current, got red hot, and ignited the Hydrogen gas.

Corrective Actions

Use a larger gauge cable, to allow for larger Amp draws without getting hot.

Fill the cell to the top with salt water to lower the amount of combustible gas present in the fuel cell.

Install a pressure release valve.

Perform future testing with an open top fuel cell so that the combustible HHO gas will dilute into air.  This would be best done outdoors, too, to prevent an explosion inside your house.

See more of the HHO videos on RonL2524’s Youtube channel.

Related post:  Electrolysis of water into HHO using solar cells

Hampton Bay Solar Light Reviews

The solar lanterns are made by Hampton Bay.  I see online there are many negative reviews for these lights.  Some of the complaints I also have:

• LED is too dim
• LED won’t turn on
• Not enough illumination
• Battery contacts corrode
• Solar panels darken and become cloudy over time
• Batteries included don’t last long (I replaced mine with batteries having more mA hours)

Here are some excerpts from other reviews on the web:

“I will never by anything with the Hampton Bay name again.”  complaintsboard.com

“Very dim, barely lights. Hard to see at night. Purchased at Home Depot…” complaintsboard.com

“Most lights quit between 10-18 months so if your looking for long term lighting solution, plan on continually buying replacements…”  homedepot.com

“I always get battery contact failure and end up soldering my batteries in.”  thestuccocompany.com

“I purchased a hampton bay solar walk light several weeks ago and it just stopped working.”  askmehelpdesk.com

Cleaning the Panels

The solar panels become cloudy and weathered in the sun.  The panels can be cleaned with rubbing alcohol.

The photoresistor works better if it is clean, so that the circuit knows when the sun is up.  There is no need for the light to be on during the day.  A clean photoresistor makes sure the LED is off during the day, saving the battery power until it is needed at dark.

How to fix solar light

A few things that can be done to improve the solar light:

1. Clean solar panel with rubbing alcohol
2. Clean battery terminals
3. Press on capacitors
4. Replace batteries

If your rechargeable batteries are old or not holding a charge, you should change them with new rechargeable batteries.

Electrolysis

To measure the power output of the small solar panel built onto these lights, I used electrolysis.  I had a few questions:

How much power in Watts do these panels produce?

Answer:  84 mW in winter

Can low power be used in electrolysis?  How many volts and amps does electrolysis require?

As shown in the video above, electrolysis can be achieved with low power.  With only 3.8V and 22 mA, we are splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen!  It doesn’t take much power to make hydrogen.  Looks like anyone can make hydrogen fairly easily.

]]> http://www.elperfecto.com/2010/01/01/solar-light-maintenance/feed/ 0 http://www.elperfecto.com/2009/12/19/make-your-own-air-battery/ http://www.elperfecto.com/2009/12/19/make-your-own-air-battery/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:14:44 +0000 Earl http://www.elperfecto.com/?p=535 Make Your Own Air Battery

The video below shows three different electrolytes for a cell.  Which electrolyte will be the best, producing the most voltage and current?

To make your own cell as in the video, get a couple scrap pieces of metal like Copper and Zinc.  The Zinc can be in the form of Zinc-plated steel.

Dunk both metals into a conductive liquid.  This experiment will test three liquids.

1.  plain tap water

2.  water with Sodium bicarbonate, also known as baking soda, which is a salt

3.  water with Sodium Chloride, known as “table salt”

Which one will produce the most power?  Which one will produce the highest voltage and current?  See the video below to find out…

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Spoiler alert:  answer is below.

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Sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water produced the most voltage, current, and power.

tap water alone produced 0.62 V, 0.27 mA

water with sodium chloride produced 0.70 V, 0.50 mA

water with sodium bicarbonate produced 0.71 V, 1.45 mA

Related post:  Tomato Battery

Making a waffle out of sodium acetate trihydrate. This is the same stuff that makes up “hot ice” and heating pads.

How is the liquid made?

I used vinegar and baking soda to make the liquid. Boiled off the water to leave a super saturated salt solution. The salt is normally a solid at room temperature, so when it cools off in the waffle iron, it solidifies.

Vinegar contains the acetic acid.
Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate.
Sodium acetate is the salt formed.

The chemical reaction

acetic acid + sodium bicarbonate —-> sodium acetate + carbonic acid

HC₂H₃O₂ + NaHCO₃ —-> NaC₂H₃O₂ + H₂CO₃

The carbonic acid breaks down almost immediately into water and CO₂.

H₂CO₃ —-> H₂O + CO₂

The CO₂ bubbles out of the liquid, leaving just sodium acetate dissolved in water. The sodium acetate binds 3 water molecules to create sodium acetate trihydrate:

NaC₂H₃O₂ + 3 H₂O —-> C₂H₉NaO₅

The sodium acetate trihydrate is what is shown in the videos on this page.

Here is a video that shows how the liquid is made.

Sodium Acetate Trihydrate is a solid at room temp. It melts at 58C (136F). Boils at 122C (252F).

Molding with Salt Crystals

There could be some molding potential for this material. I wonder what interesting creations could be made by pouring this liquid into a mold, as is done with concrete? Care would have to be taken with a mold out of this material, because water would make it dissolve and disassemble. That could be an advantage, however, if you want a temporary mold.

One idea:   make a rain switch.   Place a spring-loaded switch inside a mold of this salt and place the mold outside. When it rains, the salt dissolves, allowing the switch to close. Then, a circuit of your choice could be enabled. So when it rains, your switch would turn on (or off if you wire it that way).

Acid can release electricity from metal.  What is an easy-to-find source of acid?   Tomatoes!

The video above shows how an LED and a buzzer are powered by a tomato battery.  It’s just two different metals dipped into mashed tomatoes.  It even helps charge a AAA battery.

How does this work?

It’s a chemical reaction.  Take any two metals, separate them with a liquid that conducts electricity, and you have a battery.  Details are included below.

What kind of tomato is best?

Well, green tomatoes are more acidic then red, ripe ones.  So, no need to waste a good eating tomato.  If you grow your own tomatoes, you could pick one early, while still green, and use the acid from that in the battery.

Update on Tomato Battery – 4 Days Later

The video below shows how the Zinc plating was stripped off the metal by the tomato acids.  Also shown is how the LED still lights up, although with less intensity, four days after the tomato battery was constructed.

Video above shows how the AAA battery was charged from the tomato battery.  The AAA battery went up from 1318mV to 1330mV.  While not much, it shows that this small scale experiment could have a practical use.  The energy transferred from the tomato battery to the AAA battery could be used in any application that uses AAA batteries, like wireless headphones or an LED flashlight.

Is the AAA battery being overcharged?

The battery label says it is 1.2V.  If the tomato battery is charging it up to 1.33V, is that overcharging it?  My short answer is “no”.  See the video below for an explanation.

About a week after the tomato battery was constructed, mold was growing on the tomato mix and power production dropped to nearly nothing so I disbanded this experiment and cleaned up my mess.

What kind of acid is in tomatoes?

Tomatoes have a pH of about 4.1.  The lower the pH, the stronger the acid.  To give some perspective, here are the pH values of some other acids.

0.0 Hydrochloric acid

1.0 Gastric acid (in your tummy)

2.2 lemon juice

2.4 vinegar

4.1 tomatoes

5.8 potatoes  source

6.0 urine (Yeah, your urine can be acidic and would work as a weak battery electrolyte!  It is usually more acidic when you first wake up in the morning and turns more alkaline as the day progresses.  The more meat you eat, the more acidic your urine will be.  Vegetarians can have alkaline urine.)

7.0 water (considered to be neutral and not an acid)

From my reading, it appears there are many kinds of acid present in tomatoes:

• ascorbic acid
• chlorogenic acid source
• folic acid source
• p-coumaric acid
• chlorogenic acid source
• salicylic acid source
• malic acid source
• caffeic acid source

What is the chemical reaction in the tomato battery?

In the video above, the tomato battery is initially made with:

• Zinc
• Copper
• acid

The Zinc is the negative terminal, the anode.  The tomato’s acid liberates electrons from the Zinc.

Zn(s)  –> Zn2+(aq) + 2 e-

Solid Zinc releases a couple electrons, changing into Zinc ions, which allows it to dissolve into the electrolyte (the water / tomato acid mixture).

Copper is the positive terminal, the cathode.  The Copper atoms attract electrons more than do the Zinc (Zn) atoms.  The electrons that came off the Zinc get sucked into the Copper terminal.

How does the acid help?

An acid’s active ingredient is positively-charged Hydrogen. The acid releases Hydrogen ions (H+) that are reduced to Hydrogen gas (H2), which bubbles around the electrodes.  When I was recording the video above, I did witness bubbles forming around the Zinc plates.  As more bubbles coated the Zinc plates, the battery made less power.  This is because the Hydrogen bubbles prevented the electrolyte from making contact with the metal.  When I lifted the plates out of the electrolyte, the bubbles vanished into thin air, literally!  After returning the plates into the electrolyte, without the Hydrogen bubbles covering the Zinc, the battery gave more power.

By the way, if you could capture this Hydrogen gas, you could generate power from it, too!  Just make a Hydrogen fuel cell and you would get two power sources here.  But back to the battery…

As the current flows, more Zinc ions are dissolved into the tomato electrolyte.  The Zinc is gradually being eaten away.

What is the chemical reaction when salt is added to the electrolyte?

A tomato is actually not necessary, nor is any acid.   Any pair of metals separated by any liquid that conducts electricity will behave as a battery.  The liquid cannot be pure water and the metals must be different.

Most combinations of metals and liquids do not produce enough electrical power to be practical.  The chemical reactions are usually not strong and soon stop producing an electric current.

The first battery was invented in 1800.  In early batteries, someone often had to scrub the metal plates to remove hydrogen bubbles, oxides, and other foreign material to keep the batteries working.  You could still use a battery like this if you didn’t mind the maintenance.

Salt water can be the battery’s electrolyte.  This is called an “air battery”.  However, using an acid generates more power, a higher voltage, and higher current, because it liberates the electrons from both the anode and the cathode.  This means the metals, in this case Copper and Zinc, both get consumed.  In an air battery (or salt water battery), only one of the metals is consumed, resulting in less power generated but also with less materials consumed.

In the acid battery, the acid and both metals are used up.  In the salt water battery, only one of the metals is used up – the other metal and the salt is never consumed.

Related post:  Make Your Own Air Battery

Can a Peltier cooler be used to extract moisture from the air using off-the-grid power?

I was wondering how to get water if my local water utility company failed to provide safe and clean water.

In the video above, I also show how you can salvage a 12V fan from a dead computer’s power supply unit.

Salvaging a 12V DC fan from a PSU

Parts used in experiment:

• Peltier cooler (also called TEC or Thermo Electric Cooler)
• liquid CPU cooler
• portable 12V battery
• temperature gun
• 12V cooling fan salvaged from computer power supply
• thermal paste

Water dripping from a Peltier cooler as the ice melts.

My conclusion after testing this is that yes, Peltier coolers can extract water out of the air.  However, I question if this way of getting water is practical or economical.  In my area, my time would be better spent getting water in other ways:

• Digging a well
• Capturing the water from an air conditioning unit
• Distilling water from the lake across the street from my house
• Distilling water from the creek that runs through my property
• Capturing rain water

Because water is abundant where I am located, I will stop testing Peltier coolers for the purpose of capturing water.  (Not sure why exactly I felt compelled to do these tests anyhow… was mostly curious.  Oh yeah, I did have an idea that maybe I could set up a drip irrigation system with these in my garden with a solar panel attached to them.  No need to run pipes and plumbing if the Peltier coolers could drip water directly over plants on my property.)

Anyway, it works and I had fun with this experiment.  Next, I’ll try generating electricty with these thermoelectric devices.

Related Posts:

Peltier Cooler Generates Electricity

Velleman sells a kit that you can build, advertised to be a sound indicator.  “…simple sound-to-light unit for music, the hard of hearing:  can be used to indicate the telephone, doorbell, barking dog.  Adjustable sensitivity with potentiometer…“  We built the MK103 kit and made a video showing a product test and review.

The construction took an hour with the only tool being a soldering iron.  An additional half hour was required to trouble-shoot the board since it didn’t work the first time.

I found a couple components were shorted together on the bottom side due to poor soldering by me.  Another tool that would be helpful for this project is a pair of diagonal cutters, but I don’t have any, so I couldn’t cut the wires to the proper length on the bottom of the board.  I also couldn’t mount the unit to the battery pack since the wires stick out too far.  Some day I’ll buy some diagonal cutters and trim the wires down.

Once the unit was finished, it worked.

Click image above for video.

Jan-17-2008 Update

A family member gave me some diagonal cutters at Christmas so I came back to this circuit board, trimmed the wires off the back, and was able to mount the circuit board to the battery pack.  Here is the final, completed circuit:

A few observations:

A fresh battery made the circuit more sensitive and responsive than an older battery.  When I put a fresh battery in the unit, the LEDs lit up more at lower volume sounds.

The microphone was not very sensitive, even with a fresh battery.  (Turning the potentiometer all the way to one side basically turned it off.  Turning the potentiometer all the way to the opposite side led to the results shown in the video above.)  After making this video, I gently tapped on the mic with my finger and then the LED’s lit up for even soft sounds.  Some how, tapping on the mic made the circuit more responsive.  But that only lasted a minute and then the circuit went back to behaving as before, requiring loud sounds to light up the LEDs.

When I put the circuit next to our phone and made the phone ring, the LEDs did not turn on.  Our phone was not loud enough to trigger the LEDs.  However, my kids enjoyed yelling at the circuit and watching the lights turn on.

The kit was rated “beginner” level.  Since this kit requires a soldering iron, the beginner should be old enough to respect the heat of an iron so as to not get burned.  My son enjoyed watching the entire build process, helped place the components into the board, and learned about electronics along the way.

My two kids were interested in the experiment, so for fun, we tried making our own volcano with Mentos and Diet Pepsi. It works!