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Oxygen Journal
Hi All, I hope all is well! I have gone and done it. I have finally assembled my H-Cell. Now, you may be asking yourself. What is a H-Cell? Well, a H-Cell is another name for an electrolytic cell. And an electrolytic cell is used to break down molecules into their primary constituents. For example, if one so desired, they could take seawater and break it down into several highly prizes substances. These substances included Hydrogen, Sodium Hydroxide, Chlorine and Oxygen. Experts consider the electrolytic cell the tool of choice for chemists. One way of looking at the electrolytic cell is as if they are the chemists' scissors used to chop molecules into their most fundamental constituents. Alessandro Volta invented the electrolytic cell in the 1800s. However, the idea has been around for quite some time longer. For example, the Bagdad battery from about 200 BC is an example of an electrolytic cell from two thousand years earlier. These were made from clay pots, Bitumen and copper. But whatever the case may be, it was undoubtedly Alessandra Volta who patented the idea and explained how the process worked. Thanks, Mr Volta! And finally, I have built one as well. Please see photo below. Now I should be honest. This electrolytic cell is, in fact, the second electrolytic cell I have made. The first cell consisted of two drink dispensers, yep, the same ones you can see at a birthday party, you know, the ones with cordial or punch in them? These were joined at the tap by a piece of clear food tubing. The problem with this version was that I couldn’t get the lids off the jars after completing the experiment due to severe corrosion from the seawater I had used. This time it would be different! So it was off to K-Mart. I went with all my hopes and dreams crammed into my wallet. I soon found what I was looking for. Plastic containers with lids that would clip on and off easily, there was no risk of having the lids rust up! I could easily remove these no matter how much corrosion was created, which would be minimal because the containers were made from plastic and not the glass and metal like my previous attempt.
After having built the contraption, I was left with the decision as to whether or not I should actually turn it on. I had recently read several posts online explaining why such experiments are best left to the experts. Hydrogen, they said, was explosive. And electricity, they said, was dangerous. Shit. That’s why I did this in the first place! Of course I was going to turn it on! If you hear a bang in the distance. That was me making a mistake.
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In 2018 and 2019, my hometown of Goondiwindi in Queensland, Australia, experienced some of the driest weather for over one hundred years. It got to the point where people believed that they were only months away from running out of water. Many towns in the region had already run dry and required water to be trucked into their hometowns to survive. Stanthorpe was one such place. At times it got so bad that it rained mud. Yep, this is true. As a result of this severe water shortage, watering plants become secondary to everything else. I’m not saying that you couldn’t water your plants, you could still water them, but it was hand watering only. Automated sprinkler systems were not authorised. The ever lingering fear of fines hung in the air. They were being issued to anyone caught breaking the rules. So it may come as no surprise to say that I was starting to look for ways to alleviate the water crisis for myself. I even went as far as developing a solar-powered system that extracted moisture from the atmosphere. The plan worked well, but there was a problem. There was little to no water in the atmosphere to harvest. In fact, from what I have recorded, the atmosphere was at 16% humidity compared to coastal regions that regularly have at least 80% humidity. The amount of energy it took to extract the moisture was enormous! But that is a story for another time, perhaps. I also researched how rain gauges worked, and what I discovered was very interesting. If one millimetre of rain falls on one square metre of rooftop, one litre of water can be collected through the gutter systems. I observed during the next rainstorm that many of the houses in the area were not catching the rain that fell onto their rooftops. Instead, it just ran out onto the ground. This revealed one cold hard fact. People had clearly become complacent about the actual value of water. It has become too easy for people to just go and turn on a tap and have water at their disposal. Apparently, as my observations clearly suggest, comfort leads to complacency. After moving to the coast, with all this newly acquired knowledge in mind, it came as a surprise that more work had not been done to extract drinking water from the ocean. After all, everyone was running out of water, not just the inland communities. Upon arriving at the coast, I was quick to discover that there was water everywhere. It was in the atmosphere and in the sea. All one had to do was learn how to extract it. From past experiences with brewing beer and making moonshine, I knew that extracting water from the ocean could be achieved through evaporation and condensation. And so it began. Before there was even an idea of the solar still, there was the air still desalination unit. Watch the video below to see how I achieved this! Most of us are aware that the ocean is full of water. And, some of us, Homer not included, know that the oceans' water cannot simply be consumed in the state in which we find it in nature. Doing so would be a death sentence. I find it interesting that when swimming at the beach, we rarely take the time to think about the fact that we are floating in a liquid that could kill us if too much of it is consumed. But there we have it. Despite this simple truth, we can freely go to the beach and swim in a liquid that could lead to our own demise. It just goes to prove the old adage that ignorance is indeed bliss. I bring this simple truth to the surface for one excellent reason. At times, water can be incredibly scarce. And to those who have been unlucky enough to have been trapped at sea, ocean water starts to look very tempting once thirst takes hold. Therefore, understanding how to extract drinking water from ocean water is an excellent process worthy of comprehension. The good news for you is that removing drinking water from the ocean is not as hard as you think. In fact, once you understand the basics, it is something you will never forget. Furthermore, knowing how to complete this process may inspire you to come up with inventive ways of extracting the drinking water yourself. Basically, when it comes to learning water distillation, the rabbit hole tends to quickly become wonderous. For example, one such wondrous rabbit hole appeared just the other day. I dove into it headfirst, keen to see where it would take me. Often I find myself reflecting on the many rabbit holes I have ventured into. One of the most exciting aspects of a sound rabbit hole is how I discover them in the first place. Sometimes the entrance to a rabbit hole can be obscured by the craziest stuff. Interestingly, this rabbit hole story starts with seeds and mice. For years I have been learning how to grow my own vegetables. Participating in agricultural activity is one thing. Mastering it is an entirely separate concern. Let us just agree that I am far from ultimately perfecting this. I have found that each season brings new challenges, and there is always something new to learn. When it comes to growing your own vegetables, concerns such as weed, space and time management are some examples of the lessons that are waiting to be taught. However, it's the lessons that have teeth that tend to bite though; they also have a way of sneaking up on you while you're not looking. In all honesty, pest management was something I should have been better prepared for. The topic was never entirely overlooked. Some thought has been given to pest management in the past. Sure, keeping my dogs out of the garden has always been an issue. I had already solved this by completely isolating the grow zone. But mice don't care for fences. This particular pest issue began at the time of sowing. I would plant the seeds in the afternoon in their own unique little punnets so I could better support the first stages of their life cycle. The following day I would go about my life, assuming that my seedlings were perfectly safe. As far as I was concerned, they should have been! Then, after work had finished, I would race home to see the seedlings progress. Keeping the seedlings moist was essential; watering quickly became a part of my daily routine. I also came to learn not to consider it a chore. After all, I was keen to see the plants. I eagerly waited for the day that the seedlings would emerge. Unfortunately, when the time had come to water the plants, I often found the pest issue would reveal itself. Instead of seeing my seedlings as I had left them, all that remained was a little hole where the seed had been planted and tiny digging marks. Unwittingly, the seeds had become mouse fodder. Mice?! I wasn't even aware that we had a mouse problem! Of course, I was now that all of my seeds had been dug up and eaten by Disney's most adorable! This could not be allowed to continue! I needed a quick solution. When it comes to raising seedlings, time is of the essence. But how was I going to fix this problem? Embarrassingly, I must admit that it wasn't the first time I had seen this issue either. I have tried to plant my seeds directly into the ground during previous seed raising attempts. Again, I would return to find that the seeds had also been removed. It felt like a cruel joke. Often, I found myself wondering if someone was messing with me. Maybe it was the neighbour? Yes! That's it, it was the neighbour, and he was jealous of my agriculture skills! Of course, it wasn't my neighbour, but I couldn't be sure at first. The other problem with planting seeds directly into the ground was birds. These winged creatures of the air were notorious for taking seeds from the ground. And in any other circumstance, I would have blamed the aviation animals for this particular theft of seeds. Still, the evidence was on the soil, and birds don't dig, leaving little mounds behind where the seeds once were! Mice it was. So, to fix this problem, I simply purchased a clear plastic container large enough to put the seed punnets into. Easy done, right? The plan was to water the punnets and then seal them into the container with a clear lid. Air could still move freely in and out of the container. The cover, after all, was not a sealed fit. But, it was closed enough to keep the rodents out while still allowing the air and carbon dioxide to move freely. So, there you have it. Seedlings in and rodents out. The transparent make of the container still allowed the sunlight to enter the container, so I had the light issue sorted. One of the unforeseen outcomes of this transparent container experiment I soon discovered was that any water watered onto the seedlings was to become trapped in the box. In effect, I created a solar condensation cell. As it was to turn out, this was to become a crucial step in understanding water desalination. See, from mice and seeds to water desalination in less than seven hundred words. Damn, I rave on sometimes... The first step of this desalination process was completed during the warm daylight hours. This warmth would lead to the evaporation of the water I had used to water the seedlings. Just like that, I had moisture-laden air. The second step was completed after the sun had set. The night air was cool, which led the moisture-rich air in the container to re-condense along the sides and lid of the container. This leads to the moisture running down the sides and ultimately filling the bottom of the container with liquid water. After a couple of days of observing this condensation cell in action, I thought of a project I had been planning on completing ever since moving closer to the coast. The project was simple enough. Take a bucket of water from the ocean and extract both the salt and the drinking water from it. I desired to document the weight of the water before starting the process and the quantity in litres. Then, once the process had been completed, I simply had to weigh and measure the outcomes. If done correctly, I would have an honest answer about how much drinking water and salt could be extracted from one litre of ocean water. I would also document the amount of energy required to complete the process. The amount of energy necessary to complete the process was an integral part of the experiment. I soon discovered that there are many ways to extract drinking water from ocean water. Some are far quicker and more energy-intensive than others. These often require more moving parts, and from what I have learned about any system of any size, the more moving parts a system has, the more things tend to go wrong with it in the long run. For my first attempt I decided to use an air still to complete the process. Please see the video below. A follow up article will be written in time detailing the complete process. It should have been so simple...
I asked Google a single, simple, question. Turns out, that's how all the fun rabbit holes are stumbled upon. The question I asked was as follows. What is water made mostly of? The answer as it turns out was not so simple. You see, it really depends on which race your putting water into. If it's a shear numbers race then hydrogen certainly wins. Water is made of a single oxygen atom bound to two hydrogen atoms. So there it is, for all to read. Water is made of mostly hydrogen atoms. Yet, if you were trying to find out what water is mostly made of in regards to simple mass than water by weight is made mostly of oxygen because oxygen atoms are sixteen times heavier than hydrogen atoms. Confused? Your not alone. Me too. So, to simplify, a single molecule of water has twice as many atoms of hydrogen than oxygen atoms. Yet it is outweighed by oxygen. Which means that water is made mostly of oxygen. Or at least that's what we are lead to believe... So, this raises another interesting question. (This sometimes happens and is generally a consequence of asking a good question in the first place). The question is as follows... Weight vs Single constituents? What's more important in water? When Google answered my original question, it directed me to sources that indicated that water was mostly made up of oxygen due to oxygens atomic mass. But this simply cannot be true. When it's a numbers game, like it most certainly is when asking a question about what something is mostly made of, the answer should be directed to the sources indicating that water is made mostly of hydrogen atoms. Because when we are talking about things in this universe, we should refer to things that are relatable to this universe and its atomic scale. Put simply, we don't normally count things by weight, we count them by individual constituents. To say that water is made mostly of oxygen is like saying that a zoo that has two elephants and one hundred birds mostly has elephants because the birds are so small. It simply doesn't make any sense. Yet, when talking about how much something is made of, we are being taught to forget about the numbers and just replace mass as the single most important value. Perhaps this is because mass is an integral part of one of the most valued formula's of physics. What is this formula, I hear you asking? Well, that would be Einstein's famous E = MC2. So, perhaps this is why, when talking about what something is mostly made of, we talk about it in relation to its mass and not its individual constituents? The fact that water is made mostly of oxygen by mass means that if we were to somehow chop off one of the hydrogen atoms, the water molecule should be just fine, that is, the molecule should still be a water molecule. Right? Well, actually, no. After chopping off one of the hydrogen atoms you would have created a hydroxide ion. While this is one of my favourites types of ions it is simply no longer a water molecule. So, it turns out that the numbers of the individual constituents are important after all. Sure, by mass oxygen rules the roost in water but without hydrogen you simply wouldn't have water. For this reason and until further notice this post belongs in both the Oxygen Journal, as well as the Hydrogen Journal. But, for the time being you will only find it posted under the Oxygen Journal, because, you know, Google... Told you it wasn't a simple answer. Good luck wrapping your noggin around that explanation. |
Micheal FarmerWe breath what plants excrete. ArchivesCategories |