An example of a solar cell.
Well, this is somewhat of an update. A side project that I've been working on for a little bit has been an attempt at running my cell phone off solar power. I ordered some photovoltaic (solar) cells off www.plastecs.com that will amount to a total of 10 cells, each rated at 0.5 volts and 700 mA (milli-amps). This will give me a combined cell potential of 5 volts at .7 amps, which is about the standard charging specifications for my cell phone, which is the LG Voyager. I have already stripped the connections off a USB charger for my cell phone which gave me the positive and negative terminals that I will need to connect them to the solar cells when they arrive. When they do, I will post an update specifying whether they worked or not and if they did, how you can do it yourself. NOTE: Powering your phone off solar power is not only for the LG Voyager. You can power any phone off solar, but you need to know the proper voltage and amperage that it takes to charge your phone. That information should be located on the back of your phone's charger.
ALSO... I will be posting an update for the hydrogen production experiments as soon as I get some platinized electrodes. Unfortunately, nothing else seems to have worked thus far, so it is my last resort. However, I may try stainless steel before I go to platinum, but I do not know if it will stand up to the intense oxidizing conditions of electrolysis.
If you notice at the top of my site, I now have a link for the Power4ThePresent official toolbar! It is an internet toolbar with a search engine, links page, RSS feed page, customizable internet radio player, weather information, a link to this site, and much more. Please download it, as it's a great toolbar that I use myself. It works fine on firefox and internet explorer.
As always, if you have questions/comments, please feel free to post them. I won't call you dumb or make your suggestions feel insignificant :)
Well, the carbon rods I talked about in my last post proved to be... disappointing. The cathode ended up dissolving for reasons somewhat unknown, most likely due to oxidation. However, it did disappear more gradually than previous electrodes such as copper, which was the only positive aspect. This means I will have to resort to using some sort of platinized material as an electrode in the future, but luckily only for one of them, as the anode does not corrode during the process. I used the epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) as an electrolyte and luckily, it did work. I assumed as much, as magnesium sulfate is soluable in water (necessary for it to be an electrolyte), but also had stronger bonds between its atoms than NaCl, so it did not produce any unwanted materials at either electrode. I will be ordering platinum electrodes (of some sort) and post another update when they arrive. I'll also be trying to find another voltage source that hopefully is a bit better than my current 24 volts :D.
Note: When I iron out all of the problems with the water electrolyzing process, I plan to run it (full scale) off of solar power, which means that it would cleanly generate hydrogen for use in fuel cell vehicles, the only byproduct being water, which was the "fuel" that provided hydrogen in the first place.
I look forward to posting an update soon!
Hey again. Right now, the main source of power I'm looking into is hydrogen, derived from water electrolysis. In case you aren't familiar with the concept, water electrolysis is the separation of water (H2O) into its components: Hydrogen and Oxygen. It works by using two electrodes (made out of some inert conductive material, I'll explain why later) to pass an electric current through water. This creates two half-reactions which cause hydrogen bubbles to form at one electrode and oxygen bubbles to form at the other. If you preform an experiment similiar to this, you will notice that there is more hydrogen than oxygen. This is because the molecule of water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. Thus it will create twice as much hydrogen as oxygen. You also must use a DC (direct current) power source for this experiment, as AC (alternating current) alternates the current over 60 times a second and produces no results. Now, back to the topic of the electrodes. You should use an inert metal or other conductive material such as stainless steel, platinum, or even carbon, as they will not OXIDIZE. Oxygen happens to be your worst enemy during this entire process, as if you use certain metals such as copper, steel, iron, or other reactive metals, you'll get a very corroded electrode (I know from experience.) I've ordered carbon rods (essentially huge pencil leads) to see how well they'll preform. Otherwise, I may need to buy platinum electrodes, as it is the only fairly conductive metal that will not corrode. Finally, as when I perform this experiment, you'll want to use some sort of electrolyte to make the water more conductive, thusly speeding up the electrolyzing process. I used table salt (NaCl) at first, until I smelled the cathode (where oxygen comes out) and smelled CHLORINE. BAD IDEA. Use some sort of acid, base, or salt which will readily dissolve and make the solution more conductive. And nothing with chlorine like NaCl or it will generate chlorine gas, which is poisonous (also known as the chemical agent in mustard gas.) I will be buying epsom salt soon and will inform you of how that works out. Right now, unfortunately, I have no good electrodes for this process and am waiting for the graphite ones to arrive on thursday. I also am looking into getting a better DC power source, as the one that I have now is only 24 volts. If I left anything out or you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments area as always. I'll get out another update as soon as I can.
Before I start up some discussions, I'd like to clarify a few points regarding the structure of this site. I decided to place a news feed at the bottom with the topic, "Solar Power." If you have any other ideas for topics, please let me know so I can incorporate them in the news feed as well. Well, that's it actually... if you have any questions/comments regarding this post, please feel free to comment on it. I'll be posting some of my progress regarding my experiments with water electrolysis and hydrogen power soon.
Hey everyone, thanks for visiting my site. I created it mainly because I felt that there were too few sites discussing legitimate ways to power our vehicles in a clean, reliable, and efficient way. Feel free, at any time, to comment or discuss any of my studies/experiments on this page so that everyone may benefit from these types of discussions. I hope you appreciate my efforts here as much as I do yours. If you'd like to find out more (limited :D) information about me, check out my profile. Thanks again for visiting and happy blogging.
