[NewCandle] hydrolysis of water by aluminum with no salts

[Nick Reiter]

Good afternoon, all,

Something of a puzzling and fascinating development.  Wrapping up the uranyl acetate and foil roll experiments, and seeing the odd actions of the Geiger counter looking at said rolls, prompted me to try a basic foil roll bucket configuration that just had seemed counterintuitive enough early on, that it had never been tried.  Almost 2 years ago, the first hydrogen generating reactors with foil rolls and salt water had been tried by both Sam Faile and I.  As we have both have tended to do over many years, we followed a vector generated from earlier experiments (in this case the anode glow with aluminum in weak acids and alkalis)  Maybe because of that, we never bothered to try a full sized foil roll reactor with distilled water only, no additives or salts.

I didn't really expect it to do anything except maybe slowly erode or oxidize over many weeks of time.  Looks like I was wrong.

The configuration was typical - six half-rolls (600 sq ft of foil total) in a 10 quart polypropylene bucket (fresh) with 4.5 liters of steam distilled water added.  For about 36 hours, no action was noted.  However by about 48 hours, fine bubble streams were observed.  By 60 hours, this had become a constant fizzing, with ignition of bubbles confirmed by a lighter.  This past Wednesday afternoon, at about T+70 hours, the temperature in the bucket had risen past 70C, and hydrolysis was going full bore, foaming up to the bucket rim.  From T+70 hours to T+96 hours, when the bubbling had diminished off to a trickle, it appears as though the system hydrolyzed a good honest 2 liters of water, before the oxide crust on the aluminum capped the reaction.

Haven't pulled any rolls yet, but will probably do so by Monday.  Not much to see, though, without my SEM:( (he sniffs)

So maybe I need a good review - over the occasions we discussed all of this here, I remember (maybe erroneously?) that the water-aluminum system needed to have an alkali metal or alloying component to work in the way we observed it to.  An ionic solute or salt.  OR an applied potential of course.

But such energy release with just distilled H2O and aluminum foil?

Tutorial anyone, for a fady brain?

n