note: for more information, check out: http://www.voicenet.com/~eric/dennis.html Tom Napier asks, "Does Brown's Gas implode?" Among the "wonderful" properties of "Brown's Gas" is that when ignited it doesn't explode, it implodes. That is, the reaction product has a smaller volume than the initial gas mixture. Is this true? Is it remarkable? The answers to these two questions are "Not exactly" and "No." Brown's Gas is what you get if you electrolyze water and keep the resulting hydrogen and oxygen mixed together. Let me make two important comments at this point. One is that it would be extremely hazardous to store any large quantity of Brown's Gas, either at atmospheric pressure or in compressed form. A spark, or the presence of any material which catalyzes the hydrogen/oxygen reaction, will cause a devastating explosion. The second comment is that all the energy which comes from burning Brown's Gas was put into it by the electrical energy used to electrolyze the water. In a loose sense, since Brown's Gas could be used as fuel for an engine and, since Brown's Gas is made from water, one could say that one was running a car on water. However, the power driving the car is coming entirely from the electrical input, not from the water. A car "driven" by Brown's Gas would either have to carry a large tank of compressed gas (see my point one) or drag a long power cord behind it. If you had electrical power available you would be much, much better off driving the car with an electric motor than fooling around with a gas generator and a gas powered motor. So does Brown's Gas explode? Yes, of course it does. As it happens, in my foolhardy youth I once filled a polyethylene bag with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen and lit it from a safe distance. It exploded very satisfactorily and made a very loud boom. Many of NASA's rockets, including the Space Shuttle, burn hydrogen and oxygen. If Brown's Gas always imploded, the rockets would be sucked into the ground. What you may have seen, and I have seen, is some Brown's Gas being put into a cylinder and then being ignited. The piston in the cylinder is sucked in with a thump. However, if the piston was free to move outwards it would fly across the room. Brown's Gas would be great in spud guns. When ignited, Brown's Gas explodes, that is it burns rapidly, generating hot, high pressure gas, in this case, water vapor. Because it is inside a long, narrow, room temperature cylinder the water vapor rapidly condenses into liquid water, heating the cylinder as it does so. Since the water has much less volume than the hot vapor the pressure inside the cylinder drops suddenly, pulling in the piston. The cylinder heats up in the process, the heat energy from the burning Brown's Gas has to go somewhere. If the experiment were to be repeated, for example in a continuously operating engine, the cylinder would get hotter and hotter and eventually the internal pressure would blow it apart. So the answers are: Does Brown's Gas implode? No, Brown's Gas explodes like any other combustible gas mixture. Is this remarkable? No, except that in this case the combustion product, water, readily condenses to a liquid. Now for some numbers. Let's suppose we use an aluminum cylinder which is 60 cm long, has an internal diameter of 8 cm and a wall thickness of 1 cm. (That makes it 4 inches by 20 inches for you non-metric types.) The volume of the cylinder is about 3 liters. Let's fill it with Brown's Gas at atmospheric pressure. It now contains 2 liters (0.1633 gr) of hydrogen and 1 liter (1.307 gr) of oxygen. When these are ignited they will generate about 176 kJoules of energy, briefly generating a high pressure and temperature in the gas. However this heat is quickly transferred to the aluminum cylinder. As the gas next to the cylinder condenses it creates a low pressure, sucking more gas to the walls of the cylinder where it too condenses. Not only does the cylinder have to absorb the 176 kJ from the combustion, it also has to absorb the heat of condensation of the vapor. That comes to another 3.3 kJ, it's negligible but I didn't want you to think I had forgotten anything. OK, we put 179.3 kJoules into an aluminum cylinder which weighs 4580 grams (almost exactly 10 lbs). It takes 0.217 calories (0.908 Joules) to heat one gram of aluminum by one degree Celsius. That is, it takes 4.158 kJoules to heat the whole cylinder by 1 degree. Since we put in 179.3 kJ the cylinder will be 43 degrees C (77.6 degrees F) hotter after the "implosion" than it was before. I can believe that. If the cylinder started at room temperature, say 25 degrees C, it would end up at 67 degrees C. If it was immediately refilled with Brown's Gas and this then was ignited the cylinder would now be at nearly 110 degrees C, too hot to condense the water vapor and to generate a pressure below atmospheric. The piston won't be sucked in until the cylinder cools down again. So ask your local Brown's Gas merchant, why did the first charge of Brown's Gas implode but the second charge didn't? --------- The following was offered in response by George Wiseman: > > The last time Tom tried to ignite a stoichemetrc mixture, it exploded. . . He posits that a phase change just after explosion > makes it appear to implode. Typical 2H2:O2 behavior, known to everyone. Because 2H2:O2 (diatomic hydrogen and oxygen in stochiometric mixture) needs heat (explosion) to break the atomic bonds between the diatomic hydrogen molecules, turning them into "mon-atomic" atoms, which can then reform into water (implosion). So you get an explosion, then an implosion. It is important to realize that for hydrogen and oxygen to form water, they must be in their mon-atomic or "elemental" form. The heat in a 2H2:O2 flame is called a "self propigation" temperature, the temperature at which the flame will continue to burn. This is the temperature (heat energy) required to break the atomic bonds of the diatomic molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. The heat energy required to break the bonds of diatomic hydrogen and oxygen (2H2:O2) exhibits a temperature of about 5000°F. This is all standard chemistry folks, easily looked up in any good chemistry book. A pure 2H:O mixture (two mon-atomic hydrogens and one mon-atomic oxygen) and in a pure form will implode with NO explosion first, because it does not require a "self propigation" temperature to break the atomic bonds. There are no atomic bonds to break; therefore the mon-atomic atoms can form directly to water, which is an implosion with NO explosion. This "Pure" mon-atomic gas has no name at this time because I know of no one who can make it. Brown's Gas is a mixture of mon-atomic and di-atomic hydrogen and oxygen, with a bit of water vapor thrown in. I measure the "quality" of Brown's Gas by the amount of mon-atomic portion. 100% gas is pure di-atomic; 200% gas is pure mon-atomic. My testing of a BN 1000E showed a typical quality of 120% Brown's Gas. Our ER 2200 gets 130% quality Brown's Gas. In these qualities you will still get an explosion before implosion, because the explosion caused by the di-atomic portion is greater than the implosion of the mon-atomic portion. As the Quality goes up, you get less explosion and more implosion. All this and MUCH more is covered in detail in my Brown's Gas books. I suggest that people read the books before dithering about anymore. I have proven the above with mathematics and experiment; and detail how people can build their own Brown's Gas electrolyzers at a fraction of the cost of the machines sold by Dennis Lee. Our designs are not only much less expensive but weigh half as much, put out more gas with only half the wattage and are simple to build, safe to operate and easy to maintain. >We would be happy to examine Dennis Lee's > Browns gas implosion demonstration equipment, but he refuses to have or allow his followers any contact with me.< We at Eagle Research have tested the BN designs that Dennis Lee is selling. The results of that testing are included in the Brown's Gas Book 2. Dennis has a copy of that book and insists on perpetuating miss-information. Among other things, the Brown's Gas quality coming out of his machine explodes, then implodes because it is only 120%. Brown's Gas Book 1 is $10 and Brown's Gas Book 2 is $20; available from Eagle Research, PO Box 1852, Eureka, Montana, 59917. Please include a dollar for shipping. > > We have all heard fascinating claims about Browns gas, like how it > implodes. I just listened to a tape where Dennis claims it takes less energy to create than you can produce running an engine on it.< This is pure bull. I have proven YEARS ago that Yull Brown made a mistake in his calculations and I have pointed out the error to Yull Brown and to Dennis Lee; but Dennis insists on perpetuating the error. The error is so easily proven wrong that this one fact will blow holes in Dennis's (non-existent) credibility. Yull Brown stated that it takes 4 watts to make one liter of Brown's Gas (which equals 4 joules of power) which can raise one liter of water 10 meters. He states that one liter of water falling 10 meters in one second is 98 joules of energy (which is exactly true) So we have (according to Yull Brown) better than 18 times over-unity. In fact it takes 4 watt-HOURS to make one liter of Brown's Gas (equals 14,400 joules of power) I prove this with math and experiments with my electrolyzers AND with tests with actual BN 1000E, sold by Dennis Lee (fully detailed in my Brown's Gas Book 2). So we have 146 times UNDER-unity; (with the same amount of power to power one "atmospheric motor", you could have powered 146 electric motors). In addition, in real life, using gas to displace water up 10 meters will take considerably more than one liter, because the pressure of the water, thus more power required. Again full details debunking this statement and several others are detailed in my Brown's Gas Book 2. Brown's Gas DOES have many important uses, but there is a lot of miss-information that has been fed to people who don't know any better. Best from George Wiseman ------------------------------------ the following is a news group post on the subject: Uh, Eric - I live in Carson city,have built several Brown's gas generators, and there are a lot of other people working on the technology besides Brown and the chinese, not the least of whom is George Wiseman, who is starting the manufacture of generator/welders of a much better quality than you can get from China (http://www.eagle-research.com). Brown didn't invent the generator, or the gas, by the way - William Rhodes of Arizona State had PATENTS of the generator in 1967, TEN YEARS before Brown did. All patents have expired, and as far as I know the only thing Brown has is the research he did on a product generated by a device invented ten years before him, and an unfounded desire to say that he has intellectual rights to someone else's prior art. All of Brown's generator designs require a transformer, which Rhodes proved was unnecessary, and which Wiseman also has proven so as well, so all of Brown's designs are much less efficient at producing the gas than Wiseman's. So much for "Dr." Brown's "invention." Not that the gas doesn't have phenomenal capabilities, which I have seen with my own eyes, from transformerless welders I built myself. I don't call it Brown's gas - I call it Aethergas, because it was actually produced at least a century before Brown, by someone who called it "aetheric vapor" - John Keely. OHannon