MYTH: Brown’s Gas can be used to replace normal hydrogen and petro-gasses. Yes it can, BUT definitely Not as usually outlined.
The biggest problem I’ve seen with Brown’s Gas ‘home-use’ outlines is the lack of understanding of the concept of a practical power system. Why use Brown’s Gas at all, for home-use? Brown’s Gas REQUIRES a huge amount of electricity to make. If you’ve got the electricity to make Brown’s Gas, just use the electricity to power your home appliances directly.
Or use your excess electricity to pump water up into a storage container (using a conventional pump) to recover with a turbine later. Why bother with the expense, maintenance and danger of an explosive gas?
The second largest ‘home power outline’ problem I’ve seen is the assumption that you can somehow get more work out of the flame than the electricity you’ve put in, so you can run an engine to make enough electricity to make your Brown’s Gas and have electricity left over. My experimentation has shown this to be bunk! (Hyper-Gas is a different story, but we can’t do it consistently yet)
The third problem with the ‘home power outlines’ is that they show serious ignorance of Brown’s Gas actual characteristics and that will at least cause loss of research time and money and at worst loss of an entire home and lives. PLEASE refer to the ‘Brown’s Gas, Books 1 and 2’. All my comments have been experimentally verified.
You will also note that nowhere in the world is Brown’s Gas being used to actually power a home. That’s because it can’t. People have been great for saying the gas could do this and that, but in a lot of cases, it simply can’t, or if it could, there are a lot better “conventional” ways of doing it.
Heating Applications:
Usually “Brown’s Gas home power” outlines base cooking elements and space heating on existing hydrogen technology, not on Brown’s Gas. It is true that hydrogen in it’s di-atomic form burns at 400-800°C with a catalyst, BUT Brown’s gas in it’s pure form would quickly burn up your catalyst (usually nickel/platinum, I’ve burned up a lot of it). And if you mix Brown’s Gas with air before using it in the catalyst, you would have a gas with an energy potential many times greater than normal di-atomic hydrogen, the catalyst could still be destroyed, along with the house. Also mixing Brown’s Gas to burn with normal air will cause oxides of nitrogen to be formed.
As for using pure Brown’s Gas in a normal burner, so that you won’t produce oxides of nitrogen, that is just as bad. Even Yull Brown will tell you two things:
First, unlike any other flame, Brown’s Gas burns in open air at about 127°C, which isn’t hot enough to use for heating, so forget using Brown’s Gas in any heating application like water heaters, clothes dryers, space heating furnaces, etc., you’ll just be wasting huge amounts of electrical power to make the Brown’s Gas and getting practically no heat from the flame, UNLESS you turn it di-atomic but then you no longer have Brown’s Gas, you have normal 2H2:O2 and just treat it as such.
Second, Brown’s Gas causes different materials to change to their melting (or vaporizing) temperature and with laser-like accuracy. If you set a cooking pot on a pure Brown’s Gas flame, the Brown’s Gas flame will burn right through the pot in seconds (or less), even if the material has a melting point of greater than 6000°C.
Cooling Applications:
Again, it takes huge amounts of electricity to make Brown’s Gas. Releasing pressurized Brown’s Gas to make cold would work, but is an extremely inefficient way to use high grade electricity (making compressed Brown’s Gas gas), better by far to use a normal air compressor, you’ll get the same refrigeration effect with a fraction of the power (about thirty times less power) AND you’re not releasing combustible gasses into the atmosphere (or exploding/imploding them in an enclosed system).
Better yet, simply use an “off the shelf” refrigeration system. You have to have electrical power anyway to make the Brown’s Gas, so just run a refrigerator. Then you can get many many times the refrigeration effect that you can get releasing pressurized Brown’s Gas or air.
Secondly, using Brown’s Gas as per the pioneer frigidaires to create refrigeration by making heat; it wouldn’t work. I grew up with that type of refrigeration because my father’s ranch had no utility power. It wouldn’t work for the reasons mentioned previously; first a Brown’s Gas flame has no real heat unless directed on something and second if directed on something Brown’s Gas will burn right through it in short order. These refrigerators require a steady or intermittent heat to be applied to a bulb or tank of refrigerant. Burning through the bulb will release the refrigerant.
To make cold by reducing pressure of Brown’s Gas, we electrolyze a liter of Brown’s Gas by adding 3kW of power, which in an hour is about 10,242 Btu worth of electrical energy. We fill a container of about 0.54 m3 to about 6.8 atmospheres (100 psi), at 20°C. If we do a pressure drop to get maximum temperature change at atmospheric pressure, we find that T1 = (P1 V1 T2) / (P2 V2) = (1 * 3.7 * 293) / (7.8 * .54) = 15°C. We can cool about 3.7 m3 of air by 5°C; this is about 10 Btu. So we throw away 10,232 Btu of electrical energy.
A four horsepower compressor uses about 3kW worth of electrical energy to compress 52 cubic feet per minute to 100 psi. In an hour this is 115 cubic meters of compressed air. If we let this air cool and release it as per above, we get 312 Btu of cooling.
If we used an ‘off the shelf’ heat pump at 3:1 CoP, we would get 30,726 Btu cooling for the same 3 electrical energy.
So releasing compressed Brown’s Gas WILL COOL, but hey folks…it’s like… im-prac-ti-cal.
