Bigger is not alwayse better !

and I am not refureing to viagra either but Hydroxy cells !
when I first got into these Hydrogen generateing cells I saw that people were realy lucky to get 1LPM.... that was a good cell at the time ...
so I desided that when I make one I'll make a big cell and have more LPM output...
but I soon discovered that although my cell was twice the size of other peoples cells getting 1LPM I was only getting 1/4LPM at the most....
even though I gave it the same amprage that they were giveing their cells ...at 20 amps !
... I was baffeled as to why this would happen and I slowly discovered that More plate area
brings along with it a demand for more amperage ! to achieve the same amount of output per square inch of plate area !
... here is the key to understanding the problem.
in a Hydroxy cell there are plates these plates have a certain area in size
when you feed that cell electrical power it is said to be Amps per square inch in plate area....
so if you have 100sqr inches of plate area and push 40amps into it 40/100=.4 amps per square inch almost but not quite 1/2 an amp per 1 square inch of plate area.
now if you tripple the size of the cell to 300 square inches by makeing the plates bigger or adding more plates ( if its hooked up in a parallel manor to the power)
you will now have 300square inches being driven by 40 amps or 40/300=.1333 amps per square inch of plate area....
from .4 amps per sqr in. we went to .13 amps per sqr inch... a MAJOR DROP in power to the plate area...
now I know from experience that .4 amps per sqr inch will produce fairly well
and a Working "Randy Cell MKI" will produce about 2.5LPM at 20amps or so and there is aproximately 55sqr inches of plate area in a Randy cell... so its 20/55=0.3636 amps per square inch....so we can easily say that a cell with 0.36 amps per square inch CAN produce as much as 2.5LPM..."IF AND ONLY IF" the plate spaceing is the same as a "Randy cell"
if the plate spaceing is wider than that of a "Randy Cell" the output drops off quickly
so even a spaceing of 1/16" will have a lower output per square in. than a "Randy cell" has
all other things being equil.
so if we take a cell like the "Randy cell MKI" and add more plates to it what will happen ?
the output will go down. simply because the amps per square inch will drop dramatically.
...example. the MKI Randycell has 11 plates/washers in it....
what happens if we double that to 22 washers/plates ?
instead of 55sqrin. we now have 110sqr inches, feeding it the same 20 amps as before gives you 0.1818 amps per sqr inch... (2x.1818=.3636... right on the button (checking the math))
so you can expect 1/2 the output at best, from a Randy cell with 22 washers instead of 11 washers...
this is because of the amps per square inch problem... but if you raised the amprage then what ?
well all bets are off then because your not playing with a level playing field any more
and indeed that is what you need to do to get the output UP on a cell that is bigger... you need to raise the amperage !
...
so when I discovered this FLAW in my thinking I desided to calculate how many amps my first cell would need to operate at the "Randy cell" rate of output... and it needed a whopping 236amps to reach the same amps per square inch of that of the "Randy cell" !
...
needless to say it set me back a bit I had 24 plates of almost 10sqr inches each but couldn't use them because I didn't have 200+ amps to power it with!
so I could do something else... reduce the number of plates....
still using 20 amps I started taking plates off and when I reached 8 plates the output that had slowly risen to over 1LPM suddenly dropped to less than 1/4LPM... so I put 2 plates back on and achieved 1.5LPM with 10 plates the best I ever got....out of the big cell because I had a fixed amount of amps I could give it ...only 20 amps, and even then it wouldn't last very long !
...
that experience tough me allot about the workings of a Hydroxy cell...
hopefully you won't fall for the same thinking as I did that Bigger was better, bigger meant more output...because it doesn't unless you can raise the amperage right along with it !
Bigger Can mean more output... this is true but it also takes a bigger Amperage supply to do it.
...
FWIW (for what its worth<grin>)

Bob.......