How to make hydrogen from NaOH, aluminum and water

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By torque63
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This is a hydrogen atom

There are many ways to skin a cat as there are many ways to generate hydrogen, I will briefly explain how you can do this chemically with household materials.
To make this an automotive application visit www.h2gen.info for opensource hydrogen project.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Water
Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH)
Aluminum (scrap)
A heat resistant vessel
Safety Goggles
Do this outside for safety

Step 1

Use 100% pure lye only in pellet, flake of powder form.

Visit this website to learn about the hazards of NAoH, sodium hydroxide, or 100% Lye. This stuff is very dangerous so be careful.
http://www.physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/SO/sodium_hydroxide.html
I will also provide a link in resources.
You can purchase pure lye from here www.biodieselbarn.com
Step 2

This is what I used for my experiment.

Add one quart of water to your reaction vessel, it's important that it can handle heat and be composed of plastic material. Add 10 tablespoons of lye to the water mix and stir slowly, let it dissolve into the water.
Step 3

Add your scrap aluminum, if it has clean surfaces the reaction will start quickly. Aluminum cans take longer as the painted surfaces dissolve slower. Bubbles will form on the surface of the aluminum as the hydrogen is released the oxygen in water will form aluminum oxide that will fall to the bottom of the bucket and look like black sand.
Step 4

The reaction will continue for about an hour, the bubbles released are hydrogen (and a little steam). Congratulations you have made hydrogen from a chemical process. Visit www.h2gen.info to learn how to make a car apllication for this principle.

Comments

wildpen said

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on 4/15/2009 I used to do this all the time in high school and college. You have to be careful how quickly you add the aluminum, as the reaction is very exothermic. I would often use aluminum foil and it would heat up really fast due to the large amount of surface area. Once in a while I would use an old beer bottle as a container and right as the reaction started, light the top of it. It would burn the hydrogen off as it was created making the beer bottle sort of a wick-less candle. It would then get too hot and crack the glass...Good times. I also got quite a few lye burns on my hands back in those days...