Alternative energy of detonating gas (Kirillov & Apalkov, 2021)

Alternative energy of detonating gas

I. V. Kirillov and R. G. Apalkov, The Scientific Heritage No. 72 (2021), pp. 3–6. Published open access under CC BY; translated from the Russian by the archive, September 2026. Section headings are the authors’. The paper’s figures are not reproduced.

Abstract

Alternative energy sources for powering cars are considered. Two main energy options are analysed: the use of electricity, or of hydrogen fuel. Numerous attempts have been made to separate the water molecule into its constituent components, hydrogen and oxygen. One of these processes is electrolysis. The task is to create a fuel cell and a method in which water molecules are divided into constituent gases (hydrogen and oxygen) and a mixture of fuel gases is produced, including hydrogen and oxygen, which were previously dissolved in water. The term “fuel cell” used in this description refers to an element of the invention containing a water condenser that produces a combustible gas in accordance with the method.

Keywords. Hydrogen, oxygen, detonating gas, ecology, alternative fuel, Meyer cell, Stanley Meyer.

The problem

More and more attention is being paid to alternative energy. Every motor vehicle and every factory throws an incredible volume of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and in consequence the mean annual temperature rises and the glaciers melt. Humanity cannot rid itself of hydrocarbons entirely, but it can minimise their consumption and so reduce the greenhouse effect.

Natural gas as a fuel is not an alternative, though it can reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Solar, wind and hydroelectric stations count as clean electricity, and judged by carbon dioxide alone they are the cleanest methods — but that reckoning leaves out the recycling of solar panels, the noise and vibration of wind turbines, and the flooding of land behind dams. There is a law of thermodynamics: as much as came in must return, provided there is no heating, which accompanies any change of energy.

The solution

One replacement for hydrocarbon compounds is electricity. The second method is the use of detonating gas as an alternative fuel — a mixture of two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Water exists in nature with the chemical formula H₂O; some articles explain that water is oxidised hydrogen. We therefore need to tear the hydrogen atom out of the water molecule and use it as fuel.

Many subtleties have to be allowed for. Hydrogen stands first in Mendeleev’s table and is the smallest molecule, which raises the first problem: storage. Not every metal cylinder can hold a hydrogen molecule — it diffuses through the walls of the vessel it is kept in, so special containers are needed.

The next problem is explosiveness. Pure hydrogen is not subject to combustion, but mixed with oxygen it forms detonating gas, which burns across a wide range of concentrations in air, from 4–9 per cent by volume in lean mixtures up to 75 per cent in rich ones, and detonates over approximately the same range. Hydrogen is therefore dangerous only on ignition. There are two ways to use it with minimal risk: flame arrestors, which are simple and exist in many designs, or conversion back into electricity, which needs a fuel cell. A fuel cell is a proton-permeable membrane with metal walls; the protons of the hydrogen atom passing through the membrane combine with those of oxygen, water is formed and an electron released, a potential difference appears across the metal walls, and so a current appears.

Making the gas

Obtaining hydrogen divides into the chemical and the electrical. The chemical is the interaction of a metal with an acid — Zn + 2HCl → ZnCl₂ + H₂, here zinc and hydrochloric acid. The electrical is electrolysis, 2H₂O → 2H₂ + O₂: two electrodes in a liquid, and when a current is passed through them the water is split.

The evolution of hydrogen in an electrolyser is directly bound to the magnitude of the current flowing. As the current rises so does the volume of gas produced — but by the Joule–Lenz law a greater current increases the losses in the resistance of the electrolyte, so the liquid heats. Heating the liquid is a wasted loss, and the efficiency is therefore lower.

Meyer’s proposal

Using current to split water into its constituents is practical, but it is not economical. Stanley Meyer proposed a theory of splitting water into its constituents not by current but by a high potential of voltage [1].

Unlike charges within an electrical circuit establish “electrical attractive forces”, while like electrical charges within the same circuit maintain a “repelling action”. In both cases the movement or deflection of the electrical charges is directly related to the applied voltage. These electrical “forces” are known as “voltage fields” and can exhibit a positive or a negative electrical charge. Ions or particles within an electrical circuit carrying unlike charges are attracted to one another; those carrying the same or a similar charge move away from one another. Electrically charged ions or particles can moreover move toward a static field of opposite charge, according to Newton’s second law.

The structure of the atom presents two types of electrically charged mass [2]: electrons in orbit carrying a negative charge (−), and a nucleus of protons carrying a positive charge (+). In a stable electrical state the number of negatively charged electrons equals the number of positively charged protons, forming an atom with no electrical charge. Whenever one or more electrons is torn from the atom, the atom takes on a positive charge and is called a positive ion; if an electron attaches to a stable or normal atom, the atom takes on a negative charge and is called a negative ion.

A voltage potential in an electrical circuit can cause the separation of one or more electrons from an atom, through the repulsive force of opposite polarity between oppositely charged objects, according to Newton’s law and Coulomb’s law of electrical forces.

When an oxygen atom combines with two hydrogen atoms to create a water molecule, by accepting the hydrogen’s electrons, the oxygen atom becomes negatively charged (−), since the restructured oxygen atom now has negatively charged atoms and only positively charged protons. The hydrogen atom, with its single unused positively charged proton, now acquires a “net” positive charge equal to the electrical intensity of the negative charge of the two electrons. Being separated from the oxygen atom, satisfying the laws of physics that every action finds an equal and opposite reaction, the sum of the two positively charged hydrogen atoms balances the negatively charged oxygen atom, forming an electrically neutral water molecule. Only the unlike atoms of the water molecule exhibit opposite electrical charges.

According to the above assumption, the use of a high potential is capable of separating the molecule of water into oxygen and hydrogen.

References

1. Meyer S. A. Water fuel cell. Explaining the Hydrogen Fracturing Process on how to use water as a new fuel-sourse / Stanley A. Meyer, Inventor, 3792 Broadway, Grove City, Ohio 43123, 1-614-871-4173, Fax: 1-614-871-8075.
2. Meyer S. A. Method for the production of a fuel gas / Stanley A. Meyer, 3792 Broadway, Grove City, Ohio 43123. Patent Number: 4,936,961. Date of Patents: Jun. 26, 1990.

What this paper is, and what it is not

It reports no experiment. There is no cell built, no gas measured, no current or voltage recorded; the paper surveys the storage and explosion problems of hydrogen, gives the standard efficiency objection to electrolysis in the form of Joule heating, and then sets Meyer’s claim beside it without testing it. The closing sentence is the authors’ own summary of Meyer, not a finding: according to the above assumption.

Its bibliography is two items and both are Meyer’s: the technical brief and US 4,936,961. A 2021 paper on splitting water whose entire literature is its own subject cannot be read as independent corroboration, and the physics section above is not analysis of Meyer but Meyer translated — “voltage fields”, “electrical attractive forces” and “repelling action” are his phrases, carried into Russian and back into English here. The last paragraph of the abstract is lifted from the patent.

Three production faults are worth recording, because a reader meeting the paper elsewhere will meet them too. The English title printed above the authors’ names is not this paper’s: it reads “ENSURING THE STABILITY OF THE POWER SUPPLY OF THE CLIMATIC EQUIPMENT OF THE PIG FARM”, which belongs to another article in the same issue. The English keyword list renders гремучий газ — detonating gas, the old name for a stoichiometric hydrogen-oxygen mixture — as “rattlesnake gas”, the adjective having been read as the one in гремучая змея, rattlesnake. And the concluding sentence reads молекулу моды, the mode molecule, for молекулу воды, the molecule of water.

What it does show is where Meyer had reached by 2021: cited by name, and by two practising engineers at a Russian instrument works, in a journal, as the alternative to current-driven electrolysis. The address and telephone number carried in their first reference are the ones on the Broadway lab’s own stationery — the same numbers printed on the binder label of WFC 422-1DA.