A filter with no filter: Stan Meyer's Electrostatic Filter Assembly

Stan Meyer's water fuel cell left the water's dirt behind. In 1985 he made a point of it: "you see any filters to the system? You see any chemicals to the system?" But dirt that stays behind builds up. Natural water carries "typically 20 ppm to 40 ppm" of suspended and dissolved contaminants, says his memo WFC 422 DA, and his answer was Figure 3-45, the Electrostatic Filter Assembly. The rising gas pumps the water out of the cell and through a box with a positive post and a negative post: negatively charged contaminants migrate to the positive post and are trapped, positively charged ones to the negative post, and the purified water goes back into the fuel cell. The memo adds that the voltage fields "kills bacteria that might be present", and that "periodically back-flushing (rinsing out) is all that is required." On the Gas Management System tape one of the Meyer twins describes the same loop: the gas acting as a water pump, into "this filtering tray, which separates the contaminants and then allows the water to go back." Today engineers call the idea of pulling charged particles out of water with charged electrodes, then rinsing them clean, capacitive deionization, and it's sold for treating water. Could a water car clean its own water as it goes? The memo and the tapes are on stanslegacy.com.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer · Deer Creek, Ohio · 1985
• Stan & Stephen Meyer · the GMS unit · GlobalKast master
• Stan Meyer · Figure 3-45: Electrostatic Filter Ass'y · WFC 422 DA
• Stan Meyer, Impurity Extraction Process and Figure 3-45, Electrostatic Filter Ass'y, WFC 422 DA — stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, Deer Creek, Ohio, 1985, at 1:32:40 — stanslegacy.com
• Stan and Stephen Meyer, the GMS unit (GlobalKast), at 33:16 — stanslegacy.com