Hydrogen Extraction from water

[acidman]

hey all can you please help me with this

i tried extracting hydrogen from water, by adding salt in to the water and than providing direct current with a 12 volt battery, the bubbles started coming up almost immediately from the negative wire, but the water soon changed its color to orange and than very quickly to dark green.

one i want to ask if im doing anything wrong here and if there is a commercial benefit to the hydrogen extracted like if we use it to run a generator the amount of electricity it will provide as oppose to the energy it takes to produce hydrogen with this method..

Please tell me if there is any better way to produce Hydrogen from water.

Thanks Acidman

[spinningmagnets]

The orange color was probably iron oxide (rust) and the green color was probably copper oxide. (released oxygen reacting with the wire and some steel touching the water?)

Electrolysis is well-known and widely experimented with. I was on a submaring from 1977-81, and we used this process to make oxygen, which was stored in a stand-by tank to be bled into the breathing air.

Putting electricity into water separates the hydrogen and oxygen into gasses. Single atoms are unstable and most pair-up to achieve a higher state of stability (H2/O2)

Gasoline is very dense (C8-H18) and has a lot more power than H2, which is MUCH less dense. A piston engine can be converted to run on H2, but much of the energy is wasted as heat in the exhaust.

There are also losses when using generator output to make the H2, some of the generator energy is also wasted as the generator gets hot.

The submarine had extra electrical energy to spare, and we wanted the O2 at any cost, but to burn H2 in a generator to make H2, you would be spending a dollar to get a nickel.