Public Domain Waterfuel Technology
On June 27th, 2007, U.S. Patents 4,936,961 and 5,149,407 by the late Ohio inventor Stanley A. Meyer expired, and his technology for the Water Fuel Cell fell permanently into the public domain in the United States. As what many consider the most sophisticated approach to "Hydrogen-on-Demand" technology (running a vehicle or genset on water alone), the Water Fuel Cell ("WFC") may be the most practical free energy device to introduce on a widespread basis. While it is alone among waterfuel devices in being accompanied by a reasonable theoretical foundation as to why it works, it is also among the simplest and least expensive waterfuel systems to construct. For these and other reasons, on January 1st, 2007, a new nonprofit research & education foundation, the H2earth Institute (http://h2earth.org) was organized to explore waterfuel technology generally, and to re-launch the Meyer WFC in particular, once it became free of intellectual property rights issues, upon expiration of the patents.
Notably, the 5,149,407 "Design" patent, which issed more than two years after the 4,936,961 "Methods" patent, was deliberately truncated by Meyer so that it would expire coterminously with the primary one. Disclaiming the remaining term of a patent is an almost unheard of step for an inventor to take, and indicates the later patent to contain some critical improvements that Meyer wanted the world to have when his basic technology became public domain. Meyer, who died in 1998, was working on more involved and exotic implementations of the technology, involving water injecting spark plugs, which is embodied in other Meyer patents which remain in force until 2011. This project is not concerned with that architecture, but only with the body of Meyer's work which is now in the public domain.
In June of 2006, retired U.K. Research Engineer Dave Lawton released a report, compiled by PGFED Editor Patrick Kelly (http://www.panaceauniversity.org), detailing Lawton's success in constructing a working Meyer WFC, which has produced gas at 3x the Faradic equivalent rate for the power consumed. Lawton, who spent much of his career at Britain's Rutherford Labs (equiv. U.S. Lawrence Livermore) designing and constructing instrumentation for high energy particle physics research, is far from the average 'tinkerer'. Videos of his two WFC units, one with an alternator based circuit, and one employing solid state timing logic, were posted on YouTube, and have received over 50,000 hits. The cells operated at 12-13v/3-4a - averaging approximatley 57 watts of input power - producing gas aggressively in distilled water with no electrolyte. On February 23rd, 2007 (the 18th anniversary of Cold Fusion), the H2earth Institute initiated an International Research Fellowship Program to facilitate realtime collaboration between waterfuel researchers around the world, working to decypher the keys to building a functional WFC, based on these Lawton WFC replications.
Almost immediately, some deficiencies were uncovered in the documentation, representing a difference between the Lawton unit "as built" and the schematics that had been published on the web. Presently, over 50 Research Fellows of the H2earth Institute, from 15 countries, are seeking to uncover the keys to making a functional WFC, and several have demonstrated gas evolution at 0.2 Amps (12v) in distilled water with no electrolyte. This is impossible by the known principles of conventional electolysis, and strongly evidences a real, legitimate "Meyer Effect".
This platform on PESN is intended to publish the technical findings of the H2earth Institute with respect to the WFC, in a public format which allow the documentation to grow over time as the design is further refined and "Best Practices" in constructing replicating units become known and confirmed. In the descriptions below, Bulleted items constitute findings generally accepted by the Institute (as of June 27, 2007) as having been found to be indicative of success in WFC theory, design, construction, and operations.
More about this item at: http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Water_Fuel_Cell