TOPIC:

Today I tried my 'quickie' improvised forced air generator. The chambers are glass but the tubing is all 1/4" polyethylene. I did make some bubble diffusers by heating up the tubing to crimp the end shut and then used a straight pin to poke holes in it. I have glass tubes coming and will convert to all glass as soon as I can.

I bought the lowest price aquarium pump at petco. I also bought a 2 gang valve for it. That way I could exactly control the air flow into the reaction chamber. I did have to open the other valve a little to let some air through to relieve some of the air going into the system.

I also tried using a cork for the reaction chamber yesterday and it did not work. It was too porous and not enough pressure would build up to push Cl02 through the tubing into the cold water. Today I tried a mason jar with holes drilled in the plastic lid for the tubing (see pic). That also did not seal well so I did not get any gas being pushed into the 3rd chamber where I had plain water to try and soak up any excess Cl02 escaping from the 2nd chamber. Therefore, I think a rubber stopper is necessary on the 1st (reaction) chamber for sure to get good sealing, and any chamber where you want good sealing. In the pics below, that is a light colored rubber stopper on the smaller reaction chamber so I could get a good seal.

I put my setup out on the back patio and had a large fan blowing right near it to dissipate the Cl02 escaping from the mason jar.

I had 1000 ml of cold distilled water in the 1/2 gal. mason jar and used 110 ml of MMS and 110 ml of HCl 4%. I let the air pump for 30-40 mins. till the chambers were both the exact same yellow color.

I do believe I am getting full saturation of the distilled water now, whereas I did not the first two times I generated without forced air. I have been taking 1/2 tsp. CDS hourly (in 2 tbsp of water) 8 hrs/day for the last 2 weeks and when I started taking today's batch from forced air, it started burning my throat. It is definitely stronger, the yellow is darker also. I think this is real saturation.

It seems to me the chlorine dioxide test strips (0-500ppm) are not that accurate when you get into the higher ranges. It might be better to take 1 ml. of the CDS and put it in a certain amount of distilled water and take a reading from that to get the reading into the lower ranges.




Start of the generation.




End of the generation 30-40 mins.

Michael

Steve wrote:

The only problem is that unless every CDS generator is built to same specs and all, each person will need to determine that thru testing on their own.

Grainger sells the ClO2 test strips online fairly cheap. I also really want to point out that 3rd chamber of sodium thiosulfite.
Pinch a penny has this for about 10 bucks called a chlorine neutralizer. It will neutralize any vented ClO2, the smell is negligible.

Some people can not tolerate the smell of ClO2, and this is a big help. I just put a few grams into 16 oz of water. I ran 5 batches thru it, and it stayed clear. One of those batches was Flake with HCl and it was STOUT. 500 ppm in CDS in 5 minutes. If someone was going into production of more than personal use, I would recommend doing this.

Again Steve.. is sodium thiosulfite also named sodium thiosulfate? My area had the sodium thiosulfate which is crystal white... please clarified for me... thank you...

does the tube that comes out of pump goes into the MMS1 liquid so the bubbles bubble inside the activated MMS at the first chamber?

Thanks

Nir

@Steve,
If you find the 0-50 test strips, would you post a link here? I can only find 0-10 and 0-500. The 0-500 does show smaller increments, but it's not nearly as sensitive as a 0-50 would be.
Pam

Hi Steve,

Regarding Nir's question on the tube from the air pump going into the 1st chamber (MMS & activator), thanks for clarifying. I thought we were trying to get it to bubble through the liquid but now that I look at your picture again it looks like you just a have a straight glass tube going down almost to the bottom of the bottle.

In my set up, I did have my homemade polyethylene tube bubbler down in the reaction solution. It is nice if we don't have to do that. Probably it does need to go down low in the flask like you have because that Cl02 gas seems kind of heavy, at least it might be best that way.

Michael

Michael and Steve,

I thought the purpose of the air pump was that of mixing the two reagents in the reaction chamber. If this is not the reason and the pipe connecting to the pump doesn't deep into the reacting solution, in my opinion it is useless. At the contrary, the air you blow in the system may have a stripping effect on the final solution with loss of ClO2. This is particularly true if the second chamber is too short.

Apart from this, it would be useful if when making the experiments you post:
1. the final ml of solution in the reaction chamber;
2. the final ml of CDS solution;
3. the grams of NaClO2 used for the reaction;
4. the ppm of ClO2 obtained.
It is obvious that the quantity of acid, citric or chloridric, has to be always in excess, in such a way that the efficiency in ClO2 terms is the same, not depending on the kind of acid used.
In this way we can make a statistic of the efficiency of the process.
From the numbers I have seen till now the efficiency seems very low. I doubt that something is wrong with the indicator used.
I can't imagine that over 50% of ClO2 goes lost.
It is a pity I can not help with the experiments. I am not a seller of MMS and I have only a small bottle of it; so I had to order the product and it didn't come in till now. But 25 liters are on the way.
Thank you.
Alanti

Steve wrote:

Michael, you are right about the test strips. This will give me cause to buy that pricey meter I've been eying..... after Christmas.

You could dilute CDS, to get in more precise range of test strips.

For example, if you dilute it 10x (by adding 9 mL of water to 1 mL of CDS) you maybe get in more precise range of test strips? After that, you just multiply results with 10. I don't know range of test strips, but we could always dilute solution to working range.

NO, only faster PROCESS

NO, ONLY FASTER