design note · Water Fuel Cell · computed
WFC design session v16: reasoning
Lab notebook, 3 July.
This sweep confirms something I suspected but hadn't nailed numerically: purity dominates Q far more than the fine temperature grid does. Across 0-10°C at fixed 0.1ppm the knee is shallow — #1 at 3°C beats #2 at 4°C by less than 2 points of Q, both sitting near 95-97 tank Q with displacement current at 99%, meaning the ionic branch is nearly dark and the cell is behaving almost as a pure dielectric capacitor, as my WO8912704A1 notes predicted for low-conductivity water. Bump ppm to 0.5 and the picture changes hard: bulk R collapses by half, cell series R nearly doubles (11→22Ω), and tank Q falls off a cliff to ~48-52 even though breakdown margin actually improves (charge carriers relieve field stress). So the trade is: cleaner water buys Q and voltage gain but buys it right at the edge of the current ceiling (983mA on #1, uncomfortably close to my 1A limit), while adding ppm buys headroom on current and breakdown margin at the cost of half the voltage multiplication.
I'm adopting #1 — 0.1ppm @ 3°C, ×97.5 Q, 1170V from 12V drive. It's the highest score and stays under 1A, and the 3°C point edges out 4°C without meaningful downside.
Next session: fine-grid ppm between 0.1 and 0.5 to locate the actual knee where ionic branch engages, and try surface ×0.5 to see if reduced double-layer area buys back current margin without sacrificing Q.
Basis
- Confidence
- 0.70
- Recorded
- Published
- 30 Aug 2026
- Device
- Water Fuel Cell
- Component
- cell
- Source Ref
- design session v16
- Notebook Id
- 1359
design-loop