Birkeland Eyde Reactor
This is my chemical reactor that uses the Birkeland-Eyde process to generate nitric acid from nothing but water, electricity, and atmospheric reagents.
This particular somehow shorted during testing but showed some promising results.
The device uses an electric arc to ionize nitrogen in the air into nitric oxide, which then reacts with oxygen in the air to produce nitrogen dioxide. The nitrogen dioxide is then bubbles through water, forming nitric acid. The chemical process can be seen in the flowchart below.
I was successfully able to generate nitrogen dioxide, whose presence can be confirmed by a brown gas in the chamber.
The water, however, did not show any signs of significant acidity. This is likely because the reactor was not given sufficient time to produce any measurable molarity of nitric acid. I was only using pH strips to confirm the presence of acid, so it is possible there were trace amounts of acid. A titration is necessary to be certain.
My reactor is built using a 12v air compressor, an olive jar reactor chamber, and a pasta jar bubbling flask. The power supply is a PC power supply with the 5v and 3.3v supply rails broken out. The air compressor was undervolted to 5v to prevent the buildup of pressure.
To produce the electric arc, I tried many different high voltage generators. Initially, I used a cheap "taser module" from Amazon. This worked well, but was clearly not designed for continuous operation. Even with thermal paste and a CPU heatsink for active cooling, I fried multiple modules. I then tried another high voltage generator, but this one caught fire.
I eventually decided to design my own transformer coil and driver. I'll probably use a ZVS driver and wind as many turns as I can fit on 3D printed bobbin. Here's a picture of what I currently have for that.
This particular somehow shorted during testing but showed some promising results.
Here's a video of an early version of the reactor in action:
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