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Permalink Reply by Stephen on September 27, 2011 at 10:22am

Need details like:

 

How thick is the stainless steel?

What grade?

What is the torch LPM output?

Is there a lot of visible water vapor in the gas?

What size tip are you using?

 

Might help :)

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Permalink Reply by Roger Heise on September 27, 2011 at 11:01am

The stainless is up to 3" thick - various grades - 304,316, 254SMO etc

We're using commercial torches with hydrogen and oxygen feeds - run the O2 at up to 50L/min - varying all over, with no success

No visible water vapor - pre-packed gases.  We have enough to do that we felt a generator would be difficult to work with for the volumes we need, for now at least.  If I knew that it would work better with a generator, we'd look at starting small and going larger.

 

Tried various tips with no success

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Permalink Reply by Stephen on September 27, 2011 at 12:13pm

Fact: So tank hydrogen is mostly parahydrogen ~90%. At normal room temps and pressure only ~25% is parahydrogen and 75% is orthohydrogen.  Even boiling temperatures yield very little change in this percentage. Compressing the hydrogen and lowering the temps causes orthohydrogen to spontaneously convert to parahydrogen. 

 

Supposedly orthohydrogen is approximately 3X more powerful than parahydrogen. So it's not too wild to test the theory than producing on-demand hydrogen could yield better results. 

 

I know that even my tiny little micro torch at 1 LPM using a .025 tip will cut right through thin 304 stainless in a matter of minutes. Maybe try a small 5-10 LPM torch on 1/4" stainless and see what happens?

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