How do you separate hydrogen and oxygen so that you can compress them ?

Question

How do you separate hydrogen and oxygen so that you can compress them ?

Answer 1

Are you speaking in regards to separation oxygen and hydrogen from  water? After you separate them you Will need to capture the two separately then to compress them.

Answer 2

Pass an electric current through water but the result is explosive!!

Answer 3

electrolysis.

but they will both go "bang!" quite readily if you simply compress them, you should chill them first...

Answer 4

How did you get them mixed? That is a dangerous and explosive mixture!

Did you use electrolysis? You should use separate containers for each electrode and then the gasses do not mix.

.

Answer 5

Clarify question if you can.  

My assumption is that you want to simply break down water through hydrolysis and obtain the two components, Hydrogen and Oxygen.  This is done by passing electrical energy through the water which will break apart the H2O into its basic parts.  The Hydrogen molecule is positively charged, so will collect at the negative electrical eletrode. The Oxygen will collect at the positive electrode.  

Thats the easy part.  Compressing the gasses and storing them will require some specialized pumping equipment and high pressure cylinders.

The most common way we obtain hydrogen is by converting a fossil fuel, methane by using an entirely different process.

Just a quick comment about Hydrogen powered vehicles.  Almost all hydrogen produced will require fossil fuels to create, either methane and natural gas in the one process, or fossil fuels used to generate electricity to use in the hydrolysis process.  Each of those is less efficient than using the fossil fuel directly as the power source fo the vehicle.  In other words, using hydrogen to power vehicles will always require more fossil fuel in the process than it would take to power the vehicle directly.  The only alternative to not haveing fossil fuels in the equation is if the electrical energy generated to produce the hydrogen is from nuclear power.  And it sown set of issues.