[NewCandle] Steam electricity and aluminum masses

[Nick Reiter]

Good morning Keith,

It's been sort of slow and touchy feely empirical -
but overall it seems that when you get to tightly
rolled foil that ends up comprising more than about
400 square feet, there's enough mass... and thermal
mass... that with limited cooling, the temperature of
the pile will go up above about 50C, which in turn
seems to be something of a magic value for letting
hydrolysis take off exponentially.

Now with typical rolls of thin kitchen foil, 200
square feet is about the largest you can find in the
grocery store.  Two 12 inch long rolls of such, sawed
in half to make a cluster of four in a liter
container, the volume of which is then taken up with
salt water (2 tbsp/liter), will start to catalyze and
bubble within about 12 hours.  I've maintained about 1
slpm of (apparently) H2 for over 24 hours, topping off
the water as needed.  Finally, the buildup of crud /
oxide catches up, and the gas evolution begins to cap
off.  That general arrangement seems to be about the
"minimus".

One of the downsides is that the self-heating of the
large aluminum mass eventually just starts to boil the
water, so you start to get steamy wet hydrogen, and
your water level goes down faster.  So there is a
hefty caveat with it.  The NaCl+H2O+Al reaction can
really kick in, and approach some apparent efficiency
of gas evolution, but she's gotta run hot, which
implies the need for cooling caps and condensers, etc.
in a real world setting.

Now to re-establish a perspective correctly, though...
all of this excursion into salt water hydrolysis was
intended to look for minor anomalies and oddities. 
Practically, it doesn't hold up to vigorous classical
reaction of NaOH or KOH in H2O + Al.  You want fast
H2?  Either pay Vishnu the appropriate number of
electron volts and electrolyze, or dump scrap aluminum
into an evil alkaline brew.

I'm closing in on acceptance that I've not seen any
real good evidence that electrolysis or hydrolysis
done in a rolled foil Casimir cavity environ has any
magic to it.  Still not sure why dosing the salt
solutions with a little D2O seemed to envigorate the
reaction - that remains kind of neat, but I'm almost
out of D2O.

N

--- Keith Nagel <NewCandleAdmin at ipdiscover.com> wrote:

> Hey,
> 
> Yes, I'm alive at least. I've been in the studio
> this past
> week, and I'll have a bit to report soon. 
> 
> Fred used to bang on quite a bit about the steam
> thing. 
> He recently asked me to post something to this list,
> which
> I will do following this email. 
> 
> So Nix, was dat "critical mass" for room
> temp/pressure?
> 
> K.
> 



       
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