[NewCandle] Mega-roll goes critical

[Keith Nagel]

Hi Nick,

OK, I just smoked a roll, here's the skinny.

600ml beaker, distilled H2O with NaCl using your
concentration ratio. About 6 square ft aluminum.

The beaker was put on a hot plate and variac, and
I slowly increased the temperature.

Below 50C, very little bubble was noted.
At about 50 degrees C bubbling began in earnest,
every 10 degrees over producing some more ( but
it didn't seem proportionate. ). I let
it sit for a while as I got a call from Fred Sparber
who wanted to talk about this Kansius fellow
and his RF heating/dissassociation of salt water.
So we shot the breeze while the thing bubbled away.
Now, I just cut the power, and the bubbling at
50 C is much smaller on the way down... This makes
some sense to me, as the protective layer is thicker
now than on a fresh piece of foil on the way up.

Now 50-60C is warm to the touch, you can still hold
the beaker at that point. At that point, H2 generation
was about what it was at the peak of my distilled H2O experiment.

Although this doesn't prove thermal runaway is the
cause of the effects noted by Nick, it does show
that the reaction can be increased by temperature rise
and there is a critical temp over which the reaction
begins to run in earnest. And we also know
that the dissolution of the Al is exothermic.
And there's a large thermal mass with the working
protocol. So all the pieces are there. To really pin it, one
could do the exact working protocol, but suck the
heat out with a cooler to maintain a constant room
temp. I would predict then that it would behave just
like our previous experiments, reaching a peak of
activity and then subsiding after a time. 

Alternately, one could do a smaller amount of Al
in a dewar, to catch the heat. Then I would expect
boil off with reasonable amounts of Al.

Time to get back to the code base, for this afternoon
anyway. WIPO is about to get some weirdly formed
search requests...WTF???

K.

-----Original Message-----
From: newcandle-bounces at ipdiscover.com
[mailto:newcandle-bounces at ipdiscover.com]On Behalf Of Nick Reiter
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 10:57 AM
To: New energy for the new world.
Subject: Re: [NewCandle] Mega-roll goes critical


Hi Keith,

Well, the basic version that is on the table here
contains the following specific elements:

* rolls of aluminum kitchen foil (the thin cheap
stuff) that are hacksawed in half, with the inner
remaining cardboard tube scrunched and pulled/twisted
out.  Sam uses 200 foot size rolls of Kroger brand
foil.

* PETE Kroger "Snap-Lock" plastic storage containers
for the reaction vessel (has a nice inner rubber lid
seal).  The one Sam used and the size that he sent me
is the "half gallon" sized version.

* an aqueous solution of ~ 2 tbsp. of Morton table
salt in distilled water.

Now, the versions I had tried a while back that just
sorta sat there differed in the following ways:

1.  I used a little less than a half (sawed) of a much
smaller roll of foil (a "75 foot" roll, not Kroger
brand).  Just used the single ~half roll section. 
Thus about 30 square feet of foil surface rolled up
instead of 400...

2.  I used a smaller snaplock PETE container (the one
quart size).

3.  I have a feeling I handled the foil roll a lot
less than Sam did, since he used a manual hacksaw at
home, and I sliced mine zip zip on a bandsaw at the
lab.  I don't know how much of a factor skin oils
might play, but its a minor variable I can't quite
dispense with.

Thats about it.  When I tried this twice, with the
salt water, the rolls never really took off on their
own.  On the one occasion, I added a little pinch of
NaOH to try to "trigger" things, and I got a little
bubbling for a couple of days before it went dormant.

I am inclined to try a version later this week with a
"split the difference" arrangement - maybe use two
half rolls of the "200 foot" stuff instead of four. 
And keep it out on in the back 40 on a cement slab...
with a couple of TCs attached.

Best of luck to any who want to give this a whirl...

N


> So now that you have a protocol that works, what
> were you doing before that wasn't? I'll try
> something
> here but I don't want to do a large device for
> safety reasons and if I understand you, smaller ones
> weren't working... What I'm sorely tempted to try
> now is a small one with a heater. I think that's
> part of the magic, the large thermal mass allowing
> a buildup of heat and the reaction hastens.
> Alternately
> I could do a cell in a dewar, to trap the heat and
> simulate a big cell.
> 
> K.
> 
> 



       
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