From avalonbiker at yahoo.com Sat Sep 5 11:41:45 2009 From: avalonbiker at yahoo.com (Nick Reiter) Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 08:41:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [NewCandle] final four salt-aluminum hydrolysis buckets In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <709060.9517.qm@web65406.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Hi all, Looks like things are finally drawing up to a close on this project that has run much longer than I ever suspected it would initially. With the end of my SEM and EDS work looming, Sam Faile and I have held some brainstorming sessions, discussing what salt additive combinations could not just modify the basic gas production via hydrolysis, but also "tweak" the minor but potentially anomalous elemental "product traces" found on the inter-turn foil layer surfaces. Looks like things end with Pixie 22 - probably to be started Tuesday, with iron II citrate added. The recent trio of buckets that I am working through analysis of, by EDS, were Pixie 19 - which was KCl salt water driven with HCl to a pH of about 4.5... Pixie 20, which used antimony III chloride as an additive, and Pixie 21, to which we added lead II acetate. The acidic KCL bucket was a dog for gas production much as was the alkali counterpart. The salt water - aluminum hydrolysis really seems to work best at a near neutral state. No real mentionables as far as surprising elemental traces, other than some S and Na that were hard to account for. The Sb laced bucket was chemically an oops. It reacted with the Al vigorously for about 20 minutes, then settled off into a very slow, and nearly non-working state. When I pulled some foil turn samples to look for elemental signal, I did find something curious, but low enough level to border on noise. Might also be an artifact of the Sb peaks, but it looked like Actinium. OTOH, not a peep from a Geiger counter held near a roll. The lead acetate run had some really complicated chemistry going, I believe. The gas production rate was light and not exciting - it probably hydrolyzed about 1.7 liters of water in about a week. However lots of granular precipitate was formed, along with a shift to about a pH 4 due to acetic acid. Some interesting traces elementally in the precitpitate and on the foil surface. Au, Ag, Ga, substantial Ni (larger than the baseline Fe signal) Another oddball feature of the spectra are several well defined Xray peaks that appear to correlate to energies of say Cd Lalpha or Rh K alpha, but don't have a positive identification from the matching software. Nor do they correspond to summing peak artifacts, which I learned how to mark and identify. (recall the debate about Ag from last year) Shades of Walter Russell's missing elements :) I should have some better ideas about this next week, after pouring through the EDS manuals and tutorials. Which I will miss dearly. Best, nr From johnsteck at tetrahelix.com Mon Sep 14 15:48:28 2009 From: johnsteck at tetrahelix.com (John Steck) Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:48:28 -0500 Subject: [NewCandle] First-ever high-resolution 3-D images of a polymer solar cell Message-ID: <6C8E9BB510554ED8BBFF5C3AA6CCD522@Proteus> http://www.rdmag.com/News/Feeds/2009/09/materials-first-ever-high-resolution-3d-images-of-a-polymer-/ -john From NewCandleAdmin at ipdiscover.com Wed Sep 16 18:38:43 2009 From: NewCandleAdmin at ipdiscover.com (Keith Nagel) Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:38:43 -0700 Subject: [NewCandle] Plasma radio Message-ID: If you're close enough to a transmitter tower, you can build a rather amusing radio set with nothing more than a loop of wire and a birch branch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMEzUp_8az8&feature=player_embedded Beats hell out of the old crystal sets we made in the Boy Scouts. K.