[NewCandle] hydrogen sudsbuckets

[Nick Reiter]

Guten abend, all,

Been a bit silent here for a couple o weeks, but I reckon I haven't helped any, by being buried in tasks myself.  Apologies also to Horace whom I had been helping along with some mineral analysis, at a pace I myself found shamefully slow.  Life gets busy.

Anyway, I wanted to offer a couple of very brief updates on the rolled aluminum foil hydrolysis bucket project, carried on now for nearly a year.

The latest recipe used potassium sulfate as a salt additive.  This was "Pixie 13" which is an awful good name for a Goth band, but not so spectacular for hydrolysis, or tantalizing oddball element hints seen on the foil surfaces afterward.  Gas production was modest, less vigorous that KCl, KI, or NaCl.  Unusual elemental signals by EDS were pretty much null, a bit of Na, and a few peaks of Ti, but all quite down in the grass as far as amplitude.

The project is approaching its closure.  Two more Pixie variants remain to be tested.  One that I have wanted to try for a long time has been to use actual sea water for the reactor salt solution.  My son provided me with a jug's worth from the Florida Gulf Coast back in February.  This will require the added discipline of doing a baseline EDS on some dried down salt, to get an assay of the different traces for the purpose of accounting for anything surprising that would show up afterward.  Following that, Sam Faile and I decided we would run a "best-of" recipe... combining KCl with KI, and a small enrichment of D2O.

Beyond the Pixie series, I would like to begin focusing some more on the further replication of the Al-K-I system micro squid or anemonie forms, and try to seriously produce some of this material in a quantity sufficient for characterizing.  Once bitten by those images, I have not been able to wash the curiosity out of me.

All the best,

nr