[NewCandle] Stretching (and hiding) nanosquiddies

[Nick Reiter]

Hi Keith and all,

Tried a kitchen table experiment yesterday with some strips of foil in the KI solution, and applied potential.

Total area of both + and - foil tabs was probably about 12 cm2.  I applied 4.5 volts from three AA batteries in series, and found that I was drawing a current of about 90mA.

I let this run for about 10 minutes.  Within 2 or 3 minutes, I began to see a slight yellow-green hue to the water.  The cathode was bubbling, the anode seemed to be quiescent.  Neither surface appeared to darken, though, despite the pea color of the electrolyte.

When I pulled both, and held the anode strip up to light, I found it to be perforated with thousands of pinholes.  The cathode was unscathed.

I brought both strips with me to the lab and tossed them in the SEM.  No squid forms anywhere.  The anode pinholes are irregular, typ 10 to 20 microns across, with an eroded looking nature as opposed to impact or EV puncture style.  The cathode foil was scattered with some KI crystals but was physically un-altered.

Just for giggles, even though no squid were formed, I ran some EDS on both samples.  The foil surface of the anode, both near and away from holes seemed to be pretty virgin, no surprises or "pop-up" elements at all.  However on the cathode, I found something somewhat interesting.... a repeatable (between .3%at and .8%at) signal for Ni.  Interesting.  While Fe seems to be part of the "virgin" composition and in many of the pixie reactor runs is seemingly amplified, I have never seen Ni, either as part of the incoming assay or an anomalous product.

Nevertheless, lack of squid may just mean the application of current needs to be done at a lower level and for a long time period.

Maybe I can calculate from potassium, iodine, and aluminum what manner of potentials would be possible, and then get some idea of what level these "slow" or natural currents would be given surface area.

n


> As it is pretty easy to do, why not stick two small hunks
> of aluminum in
> your KI
> solution and juice it with enough current to see the
> discoloration
> of the solution, etc. Then perhaps it will be clearer what
> I
> am ham handedly driving at. It might help to look at the
> pic
> I just posted and consider that the tubes are identical
> except
> for the physical surface area of the three canodes. What a
> difference
> in the reaction rate! You've gone down by a factor of
> what, one thousand
> times?
> 
> K.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> NewCandle mailing list
> NewCandle at ipdiscover.com
> http://ipdiscover.com/mailman/listinfo/newcandle_ipdiscover.com