alufoil cell

[hartiberlin]

Today, the cell is up again to 0.4 Volts at the 100 Ohm load.
As I did not put the cell into any container,
the water can now evaporate slowly out of it via the paper towel
that hangs out a bit at the top and the crystals can form again.
Now I guess in a few days the cell will be again at least at 0.5 Volts
at the 100 Ohm load resistor.
It seems, that a load  is beneficial for the crystallisation to take place.

Regards, Stefan.

[Bruce A. Perreault]

Stefan,

I have some graphite powder that I am willing to sell for $1 USD per pound plus postage. I also have some catalytic graphite that I might sell for $5 per pound if people are interested. This material boasts cell power.

                    -Bruce P.

[hartiberlin]

The alufoilcell is now again up to 0.43 Volts on the 100 ohm load
and still climbing.

Regards, Stefan.

[hartiberlin]

I did a new experiment today, as the old alufoil cell
has dried out and also some of the alufoil has disintegrated...

So now I did a new test.

Have a look at this picture below.
I wanted to do first a basic test, to see, if the
output could be scaled up by using more output area
pickup graphite material.

I did brush a piece of alufoil, so the surface was rough.
Then I mixed 3 to 4 tablespoons of seasalt with 1 tablespoon
full of K2CO3 and made with a bit of water some kind of
mix paste from it.
Then I put this mix paste as a small layer onto the alufoil.

Then I poured graphite powder on it and finaly a graphite plate.

In the picture you can see, that I only had a pretty small graphite plate left.

The "canals" are from placing graphite rods first
onto the graphite powder surface to further test additional pickup
rods, but these don?t have much surface and some of the
salt-mixpaste and graphite did glue to them, when I removed it..

Anyway I got at the fresh start 1.42 Volts open circuit.
Here in the picture it is still shown at 1.36 Volts, after I made some
short circuit measurements.

The max shortcircuit current was about 25 mA going down then to about 12 mA
after about 45 seconds.

The output only depends on the available area of graphite plate contact and
graphite powder on the salt-mix.

If I would have had bigger graphite plates I could have got much more output power.

If the salt mix dries out the voltage will go down to around
0.7 to 0.9 Volts open circuit , but the current will drop to very low
values, like under 0.2 mA.

So this needs to stay in a certain wetness state to generate
enough output power, so 3 cells in series can drive a white LED quite nice
for pretty long time.

Regards, Stefan.

[hartiberlin]

Today after around 14 hours atthe voltmeter the salt-mix
has already dried out a bit and the voltage is down to 1.1 Volt opencircuit.

I will let it dry out totally during the next days and see, where the voltage goes.

Regards, Stefan.