alufoil cell

[hartiberlin]

Okay, good idea to use a pencil lead graphite. Did not think about that.
Will try it out and let you know.
Okay, this is a cheap sourc of graphite, I agree !

Regards, Stefan.

[hartiberlin]

I tested to replace the stainless steel wool with a graphite lead pencil rod,
but it performed worse !

It seems that the small graphite lead pencil rod has too low surface area, so
it can not collect all the electrons from the graphite powder.

When I replaced it, the voltage went down to 0.18 Volt in a few minutes at
the 50 ohm load, so that was not good.
With the stainless steel wool it stayed at least at around 0.3 Volt at least
after many hours of use.

Also with bigger graphite plates it was not very much more, so it seems
it really depends on the surface from graphite to the collector material
and as Stainless-Steel wool has lots of surface, it is better under load !

Also I saw, that the active charcoal powder also did "eat up" the
stainless steel wool a bit. I had some pieces of ss-wool broken apart
from the rest as it was the case of the itching away of the ss-contacts
at Walt?s batteries, when they were in contact with the graphite cylinders !

Also my ss-sink in the kitchen got itched up by the graphite powder !
So be careful when you handle graphite powder with stainless steel
and water, it seems the graphite oxidizes the stainless steel away in saltwater !

Regards, Stefan.

[cmichaelcouch]

Stefan or Walt:

Does the Aluminum get eaten up as the battery is used?

Michael Couch

[Walter Hofmann]

Hi michael,
stefan can probably answer this from his present test but I stopt experiementing with alufoil because of the consumption of the alufoil. Stefan's intend here was to show how easely with simple and cheap off the shelf (or the kitchen) materials to build a emergency power source where you could have a little lighting. maybe someday we would be happy to have this possibility.
greeting
walt

[hartiberlin]

Hi Michael, yes, the ALufoil is consumed, but only very slowly.
For better power output it is indeed better to also use the stainless steel wool
from a dish-cleaner. This seems to have more power, than the graphite plate for the contact
to the active charcoal ! With a graphite plate to the active charcoal powder, my cell is now down
to 0.1 Volts after another 8 hours run. I will now change this again and use again the
Stainless-stell wool. Also the stainless steel wool seems to be eaten up after a while
by the active charcoal. But as these things are not too expensive to get in every
supermarket, this is indeed a good emergency battery which you can use to light
up white LEDs. ( with 3 or more cells in series or with only one cell and an oscillator circuit)

Regards, Stefan.