Crystal Power CeLL by John Hutchison

[Koen1]

G'Day all,

@Koen,  I'm very interested how your gallium germainium mix turns out over time.
What if you prepare the pyrites and gallium together (pre mix) as I did with the quartz sand and gallium. A ratio of 20 to 1 pyrites to gallium would be all you'd need. You would then have the makings of multiple junctions before combining with the rest of the ingredients. Just a thought 

You mean like the gallium coated sand you made some time ago? Yeah, that's an idea... I was actually considering to "cook up" my own
pyrite-galena compound: instead of buying mineral samples of pyrite and galena and crushing them into powder, I thought it shouldn't
be too difficult to produce some iron sulfate and lead sulfate and just mix them up... Synthetic pyrite/galena mix so to speak...
Also just a thought

So far it seems that the more silicates are in my cell material, the less efective bonding the gallium appears to perform.
In a few of my test tubes with only different silicates and zero rochelle salt, the gallium seems to "overpower" the silicate
in reacting/bonding with the aluminium of the cell wall, resulting in an inner cell wall covered in nice shiny gallium-aluminium
alloy and very bad bonding with the silicate. This leaves a cell where the cell material does not appear to want to stick to
the cell wall at any temperature above galliums melting point, with some really funky yellowish discolouration in those areas.
It seems the more rochelle salt is added, the less nasty effects of the gallium befome apparent and the better the material
hardens out. But it seems the voltage from rochelle salt is significantly lower than that of most of my silicate cells, and the
amperage so far is about equally low...

It also seems I was right to question the matter of water retention in rochelle salt: it looks like the rochelle salt is extremely
absorbant and retains crystalline water up to quite a high degree.
I also noticed that, when the rochelle salt is heated to about 120 degrees on a stainless steel plate, it "bakes" into a
reddish brown to dark brown substance which stinks quite a bit; it smells exactly like a new chemical "cement plasticiser"
lime replacement powder that I just happened to test some time ago, and that stuff is also reddish brown... Nothing spectacular,
but perhaps interestig to see how this "lime replacement" relates to rochelle salt exactly... (in the view of our ceramics interest,
of course )

Kind regards,
Koen

[Koen1]

Ok, very brief update:

The "JH-style" cell (RS, Pyrite, Ge, Ga) appears to have "stabilised"
at a voltage of 0.4V and an amperage of around 5mA.
(That is without short and without resistor connected between the electrodes,
just plain zero-flow measurement.)
Which is actually not bad... I had expected it to stay quite a bit lower...
But may be wordt re-melting and polarising with higher voltage.

A new cell I made contains my "classic" silicate base material, with
added Gallium and Germanium.
The Gallium seems to have a funny tendency to "creep up" in the cell,
and in a couple of experiments the mixture "cooked over" the edge of
the cell and after cooling I found a shiny Gallium film on the outside
of the cells. All of the ones where that happened were aluminium cells,
by the way. Anyway, the Gallium seems to have quite a strong affinity
to the aluminium. Even while mixing and heating the stuff in a cell, you
can often see a piece of really shiny and clean cell wall where it is coated
with Ga, whereas generally the aluminium is easily coated with the other
materials, which tend to stick to it.
In any case, the successfull cell was just silicate base material in an
aluminium tube, with Ga and Ge added, heated, reacted, and a copper
electrode inserted. Cell dimensions same as previous: 3cm diameter and
6cm tall, amounts of Ge and Ga approximately 1 gram each.
Readings of solidified cell after a few days of settling: 1.192V at 5-8mA.
(again, no short, no resistor, just plain zero flow "probes on the poles")

Looks like the familiar voltages I got before with my silicate mixes,
but I need to check the actual current throughput.
I am hoping that with addition of a resistor, the final output current
will be a little higher than that of my older cells...

[ian middleton]

G'Day all,

@ Koen:  Good work mate. Interesting you mention the aluminium and gallium combo.
As you know I roll my cells from .25mm AL sheeting.  I decided to coat the inside of the sheet with gallium which was applied
in liquid form with a stiff paint brush. ( works well on AL piping). However after a while, the coated sheet became very brittle.
So brittle in fact the sheet fell apart under it's own weight.  After a quick trip around the metalurgy sites it appears that gallium's affinity with aluminium causes it to creep between the Aluminium crystal structure weakening the molecular bonds.

What I was left with was a Al Ga alloy which was brittle enough to be powdered, which of course I did. 
Now all that remains is to figure out what to do with the stuff.

Koen, it is time to break out the data logger on your last cell.    Let us know how it goes.


Got back into cell making last night. Thought I'd try out a new secret ingedient.

The new really really secret ingredient is............Automatic front loader washing powder!
Waits for the groans and eye rolling to stop...
However, the cell managed to put out 1.5V @ 7mA, enough to light an LED until the Rochelle salt fully crystalized.
Now after 24hrs it is at 0.714V and it's short circuit current holds at around 0.2mA. The only water used in this latest mix came from the Rochelle salt crystals themselves.

If anyone is interested I'll post the formula.

The washing powder contains high levels of phosphorus which I wanted to investigate. Also JH did mention cleaning products in one of his earlier videos. The phosphorus may act as a go between between other ingredients in the mix. I'll make a few more and report back.

Good luck dudes.

Ian

[jeanna]

Well well, Did Ian get taken to the cleaners? 

Yes, I would like that formula, please.
What happens if you spray a little water onto the cell when the power drops? Does the voltage come back up?    [Natrium Magnesium Phosphorus, sounds pretty cheap. add some Si add some Al --- yes, please share the formula.]

---------

I was thinking about the properties of clay the other day. (again).

In last year's building workshop the instructor stopped us from "patting" the clay. He explained that clay has a magnetic polarity, which is what makes clay sticky. When you slap it to make it workable It loses that molecular magnetism.

So, I wonder if one could use this dirt cheap stuff for its magnetic properties.

Going backwards on the thinking a bit. The washing soda mixed with clay which I thought would make the geopolymer fibers made a very light powder instead. It is extremely weak and fluffy as a powder. I wonder if it could be treated with acid and re-magnetized and used in a cell?

jeanna

[Koen1]

@Ian: Yeah, I'm still trying to get that old laptop to work again so I can have it
run my logger while I use this computer to work on... But there's something really
wrong with the old thing, am now testing major components with my multimeter to
see where exactly the problem lies.
On your washing powder idea: Good of you to try it. I have considered mixing some
into my cells a few times, but have decided to stick with the ingredients I had at the
time... I don't know what the exact composition of your washing powder is, but most
such powders contain zeolite powder and phosphates, which are potentially interesting.
Perhaps not so much in the RS mixes, but phosphorus compounds tend to mix
and if reacted also bond quite nicely with silicates and aluminosilicates, which zeolite
happens to be... so perhaps it is more usefull in silicate based cells...?

@Jeanna: that's something I have never heard before. Magnetic clay? Is that new?
As far as I know clay sticks because its particles are tiny plates, which tend to stick
together. You could say it's the Casimir effect that pushes them together and that may
in fact be correct, but it is more easily explained by the familiar example of two sheets
of paper, plastic or foil that tend to cling together when you try to peel one off the other.
As far as I know, that's what happens in wet clay as well. And that's why all clays are
phyllosilicates, meaning plate or leaf silicates, and why other non-platelike
silicates do not stick together like clay does...
I have to this day never encountered a clay that was truly magnetic as in sensitive
to a permanent magnet in any way.
Perhaps it is a matter of misconception of that instructor? Perhaps the person who taught
him had compared the stickyness of clay particles to tiny magnets that also stick together,
and the instructor person misunderstood clay to actually be composed of tiny magnets?
It just so happens that the old-fashioned horseshoe magnets are and were most often
made of magnetised iron and should indeed not be hit, slapped, or struck to avoid demagnetisation.
Real permanent magnets are made of magnetic ferrite, which unlike magnetised iron is
truly intrinsically magnetic and does not demagnetise (as much) like iron does when it's hit.
That seems to indicate that this instructor person did not know much about magnets,
and merely misunderstood an analogy between the stickyness of clay particles and magnets
to be a fact of magnetic properties of clay... I think.