Crystal Power CeLL by John Hutchison

[ian middleton]

Bugger, I left out the clock pulse photo. 

[ian middleton]

G'day all,
just thought I'd show you this. The pictures are of the discharge through short circuit and recharge of a cell made on 13th Feb 2010. I've marked the points of interest.
You will notice that once the short has been removed the cell starts to recharge itself quite sharply and then settles to a lower rate of voltage rise. Then at a certain point the rate of charge suddenly excellerates for a time and then once again settles into a normal charge rate.

For me this is a tell-tale sign that the cell is operating as a proper crystal battery.
The voltage rise through galvanic action would not produce such a curve.
I used a different manufacturing method for this cell and no Sodium Silicate or Rochelle salt was used.

It is not a great cell by any means, it hangs around 0.85 V and can happily supply 150 uA into a 1kOhm load. As I said it is nothing special.

I've made 8 more batches of cells since using slight variations of this new method with interesting results so far. But as we all know they have to age for a time before any firm conclusions can be made.

This is for the guy who seems to be having trouble contacting me.
ian.middleton1@bigpond.com

Ok then, it's back to the lab. 

Take care all,  cya.

[ian middleton]

G'day all.
I was having a discussion with a very sceptical friend of mine. He firmly believes that a true crystal battery is a myth. Now because these things are so easy to make I decided to knock one up for him to take away and play with.

Through my research I have discovered that you can make a crystal battery out of almost anything, it's just how you bolt all the components together. So as a kinda challenge I made my friend a battery out of sugar. Good ol store bought brown sugar.

Now some would say sugar is not a good conductor of electricity and it isn't, it sucks.
However it is a crystalline material that becomes the vehical for a number of other semiconductor materials that do. It's the doping ratios that are important.

So very briefly this is it.
Melt 3 heaped teaspoons of brown sugar. ( you are now making hard toffee)
While still fluid add any oxide that you wish. Zinc oxide works best followed by iron oxide. ( in my experience). Then throw in about 1% copper oxide w/w.
I was going to use aluminium oxide but I ran out.
Anyway, boil the whole thing and mix well. Pour into a cell ( however you wish to make it )
My usual cells have Al -ve and Cu +ve.

The mix hardens on cooling and I used a small polarizing current of 150uA through the mix. Thats it, so simple.

The other reason for using sugar was to prove to my friend that this cell could in no way be galvanic. Now mind you this cell is not going to light up the world. It is just a POP device ( proof of principle).
It's open circuit voltage is around 0.28V and it's short circuit current is 5uA. It's not the sort of thing you'd expect to get out of a bowl of sugar is it. Anyway the cell was shorted for the night and and sure enough when the short was removed the o/c volt quickly rose to to 0.28V.
the thing to remember here is that you don't have to use sodium silicate all the time, any substance that produces a good crystal structure  and will except dopants will be fine.

I've called this cell "the lolly" 
Sweet eh.
Ok have fun, catch you later.

Ian

[Pirate88179]

Ian:

Great work you are doing over here.

That is amazing to me about the sugar...truly amazing!  On your cells, I read where you reported about the after effects of having it shorted for a while and it bounces back, what i would like to know is the longevity of one of your cells.  In other words, does "something" get used up eventually after a "time period" of use?

For example, let's say you put some number of them together in series/parallel to run a basic JT circuit and a single led.  If it lights the led for a while, I wonder how long that would be AND if it goes out, can you disconnect it for a while and hook it back up again after it recovers?

Again, you are doing excellent work on these devices.

Thanks,

Bill

[mscoffman]

@Ian:

Moddy, I think you should consider deleting your above post,

I mean there are beginners on here. I know you were only
playing...but you risk;

o Wining this year's MIBby Award for the most disinformation,
   lack of scientific thinking and violation of scientific protocols,
   all packed into a single project.

o Becoming the person credited with inventing the first ever
   crystal battery requiring refrigeration.

---

...Drive 100mph and put another shrimp on the barby.