Potassium Alum Pyramid (growing crystals)

[Koen1]

Hey very interesting!
Thanks for posting your alum crystal pyramid growing videos!

Now of course alum is one of the materials that are easy to grow into crystals,
but the basic technique is very interesting, and it may well be possible
to use the same method at higher temperature to poduce similar
crystals from other materials...

You said you have also grown crystal plates?
Can you tell me how you did that?
(plates could be much easier to use in capacitor- or other
electrical applications than pyramid shapes)

Kind regards,
Koen

[helmut]

Hi Drennom

I like to thank you, to come here and present such a interesting
and impressing part of physics.
Just free fore everybody to try out.

helmut

[hartiberlin]

It could be, that the crystals have Potassium K40 radioactive isotopes in them in some low quantities and when these decompose radiate out and excite the whole crystall with beta rays and maybe also gamma rays, so there might be the connection to the radioasthets being able to see the energy come out  of the crystall ?

Well yes, crystall plates would be best to check out 2 different crystall layers growing on each other to get a p-n-layer diode effect. When this gets the right band gap distance it could also work as a solar cell.

[amigo]

@ Stefan,

Why bother with PN junction then if there are radioactive isotopes present. Couldn't we then just use the charged particles passing between two plates of metal to create a potential between them, no? If this is done on a micro scale, or better, nano scale you could build thousands of these and these combined could produce a lot of energy...


@ Drannom,

would it be possible that you write up a short how-to for beginners so that interested parties can try this crystal growing? Perhaps you have some easier setup that does not require big water vessels, motors and lights? Then you can expand into more complex methods etc...

[Koen1]

I think this is one of the easier ways of doing it...

Although you might be able to grow smaller ones in a smaller vessel...
but I think doing it the same way would still be the best option...

Thing is, he's got everything you need to grow a crystal:
- saturated solution
- heat (energy) source (the lamp)
- seed crystal (the tiny crystal he puts on the glass plate)
And the use of the smaller "feed" bottle with oversaturated solution at the top
is a quite clever way to add regular amounts of alum in solution.
The heat from the lamps will stimulate the alum to be dissolved,
gravity will "pull" some of it out of the bottle,
the little rotor causes the solution in the bigger tank to "vortex",
which feeds dissolved alum to the alum crystal on the bottom evenly
on all sides,
and the shadow zone keeps the seed crystal and the growing pyramid
crystal cooler than the rest of the solution, allowing the alum to
condense and bond to the crystal.

I can't really come up with a much simpler method of producing such
crystals...