Crystal Power CeLL by John Hutchison

[ian middleton]

G'day all,

@pirate: These experiments are costing me a fortune in T shirts, I do however have an old pair of the ex wifes knickers, they'll hold a couple of boulders   

Settle down Ian.

@Sutra: I am thinking about getting a stone tumbler.But instead of polishing stones, use it to crush minerals to the consistancy of talcum powder. To do this, instead of using grades of carborundum grit, use a number of hardened steel ball bearings. This is the principle of a ball mill. But as with tumbling stones it can be a slow process. However the end product is a consistently fine powder in the sub micron range.

Your proposed mix is well worth a try. As for the resin based cells, I made a number of these a while back using 220 grade silicon carbide grit to increase the dielectric value of the mix. As a potential power source they are no good. But they do make very stable high frequency capacitors.

@Koen: Sorry dude, I made an error. Some where I think I told you sodium carbonate has a melting point of 34C, what the hell was I thinking about. It is of course 871C 

Ok , time to go shopping and get some more wire.

See you later.

Ian

[Pirate88179]

@ Ian:

The ball mill is a good idea except, if you are milling quartz ( hardness of 7) or most ceramic (hardness of 9) the steel ball bearings would wear out and leave metal dust long before they abraded the harder materials.  We used aluminum oxide spheres which can be purchased for a reasonable amount.  That would mill just about anything you might find out in the field with the exception of diamond of course.

Bill

[ian middleton]

G'day all,

Bill you make a very good point there. Thanks. I'll have a re-think. I suppose what I should do is try it with the bearings and find out what amount of contamination they produce and if they can be removed magnetically.

Do you have any experience with ball milling?

All the best

Ian

[Pirate88179]

Ian:

Well, yes.  I was in the precision ceramic machining industry for over 18 years.  All of our machine tools were diamond equipped.  We did some ball milling but I am more familiar with it as that is how our materials were produced by our suppliers.  They have it down to a very scientific process in order to gain consistency such that their published material specs can be depended upon by design engineers.

Basically, what I know from my old geology days, and from my polishing experience in the ceramics business, is that a hard material will never be attacked or abraded by a softer one.  You could put steel balls in the mill for a thousand years and never even scratch the harder material.  Someone mentioned the rock tumbler.  Similar process and you will note they use media like al203, or silicon carbide, or diamond powder, or tin or iron oxide to "grind" and polish the softer material.  It is interesting to note that materials of the same hardness will abrade each other.  An example of this is the diamond.  To grind or polish diamonds, you need other diamonds.  Not a fast process when the materials are matched but, as in the case of the diamond, it is the only way it can be done.

These abrasive powders are readily available in a multitude of grit sizes and materials.  I would try to determine the hardness of the hardest material in the mix and choose a media that is much harder than that.  Again, quartz (silica) is 7, which is hard but soft compared to the media materials I mentioned above.  Glass is about 5.5 and most people think it is hard, which it is, but not really.  The hardness scale is a relative scale and you can see that quartz will readily scratch glass.  I hope this helps.

Bill

[Nihilanth]

So it would seem that I'm not the only one who's thought of using pulsed magnetic fields. Jeez, the one day I don't check the site, it comes alive . Judging by the information provided by sutra about electro-conductive ceramic, I guess I was right in that adding mechanical pressure would help (even if it's more than I can provide).

If anyone could create a pulsing magnetic field with an adjustable frequency, maybe specific frequencies would have a better effect. I know it's horribly cliche, but I was thinking of the Schuman resonance when it came to mind.