Crystal Power CeLL by John Hutchison

[jeanna]

Koen1,

Your suggestion is quite possibly correct. I do remember his mention of the plates and the different polarity on the ends of them. His conclusions could have been his own too.

(I have been puzzling about how powdery the clay becomes with the addition of sodium carbonate and wondering if the stickiness could be restored.)

If he is right , however, it might be that clay (the sticky potter's clay) would make a good substrate for a diode or a crystal cell or whatever you call these interesting things you are making.

thank you,

jeanna

[ian middleton]

G'day all,

I was going to post the results of two cells made on the 22nd but they went from bad to badder so I'll sweep them under the carpet
and forget about them .

Anyway I had a better time on the 23rd.

I thought I go back to some of the original ingredients and bung in some rochelle salt.
Here is the list:

   0.8g   black tourmaline
   2.5g   clinker and pyrites   60/40  crushed
   1.3g   rochelle salt
   1.8g   sodium carbonate
   5.3g   quartz sand
   0.05g  graphite

All the ingredients were mixed together with a small amount of water to make a thick dark brown paste.
The whole thing cooked  until it became like tar.
Using the usual Al tube and heat treated copper electrode the mix sets very quickly. When hot the mix has a tendancy to
creep up the tube.

Once cooled the initial short circuit surge current was 64mA with a voltage of 0.341V.
Although very galvanic at the start the voltage rose to 1.62V and finally settled down to 0.8V after a night on the data logger.

For a short while the cell managed to light, all beit very dimly, an LED.
For the last 3 days the cell has worked well under load but unfortunately I was a bit heavy handed with it and broke the
central electrode.
This gave me the opportunity to dismantle it and check out the bonding.
Very good bonding with the copper but not so good with the Aluminium, which is usually the case.

I,m going to play with the ratios of this mix for it needs some extra strength.

So anyway comments and suggestions always welcome.

It's gone a bit quiet here guys, whats cooking. 

catch you later.

Ian

[Koen1]

Yay Ian's got a creeping goo cell as well!

Great! Join the club!
As I told you already, my "creeping goo" was a mix of
rochelle salt based- and silicate based- material with stuff like
germanium and gallium in there.
It has now been 4 weeks since I made that one, and believe it or not,
the stuff still keeps crawling up the tube!
It's flippin weird stuff... Seems to solidify into a nearly solid putty that
looks and feels like dried silicon rubber, but then when I return to the
lab a day or two later most of the stuff has climbed out of its tube again.
It has not climbed into the jar of oxide powder that I placed next to it,
so either it is not alive or it doesn't like oxides.
I'm off to my lab in a fw minutes, so I'll see if it has finally learnt to stay
put, but I'm afraid I'll find it at the edge of the table again.

Quick overview of a few days datalogging on the Hutchison style cell,
this time with a 1Kohm resistor attached: Zero dot zero volts.
Same test with Reid style cell, 1Kohm: approx 0,29Volts continuous,
did unfortunately not write down the amperage I got... Low, I can
tell you that. But hey, it IS a friggin 0,29V continuous DC from a darn
piece of ceramic... So that's cool.
Please note that this was the most recent Reid style cell with germanium
and gallium in the basic silicate mix, and in contrast to most of my cells
it has not been inside the dryer box for over a month or two, so it still
needs to dry some more and there may be a slight galvanic component in
the output at this time.
I will hook up the logger to a few older cells to get a proper baseline test.
May also hook up a normal AA alkaline battery to get a nice graph of
the discharge voltage over time, to compare it to the cell graphs.
Funny little factoid: I briefly attached two of my larger cells to the logger,
one large cell with very basic Reid material mix (with slight additions
to the mix based on personal views) and one large cell with an oxide mix,
predominantly cobalt-alumino-silicate compound. The R-style cell shows
static volts on a multimeter but zero volts over time on the logger, while
the oxide cell showed a 0,17-0,21 Volt output (again, all cells had 1Kohm resistors).

so much for the update.

As for things getting quiet here, yeah... it looks like it's just you and me and Jeanna again...
The rest of the gang seems to have moved their sights to the "single circuits generate nuclear reaction" thread...
Which in a way I can't blame them for, I was highly interested in that myself. But that thread seems to
be getting increasingly confusing while it was originally so clear. When things calm down there and it turns
out there is still OU measurements in the circuit, it may certainly be worth looking into it... after all, it
seemed to show a 300-500% output in some tests...
I think some of the guys that were here have discovered that mixing the ceramics, baking them, but especially
the materials part of what mixes with what and what does and does not crystallise and more importantly what
electrodynamic effects do the materials have after they have reacted chemically and bonded etcetera is a lot more
complicated than it sounds when you just read our lighthearted posts about it... I'm not certain but a few may even have
done a few simple experiments with Rochelle Salt and some other materials and discovered that it's 1000 times more
easy to get zilch out than it is to actually get any proper output.
And of course we are fussing over a few measly volts and amps, the latter of which we're not even getting out much at all,
while the "single citcuits" thread for example discussed a device that should be able to amplify input pulses of a few
hundred volts up to kilovolts, and get output in the several amps. Both projects still need quite some work. But an
oscillating or pulsing electrical circuit with a coil and pulsed discharges is a lot more tangiable to most people than
the complicated stuff of mixing the exact right atoms and molecules in the right amounts, mixed with some equally
complicated and vague theory on the materials internal matrix, and hoping it will work.
But those are just guesses, of course.

[sutra]

Hi guys

I'm still very interested in your work and I'm frying 'cause I didn't received yet the galena I bought and eventually I cancelled the money order...now I'm trying to get it from ebay, some how....
Otherwise, I would just experiment the whole day.....eheheeh


Ciao Ciao,

keep up the good work.

[Koen1]

Update: Yesterday I spent the afternoon in my lab/workshop,
working on some plate based experiments.

The "goo" cell surprised me again. Once again I returned to my lab
table to find the "goo", in the mean time affectionately named "Quirk",
had crawled out of its tube again. It was again next to the tube on the
table. It clearly refuses to stay inside its aluminium tube.
By now, 4 weeks into this rebellious behaviour, the tube is showing
signs of corrosion and metal fatigue. The bottom of my 5mm thick aluminium
tube appears to have a crack running along its entire edge, the entire
outside of the tube is corroded ranging from slightly to very much locally,
and there are zones on the tube that look like the aluminium has been
fused/alloyed with the germanium a bit (going on colour).
It seems the gallium does indeed "squeeze" itself in between the aluminium atoms
in the aluminium crystal matrix and thus it disrupts the matrix coherence
which causes the aluminium to become brittle.

After 4 weeks of fruitless attempts to "train" the Quirk to stay in its tube,
I had now had enough. So I heated it up untill it was liquidy again and poured
most of the Quirk into a stainless steel box, had it settle for a minute, then
added a piece of copper foil on top. The Quirk seemed to like the steel a lot
better than the aluminium, it did not appear to climb/crawl out of the container,
and the copper plate sank into it about a millimeter or two deep so it is now
nicely covered in a thin layer of Quirk. Looked like it was solidifying very slowly.
I also took the copper rod I had been trying to use as central electrode, gave it
a good whirl along the tubes inner wall, and wrapped the by now fully Quirk-covered
copper rod in aluminium foil. Then as a last attempt to make something of the
thoroughly abused tube, I rolled a cylinder of copper foil and inserted it in the tube,
rolling the copper foil out as much as possible and pressing it against the inner wall
of the tube. Hopefully the remaining 1 to 2 mm thrick layer of Quirk on the tube wall
will solidify now. So there's 3 different attempts to make something usefull of the Quirk.
Let's hope one of them gives us some nice output.

Kind regards,
Koen