Crystal Power CeLL by John Hutchison

[Koen1]

Sounds like one sober rasta there


@ Triffid: As for the plaster "of Paris" or common gypsum plaster,
mr. Reid has a friend, dr. Staschewski, who has done his
own experiments with several types of rock and plaster
and found plaster to be able to produce a small potential difference
in two electrodes, but only while the plaster still retained moisture.
As soon as the entire plaster/gypsum block has dried, it stopped
producing voltage.  Note that he did not use dirt in it or anything else,
just a tube filled with plaster.

My own tries with plaster/gypsum based mixes were not very encouraging;
I did manage to get a voltage from one or two but that dropped drastically as
they dried, and some of them were complete duds from the start...
I myself have given up on calcite and calcium-based materials, at least while
I'm working with the mixes I have developed so far. I may decide to revisit at some
point.
Nobody I now of that has been working on crystal cells (and I mean the front liners
like John and Reid) uses calcium compounds as the main ingredient.
Just fyi.


@ Sutra: yes, obviously classic methods of multiplying output of a cell could be used,
such as stacking several thereby increasing surface area.
But you'll still need your basic cell to work and produce some volts and amps.
And the amps won't go up much by stacking them, though the volts will...
However, you'll need a stackable version eh? Now that's not as easy as it may sound.
Cylindrical versions are easy, they are container and electrode in one.
Flat and stackable versions are quite a bit more difficult to make.
Of course it depends on what materials you use; I've been using a mix that
needs to react chemically before I add the last ingredients (like silver sand
in most and often other stuff too), and it needs to bond with the metal while
drying... but I've found out my switching to a flat boxlike mold in attempts to
produce a flat version appear to give me a whole different rate of evaporation
and drying which apparently has quite some influence in how well the material
bonds with the metal, as well as on its overall material structure. In the end,
most of the flat versions I've tried to make so far turned out useless.
Of course, with other materials you may not have that problem... But you may
still run into the altered drying rate problem if you're using things like plaster...
Just something to keep in mind here I think.

As for other ideas for increasing surface area, I've used a coil of wire as the
inner electrode, and I've also tried "+" and "*" shapes from folded copper
foil, as well as simply taking some fine copper wire and tangling it up
into one big fuzzy knot, then wound that aound a copper rod... All of these
seemed to increase output voltage a little, but not terribly much.
The coil and the "fuzz" worked equally well, maybe the "fuzz" even worked
slightly better.

@Ian: ah, the little known Indian who invented solid-state microwave devices
before they were even interesting to the west, and who came up with the
bose-einstein condensate in correspondance with Einstein? Alright,
what about him? He used quartz blocks as the microwave waveguides...
Is that it? Or is there something more interesting about him?

Good to see the thread is becoming more active again

Best regards everyone!

[AbbaRue]

I came up with another safe HV source.
Many hardware stores are selling electronic mosquito killers.
They look like a tennis racket with wires in it.
They work on 2 AA batteries and pack quite a jolt.
Maybe could be rewired to work off a 3 volt adapter to save on batteries.
I bought one while on holidays in northern Ontario for about $6.
Comes in handy around the house for flies and mosquitoes too.
So you may want to buy 2 of them, one for experimenting and one for killing bugs..

[Koen1]

Didn't Ian mention using such a "bug zapper" long ago?
I'm sure he did.

But yes, easy to obtain hV sources would be a TV screen
with a piece of alu foil stuck to it and a wire connected to that,
or a bug zapper, or a handheld taser, or a tesla coil,
or an electric fence transformer (you can get small ones that
run off a 9V battery and put out 1000V DC pulses, about
the size of a matchbox or pack of cigarettes, and quite cheap)...

If you only want hV static for polarisation, you could even use
simple electrostatic generators, like a simple Electrophorus,
a Wimshurst device, a vandeGraaff generator, or a homopolar generator...

But if you want to have a hV source that you can adjust to put out
some exact voltage and amperage, then you'll need something more
precise and more controllable, and then you're looking at proper
adjustable transformers and adjustable "lab" power supplies.
And those are expensive. Unless you build one yourself, of course.

[triffid]

I saw the cast earth samples my friend had made and I was impressed with the results.While they may be be more suitable for filling holes in walls,I thought it could prove to be a suitable matrix for some of the experimenters here.I also read a book about electrons in crystals and how they diffuse through a crystal (temp dependent) much like how the smell from an open bottle of perfume spreads throughout a room.If a electric charge is applied sometimes a residual charge remains.My friend used oklahoma red dirt very little organic material.I was not there when he made it but I didn't see any grass in the samples.I would try more sand myself since it was mentioned here earlier that a good capacitor
could be made from it.Maybe two or more layers of sand could do something in a cell.Also I found out that all electrical properties(resistance,capacitance,etc) could be put on a silicon chip except for inductance.I never knew that before.Triffid

[Koen1]

Triffid,

another feature of sand, in the form of SiO2 and not so much as "dirt",
is that it is (or can be made) into an electret, as in that it is a "polarisable"
dielectric (or "ferroelectric" if you will). Also interesting.

And on the subject of crystal lettices and the electron diffusion, that is indeed
related and very interesting. Mind you, there is a somewhat related subject of
ion difusion and ion transport in ceramic and other crystalline materials, which
is probably also a good subject to read up on in this context as quite a few materials
allow for thermally driven ion transport through their quasi-porous matrix
(example: sodium ions move through alumina on thermal input alone), and this
can result in false output readings. (As in that during a certain period the ions
may move and shuttle charges to the electrodes which may seem like actual
"crystal cell" output but will eventually stop when the ion concentration on the
thermal "input" side becomes too low, so the cell was actually a thermal ion
battery with the thermal input normal environmental heat and the ions put in
during production of the ceramic-like material. Okay, usually such ion transport
setups need quite high temperatures way above room temp, but is can occur
at lower temperatures too.)
But crystal lettices, electron diffusion and lettice interactions, and not in the least
pn-juncions are all good subjects to study in this respect, I think.
However, I think we may not want to put too much emphasis on the temperature
as input... after all, a ZPE cell seems much more desirable than a thermal cell...
doesn't it?

Oh, as for sand and "dirt", if your friend wants to make sure he's got sand containing
mostly SiO2 and Fe2O3 (red sand usually consists of actual quartz sand SiO2 and ferrous oxide
of the red variety a.k.a. Hematite, and a certain level of contaminants), it may be
worthwile simply "washing" the sand in clean water... Just put the sand in a lot of water
and shake or stirr it well untill the water becomes murky and dirty and most of the sand
is still on the bottom as mud, then pour off the dirty water and refill, repeat it untill you
only get relatively little dirt in the water, now most of the contaminants have washed out.
I use high purity quartz sand sold as "silver sand" (high grade, you have cheap versions too
in which you tend to find bits of other rock, other sand, sometimes even twigs), that is
really clean already and consists mostly of tiny SiO2 crystals. I add my own iron if I need it.
I do this because I find it much easier and more controllable to start with pure ingredients
and then mix them up, in contrast to starting out with mixed ingredients of uncertain composition
and later trying to figure out what exacly I have been testing. But to each his own and if your
buddy thinks it's easier to use random "dirt" then of course he must do so. Heck, if he manages
to make a working cell with his local red earth and there's enough of it there, then why not.
But was he even trying to make a cell? Or did you only mention his mix because it produced
a nice piece of ceramic-like material and you thought that might be of use in experiments?
Hmm yes, a quick second read seems to show that's the case... Oh well, in that case most
of my ranting here is quite useless to your friend and his plaster experiments I guess...