Crystal Power CeLL by John Hutchison

[ian middleton]

Good morning or evening wherever you are.

@Sutra:  You are correct, crystalization of the mix does produce a very robust structure and if left to dry on it's own produces very low outputs. The process requires a polarizing voltage while the mix is crystalizing, to align the platelets. Simple in theory but there are limitations.

@ Koen: would you like to share your polarization diagrams, they illustrate very nicely the challenge we have.

In a round about way I'll use jeanna's idea of pulsing a mix but I'll do it with my Tesla coil, high voltage high frequency, and see if I can get some sort of polarization through a standing wave effect.
I'm pretty much tooled up to do this now.

What we need people, is a Ball Mill. Which reminds me, Sutra do you tumble stones?

It's late, and I'm buggered    so I'll catch you all later..

May all our endevours be POTENTIALLY rewarding 

Ian

[sutra]

Yes, I do tumble stones....it takes weeks...

[sutra]

For all:

I may be wrong but my idea consists in using borax as rigid material in which embed microscopic quartz crystals sorrounded by graphite platlets orientated thanks to magnetically "impressed" iron oxides (hematite), through strong magnetic pulses . I want to try this building a cell big as bottle metal cork with several different mixtures, using see sand: washed and trated with muriatic acid to remove all little shells flakes (CaCO3 could react with Si and C forming CaSiO2 + CO2 and Fe metallic...just like what happens extracting pure iron from rocks).

I don't know other ways to crush rock than mortar and pestle unless you have a sintered diamond faceting lap at hands....
Try with a tumbler...it takes weeks, but it does the job completely alone...you'll have to sieve carefully the sludge to separate the grit..


For Ian: I thought of other non water based mixtures but i really think they wouldn't be as rigid as the right one shoud be...That's why I'm thinking of borax: it melts at low temperatures and it has a glass-like consistancy once cooled
.
As other rigid hardening mixtures an interesting one could be the bi-component resin (it is insulant though) used to fill the outdoor cable couplings...
But not including seriously high temepratures, nothing better popps in my head yet.

For Jenna: thanks for the indication

Talk to you soon guys.

Ciao

Sutra

[jeanna]

In a round about way I'll use jeanna's idea of pulsing a mix but I'll do it with my Tesla coil, high voltage high frequency, and see if I can get some sort of polarization through a standing wave effect.

Ian

Actually not so round about at all. I woke up this morning thinking of drawing a diagram for clarity. I learned about this when I got a cert for using the PAP-IMI machine, which is a machine that delivers a pulsed mag field to something (a person  etc.) and that pulsed field induces a charge inside which would otherwise skim the surface.

I drew the diagram using a tesla coil, (because I knew you had one, Ian ) but I am sure anything that delivers the spark to the bolt will do. A wimhurst machine, maybe. (with the PAP-IMI it was just a spark produced by a powerful transformer using the mains.)

So, in words then,

The spark hits the bolt, then the charge and the magnetic field travel down the wire to the loop, from the loop the mag field is directed both up and down perpendicular to the plane of the loop. It returns to the system somehow, I better not guess that part . but the next pulse comes with the next spark etc.

So, here is a drawing of that:

jeanna

[Pirate88179]

@ All:

Some of you may already be doing this but, whenever I want to crush rocks, minerals or ceramics, I just take an old T-shirt and place the material (wrap it up) in the shirt.  I then beat it with a hammer and it breaks up nicely into whatever size, give or take, that I want.  Still wear eye protection but it keeps the shrapnel contained.  It will make a pretty fine dust if you keep working on it.  Then, as previously suggested, you can transfer the material to the mortar and pestle.  you don't lose much material this way.  Hope this helps some of you.  Interesting work over here.

Bill