This is also a preliminary response to Horace. I agree that the
Galileo Project is a "poor kit to offer," or whatever you wrote.
However, it was designed for simplicity. Make it complicated, and
"replication" becomes less likely. I'm starting for my own testing
with Galileo because I'm confident that I'll see results, not because
the design is optimal. There are many aspects to the design that can
safely be optimized, especially by adding external monitoring of
various kinds. Cathode design is an obvious place to move to, but
much monkeying with it in the initial tests gets increasingly risky
with how complex the change is. What you have written, Horace, isn't
wasted, it will be considered as final cathode design moves forward.
Fabrication through plating had already been considered. (Why use a
gold wire if a gold-plated silver wire, for example, would do?)
It's been suggested that I study various topics. Great idea. When I
have another lifetime to spare, I will. Seriously, every day I feel
intensely the weight of my ignorance about, say, electrochemistry.
Especially electrochemistry. As well, my knowledge about the behavior
of various elements under alpha bombardment is severely limited. So
many topics, so little time. So ... I punt. I depend on my friends
and even on my enemies. They will point my bloopers out to me. In a
way, I'm just a node in a network, my own intelligence is quite
limited, the network's intelligence is not nearly as limited. If I
don't listen to my friends, that's when I become truly stupid.
At 11:42 AM 10/25/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Horace Heffner wrote:
5. By making the grid elements small, say under 0.1 cm, there will
be a clear marking of a scale on the micrographs and this will
hopefully assist in counting and locating tracks, although the hole
diameter should of course be larger that the thickness of the
primary metallic layer (base),
Is this supposed to be 0.1 mm?
With cumulative detectors like this, such as x-ray film and CR39, I
recommend some sort of mask; that is, something that blocks the
particles you are trying to detect, and casts a shadow. Not seeing
particles is a good as seeing them, in a sense. Italian researchers
used dental x-ray film to detect x-rays in aqueous electrochemical
cells. The anode cast a shadow on the film, and they used this
shadow to make various analyses. It was remarkable how much
information they got out the x-rays.
Yes. Excellent idea, and easy to implement. It also brings up another
possibility, time-dependent masking. One of the problems with CR-39
or LR-115 detectors is their very strength, they are cumulative. What
if a mask is shifted in position so that a single detector covers a
time period instead of the whole run? In addition, when the
experiment is terminated, the cathode should be held against a
detector for a time, for an auto-radiograph detecting residual
radioactivity. With controls, of course.
Some aspects of the reports I've seen indicate that the palladium
plating may be fragile and can fall off easily, so moving stuff
around is tricky. However, all the CR-39 I've seen that has been
immersion with direct contact with the cathode has been, essentially,
overexposed, so counting of tracks in the most active areas is
impossible. LR-115 should be more tolerant of high track density,
that's why I'm investigating it. I also intend to play with
commercial CR-39 that is not the special stuff used by
Fukuvi/Landauer, which is pretty expensive. I might put a lot of it
in the cell, actually displacing significant heavy water. I was going
to use acrylic for that, as well as to support more precise cathode
structures than the flexible polyethylene cathode support Galileo
used (and substituting acrylic is safe, I expect), but why not use
cheap CR-39 and then see what happens when it's etched?
Whatever I do, it has to start out very simple, or I'm unlikely to
actually do it. But once I have something working and can replicate
it, then the design can grow, with a baseline to compare it with. At
a certain point, what I have will be sufficient to begin sales, and
then the community of customers will help develop it further.
