Horace writes: >You don't think a carbon anode will contaminate the cathode with carbon?
How? By pieces breaking off and codepositing with the metal? Possible, I've codeposited insulators and conductors this way with some difficulty ( you saturate the electrolyte with the powdered material and stir vigorously ). I've used carbon anodes before without difficulty, but I agree that contamination is possible here. What really bothers me about carbon is that the anode reaction will liberate Cl or O, rather than a nice clean dissolution of the Sb. This will make a substantial difference in the voltage required to initiate the plating, thus overestimating the energy required to create the allotrope. >The energy input is not critical to know. It is the cathode deposit energy >density which is above chemical. If you should run electrolysis all year >to get a gram deposited that still is not necessarily meaningful. Maybe a >large part of the electrolysis energy is lost as heat somehow. Without >careful calorimetry you won't know exactly what energy went into the >cathode. It is the energy output per deposited gram number that is >suspect. I was under the assumption from reading the posts here that we can't even agree on the cathode reactions which form the allotrope; perhaps you can post what your numbers are for the faradic efficiency and deposition rate and see if others agree. My rationale for this experiment is my assumption that if extra energy is being released by the reaction, the first place to look is the input energy. If I find it takes as much energy to make the allotrope as is released ( minus chemical energy ) then we can probably move on... >As you imply, the thing that has to be done for replication is a very >difficult thing - measuring the heat produced in the explosion. Yup, you've got it. One wouldn't want one's bomb calorimeter to become simply a bomb. K.
