At 1:25 PM 3/1/5, Keith Nagel wrote: >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.
No need. *No chemical reaction* will account for over 100 eV per atom. > >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... Well, if the energy *is* being provided by the electolysis it has to be over 100 eV per atom and that would be a lot of energy. Calorimetry would be required to make sure that much energy wasn't being dumped as waste heat somewhere. As it turns out, maybe this issue is now moot. >>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. Bombs away! 8^) Regards, Horace Heffner
