On Sep 9, 2007, at 5:39 AM, Jones Beene wrote:
What am I missing about H2 that would be a negative in this role?
Yes many materials are hydrided by contact but in a situation of
low heat (!300 k), and using gold plating on the acceptor and a
nitrided donor, then it would seem that the hydride could be avoided.
There is another issue regarding the ideal acceptor material.
Silicon is way up the triboeletric scale from gold, platinum and silver.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triboelectric_effect
A p-type doped silicon may be a terrific acceptor candidate. This
would rule out water, ammonia, hyrdogen, and many other things as
transporters though. Something fairly inert would have to be used as
a transporter, possibly silane. This would limit cell operating
temperature to 420 deg. C. This might cause problems on the donor
end. No donor, no current.
It would be very interesting to measure the conductivity of lead-
silane-gold transport and zinc-silane-gold transport systems.
It appears a couple critical experimental thrusts are in order. One
is measuring conductivity across single thin gaps for a wide range of
donor-transporter-acceptor materials. It is important such
conductivity does not involve some kind of cascade ionization plasma
formation I think, but maybe that needs some thinking.
A second tier, given the identified good conductivity donor-
transporter-acceptor triplets, is to look at their power generation
capabilities, especially in stacked pulsed mode operation.
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
