At 09:11 PM 10/3/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
What has been lacking is testing a (3rd particle) seeding concept as
an augmentation to a protocol that has already been shown to work for
CF fairly reliably, such as SPAWAR's codeposition methods.
Making this easy is part of what I'm trying to do. The Galileo
project documentation suggested this:
The minimum materials cost for this experiment is about $700
Expect that the initial setup of the experiment may take 15 to 30
hours. Add another 16 hours if you are going to use IC-based power
supply/limiters instead of a potentiostat.
Although the experiment can be done "on the (relative) cheap", it
can not be done "quick and dirty." Although minimal researcher time
is necessary during operation, the researcher must dedicate enough
time during the setup phase.
It is not the objective of Phase-1 to test the boundaries of the
parameter space, such explorations are for future phases.
From my examination of the actual materials, the cost for two cells
(one experimental, one control) would be way below $700, but part of
that might have to do with minimum purchase requirements and the
extra per-unit expense involved in buying in very small quantities.
I'm finding that some of the prices have risen substantially in the
two years or so since Galileo, but, still, I believe I'm looking at
well under $100 as a per-cell cost, including mark-up necessary to
make the operation self-supporting.
Once standard cells are available, with a standard protocol, there is
a baseline to work with, and "exploration" of the "parameter space"
should become much easier. Some of this exploration is likely to
further reduce the cell cost. For example, how much of an effect
would be seen from the usage of 99% D2O instead of 99.9%? 98%? The
price goes down. Easy to test, and, in fact, one mice little piece of
work would be a study of the effect of D2O percentage on measured
effects. Taking it all the way down to deuterium-depleted water. What
other options are available for the base electrodes? We can use gold
for the cathode. What about gold plated silver, say? Or platinum
plated? What about the anode? It seems a shame to spend so much for
pure platinum wire if something else will function as well!
I'm interested in recombination for a different reason than many of
the experimenters, who want to recombine for calorimetric issues. I
want to recombine because heavy water is expensive. I'm looking at
toy fuel cells, there is one on the market, retailing, the whole kit,
including a little car that operates from the generated power, for
$100, and a fuel cell would have the nice advantage of easily
instrumenting the recombination rate (current generated!).
The cheaper the cells, the easier it is to run many cells and thus to
explore the effects of even very small changes to parameters. Such as
the percentage of tritium in the D2O.
I think one of the most useful experimental techniques, not so much
for generating energy, but for diagnostic purposes, might be light
tritium doping.
Right. It might either reveal something or identify a blind alley.
