Surface area: When you go down in size, every time you reduce the radius by half (for a sphere) you increase the available surface area by ~50 times for the same weight.
The problem with this rule of thumb is that true nanopowder is expensive, yet there are a few kinds of useful nickel having small (below 10 nm) surface features in a larger (200 nm) particle. My personal recommendation for testing for the Rossi effect is a powder known as "filamentary nickel" - the nominal size is larger than ideal, but the cost is reasonable, and it is full of much smaller surface features - in the correct range below 10 nm. It was once available on eBay but I haven't checked recently. Hopefully, a positive report on this kind of nickel will be forthcoming soon. It is at least 10 times cheaper per pound than nickel which is being sold as nanopowder, but the downside is that there appears to be a variation in surface features. From: Peter Gluck There are zero data re Rossi's nanopowder, but if it is nano, the specific surface is much greater as that of the wire. Dennis wrote: Is anyone out there good at running numbers? what is the comparison in surface area of Rossi's nanopowder and Mill's fine Ni wire?
