At 06:38 AM 9/14/2009, you wrote:
I'll wait for the detail of your ideas regarding the electronics, but it seems to me a few dollars worth of components would be sufficient for the computing and electrical "equipment", which could boil down to a tiny "USB key" with some relatively simple microcontroller and power electronics design work. A full blown computer plus a programmable power supply are certainly not necessary.
"Programmable power supply" means that the electrolysis protocol can be automatically followed. That's pretty simple. It's not different from the "power electronics design work" you mention. By the way, I was primarily a printed circuit designer for years, I still have the business, but the design work is now being done in Brazil, I'm really rusty, but I have the Altium software.
Regarding current reversal: a/ no it's not stupid I don't think, indeed I seem to recall platinum works as a cathode substrate in those experiments (i.e. pits are produced). But you'll have to verify that the plating on the cathode does redissolve when it becomes an anode, things are not exactly symmetrical as Cl2 will have evolved from the solution in the first run I think. Anyone knows? b/ if it does redissolve, the electrode on the bottom doesn't have to be a permanent anode as you proposed, it could be an extension of one of only two electrodes (rather than three), which would thus occupy one side and the bottom, agreed?
No, it should be separate, very simple to do, and it allows the "bottom" anode to function with either polarity. Otherwise we would have to do the de-plating run as a separate run. The cathode doesn't care whether the palladium in the electrolyte was added as a chemical at the beginning or was dissolved from the anode. The bottom anode can be silver, it's just there to scavenge palladium.
So we'd have two platinum wire electrodes which do alternate duty as cathode/anode, and a bottom electrode which is probably silver foil, or some other metal with silver plating, or maybe silver plating on the bottom of the cell?
Ideas about the chlorine would be useful. Could that be recycled? Or would it limit the number of runs that could be done?
