I don't want to frighten people away from trying things. Playing with
electrochemistry can be a way to learn about it, and to start to get
a sense for what has happened in the field. Chuck's experiences with
things getting gunked up, for example.
CF anodes (the electrode connected to the positive terminal of the
power supply) tend to dissolve. They all do, to some degree. Platinum
will be found, after a time, depositied on the cathode. But it's slow
for platinum, I understand. I've got lots of stainless steel (316L
steel) *yarn*, it happens to be a business of mine (12 micron wires,
twisted 2x275 of them, soft), but I'm worried that the complex alloy
involved would put too much weird stuff into the soup, so I'm
planning on staying with platinum for a while.
If you use a piece of gold as an anode, it dissolves and plates the
cathode with gold, Dennis Letts does this to create his overcoating
of gold in his dual laser experiments.
Electrolyis of water produces hydrogen and oxygen, and, unless one or
the other is differentially absorbed, the mixture that will come off
of a cell is exactly the explosive mixture. So, unless you really
know what you are doing, you don't want to allow the gases to
accumulate. If they do, any spark could set off an explosion.
I read an account of an early amateur who wanted to try the
experiment and wanted to recycle the heavy water. After all, it's
quite expensive, plus a lot of energy escapes with the uncombusted
gases, so the *actual* energy output is larger than might appear.
So he got this bright idea, set up a spark gap and keep igniting it,
in a closed cell. He did. The contents of the cell ended up on his
ceiling, and it could have been much worse.
When the catalytic converter failed in an SRI closed-cell experiment
in the 1990s, and then, when the researcher picked up the cell and
jarred the converter into suddenly working, the cell exploded, and it
was fatal to the researcher and I understand Mike McKubre still has
glass in his body from then.
So be careful. Really.
I recommend, especially, keeping things small until you know how a
small experiment behaves.
And if someone wants to try the real deal, i.e, PdD, I do have all
the necessary materials for a Galileo Project (SPAWAR) replication or
the like, contact me directly.
(If someone comes up with a reproducible and reasonably safe
experiment with NiH, I'd be interesting in supplying kits.)
