At 06:39 PM 5/29/2011, Rich Murray wrote:
Is setting up a tinier Pt wire anode for your DPd codeposition going to delay your first attempt to try out your kit cell -- I am keenly interested in what turns up -- will you have a simultaneous control cell?
I originally planned to have a hydrogen control in series, but I abandoned that because it could raise the voltage above my 20 V power supply, given headroom for the current regulator. Then I was going to do a parallel hydrogen control. I may still. It's more urgent to me to simply start varying parameters, I want to get a standard and cheap configuration going that shows *some* effect, the most obvious one is neutron tracks, but I'll be looking for light and ultrasound as well. Heat, only if there is substantial heat, which I don't particularly expect. I've cut the cathode in half from the Galileo protocol, as to length. Same 0.010 inch diameter wire. So, half the surface area, half the current for the same current density. I was going to reduce the palladium in the electrolyte by half as well, but talking with Dr. Storms, he said that the concentration during initial plating would be important, so what I'm doing is cutting the total electrolyte volume in half.
It gets cheaper. The biggest problem I've run into is that the wires are fragile, both the gold and platinum wires break easily.
There are lots of ways to do this wrong, and I may stumble across many of them....
Anyway, I can't see how shortening the anode will do anything except raise the voltage a bit, due to the voltage between the anode and the electrolyte being higher. Given constant current, I'd expect that the cathode won't see that difference at all. The cathode also won't see the total electrolyte volume, so this smaller cathode should be just as happy as a longer one in a larger bath. Conceptually, this is like having two cathode sections in parallel. Only we just toss one....
-- there is a minute possibility that the cell could interact with neutral dark matter particles in orbit with the Earth around the Sun -- meaning that no nuclear physics experiment can so far be completely isolated from unexpected interactions -- can you set up a webcam to show you real-time doing your first runs? -- hey, ask for donations! Rich
Donations welcome. However, given how distracted I get, and how long this is taking me, I'm embarrassed to ask.
The purpose of this is not to prove anything, it's to explore, and, if possible, to replicate the so-far-unreplicated finding of neutrons from SPAWAR. I'm using different detectors, but the LR-115 that I have is recommended for fast neutron detection through proton knock-on. I do have some Boron-10 converter screen, I could detect slow neutrons, but I'm not going there first.
