Teslaalse, If you have the glove box I would recommend doing all prep in an inert cover like helium. It is a pet theory but I am positing that ambient gases limit the milling or chemical activation of metal powders by reacting with the geometry formation to dissipate the casimir force... closing the cavity entirely or growing perpendicular whiskers between to dissipate the force. The Casimir force is responsible for stiction but changes in this force are responsible for catalytic action like we see at openings and defects in nanotubes.. These changes scale at the cube of distance between parallel boundaries becoming the most powerful force of attraction below the tens of nanometers scale that we call stiction.. It is logical this force continues to scale even smaller but there is little talk of Casimir fprce below the nano scale because IMHO it is already normalized into our science as an additional binding force which helps molten metals congeal into a solid without pico bubbles and why skeletal cats have to be formed by multiple steps where lower melting point metals have to be leached out of higher melting point metals to form activated cavities. It is a an extra step but along with storing the powder in a hydrogen atmosphere for several weeks to get the FCC - 14 to 1 lattice structure Jones mentioned yesterday you could greatly improve your odds of starting out with a good LENR candidate. Fran From: Bob Higgins [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2013 7:40 AM To: [email protected] Subject: EXTERNAL: Re: [Vo]:Removing nickel oxide layer
Nickel oxide is removed pretty easily in H2 at about 310C. Once it is removed, you will see the sintering begin at the same temperature. The clean Ni surfaces begin to bond and the particles begin to grow. That is why, in part you must add the catalyst powder - to prevent the wholesale sintering of the Ni. The catalyst nanopowder I have been experimenting with is Fe2O3 nanopowder. The oxide nanopowders are much less expensive and are less dangerous to handle. Still, they must be handled in a dry glove box because the humidity will cause the nanopowder to agglomerate by hydrophyllic bonding. If the nanopowder agglomerates, you may be unable to get the nanoscale mixing onto your Ni powder. Bob On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 5:54 AM, Teslaalset <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Just buying nickel micro powder, I assume this comes slightly oxidized. How would that be removed as a first step in preparing nickel powder for LENR experiments? Just heat in in a hydrogen environment at temperatures of a few hundred degrees C? -- Regards, Bob Higgins
