woelen

I would go for a longer electrolysis, until at the anode mostly oxygen is produced. In that situation, there is only a relatively small amount of BaCl2 left, and most will be Ba(ClO3)2 (and you'll also have small amounts of perchlorate as well). Some chloride in your mix even is beneficial, because it enhances the green color of the barium ions. Btw, barium ions do not produce brilliant green, but more like a greyish green. The disadvantage is that at the stage, where oxygen is produced, there will be more anode erosion, but if indeed barium chlorate and barium chloride have similar solubilities in water, then I'm afraid you have no other option. YT, do you have any suggestions over here ?

No, unfortunately it is not. It can be prepared, but it is a lot more difficult. Cu2C2 reacts with water, forming Cu2O and C2H2. It can be prepared by bubbling C2H2 through a solution of CuCl2 and immediate filtration of the precipitate and rinsing with absolute ethanol. Drying must be done in a vacuum desiccator. You see, the synthesis of Cu2C2 is much more difficult to perform in a home lab. I've not tried it, because I do not have anhydrous ethanol and I have no vacuum desiccator. I did try bubbling C2H2 through a solution of a copper salt, but I only obtained red/orange Cu2O.

Yes, it will be approximately the same. It is, however, not true that every chloride has the same conversion times, it is sheer coincidence that the conversion times of BaCl2 and NaCl are so close.

Here is a description of an experiment, which I did with the preparatoin and detonation of silver acetylide. This is a very nice experiment, but one has to be careful. This explosive is not suitable for high volume preparation. The cost of it is very high (it is based on silver ), but in small quantities it shown interesting properties. If you have the chems, it definitely is worth yo try this, and it can be done safely, if the safety guidelines, given on the webpage are followed: http://woelen.scheikunde.net/science/chem/exps/silveracetylide/index.html

Silkworm, I was very sceptical about your efforts against Mr. Lucas, but if he really is promoting this Divine Force stuff, then you absolutely are right. This "Divine Force" to me sounds like total drivel, so at this point I have to give you my credits .

IMM, now I understand what you mean with your scissors experiment of thought. However, the closing of the scissors is created by means of atomic interactions. Even if you have an insanely stiff set of scissors, the forces still have to interact by means of atoms. Atom A pushes atom B, which pushes atom C, and so on. These pushes, however, are due to electrostatic forces from the electrons "orbiting" the atoms. These forces are wavelike and of electromagnetic nature, which does not go faster than light. Even if the scissors were made of pure neutronium, then the forces probably would not be of an electromagnetic nature, but they would be of the type, which are active in the nuclei of atoms. But these forces also are wavelike and cannot go faster than light.

In practice indeed the blades will curve, but even if if this does not occur, then it still will become impossible. If the blades become very very long, then the end points of the blades will move with a speed closer and closer to C. The energy to accelerate them will grow and grow with increasing speed and an infinite amount of energy is needed to reach the speed C. Imagine a simpler system. You have a long stick and you move it around at finite angular velocity (rotational speed), e.g. one turn per second. The end point then moves along a circle, with a speed, equal to 2*pi*R m/s, where R is the length of the stick. Suppose you have an infinitely stiff and very long and very light stick made of the newest and coolest SciFi materials available from StarWar's chemical engineers. The stick only weighs 1 kilo, it has a length of 100000 km, and a thickness of 1 cm. Now you want to rotate this. If you manage to rotate this stick at 1 rotation per second, then the other end will move with a speed of 2*pi*100000 km/s, which is well over the speed of light. But you will feel that it is incredibly difficult to rotate the stick. The theory of relativity tells that when a mass is moving faster, then its apparent mass increases. The mass near the remote end of the stick goes very fast, even at moderate speed of rotation, and its apparent mass increases. At the speed of light, the apparent mass is infinite, and hence, the force (and also energy), needed to accelerate the mass to the speed of light will be infinite. If you were very patient and applied a rotational constant torque at the stick, then you would see that the end point approaches the speed of light, but it will never reach the speed of light. You can approach it as close as you want (given sufficient time and energy), but you will never actually reach it. All this can be described very nicely by mathematical equations, but I will save you the math. It is not easy to perform the math, but sure it can be done. To give you an idea of the strength of this effect: A mass of 1 kilo, moving at 10000 km/s has an apparent mass of 1.00056 kilo. Even at that tremendous speed the effect only is marginal. A mass of 1 kilo, moving at 100000 km/s (1/3 of the speed of light) has an apparent mass of 1.06 kilo. A mass of 1 kilo, moving at 200000 km/s has an apparent mass of 1.42 kilo. Even at 90% of the speed of light the effect is not that strong. The mass then would appear as 2.3 kilo. But from that point it quickly goes up, when approaching C. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- There seems to be one way to influence particles over long distances, instantly, but this cannot be exploited to pass information over long distances. It has to do with quantum mechanics. When two particles are created and these two have a certain amount of energy together, and they move apart from each other, then when one of the particles is "fixed" in some way (e.g. its velocity), by measuring it, then the other particle also is "fixed", such that the initial energy requirement is fullfilled. This experiment was performed by Alain Aspect, A French physicist. This is a very nice achievement, but it cannot be used to transfer information instantaneously over long distances. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Aspect

I closed this thread, for further discussion, please go to the link, provided by Bascule, it is about exactly the same subject, being HHO-gas, as mentioned by Silkworm.

If you only have magnesium hydroxide and aluminium hydroxide in the stuff, then you can proceed as follows: Add excess solution of NaOH. The aluminium hydroxide will dissolve as sodium aliminate (it is amphoteric), while the magnesium hydroxide remains a solid. Let the solid settle and decant the clear liquid from the solid. To the clear liquid, you carefully have to add an acid, such that aluminium hydroxide is formed again. If you add too much acid, then the aluminium hydroxide will dissolve again. This procedure, however, by no means is easy and your end-product most likely will contain a lot of impurities, being sodium ions and the anion of the acid, used to convert the aluminate to aluminium hydroxide. Also from a practical point of view, it will not be easy. The precipitates involved are very slimy and flocculent and do not easily form nice compact layers on the bottom . If you have a centrifuge, then things will become easier. Using a fine filter also will be an option, but the slimyness easily clogs the pores of the filter and then filtering become VERY slow, unless you have a vacuumpump.

Some gases are slightly magnetic. E.g. when you have a flame, and a very strong magnet, then you can see that the flame is slightly attracted by the magnet. IIRC, oxygen also is very slightly magnetic. If you have a thin stream of liquid oxygen, then it is attracted by a magnet. But, these effects are very weak and I see no practical application. Making an aerosol of mercury seems very difficult to me, but if divided into VERY small droplets this could be possible. This, however, is not magnetic. And also, I see no connection with the property of making a cold gas.

What you ask is probably is not possible. What is possible though, is to use a gas tank and slowly drip the liquid gas on the surface, at a controlled rate. One can buy those small gas cylinders, for cooling electronics components (used for detecting failures). Such a container of gas contains enough to keep a surface cold for a few hours, but you need a mechanism to slowly release the cold gas (which btw. comes out as liquid). Another option is to use liquid butane gas. This can be found as cigarette lighter refill, and has a boiling point of -1 C or something like that. When this is allowed to evaporate, then temperatures of -20 C are reached easily. Again, here you have the same problem of finding a way to slowly drip the gas on the surface. With both solutions, you have to be careful. The gases are non-toxic, but highly flammable. A spark may ignite all gas and cause a violent explosion or a big fire, if this is not done in a well-ventilated room!

UTFSE . This is covered many times before. Do your research and then come back.

The reason why I do this is that I can obtain a LOT of 220 uF / 400V capacitors for a bargain. Usually these things cost $5 or even more, I can have them for $1 or even less per piece. Once, I have this circuit, I have a very stout DC power supply for 3.5 kV, with 400J of energy stored in the circuit. This circuit easily can give several tens of Watt of power with acceptable ripple. It also saves on transformer costs. The center-tapped transformer I already have anyways. It is just a matter of economics . I intend to use the circuit for research on relaxation oscillators, based on just an RC-combo and a spark gap of a mm or so. Of course, the thing also is fun for other things, such as gas discharges and so on. What do you mean with this? The central row of capacitors determine the total voltage, but the side capacitors also need to be of sufficient size, as I understood from many Internet pages. Usually a CW-cascade is made of all capacitors of equal size, and all of them are fully charged to 2*Uin, except the first one of the side branches, which is charged to Uin.

That is a good point. So, I only need to use one of the series resistors in the time constant computation? That is a good thing, because I don't want too large time constants.

That is correct for charging a capacitor through a resistor from a DC source, it is the simple exponential law Vout = Vin*(1 - exp(t/RC)), which you express. But... here, we are talking about AC-charging, so the actual charging only is at part of the sine wave of the applied input voltage and also, the voltage is not constant. Added complexity is the staging of charges. Do you still think that this simple RC-combination holds?

There is another argument, which goes against time-traveling. A photon travels with the speed of light. It cannot accelerate, nor decelerate. Its velocity vector can change (e.g. reflection), but its speed doesn't change. Any particle with mass can only be accelerated to speeds approaching the speed of light. The closer one gets to the speed of light, the heavier the particle seems to be. It would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate even the tiniest particle to the speed of light. So, accelerating particles to speeds larger than light is impossible. If you put in a constant energy for any length of time, then the speed of any particle goes to the speed of light asymptotically from below.

I plan to build a 10-stage dual-branch Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier. The circuit looks as follows, but has more stages: My circuit will use 30 capacitors and 40 diodes. I want to connect it to a center-tapped transformer, each half giving 120 V AC. So, per capacitor, I can obtain appr. 350 V DC and the total output voltage can be 3500 V. I want to use 220 uF/400 V capacitors. This allows for an energy storage of 400 J in the total circuit! I have one problem. If I connect the device to my output transformer, then I expect it to blow out my fuse, due to the enormous initial charge currents. I already built a 3-stage device with 100 uF/400 capacitors and when this is powered up, then sometimes the fuse is blown out, so with the more than 3 times as large circuit and double capacitance I expect major power up surges. I do not need high power output, I only want to charge the device and then use the fully charged device. So, I have the idea to place a series resistor of e.g. 1 kOhm in series with the left branch and right branch, immediately in series with the trasnsformer output. This limits the charging current, but also the time, needed to fully charge the device increases. THen I wait, until the voltage of 3500 V is reached and then start the experiments. My question, however, is how long it will take before the circuit is charged to e.g. 95% or so. I've no idea how long it will take to charge the device with 1K resistors, when a 10-stage circuit is used. My input is 50 Hz AC. If someone did simulations of this circuit then that would be nice. Any suggestions? I did some experiments with my current 3-stage multiplier circuit and 2.2 kOhm resistors in series with the transformer AC-leads (GND was connected directly). That already gives very long charge times. Are there other safe ways of limiting the initial charge currents?

Of course there is only one winner .

Besides the 1,2-dichloropropane you will have many other chlorinated products. You will have single substituted products and multiple substituted products. For each molecule of Cl2, one H-atom is replaced by a chlorine atom, the H-atom and remain Cl-atom combine to HCl. In practice, the mixing of an alkane and a halogen is completely useless for making pure substitution products.

Making barium chloride is easy. Dissolve excess barium carbonate in dilute hydrochloric acid, let the insoluble matter settle at the bottom and the clear liquid is the almost pure solution of barium chloride, ready for electrolysis. Barium carbonate is an OTC product, which can be purchased from ceramics suppliers. Keep in mind that the barium carbonate usually contains a few percent of BaS and hence you also get the stink of H2S. Dissolve the solid outside and when all is dissolved, adding a few drops of 3% H2O2 before letting settle the solid destroys the remaining H2S.

No, there is conservation of matter (even more specific, under the conditions, given here, there is conservation of elements), and there is conservation of energy. So, the amount of water input to the system will be exactly the same as the water-output after "combustion". Also, no energy pops up out of nowhere. The amount of energy gained in "burning" the HHO will be at most equal to the amount of electrical energy, consumed by making the HHO. In practice it will be less.

Ecoli, same to me. I also posted it already on a dutch chemistry forum. This article also is posted on sciencemadness.org and the author of that article also joins in that thread. Finally something good for home chemistry...

OK, let's get back on topis. This is chemistry and here we discuss methods for estimation of the age of all kinds of materials. If you want to discuss whether parts of the bible are distorted by imperfect human brains or not, then please go on to this thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=21010

@lethalfang: The conservation of energy is not the issue over here. No claims are made of making more energetic material than what is put into the material by means of electrical energy. So, this is not a point at all. What makes this interesting is the possibly completely new kind of bonding and new applications of orbital theory and quantum mechanics. So, if HHO is real, then it definitely is important, at least from a fundamental scientific point of view. Whether it can be applied in a practical setup is another point.

Using a very high voltage source and a high resistor gives indeed a good current source approximation, but that definitely is not necessary. I would not use a plain voltage source, but the setup with the PSU, which I put on my website, gives good enough current control. Electrolysis is not very sensitive. Just some calculations. Assume the electrolysis cell operates at 4V and 1.5A. With my setup, there is 8V across the series resistor. Now, suppose that due to temperature changes, changes of chemical composition or whatever cause, the voltage across the cell changes to 5 V (which is a LOT), then still, with the same resistor, you only have a 12.5% change of current. That is not a problem at all. Even a variation of 20% is no problem at all. You still get H2 and O2, the amount per unit of time being proportional to the current. You get appr. 5*10^(-6) mol of H2 per second per ampere of current. This is appr. 0.11 ml H2 gas per second per ampere and 0.055 ml O2 gas per second per ampere at room temperature. So, using coarse approximate current control is more than sufficient. So, I would suggest you to use a 10 .. 15V power supply and use a series resistor. In that way you have sufficient current control, while keeping dissipation at an acceptable level. When you use a 100+ V source, then you'll dissipate enormous amounts of energy in the resistor and that it totally useless, unless you want a room heater at the same time. As Raivo stated, NaOH indeed is a nice choice of electrolyte. But, you have to be very careful with this. It is more corrosive than dilute sulphuric acid. It slowly dissolves your skin and almost instantly blinds you when it comes into the eye. So, be very careful with this, especially if you use larger quantities. Never dunk your hands in a solution of this, your skin will become very slippery, due to the dissolving powers of this solute. This stuff, however, is very nice on electrodes. Even plain copper wire, as used in electronics, is very suitable. It does not dissolve, nor erode. Graphite rods erode (pulverize), when used as anode. Using copper or iron anodes with acid or salts solutions does not work. Under those conditions, the anode dissolves and no oxygen is formed. The cathode is less critical. You can use a copper cathode without problem in all situations and an iron cathode can be used as long as the liquid is not acidic.