Turquoise Energy News #193 - June 2024 Report
Turquoise Energy News Report #193
Covering Research & Development Activities of June 2024
(Posted July 11th 2024)
Lawnhill BC Canada - by Craig Carmichael
[CraigXC at Post dot com]

www.TurquoiseEnergy.com = www.ElectricCaik.com = www.ElectricHubcap.com

Highlights: 'Everlasting' Zincate Electrode Works; At Least a 'Forever' Nickel-Zinc Cell? [Brief; Detailed]

Month In "Brief" (Project Summaries etc.)
* On the Woes of Inventors & Creative People - Copper Oxyhydroxide-Zincate Battery - Cabin Construction & Wiring - Vehicle Coefficients of Drag... and of course Rolling Resistance - Charging an e-Bike from Solar - Spring Gardening

In Passing (Miscellaneous topics, editorial comments & opinionated rants)
*  Scattered Thots [Declining white populations] - ESD

- Detailed Project Reports -

Electric Transport - Electric Hubcap Motor Systems (no reports)

Other "Green" & Electric Equipment Projects
* Open Loop Air Heat Pumping ("OLAHP")
* Cabin Construction & 36 V DC Solar Wiring
* Spring Gardening

Electricity Storage: Batteries
* Copper-Zinc cell - Nickel-Zinc cell

Electricity Generation
* New Old Solar Panel - My Solar Power System: - The Usual Latest Daily/Monthly Solar Production log et cetera - Monthly/Annual Summaries, Estimates, Notes


June in Brief

   Well, the days pass and one does what one does. But I can't believe how I sort of dropped the battery project for the last third of the month, and the open loop air heat pumping for another whole month.

...And I really want to rewire that 7.5 HP (10 KW) motor to 36 volts to use in the Chevy Sprint, which should give the lightweight car enough "oompf" and speed to get it on the highway. The ultra-efficient version of the variable torque converter also has yet to be prototyped. There they sit, along with other valuable projects not high enough on my priority list, month after month, even year after year.
   When there's good weather in the spring it's gardening time. And the more I plant, the longer it takes every second day to water it. Signs in the news still point to coming global famine, and the more years I (and everyone) have to learn how to grow a good variety of substantial and real food, the better. (Why are we importing so many food products from China now, when they have so many to feed themselves and global shipping is having problems?)
   And of course I want to get on with building the cabin in good weather too. Ive ordered a bed to put into the unfinished bedroom, so... go, go, go!

   On the other hand I've discovered that my zinc electrodes are excellent, much better than I had thought - the "forever" cycle life with good current capacity seems to be there. This is in itself fantastic news for the future of batteries. The problems all seem to be in my copper hydroxides positive 'trodes. And I did get the CNC drilling zillions of holes in rows in plastic tubes for tube electrodes, which is a good development and the first thing I've actually used the CNC table for in the seven years since I got it at the time I moved here. Plus in building the cabin I'm wiring it up with 36 [~40] volts DC lights and plugs [from battery & solar] instead of 120 volts AC, which certainly makes the cabin a green energy experimental project. And I've been running low-power electric heaters at night from 36/40V DC [with my other battery & solar setup] rather than from the power line. This "optimum" lower voltage is pretty much safe electricly, and of course in the metal roof and walls "Faraday Cage" cabin with no AC power inside I hope and expect to eliminate or at least greatly reduce my tinnitus (ringing in the ears). And if I prove that works, it could help point the way for all sorts of tinnitus sufferers, who seem to be everywhere.

   If I didn't get it in last issue, at the start of the month I mounted the indoor radiator unit for the open loop air heat pumping on the wall near where the other components are. The fan runs. (Such a small accomplishment for a month!)



On the Woes of Inventors & Creative People

   I know I if there was a team tackling tasks as assigned, at this point, things could move along a mile a minute both in terms of creating/prototyping and commercializing exciting new inventions and technologies. It can be and has been done. Great advances happened during both World Wars, in the Apollo space program, and with the development of the graphical interface and the internet at Xerox Parc Pacific - times when inventive progress leapt ahead like a frog instead of crawled like a snail because people in charge decided on that rarest of decisions: to actually hire creative people for creative efforts, instead of assuming inventions and technological progress somehow just happen without support. As an unpaid individual, even without spending my hours at some form of non-creative employment, I work at the pace of one person with limited time and energy who can't be a professional at every aspect of work on every project, much less a marketer or promoter of the creations. (I could certainly have tried to commercialize the handheld bandsaw sawmill I created in 2018, and I might well have succeeded in getting it established and known since it's a fabulous piece of kit, but I would have been totally diverted from every other inventive project. Same with the Supercorder, a beautiful musical instrument I created from 2003 to 2006 and beyond. There'd have been no "Turquoise Energy"!)
   For decades I thought it was just me that's hopeless at promoting new conceptions and at attracting funding. But as I have been realizing for some time now, it's not. Someone may "get rich" when a "better mousetrap" is invented, but it's virtually never the inventor. Everyone needs to make a living, but the key motive of inventors is really to create something they have visualized, not to "get rich quick". The patent system provides no funding or support for the years spent on a project and offers the successful inventor no effective protection of intellectual property rights to his work. It quickly became a "big business" tool instead of a means for inventors to profit from their creations. Without administrative or legal support for inventors, it is just a scam. A musician has far more effective rights to his song than an inventor to his creation.
   As one can see from Turquoise Energy News monthly issues from 2008 on, invention is usually a process of long dedication to a goal. (in my case, to an evolving list of goals.) Edison, almost the lone example of someone who personally made his inventions into commercial successes (and in fact created a whole town for his factory employees), spent over thirty years on battery research to come up with the nickel-iron long-lasting rechargeable battery. The inventor of the blue LED emitter that has given us LED lighting and much else spent many years and much novel equipment investment on it even after all others had given up, and was told point blank to quit working on it by his employer. Somehow they didn't fire him before he was successful and they commercialized it afterward (and the company got rich), and we have amazingly efficient, bright, low power LED lighting that has replaced most other lighting technologies.

   An independently wealthy inventor with no need for income is almost a contradiction in terms. Other than an inventor finding an understanding and very forward looking employer willing to gamble, our society has no system or process for economicly enabling even the most promising or proven successful inventors, much less rewarding them for success, however game-changing their creations may be. Most of them have to take a job doing something else for someone else instead. The government probably would set something up, but few people even consciously understand what the problem is or what needs to be done. Government efforts have so far spent an awful lot of money on "research and development", that goes everywhere except to actual inventors who could pursue a new development project - however promising, dedicated or accomplished they may be. No one even wants to see their resumé. They want to see the "business plan" for how much money the as yet uncreated invention will earn with an exact timeline of the inventive process through to production. They want to see the "business team" [who will all want to be paid] with competence in various business areas. Somehow they expect that making it a business in advance with all the organization and costs involved in running a business will make the invention successful, when instead it will sideline the inventive effort in a myriad of business details with no money coming in. Talk about "putting the cart before the horse"! Creating something new invariably takes longer than hoped, and it's no surprise there's a big list of such bankrupt "inventive companies" that in spite of much [mostly wasted] funding failed to successfully make the original intended product in the allotted time.
   At one point I had been writing to the Canadian minister of finance, James Flaherty. He assured me there was lots of government support for "innovative companies" with new products. I asked where was the support and what was the reward for the inventor of a new product who had spent maybe five years creating it before a company was formed to commercialize it? I pointed out how specific existing programs completely failed to support inventors. After exchanging a few letters, by the time I had him - I think - starting to see the point, he resigned owing to ill health and died not so long afterward.
   In the 1990s Motorola, Apple and (was it?) IBM set up a company, "Taligent" to create a new, native operating system for their collaborative new Power PC processor. It was a great RISC chip with much promise to replace the Motorola 68000 series, but those they put in charge didn't know what they were doing. It was a "prestigious" assignment, so they only hired "prestigious" people - "reliable" "computer science graduates", university trained... trained to work within existing operating systems -- instead of creative assembly language hackers who could write the operating systems that underlie what university trained people can work with. They would never have hired someone like me -- a successful software developer with marketed software -- and who had actually written an advanced operating system, but with no university degree. (I once tried to get a supposedly great "C" language programmer to interface "C" language to my operating system, but when he found out HE would have to write the basic I/O and interface functions, which are of course exactly what is needed to interface "C" to any new operating system, he said "I can't work without that!" He had no idea what to do or where to start.)

   In this lecture (video),

Jordan Peterson - Why Being Creative Is Problematic And Even A Curse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGMgBtmAPlc&ab_channel=BetterChapter

psychologist Peterson really nails it. He explains the almost insurmountable problems creative people have with getting anywhere with anything or anyone, in surprising detail and with what I see as great accuracy. (My focus of course is on inventors; Peterson's is on creative people in general, who all have quite similar problems. What he said applies to a "T" to inventors and inventing.)

   This video,

Jordan Peterson - Why Creative People Fail At School
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q4BlOXcK2U&ab_channel=BetterChapter

is along the same lines.

   Barring the very odd anomaly like Xerox [Parc Pacific] where a company with a lot of money saw their business (photocopiers) was quickly coming to a dead end and were groping for direction, no commercial organization will support creators and the development of hitherto unrealized creations. It is really only by giving selected promising or accomplished inventors salaries on the public purse to work on specific projects or value, and then supporting their successful endeavors by linking them to entrepreneurial, commercial, government or public utility developers and promoters that more than a meager handful will be able to pursue inventive careers and the inventions will make their way into society. Why should this happen only in wartime or for a once-in-a-lifetime flagship program like the moon race? Then by administering and collecting a fee on royalties on supported creations on behalf of the inventors, the agency funding inventors should itself become self-supporting.

   If what I'm writing here sounds self-promoting or self-serving, please realize that at age 69 now I'm not asking for anything for myself. I'm sure that on a better organized world I should have long since been prosperous instead of scrounging scraps and pennies, and some of my designs would be in use, but now that I am comfortably set up here in the styx and get OAP I can go right on creating and developing fantastic new things, alone (at a pace that budget and time permit and as long as I'm capable), that I almost never see anyone put to any practical or commercial use. I'm a poor businessman; I'm sure I would be easily duped or outmaneuvered. I'm not going to travel around begging the wealthy for funding to start a company to manufacture and market any of them, probably to be pushed out just when it becomes profitable. Just my Supercorder musical instrument (developed 2003-2007) or the handheld bandsaw sawmill I created (mainly 2018) could enrich many lives if they were available. And the bandmill was just a small project that took only a year (with just one pivotal invented component) - never mind a highly efficient infinitely variable torque converter, open loop air heat pumping with a potential COP at least triple that of today's refrigerant based offerings at lower outdoor temperatures, improved electric motors or a superior (and economical!) mass-storage battery chemistry. (And never mind some very good things I created before the internet and Y2K, that went nowhere despite my best promotional and networking efforts.)

   I just think this is all dysfunctional and society could coordinate things a lot better, for a lot less public money. There needs to be something along the lines of a Department of the Future or Department of Progress - or perhaps organized as a crown corporation - looking for new ideas of societal value and choosing to fund promising individuals (inventors, not companies!!!) to develop them. The government has programs like SDTC and IRAP lavishing billions of dollars for "research and development" supposedly to create new things, but that by their very conceptions and rules will never give an inventor with an idea and a plan a penny. They are geared instead for already salaried university professors and their students, or to large established businesses with established products. (...businesses who would usually rather most new things would "go away" and not disturb their existing products and practices. They acquire patents and throw them in drawers for that purpose. Then NO ONE can use the new technology. By the time a patent expires, progress has been twisted into other directions.) And academics forget that there's a "D" in R & D - that somehow, once their scientific "pure" research has shown some theoretical possibility, their responsibility ends and products will somehow develop themselves unsupported, or at least not by them. (In creating SDTC this gap was recognized in parliament, but it was never addressed by that organization once it was formed. It is simply a gigantic bureaucratic boondoggle wasting huge sums of public money.)
   Once a concept is created or a product is prototyped and is on a path to being usable or produced then depending what it is, either government and public utilities can develop it, or else choosing enterprising companies or eager entrepreneurs to promote and market such a new product should present little challenge: many will have already registered with the department, looking for exciting products to build a business around! And if a product should prove beneficial, the self-supporting department can assess and collect suitable royalties on such a supported development and perhaps in accordance with some practices which become established, or by individual agreements, at least somewhat suitably reward the inventor for his demonstrated contribution to society. No privately held patents for entrenched companies to lock in drawers to frustrate improved new technologies.
   Future generation Nicola Teslas shouldn't be consigned to live and die in poverty after creating things like the induction & AC motor-generator that gives us the whole electric power grid, the theoretical basis for radio (then developed by his apprentice Marconi) and other creations, some realized and probably others never realized owing to his lack of resources to develop them. And how many other Nicola Teslas have had to take "conventional" jobs and abandon their unique inventive concepts? Why do we as a society, a civilization, offer these most creative people of unique value nothing?


Copper Oxyhydroxide-Zincate Battery

   I re-did the cross-section diagram for a "forever" Cu-Zn battery in accord with my latest conception. The zinc electrode appears to work beautifully, but I'm still experimenting with the copper one without a satisfactory result so far.



Copper Electrode Frustrations

   By using an unconnected "reference electrode", which I should have been doing all along (duh!), I finally isolated which electrode was doing what.
   Copper hydroxides seemed to be great electrochemicly. Cupro-nickel sheet metal gave great performance - for a short time and a few cycles. But I was frustrated by the performance dropping off with charging and discharging. This appeared to have physical causes. Any time I disturbed a copper electrode, its performance improved for a bit before dropping off again. For example, if I pushed down on the graphite terminal rod, discharge voltage might rise by 100mV or more for a while. All the copper substance doesn't seem to connect together very well.

   As I finish up this edition, I have run the cell down to 2mV and then 20mV, and on the next discharge tests, the voltage is up 200-300mV (from 200-400mV) and running longer. Is this what I have to do to make them work; keep running them down to nothing and they improve? Somewhat promising so far.

Great Zinc Electrodes!

   The zinc electrodes seem very good. In all these years I do seem to have created something new and good regardless of the positive chemie. Most rechargeable zinc electrodes until now have had (four) noted problems leading to poor zinc utilization and very limited cycle life. In mine, (1) the SDBS in thick paper seems to work perfectly to keep dissolved zinc ions inside the electrode, and (2) the osmium catalyst seems to prevent zincate ions from turning into "passivated" zinc oxide. Thus as it discharges, the electrode seems to turn from zinc plated onto the copper screen current collector into "supersaturated" zincate ions in solution within the electrode, up to theoreticly 100% utilization of the zinc. (3) A bit of zirconium silicate (.5 wt%) helps prevent hydrogen generation during charging. There is no need or purpose to compacting the zinc particles strongly when creating the electrode and indeed some extra space for electrolyte should be helpful. Charge is the reverse, with the zincate ions plating zinc back onto the current collector. And with this arrangement, (4) there is no real concern just how that plating occurs. It can be smooth or spongy and form any shapes it pleases. If conforms to the available space. This is the secret to being able to cycle "forever". And the reference electrode shows that the zinc electrodes have quite high current capacity with low voltage loss. It's the positive electrodes that have been the chief problem with low currents and drooping voltages.

Commercial Nickel Electrode

   Finally I decided to try something that I thought ought to work. I combined the great zinc electrode with chunks of nickel oxyhydroxide electrode from a commercial Ni-MH "D" cell. I placed the pieces in the plastic pipe with holes and with a separator paper inside the holes, and pushed in a 3/8 inch graphite/carbon rod. The current drive wasn't high, but after some charging it started working quite well with light loads (eg 50 ohms), and much more predictably than with copper. It's also edifying to see 1.6-1.7 volts rather than copper's 1.1-1.2 volts, even tho the copper compounds theoreticly have much higher amp-hours of charge by weight and by volume.
   Nickel electrodes too are said to have some limit on their cycle life, as they form slightly soluble higher oxide compounds such as KNiO2. (NiO2- ion) However, with SDBS in the separator sheet to prevent soluble ions from leaving the electrode, the cycle life of nickel should also be "forever", or near enough. (Presumably a nickel electrode wouldn't need the osmium catalyst layer since its hydroxides are almost insoluble.)


Cabin Construction & 36V Wiring

   I finally skinned the first half of the east wall that I had bought interlocking metal pieces for. All except one were a few inches longer than they needed to be. Since the store wouldn't cut angled ends, I had to cut them all myself with the angle grinder anyway, and a bit too long is Far better than a bit too short. There really wasn't much waste.

   Notwithstanding that it was less than half of the last wall, facing away from the power line and as yet ungrounded (it read megohms to ground), my body voltage inside the cabin dropped from lower tens of millivolts to unit millivolts; something like a 4 to 8 times reduction. (...except of course near the one corner with 120V AC.) That's as good as out in the forest well away from power - surely plenty low enough not to cause ringing in the ears.
   With the upstairs finally having a floor, and knowing that it's the one indoor space where the ringing in my ears isn't being aggravated, I sometimes take my coffee out there to sit a while. It's not long enough to affect the tinnitus noticeably, but of course I see all the various jobs that need doing, big and small, and I often start in on them. So the cabin is starting to progress more quickly and everything else is starting to do more sitting waiting.


   And I started on the permanent 36V DC wiring, using under the stairs as a wiring closet and place for the batteries. It's really nice to have two ceiling lights with switches by the entries.
   In the move I replaced the crappy solar charge controller with my last PowMr one. I had high hopes that it would be better, but other than not finding MPPT and sucking the solar panels down to battery voltage, the newer, cheaper unit on AliExpress also keeps right on charging after the battery is full. If the balance charger unit in line with it didn't disconnect the battery, that would be an exploding battery cells and burn-down buildings sort of malfunction. The voltage of the unit, when the battery disconnects itself, goes up to over 60 volts instead of 36 - probably to the full voltage of two series solar panels. It's not just disappointing. It's outrageous. I am appalled that anyone would design such an appliance & battery destroying, hazardous item, much less to sell them en masse.


   I put the battery under the stairs near the base. I need to make a cover for it before I accidently short it out with some bit of metal or wire.


Vehicle Coefficients of Drag

   I ran across a video about a 1938 car, the Schlörwagen Pillbug that was designed (by Shlör, pictured) to have an absolute minimum coefficient of drag (COD) or drag coefficient (DC). The lower the COD, the less extra fuel the vehicle needs to counter wind resistance at higher and higher travel speeds. Typical cars are in the .3 to .4 range. Actual drag results from the shape and size plus skin friction. At higher speeds it is proportional to the square of the velocity.

   The initial wind tunnel model had a COD of just .113. For the running model it was .186. The car was never produced commercially.
   But a few more recent cars have approached these figures too. COD of the GM EV1 was just .19, the Lightyear 0's latest is 0.175 and the 3-wheeled Aptera bottoms the charts at .15 or less.
   My Nissan Leaf is about .28 as is my Toyota Echo (.29), considered quite good, while my Chevy Sprint is listed as a surprisingly high .38. (Well, it is a little "boxy", and tall for its size. Notwithstanding that, with their light weight and 3-cylinder engines they were EPA rated as over 50 MPG city and virtually 60 MPG highway (imperial gallons), surprisingly said to be identical for the 2 and the 4 door models. That's the best of any vehicle of more recent decades. I suppose with a lower COD they'd have got 65 or 70 MPG on he highway. I almost bought one new in 1986.)

and of course Rolling Resistance

   The other most important figure for inherent vehicle energy use is rolling resistance, which is mainly a property of the tires, their inflation and the weight of the vehicle. It is certain, despite substantially lower winter "mileage". that the Bridgestone Ecopia tires I put on my Leaf a couple of years ago have saved substantial energy. With the old Ironman tires, the record most charge the car ever had left after driving home from town was 58% - more commonly 52-54%, depending where I've been in town. Now in the summer it's often as high as 60% left and most commonly over 55%, with a record of 66%, and that's with the battery health (after 9 years, 110 Mm of driving) now being down to "11 bars" instead of at "12". In winter it can dip into the upper 40's - instead of the mid to lower 40's.


E-Trike Charging

   On the 25th, my somewhat elderly friend Kamil appeared on my doorstep in the late afternoon. He had lost his driver's license a couple of years back... originally owing to never checking his mailbox(!) and hence not getting his renewal notice in time. He had ridden his new electric tricycle all the way from town, about 27Km. That seemed rather impressive, but he said he would have to leave the machine with me and hitchhike home, as it had only 47% battery left and he had neglected to bring the charger.
   Of the unappealing options to leave him to hitchhike home or else drive all the way to town and back for the second time that day, the best seemed to be to figure out how to charge his trike. It had a simple 2-pin round power socket for charging. It turned out to be 48 nominal volts, needing (according to ebay chargers for sale for that model) a 52 volt charger. That was a higher voltage than my 36V system, and higher than any of my lab power supplies. How to get 52 V? I still had about four MSP7210A 'boost' solar charge controllers in the cupboard. I had bought too many in some moment of enthusiasm. I found a round plug with wires that fit onto the trike battery's charger connector and connected it to the "battery" terminals on the 7210. Then I made up a short cable and soldered a T-plug on one end which I connected to the "solar panel" terminals. I went to the cabin and got my longest 36 V extension cord. I put a DC power meter with T-plugs in line, and plugged the controller into the 36 V DC power (not directly into solar panels). Although I remembered nothing of the many options of the 7210, I pressed "Set" a couple of times and it cycled through "volts" and "amps". I set it to 52 volts, 10 amps, and connected it to the tricycle battery. At first I thought it wasn't working, but it gradually ramped up the current to over 3 amps at about 49 volts and started charging.
   We did a few things for a while and he rode off in the evening with "87%" charge at almost 52 volts, the battery having received over 400 watt-hours of energy. My 10 KWH house battery went down a bit but of course made it up from the solar panels the next day. I didn't think to take a picture while the trike was charging. (Apparently it used 662 watt-hours of energy - if the figure read zero when it started.)



Spring Gardening

   Should I really be putting all this gardening stuff in a renewable energy projects report? On the one hand, no one has to read it if they aren't interested. OTOH, it takes extra time writing it up. There's so much here, mostly in pictures, that I've decided to put most of it in as a "detailed report", below.
   By the middle of the month I had the gardens pretty well planted. In general I'd say I've taken on too much, and it takes up too much of my time. A lot of it, even in the greenhouse, is pretty wild or has wild and weedy/grassy patches and I can't properly look after it all. OTOH, anything not protected from the deer will be eaten, so even hazelnuts, fruit trees and berries have to be in fenced "garden" spaces. Other things that grow in the open where summers are warmer prefer to be in a greenhouse or at least sheltered by the south wall of the house.

Corn at end of June. Now too tall for the box.

   By early July I was pulling out a few carrots from the row that had been planted indoors in egg cartons under an LED light in April. (TE News #191, I suppose.) That seemed pretty cool!

   On the 30th and July 1st there seemed to be quite a few ravens over in one area, making a lot of noise. On July second I went over to the travel trailer in the trees at the far side of my acreage to turn on the heat for a couple of hours to keep it from getting damp and mouldy, which I had neglected the previous couple of days. As I passed the old garden there seemed to be a lot of flies around. Then I smelled something. It got stronger as I got closer to the trailer. As if something had died - probably a deer. As I approached the door of the trailer it got very strong - must be nearby? - and a bear hardly 40 feet away tore off up a very steep bank. In 7 years now, I've never seen a bear on my property before. But I had no question about what had attracted it. or the flies and the ravens. I decided to come back a couple of days later; the trailer could wait. And could that be why two fawns were out there foraging by themselves?
   (Haida Gwaii has no grizzly bears or cougars, but is said to have two sub-species of black bears: the world's largest and the smallest. So far I've never seen a small one or heard anyone mention seeing one.)
   Someone said a bear would have dragged a deer carcass off into the bush and left it to "tenderize" for a couple of days. Later I told a neighbor and he said he had seen a dead deer across the highway from my place a few days earlier, hit by a car. It all added up!

Could one of these hungry fawns near my greenhouse be an orphan? or both? They seem to be hanging out together.

   I hope bears don't venture out across my lawn to where the apple trees are. For the first time it looks like I'm going to get a good crop. This 'liberty' tree has never had more than seven apples before.



Experiment in Africa: The left crops were grown with pee/urine (euphemisticly titled "OGA").
It has lots of nitrogen to encourage leaf growth but is by no means a complete fertilizer.
How can we ever have sustainability without fully recycling our human wastes?
Farmers spend a lot of money on nitrogen fertilizer, while it's treated as "toxic waste" in sewage systems.


   Well, the rest of the gardening is in the "detailed report".




In Passing
(Miscellaneous topics, editorial comments & opinionated rants)

Scattered Thots


* Are the white races coming to an end? It takes about 2.1-2.2 children per woman to replace the population. For half a century we've been below that and dropping. If each generation is just over half the size of the previous, and if the incredible mass migrations into Europe and North America continue, will the white races not vanish faster than the North American red skinned natives did?
   In a matter of just a few decades, white people are shrinking or have shrunk from the great majorities on three continents to minorities most everywhere. The demographics can't be reversed now because the majority of us still existing white people are past family raising age.

* OTOH, genetic testing is said to have revealed that "black" people in the USA average about 25% "white" or "red" DNA. (So, Tom, you deserve 75% reparations from whitey, but you owe 25%. Then you should give 13% of yours to Nick here who has 88% black genes, but you should receive 7% payment from Dan who is only 68% black, and...)



ESD
(Eccentric Silliness Department)

* Nothing funny in a whole month? What is the world coming to?

* Some play polo. Some play water polo. President FD Roosevelt played polio.



   "in depth reports" for each project are below. I hope they may be useful to anyone who wants to get into a similar project, to glean ideas for how something might be done, as well as things that might have been tried, or just thought of and not tried... and even of how not to do something - why it didn't work or proved impractical. Sometimes they set out inventive thoughts almost as they occur - and are the actual organization and elaboration in writing of those thoughts. They are thus partly a diary and are not extensively proof-read for literary perfection, consistency, completeness and elimination of duplications before publication. I hope they may add to the body of wisdom for other researchers and developers to help them find more productive paths and avoid potential pitfalls and dead ends.



Electric Transport

No Reports




Other "Green" & Electric Equipment Projects


Cabin 36/40V DC Wiring


My plan for the DC wiring was to use space under the stairs as the "wiring closet".
To that end I mounted a piece of 3/4 inch plywood with gyproc covering it. The flat
board provides a place to mount required equipment and "breaker panel" breakers.
The gyproc covers the plywood to stop any potential overheating electrical
equipment or arcing and sparking from starting a fire.


Solar charge controller mounted, surface mount DC circuit breakers, and a
triple "T-Plug" 36 VDC receptacle plate on an electrical box which has been surface mounted.
The first two ceiling lights are plugged into this (for now?) rather than hard-wired.


The battery is near the base of the steps. Still it will definitely get a cover over it
to prevent accidental shorts from any stray pieces of metal or wire brought near it.


Multiple ground connections are virtually always necessary. If they
are few, a grounding bolt can be mounted, eg on a piece of wood.


For more extensive building wiring, a grounding bus is the best solution. A 3/8 inch
thick alume bar was cut on a regular wood bandsaw, with mounting holes at each end
and multiple larger holes between the sides to insert wires into. Smaller holes are drilled
and tapped from the top into the other holes, and screws put in to clamp wires down.
This is the same as the neutral or ground bus inside a 120/240 VAC breaker box.

(I wasn't even very careful with hole placements. I used #10-24 screws and tap.
I put the tap in a battery drill chuck and set the 'ratchet' to start skipping at
rather low torque so the tap can't break. When it skips I reverse the drill and
back the tap right out to clear the chips. This technique taps holes very fast.)


Old wires with heavy oxidation can be frustrating to clean and use.
But they can be be cleaned off quickly with a little hydrochloric ("muriatic")
acid. It turns solid copper oxide into dissolving copper chloride
- the green in the acid - without attacking copper itself.
(Safety glasses in case of splatter. Rinse the wire well & dry it after.)



Spring Gardening


   By the middle of the month I had the gardens pretty well planted. In general I'd say I've taken on too much, and it takes up too much of my time. A lot of it, even in the greenhouse, is pretty wild or has wild patches and I can't properly look after it all. OTOH, anything not protected from the deer will be eaten, so even hazelnuts, fruit trees and berries have to be in fenced spaces.

Corn June 17th

   At the end of the month I had to take the cover off the corn box as a couple (and soon more) had grown too tall for it, and had grown tassels. In this region, in an open field without a cover they might never get this tall, period.

Corn at end of June

   By early July I was pulling out a few carrots from the row that had been planted indoors in egg cartons under an LED light in April. (TE News #191, I suppose.) I planted other carrots directly in the garden later but none were anything like so far along. The "egg carton planters" & LED lights seems like a good way to start an earlier crop.

   On the 30th and July 1st there seemed to be quite a few ravens over in one area, making a lot of noise. On July second I went over to the travel trailer in the trees at the far side of my acreage to turn on the heat for a couple of hours to keep it dry, which I had neglected the previous couple of days. As I passed the old garden there seemed to be a lot of flies around. Then I smelled something. It got stronger as I got closer to the trailer. As if something had died - probably a deer? As I approached the door of the trailer it got very strong - must be nearby? - and suddenly a bear hardly 40 feet away tore off up a very steep hill. In 7 years now, I've never seen a bear on my property. But I had no question about what had attracted it. or the flies and the ravens. I decided to come back later; the trailer could wait a couple more days! And could that be why two fawns were out there foraging by themselves?
   (Haida Gwaii has no grizzly bears or cougars, but is said to have two sub-species of black bears: the world's largest and the smallest. So far I've never seen a small one or heard anyone mention seeing one.)
   Someone said a bear would have dragged a deer carcass off into the bush and left it to "tenderize" for a couple of days. Later I told a neighbor and he said he had seen a dead deer across the highway from my place a few days earlier, hit by a car. Now everything fit together!

Could one of these hungry fawns near my greenhouse be an orphan? or both? They seem to be hanging out together.

   I hope bears don't venture out across my lawn to where the apple trees are. For the first time it looks like I'm going to get a good crop. This 'liberty' tree has never had more than seven apples before. The pear trees are still a complete wipeout for the eighth year. The new anjou purchased last year was covered with blossoms but set no fruit, and there was just ONE little cluster of flowers on one of of the two older pears and again no fruit.


   The main garden is pretty much two parts now: the north half is raspberries and bushes and the south half is garden crops in rows, presently peas, carrots, potatos, beans, beets, cabbage and onions. There are bushes around the edges except south: josta berries, black currents, blueberries, a huge rhubarb and a hazelnut bush. (I'm trying to get a Yamhill hazelnut bush. A small "native" hazelnut got me started but it has small nuts and anyway needs a cross pollinator. The larger Yamhills will be the ones to eat. But the plant store couldn't get one in this year. Hmm, there is another store/nursery I could try.)

The North Side. Hazelnut bush in foreground.


The South Side



The near end of the greenhouse.
(I'd like to know what that plant is growing in the pot with the nearest coffee bush.
Some sort of millet with big seeds or sorghum, I expect. These are also related to corn.)
Also visible: some cabbage family volunteers on the ground, my new apricot tree (dang, already hitting the ceiling in July!)
and the edge of the asparagus hedge at far right. (I have to trim it with hedge clippers so I can get by.
Perhaps I should pluck more of the shoots in spring, but I like to leave one at every root clump, and they GROW.)


The farther end of the greenhouse.
(Must fix the roof over that door and get that 2-by support out from the middle of the doorway!)


The grape vine. All leaves. (What, another plant with no flowers or fruit this year!?!)
And another apricot that didn't get enough water over winter 22-23 and died back,
now replanted and regrowing as a small bush.



Garlic planted last October should be ready in August.
I have no idea how to weed out all the grass underneath.


I covered the ground last summer to kill the grass, and moved the fence
out this spring to have a new garden space on the Outside side of the
sidewalk along the south wall of the house.
Front to back: Beans, strawberries, onions, viburnum bush... junk, greenhouse.


By watering every second day even in winter, my second walnut tree is flourishing as it starts its second year.
(English walnut, variety Carpathian)
Below in a pot also doing well is a black walnut, lovingly transported as barely a stick with washed roots from Toronto.
Having two varieties is good for cross pollination to get more nuts.
(But if I plant it where I want it it'll be in the shade of the carport for years until it's ~8 feet tall.
Walnut trees themselves eventually get quite tall and make a lot of shade.)



Electricity Storage

The Copper Oxyhydroxide-Zincate Cells

[2nd] Melting holes into the PVC pipe didn't work well. If I used the smallest pin frogs heated on an electric 'hot plate' burner, I could push the pipe down into the frog points, but it wasn't easy. I thought to raise the temperature for the next try, then found that the lead was giving way and the pins were bent over and loose. And the whole pipe heated up so much over the burner that it warped. So much for that method! If the pin frogs had a stronger base it might have worked - alume maybe. Lead was too soft.


   What was an alternative? I put a new piece of pipe in an unmounted vise, in a tray to catch the sawdust. Then I got out the 'dremmel' tool and a tiny drill bit, maybe 1mm or so, and started drilling holes, one at a time. It probably took 20-30 minutes to fill the pipe with tiny holes all the way around and along the length. I smoothed it off inside and out with 'scotchbrite'. (I probably should have used a substantially bigger bit. After all, it's the treated paper that holds the powder in. Small holes just restrict the flow of electrolyte.)


[3rd] Let's see... 15mm diameter is about .27 square inches... less the paper thickness, so about 1/4 of "4 to 8 tons". Maybe 1.5Mg.

PVC Tube with paper: 24.20g
"L" rod terminal: 6.25g
Modeling clay: 5g ?
Total: 87g
So, about 50g of monel.

   I scrunched it down - farther and farther - in the hydraulic press. By the time it was around 500Kg of pressure and the powder 2/3(?) of its original height, I decided that was surely enough. There were two problems. The first I had foreseen: I couldn't push the CuNi terminal/current collector into the compacted powder. But I had bent it into an "L" shape, much stronger than just flat, and cut it to a point at the bottom end. I drilled into the powder with a long drill bit (which went surprisingly slowly) and then pounded the terminal into the loosened center area. (At least, I hope it went straight in and didn't munch the separator paper around the edge.
   The other problem was that the separator paper scrunched down with the monel. I decided to use the original cell and only immerse the tube half way. I hope soluble ions don't wick out of the electrode over top of the separator. Next time I'll let it dry so it has some stiffness. If that's not enough I'll make the papers longer so as they scrunch in they're still longer than the tube. Worst case, they'd have to go outside the tube. (And somehow not have any gaps.)
   With the tube nothing like full I decided to just squeeze in modelling clay to fill the void and hopefully prevent the monel from decompacting. That would also make it easy to disassemble and redo later. (Although, I'm not sure how to keep the separator paper in place next time, either!)


   The cell, such as it was, started charging at just 5mA. Ouch! And I had neglected to measure the internal resistance of the monel powder before I had covered it up and got it wet. (Surely lower than last time, with all that pressure?) In a while it rose to 9mA. Load voltages and times very gradually rose.

[4th] Performance in the morning was disappointing but improving, not deteriorating. It was more suited to 50 or 100 ohm loads than 10 or 20 (much less 1 or 2). With the low currents seen, probably it needs far more holes, closely spaced, for free ion flow. The 1/2 inch PVC waterpipe is also too big diameter inside and out, with too-thick walls. That also contributes to low current capacity. 10-12mm I.D. would be better than 15. My 3D printed tubes fit entirely inside these pipes. But it seems to be what there is. I don't know of any available rigid plastic pipe in a smaller diameter or with thinner walls. (I could drill and then roll up flat 1/16" ABS sheets? Ug!)


   If as it seems, tubes with holes are about the only good way to home make copper electrodes, and if 3D printed tubes aren't strong enough and instead thousands of holes each have to be drilled individually in a plastic water pipe, I'd better outfit the CNC table with a carriage for the dremmel and a little stepper motor "spit" to rotate the tube, in order to automaticly drill many rows of holes all the way around the pipe. Was it worth it? I might just do it and then think of some entirely different way - again.
   On looking at it, the simplest way would seem to be to unscrew the router itself and make a dremmel tool holder to fit in its place. On unscrewing it, I discovered that that also disassembled the router itself, separating the bottom and top halves. Parts fell out. What a can of worms! A spring had to be held compressed as it went back together or the shaft coupler popped off, and there was no room for a finger to hold it. All with the plate for the CNC mounting loose in between the two halves. It took me an hour to put it together properly again.

   But I did make a bracket to hold the 'dremmel' tool on the CNC table's carriage.


   In the evening I decided to drill the holes the immediately fastest way... by hand again. This time I used a 7/64 inch drill bit. These "huge" holes occupying a much greater percentage of the surface should let an awful lot more electrolyte through. I glued a bottom piece on.

[5th] Busy all day... In the evening I soaked a piece of separator paper and put it in the tube. Wait! I was going to reinforce the paper by ironing in PP cloth on the outside side!

[10th] Too busy! I finally did another piece of paper. It looked rather plasticy with the PP ironed on. But I could still blow through it almost as well as with the plain (toluened) paper. In the SDBS soap the paper curled up some, with the plasticized side not wanting to swell. I put a small steel rod on it to hold it under, then forgot and left it overnight. The rod colored it greenish where it touched.


[11th] How Zinc/Zincate Electrode Works

   Zinc is usually shown as transforming "Zn => ZnO" during discharge in battery literature, but above about pH 12 it actually goes "Zn => Zn(OH)4--". (Some charts such as this one say "ZnO2--". Soluble "zincate" ions either way.) This has a tendency to turn into ZnO as the ions saturate the solution, apparently starting at the 'impenetrable' SDBS'ed* separator sheet, where ZnO particles block the passage of electrolyte ions and gradually (more like 'rapidly' in my experience) kill the cell. We inhibit this conversion with the osmium doped film. ZnO is a wide bandgap semiconductor, so once the Zn is in that imobile ZnO state and not in good contact with the current collector, it becomes very hard or impossible to recharge.
   But it's said that zincate solutions may become amazingly "supersaturated" for long periods of time even for months "depending on conditions" as the electrode discharges. If conversion to ZnO is inhibited by the catalyst, perhaps it's "forever". When charge voltage is applied, dissolved zincate ions are bound to come into contact and be reduced to Zn, however haphazard and spongy zinc plating may often be.

   It has taken me ages to piece the above together since it's not explained in the literature as far as I've seen - which is surely a reason why no one has made successful "forever" cycling zinc electrodes. (This should have almost 100% zinc utilization, too.) Most literature seems to assume that zincate is a temporary undesired state that does nothing but cause problems, and wishes it wasn't soluble. Zinc is put into electrodes in multi-size granules so something is left for recharging zinc to plate onto without blocking all the pores.
   So most alkaline battery researchers look for elements and their reaction compounds that have entirely non-soluble redox products, such as nickel oxyhydroxide <=> nickel hydroxide, or as I did with manganese negatives: (Mn <=> Mn(OH)2, both insoluble). In fact I avoided trying copper for many years owing to seeing so many dissolved ion states in various reactions at various pH'es.
   But having a soluble product exposes virtually the whole reactant to the electrolyte sometime during the charge-discharge cycle, leading to much higher utilization and hence higher energy density. The keys to employing dissolving & solidifying substances are apparently to keep the dissolved product within the electrode (SDBS* in the separator) and to keep them in the dissolved state as desired (catalyst) when the electrode is discharged.

* SDBS: sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate - a common dishsoap & detergent ingredient


Next Try Copper Side

   Might the copper side work similarly?

    It occurred to me that if the copper might form Cu(OH)4--, that was pretty similar to zinc forming Zn(OH)4--. Would it, then, similarly form a solution of valence 2 cuprate ions? (or valence 3, perhaps as Cu(OH)5---?) Would such a solution gradually turn to "passivated" CuO similar to zinc turning to ZnO, and block the electrolyte ions? Dissolved ions wasn't my conception of what was happening, but considering that every cell (which now appears to be every copper electrode) seems to gradually deteriorate over days, this may well be the case.
   And if so, might coating the inside surface of the copper's separator paper with osmium doped acetaldehyde catalyst likewise prevent or reverse this, holding the copper ions in "supersaturated" solution? It seems like a good thing to try.



   The other thing that the deteriorating performance might be owed to is using cupro-nickel for the current collectors where I have always wanted monel. I've sort of discounted this, but it could be that oxidation of the skin of the metal is causing poor connection. I checked the tracking on line... my monel "trolling line" had just come in at the post office. Yay! I drove into town and picked it up.
   Last time the separator paper around the edge had scrunched down as I compacted the monel powder. I had the thought that perhaps a "spearpoint", cone, shape would tend to push the powder more outward instead of down. I took a long 1/4 inch bolt and ground it down, then sanded and polished it, more tapered than a pencil. This would press outward a little way while pushing down a long way, with a "ratio" of force. Perhaps it could give similar compacting force to the press with just hand pressure?
   Finally I would need something like an open-eyed needle to push the monel wire current collector down through the tube and the powder. I conceived that this would best be done when the wedge still went down to (or near) the bottom but the powder was already compacting toward the outside. And furthermore that the more strands the merrier to make good connections, perhaps 4 or 6. Then more powder and the wedge could be stuffed in, spreading the wires around toward the outside but not to the paper.
   I wieghed out 25 grams of fresh monel powder and meant to add 1 wt% samarium oxide to it... but 2.5 grams is 10%, not 1%! Well, that should be more than plenty!

   Along with being a tube shape with big holes in the plastic and polpypropylene fibers reinforcement ironed into the separator sheet, this new electrode had three new experimental "innovations" instead of just one, any of which might enhance the performance and or prevent the degradation seen in previous copper electrodes:

* It had monel wires for a current collector instead of a long sliver of cupro-nickel sheet.
* It had osmium dopant on the inside of the separator sheet
* It had samarium oxide in the mix to raise the oxygen overvoltage, in case the still undetermined reaction voltage of copper to valence III was high enough to generate oxygen.

   I put in three doubled pieces of monel wire, dumped in the 27.5 grams of powder, and poked it somewhat compact. It only occupied 1/3 of the tube. I started to conceive that it was going to be something like the zinc, dissolving to ions as it charged, plating onto the monel wires as it discharged. And so I was probably wrong about the powder needing to be compacted much. (Then why was I using the tube shape, again?)

   Charging started at 40mA but dropped quickly to around 10 as the open circuit voltage climbed from .2 to over 1.1 volts. Some brief load tests looked very promising, but then they have before.

[13th] After compacting with the "awl" tool, the powder only filled the tube 1/3 full. I made a slightly smaller "plug", like an end cap except it fit just inside the tube & separator paper. I drilled a hole in it for the terminal wires, and pushed it down solidly onto the powder. But there was nothing to hold it down.
   Performance was like usual - good at first, then deteriorating. This time I could push down on the plug with any short "stick". That would bring the voltage back up again, even 100mV and more, indicating that decompaction was indeed the reason for the gradual drop in performance of the copper electrodes. But then it stopped working right. I appeared that the monel wire had been eaten through. Darn! I knew it was awfully skinny wire. Surface corrosion must have gone right to the center.


[14th] I made a shorter tube that wouldn't take so darn much monel, and would fit under the lid. I didn't put holes near the top. The idea was the electrode wouldn't come up to the top of the tube. I could put a plug in as a top cap, one that would fill the tube with a friction fit, so that once it was pushed in it wouldn't willingly push out again and would hold the material compacted. If performance dropped it could be pushed harder, pushed in a little more, by as much as half an inch.


   Now trusting neither cupro-nickel nor monel - at least not such thin monel wire - I thought of the old standby: graphite. I took a 3/8 inch diameter graphite rod and cut it to 4 inches long, then sanded one end down to a point, tapered along the length of the electrode. That way as I pushed (or lightly pounded) it in, it would continue to compact the material a bit more and at the same time make the best contact. (I had 1/4 & 5/8 inch rod as well, but the pipe was a bigger diameter than I had wanted anyway, so a bit of extra filler that also made for a "thinner" active electrode and more contact area to the current collector seemed to be all to the good.)
   Now either the rod or the cap could be pushed in a little farther if more compaction was needed after initial use.

   If this doesn't work I'm really about out of ideas. I may then go back to nickel manganates and this time try only charging to MnO2 voltage instead of NiOOH voltage.

The empty pipe et al weighed 24.40g. After assembly it was 52.75g. So 28.35g of powder. Oodles! I think I got it well stuffed in. I was having trouble because when I speared the rod in as far as I could, there wasn't enough left around the top and the cap went way in. Finally it occurred to me to put the rod in first without the cap, fill around it to the top, and then press the cap on. It still went in a ways - I might have pushed something in beside the rod to pre-compact it a bit before pressing the cap on. But I was pleased with how the conical rod went on and had good hopes for fairly good compaction through out and good connection from the powder to the rod.


   The cell initially started at about .44V, and charging (23:25 PM) with 1.5V started at just under 30mA and in minutes dropped to 20mA, which seemed disappointing.

[15th] In fact, it behaved poorly... as if it had little substance and little surface area. Suddenly I realized I might (at last) have it TOO compacted! Perhaps then the electrolyte was only getting at the surface right where the holes were? The fluffy nano samarium hydroxide would tend to fill the gaps between the monel micro powder grains. I took it out and scraped out some of the mix, especially the very hard compacted region near the bottom - hopefully without ripping the paper with its osmium & SDBS layers. Sure enough, currents went up instead of down. Not by a lot. But maybe with a bit of space to expand into, the rest will loosen off gradually with charging and discharging, since my chief problem seems to have been that it always seemed to expand and get too loose and lose connection over the hours and days when nothing was sufficiently holding it compacted.
   In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that the balance between "too loose" and "too compacted" may be a rather fine one, and that monel particles of different sizes, with some coarser grit, might be valuable to enhance electrolyte flow while keeping the mixture well compacted. This is different from the zinc side. All the zinc can dissolve and reform, whereas the nickel content in the monel, and the nickel hydroxide content at its surface, doesn't. So even if the copper forms dissolved cuprate ions (oxycuprate?) during charging or discharging, there is still a solid conductive 'sponge' that doesn't change.
   I opened it again. Sure enough the powder had already loosened off to mush. I had taken out too much and it didn't fill the space. In addition to adding more, I put in some tiny bits of monel wire and sheet cupro-nickel. Charging current stayed higher for longer, and a quick discharge had higher voltages. Then it got worse again. It seemed that any mechanical manipulation - more compaction, less compaction, just twisting the electrode rod - anything - would improve performance briefly, bringing the voltage up tens or even well over 100mV.

[16th] Perhaps the next thing to try to improve currents & capacity is to grind some coarser monel powder, and maybe cupro-nickel powder as well, and replace some of the mixture with it. But I'm tired of failure. Copper seems to have great electrochemical properties, and I've probably kept any soluble cuprate ions trapped within the electrode space, and probably the osmium keeps it from turning into CuO, but some physical property(s) seem to keep it deteriorating with each charge and discharge.

Nickel? Nickel-Manganates?

   I'm sure copper hydroxide/oxyhydroxide CAN be made to work, but it's been very frustrating. At this point I would like to explore anything that I think has a better chance of giving some more gratifying results, which would be either nickel oxyhydroxide or manganese in the form of nickel-manganese oxide. Nickel is at least known and well explored, and nickel-zinc with 'forever' zinc electrodes would be better than nickel-metal hydride if only by virtue of being 1.6V instead of 1.2, a 33% energy increase, and lighter, making a further increase in energy per weight.
   Also, if I try something else and do get similar results, I'll know it's something I'm doing rather than it being a problem with copper.

'Everlasting' Nickel-Zinc Cell?

   Hmm... Let's start at the beginning. I opened up a couple of nickel-metal hydride "D" cells and unwrapped the rolled up electrodes in one. I put a separator paper (toluened, SDBS'ed, PP ironed in, but not osmiumed) into the 4 inch PVC tube with the large holes.


   Then I wrapped some 'sheets' of the nickel hydroxide substance into it around the outside. I cut a 5 inch section of the 3/8 inch graphite rod, sanded it into something of a cone, and put it in the middle. I put in enough dry cell stuff that it was a tight fit. The pieces came up to the top so rather than make a new end cap I used heat glue to seal the top. I estimate it was around half the nickel side of one 10 amp-hour "D" cell, maybe 4 or 5 amp-hours.


   It didn't seem to work. It was as if there was no cell connected. I finally wondered if maybe the nickel side wouldn't work with the SDBS in the separator paper. I took it apart and put in an un-SDBS'ed paper. Still nothing. I moved the alligator clip connection to the zinc side - again - and suddenly it all worked. (Dang alligator clips!) Crap, now I don't know if the nickel would have a problem with the SDBS. I have no reason to think it would, but now it has a paper without it instead of with it. Oh wait... the zinc paper has SDBS, so there's an SDBS'ed paper between the nickel and zinc anyway. I wonder if a nickel side would last forever if gelled with SDBS instead of just for 500-1000 cycles? I don't see why not.

   It started charging (2.0V supply) at 40mA, which dropped in 15' to 29mA. After brief load tests it would be up to 60mA and run at about 48mA for a while. Momentary short circuit current hit 500+mA - probably as much as can be expected from such a half-immersed electrode. The reference electrode showed that with a 50Ω load it had no more drop initially than the zinc side. All seemed good. Bedtime. What would a night of charging do?


[17th] Well, there's quick gratification! It charged all night at 40mA. In the morning I ran a 50 ohm load test for 20 minutes, which went from just under 1.8V soon to 1.75, then to 1.7 in 10', ending at 1.67V, where the rate of drop had become very slow. Owing to the higher voltage, load current was delivering over 30mA instead of 20. Recharge proceeded at about 60mA.The reference electrode showed that the nickel side was the weaker, and with a 10 ohm load it dropped quickly into the 1.3V range, delivering over 120mA. Guessing for the holes as well as the diameter and length of the tube, plus the fact that the 4 inch tube was only half immersed, interface area was probably under 20sq.cm. Using 20, 120mA is 6mA/sq.cm, but the nickel's interface was dispersed around the tube, not aimed square at the zinc at a short distance, so that's probably not too bad. Momentary short circuit current was over 600mA, so that's around 30mA/sq.cm, which isn't so far below the target of 50.
   Still, charging for 10 hours at 40mA was only 400mA charge into a 4000-5000mAH electrode (only half immersed - 2000mAH?), so it should do better in a day or two.
   In the evening I found the voltage drop with a 50Ω load soon took it from 1.89V open circuit into the 1.7V range. Drop from the zinc measured just 15mV while the nickel side was 90mV, A severe drop of 400mV measured with a 10Ω load (compared to 90mV for the zinc) is probably not as good as copper - when the copper is working well. But then, the voltage and so the current are higher, hmm. ...so maybe as good but at least not much better. I ran the 50Ω load for an hour mostly in the range 1.7 to 1.6V, 31mA, ending at 1.582V. It was still going strong. By the end the rate of drop was down to about 1.5mV/minute.

   Aside from continuing to charge and test this real, working battery, what next? Should I make a nickel [oxyhydroxide] electrode with my chemicals instead of chunks from a dry cell known to have worked, should I go for nickel-manganates, or back to copper [oxyhydroxide]? Maybe the nickel, and see if the result is anything like this one with the commercial product, or if it's more like what I was getting with the copper. That should identify whether it's the copper as a chemical or my techniques are a problem.

[18th] The cell was holding over 1.9V open circuit, at least, after 15 seconds it was about 1.93. Then since 10 Ω seemed to be too heavy for it, I did a 20 Ω load test.

Voltage was quickly under 1.6V, 75mA.
  5': 1.5V, 71mA.
12': 1.480V, 68mA. Again it was the nickel side that was weaker, at this point losing 240mV compared to open circuit while the zinc lost (gained) only 30mV.
28': 1.362V, 62mA.
42': 1.268V, 68mA. The zinc is still losing 30mV, the copper now 380mV, compared to momentarily switching to open circuit.
54': 1.190, 56mA
64': 1.144, 54mA - Ended discharge
76': Recovery (12'): 1.704V

   Considering the strength of the zinc electrode (a surprise to me!), the nickel doesn't seem to work so well. What's different from when it was in a dry cell that could source tens of amps? One would expect it should still do a couple? One difference of course is the electrolyte: mostly salt at pH 12-13 instead of concentrated KOH at pH 14 (nasty stuff!), although it does have 5% KOH in it too to make the zincate work. Another is the physical arrangement of a tube instead of thin sheets of materials wrapped around each other with high contact areas.
   Hmm... measuring the separator paper from the dry cell, 50cm x 5cm = 250 sq.cm of interface area. so 50mA/sq.cm would give... 12.5 amps. Okay, that explains a lot. But why doesn't it last longer - where are the amp-hours? Once again, if it's been charging for say 36 hours now, starting at 40mA and gradually dropping to 20 (call it 30), that's still just 1.1 amp-hours of charge, so maybe 1/4 of full charge. Couple that with poor flow, and we have higher voltage drops.
   But at least the performance has been consistent.

   The copper/monel of course was charging at ridiculously low currents, so perhaps it's not a surprise I haven't been getting good results. In CuNi sheet metal form they actually performed fantasticly for a while. I simply must figure out how to get much more current into and out of the copper electrodes before I cast them aside as unworkable! HOW? WHY DON'T THEY CHARGE 1% AS FAST AS THEY CAN DISCHARGE?

Thoughts?:

- Lots of graphite powder?
- The powders are very fine... Larger chunks of monel & copper - or graphite (flakes?) - to allow better electrolyte penetration?
- How much compaction is desirable?
- Bits of CuNi or NiCu in the mix?

   But these things aren't much different from things already tried. Somehow they don't seem to be the answer. And yet, I haven't made an electrode with monel AND graphite AND osmium. Things that don't work unless every part is assembled are the rule, not the exception.


[19th] The nickel electrode is deteriorating. But this was not unexpected. The dry cell was made for pH 14 alkali, and had nickel metal in it for current collection, which was bound to oxidize at pH 12 or 13. And while the carbon rod had to be pressed in pretty hard, there were voids the substance could expand into, losing compaction. It seems to me very unlikely that a properly made nickel-zinc cell with this "zincate" formulation wouldn't work and continue to work for at least many hundreds of cycles - probably thousands, limited by (ungelled) nickel not the zinc. That's a basis for great batteries.

(OTOH, it does seem to be losing capacity and current drive, rather like the 'trodes I make myself.)

   But what about copper? On the fourth I had made a bracket to mount my 'dremmel' drill onto the CNC table. Now I decided to make the "rotisserie" for the CNC table to drill holes in plastic electrode tubes. I thought of using a coupling nut, and after that everything became simple. I only had 3/8" ones, which turned out to be just right. That was too big for the stepper motor shaft, but I dug out another stepper with a 3/8" shaft. I drilled out the threads so the nut would slip onto the motor shaft, and put in a set screw hole & screw to hold it. I would have rather had a smaller bolt (1/4") and hence more gap into which to drill the holes before hitting it, but the space should be sufficient if all is carefully set up.
   I turned down the outside just slightly so the plastic pipe would slip over one end of the nut. I screwed a 4" bolt onto the free end and turned half the hex end so the pipe would fit. Putting the pipe onto the coupling nut on the motor and screwing on the bolt through it affixes the pipe to the stepper.

   Then I found a piece of 90° angle with holes in it and mounted the motor onto that. The lower side fits onto bolts on the CNC table. Presto!


   Now, about those 8 wires... Usually there's only four. Seems each pair goes to one coil, but why are there four coils? I decided to try it with just two. I suppose the coils are two pairs that can be in parallel or series, perhaps for extra holding power.

[22nd] I cut a block of wood to support the other end of the plastic pipe, so it couldn't push the pipe down when the drill pressed on that end.

[23rd] I finally managed to find time to wire up the stepper motor. Owing to the usual sort of nuisances it took three hours to finally get it running. (To whit... First I seemed to have trouble soldering well on the tiny DB9 connector and kept bridging between pins with solder. I guess it's been a while since I've done much finer soldering. Also I had to put two resistors in parallel on the same plug pins to get the right value per the "Gecko Drive" stepper motor controller. Then, I was using the cable from the CNC table's "Y" motor to connect to the controller - but I had forgotten it wasn't a straight through cable. The motor end was unique to the CNC table's motors. So no connect. Then the circuit diagram for for 8 pin stepper motor was almost useless. It showed four coils... all neatly lined up as if none were at right angles, with no indication of which two were phase A and which were phase B - which ones were pairs? There was thus no way to tell how to wire it from the schematic and it took several tries (much soldering & desoldering) to find two coils that worked together. Finally it ran. Then I needed to make a longer cable so the motor could be on the CNC table instead of right by the computer. Finally everything was right and it was past bedtime with other things to do first.)

[30th] I finally managed to finish the G-code program and get it seen by the program and running. (It isn't seen unless it is extension ".NGC" instead of ".GCODE". I thought "NGC" was "New Galactic Catalog".) I drilled out a tube which seemed totally perfect except that around the 180° mark some holes ran together. The holes were also so close together that it weakened the tube a bit - I could flex it or twist one end a bit. Except for the flawed area I'd have used it. I found that I hadn't tightened down the wooden end holding block. Otherwise it probably would have come out well.

[July 1st] I changed the program a bit to put a little more space between holes also with a couple of adjustments to go faster - it had taken over an hour with considerable wasted movements. When I went to drill a new tube, everything went crazy. The drill pulled out of the collet and the tube was gouged.
   And it seemed that the vertical motor wasn't strong enough sometimes to lift the dremmel/drill back up. Here I discovered I had used a resistor on the connector to "set" the motor's current, "1KΩ" to set it to 1A, but the motor label said it was "4.7A". I clipped it off, which would cause the Gekko Drive board to put out its maximum 3.5A. That improved its strength dramaticly. I could hardly stop it by grabbing the up-down shaft.



   After that the real problem turned out to be that while I had edited the G-code program in the text editor, and told the CNC program to "reload G-code" a couple of times, the program had started up by opening a sample G-code routing program and I hadn't opened the real one. All the useless and annoying safeties in the CNC program merely distracted from the broad view - it did crazy things because it was running the wrong G-code file entirely! Why would it load some useless sample milling routine as a default instead of starting blank and waiting for the user to pick one? Ah well, caveat emptor... It was good to get that weak vertical axis fixed anyway as it probably would have messed up jobs in the future.

   The next tube went much better.


[July 4th] I decided to put aside a day and try for another copper "+" 'trode. Perhaps I could have better news before I finish editing this report?

   I took the new holey PVC tube and pressed a glued bottom end cap onto it. Then a previously SDBS'ed, PP ironed paper, and painted the inside with osmium 'doped' acetaldehyde.
 
A piece of SDBS'ed separator paper for a tube. Nonwoven polypropylene fabric is ironed into the outside face. (It still breathes.)
Acetaldehyde mixed with fine osmium powder is painted onto the inside face. (The osmium provides the dark color. It doesn't need much osmium.)


I extracted the graphite rod from the previous copper electrode.

Then I mixed up a batch of copper substance:

70% fine copper powder
  5% fine monel powder
10% coarser monel powder (grinder-made SB monel special roasted mix per some very old TE News)
10% (nano) conductive carbon black
  3% (nano) samarium oxide powder
-----
100%

I used .5g for each 1%, so 35g of copper powder etc.

I put it in with a funnel and when it was full, I inserted the cone shaped graphite/carbon current collector/terminal post. This pushed the powder to the sides and down, leaving a hollow when I pulled the post out. I filled that and repeated the process a few times, adding more and further compacting until it was quite hard to push the post in and to pull it out again. Then I sprinkled in a bit more and pushed the post in for the last time and turned it a bit as it went in. Hopefully everything inside is in good electrical contact.

The tube weighed 16.85g empty, 35.70g filled, so 18.85g of mix.

At 13:15 (PST) I set the tube in the cell box and added some electrolyte. The voltage started off under .1V but gradually rose. I left it a while to absorb electrolyte. In half an hour it was .2 volts. In 80 minutes it hit .295 then started down again. But I left it for over 3 hours (did some lawn mowing) before putting it on charge, at 1.5V with very low currents. Puzzling things improved after I found it had a bad connection to the negative electrode. (What else is new?) After that currents went up and it started to look promising. But then they always do.

[July 6th] This one didn't look promising for long. It never did charge up nicely and provide a good load test. And yet there's that moment seconds or a minute or a few minutes after starting the test that the voltage rises again before heading down and down. I'm sure I'm missing something vital to get them to work. What else can I try? Another electrolyte salt? Change pH?

[July 8th] Hmm.... Well, something obvious... I made the tube 4 inches long because that was the desired "production" length, so I set the CNC drilling jig and program up for it. But in this cell it's only 2/3 immersed in the electrolyte. I had been thinking of going back to all tube electrodes, but if I put this in a jar or bottle, I'd have to either use an old zinc tube of unknown ('long forgotten') properties or else make a new one.
   I tried it with two old zinc tubes. (...and almost 400cc of fresh electrolyte to fill the jar.) Wow, what a difference! And yet, higher currents, but still gradually worsening voltages after looking promising with just a little charge... just more of the same. If I can't figure this out, I may want to go with plain old nickel oxyhydroxide, or try nickel-manganese oxides again.

[July 9th] (This is the June report?!?) I ran a discharge until it was down to 2mV, and another until it was 20mV. It started recharging at over 300mA, almost double what it had been. Next time the discharge voltage was up, from .2-.4 volts to .4-.65V with correspondingly higher currents, and lasting longer. How well can I get it to perform just by repeatedly running it down to near nothing?

[July 10th] Not much better, apparently, but it works on and on. Perhaps the copper substance needs something organic in the mix? The old monel mix I added some of had some 'extras' in it as I recall. Instead of copper hydroxides and ions, might it form some organic copper compound that oxidizes and reduces similarly? Or just bind the hydroxides and ions so they continue to conduct well? I had long forgotten the idea combining organics - insofar as I had ever thought it through at all back then. This takes things back to before 2011 or so - to some of the very early TE News issues. I think I'll try an electrode with just the old monel mix. If it works better, I'll have to go through what I did back then.
   Well, this is trespassing far into July! I really must finish this issue up and post it!




Electricity Generation

My Solar Power System


The Usual Daily/Monthly/Yearly Log of Solar Power Generated [and grid power consumed]

(All times are in PST: clock 48 minutes ahead of local sun time, not PDT which is an hour and 48 minutes ahead. (DC) battery system power output readings are reset to zero daily (often just for LED lights, occasionally used with other loads: Chevy Sprint electric car, inverters in power outages or other 36V loads), while the grid tied readings are cumulative.)

Daily Figures

Notes: House Main meter (6 digits) accumulates. DC meter now accumulates until [before] it loses precision (9.999 WH => 0010 KWH), then is reset. House East and Cabin meters (4 digits) are reset to 0 when they get near 99.99 (which goes to "100.0") - owing to loss of second decimal precision.

Km = Nissan Leaf electric car drove distance, then car was charged.

New Order of Daily Solar Readings (Beginning May 2022):

Date House, House, House, Cabin => Total KWH Solar [Notable power Uses (EV); Grid power meter@time] Sky/weather
        Main      DC      East
                            (carport)

   After 5 full years (March 2019 to February 2024), I am no longer recording solar collection figures daily. (Frequently, and surely monthly.) For the chart, a figure for "n" days will be divided by "n" and taken evenly as "n" [more] days of whatever the result is. Oh... now with the DC system running an electric heater at night (From April 11th 2024), I'm interested to do daily again for now.
May
31st 1475.76,6.225, 48.64,82.91 =>   8.09 [15356@20:30]

June
  1st 1479.24, 8.91, 52.10, 86.99 => 13.70 [15368@20:30]
  2d  1482.82, 2.38, 55.53, 90.21 => 12.61 [55Km; 15389@20:00]
  4th 1489.24, 6.65, 61.78, 97.33 => 24.26 [15415@20:30] 2 days
  5th 1493.62, 8.72, 65.42,   4.59 => 14.59 [75Km; 15436@21:00]
  6th 1498.92, 2.10, 69.53,   9.73 => 16.65 [15443@20:30]
  7th 1508.66, 4.50, 75.45, 17.02 => 25.35 [85Km; 15467@21:30] Sun at last! Mowed some hay field... i mean, lawn.
  8th 1513.55, 6.67, 79.42, 22.08 => 16.09 [60Km; 15478@21:00; 50Km]
10th 1521.65, 11   , 86.38, 30.34 => 27.65 [15504@21:00] 2 days. (Dang DC meter just goes from '9999 WH' to '0010 KWH' with no decimals at all!)
11th 1524.50, 2.29, 89.04, 33.81 => 11.27 [100Km; 15527@20:30] Yay, monel wire arrived!
13th 1533.81, 7.57, 97.50, 43.80 => 33.04 [15548@21:00] 2 days
14th 1538.29, 2.15,   3.70, 48.28 => 14.81 [15561@20:30]
15th 1542.18, 4.05,   6.82, 52.57 => 13.20 [55Km; 15578@21:00; 50Km]
16th 1546.73, 6.76, 11.68, 57.77 => 17.32 [35Km; 15596@21:00]
17th 1555.59, 9.04, 17.51, 64.24 => 23.44 [15602@21:00]
18th 1559.87, 1.62, 20.91, 68.21 => 13.27 [15611@21:00]
19th 1568.64, 3.83, 26.50, 74.24 => 22.60 [55Km; 15624@21:00]
20th 1572.53, 5.98, 30.48, 79.01 => 14.79 [15628@20:30]
21th 1574.44, 7.13, 32.06, 82.66 =>   8.29 [90Km; 15652@21:00]
22th 1577.15, 8.65, 34.32, 85.56 =>   9.39 [55Km; 15672@21:00 50Km]
23th 1584.88, 2.07, 39.51, 91.26 => 20.69 [90Km; 15696@"24:00"]
24th 1593.83, 3.96, 45.19, 97.69 => 22.94 [15700@21:00]
25th 1597.74, 5.78, 48.34,   4.10 => 13.00 [55Km; 15714@21:00]
26th 1604.12, 7.85, 53.34,   9.49 => 18.85 [55Km; 15724@21:00]
27th 1612.91, 1.96, 58.86, 16.22 => 23.00 [15728@21:00]
28th 1618.91, 3.42, 63.19, 20.99 => 16.56 [85Km; 15747@20:30]
29th 1625.79, 5.18, 68.12, 26.54 => 19.12 [55Km; 15757@20:30; 50Km]
30th 1628.30, 6.40, 70.13, 29.06 =>   8.26 [40Km; 15776@20:30]

July
  1st 1631.76, 7.26, 72.71, 32.41 => 10.92 [45Km; 15790@21:00]
  2d  1635.72, 8.76, 76.02, 36.43 => 12.79 [15797@21:00]
  3rd 1642.16, 2.00, 80.54, 41.42 => 17.95 [15802@21:30]
  4th 1651.25, 3.94, 88.01, 47.93 => 25.03 [15808@20:39]
  5th 1660.24, 5.74, 91.55, 54.59 => 20.99 [85Km; 15824@23:00]
  6th 1669.76, 7.09, 97.11, 60.97 => 22.81 [55Km; 15836@21:00; 50Km]
  7th 1678.80, 8.93,   5.30, 66.92 => 22.13 [35Km; 15849@20:30]
  8th 1688.14, 1.90, 10.87, 73.49 => 23.38 [15854@20:30]
  9th 1697.53, 3.53, 16.42, 80.23 => 23.31 [55Km; 15866@20:30]
10th 1701.36, 5.04, 19.46, 83.96 => 12.11 [15872@21:00]


Chart of daily KWH from solar panels.   (Compare June 2024 with May 2024 & with June 2023.)
Days of
__ KWH
 June
2024
(18 Collectors)
 May 2024
(18 C's)
 June 2023
(18 C's)
0.xx


1.xx


2.xx


3.xx


4.xx


5.xx


6.xx


7.xx
2
 1
8.xx
 2
 1
9.xx
 1
 3
 1
10.xx
4
11.xx
 1
 3
 1
12.xx
 3
 1
 1
13.xx
 5
 2
 2
14.xx
 3
 4
 1
15.xx
3
 2
16.xx
 5
 1
 4
17.xx
 2
 2
 2
18.xx
 1
2
19.xx
 1

20.xx
 1
 1
 5
21.xx
1
 3
22.xx
 2
 2
23.xx
 2
2
24.xx
1
 1
25.xx
 1
2
26.xx


27.xx


28.xx


29.xx


Total KWH
for month
 420
 405
 540.12
 Km Driven
on Electricity
 ~1465 Km
190 KWH
 1091.9
~145 KWH
(ODO 108799)
 1407.7 Km
(190 KWH?)


Things Noted - June 2024

* June started with a storm and the weather continued from largely cloudy May. It got better.

* Solar KWH figures aren't as good as last year. A couple of grid ties aren't working well, and I took two solar panels (2*250W capacity) away from the house AC system to ensure the DC system could recharge well each day after providing bedroom heat overnight via battery. (I ordered another grid tie.) (Yes, even in summer it can get chilly overnight here on the northern west coast. I could just do two quilts...)


Monthly Summaries: Solar Generated KWH [& Power used from grid KWH]

As these tables are getting long, I'm not repeating the log of monthly reports. The reports for the first FIVE full years (March 2019 to February 2024) may be found in TE News #189, February 2023.

2024
Jan KWH: 31.37 + 3.14 +  16.85 + 16.82 =   68.18 [grid: 909; car use (very rough estimates): 160]
Feb KWH: 96.52 + 2.36 + 49.67 +  52.98 = 201.53 [grid: 791; car: 130]
FIVE full Years of solar!
Mar KWH 150.09+ 1.63 + 93.59 +  92.50 = 337.81 [grid: 717; car: 140]
Apr KWH 181.89+35.55 +123.50+142.74 = 483.68 [grid: 575; car: 140]
May KWH 129.23+67.38+109.60+126.32 = 432.53 [grid: 405; car: 145]
Jun KWH  152.54+51.02+118.99+141.17 = 463,72 [grid: 420; car: 190]

Annual Totals

1. March 2019-Feb. 2020: 2196.15 KWH Solar [used   7927 KWH from grid; EV use: -] 10, 11, 12 solar panels
2. March 2020-Feb. 2021: 2069.82 KWH Solar [used 11294 KWH from grid; EV use: - (More electric heat - BR, Trailer & Perry's RV)] 12 solar panels
3. March 2021-Feb. 2022: 2063.05 KWH Solar [used 10977 KWH from grid; EV use ~~1485 KWH] 12 solar panels, 14 near end of year.
4a. March 2022-August 2022: in (the best) 6 months, about 2725 KWH solar - more than in any previous entire year!
4. March2022-Feb. 2023: 3793.37 KWH Solar [used 12038 KWH from grid; EV use: ~1583 KWH] 14, 15, 18 solar panels
5. March 2023-Feb. 2024: 3891.35 KWH Solar [used 7914 KWH from power grid; EV use: ~1515 KWH] 18 solar panels

Money Saved or Earned - @ 12¢ [All BC residential elec. rate] ; @ 50¢ [2018 cost of diesel fuel to BC Hydro] ; @ 1$ per KWH [actual total cost to BC Hydro in 2022 according to an employee]:
1. 263.42$ ; 1097.58$ ; 2196.15$
2. 248.38$ ; 1034.91$ ; 2069.82$
3. 247.57$ ; 1031.53$ ; 2063.05$
4. 455.20$ ; 1896.69$ ; 3793.37$
5. 466.96$ ; 1945.68$ ; 3891.35$

   It can be seen that the benefit to the society as a whole on Haida Gwaii from solar power installations is much greater than the cost savings to the individual user of electricity, thanks to the heavy subsidization of our power owing to the BC government policy of having the same power rate across the entire province regardless of the cost of production. And it can be insurance: With some extra equipment and a battery, sufficient solar can deliver essential power in electrical outages however long. (Feb 28th 2023: And it's probably well over 1$/KWH by now the way inflation of diesel fuel and other costs is running.)
   It might also be noted that I never went into this in a big way. Instead of installing a whole palette load of 32 solar panels, I have 18, and my grid ties aren't the best, and I would be hard put to give an accurate total of my installation costs. All in all the grid tied part probably cost me (with all my own 'free' labor) around 7000$. At the actual "total savings to all" figures, they have paid for themselves twice over in five years. The 36V DC system largely cost a couple of thousand dollars for batteries. The solar panels were up. The charge controller, circuit breakers, DC combo meters [V, A, W, WH], 36V compatible LED lights and wiring cost were a few hundred dollars at most. (I did have to make my own T-Plug cables & 3D printed wall plates.) The battery cost has come down substantially in recent years and will come down a lot more if I can get cheap, "forever cycle" batteries working.




http://www.TurquoiseEnergy.com
Haida Gwaii, BC Canada