I need an Al2O3 ceramic tube and some type of plugs for the ends. For the plugs it seems like aluminium will do fine, so that is cheap and easy to find I assume. The ceramic pipe I found nearby and the seller contacted me at once, but when I mentioned the low volume he never wrote back. Bah!
To harden the cement I need some heat source. Perhaps I could use my dad's heat gun? Parkhomov heated to 800 degrees for one hour... That sounds awfully long to me. Hm. Need to think of something.
Then there was the thing called "thermocouple." I'd never heard about it before, so checked it out. Two metal wires welded together along with some type of ADC to read electric potential between your point of interest and some reference temperature (in my case room temperature). Sounds like 20-30€, right? Wrong. The wire itself seems to be around 60€ (for 1200°C, which is (almost?) inadequate), then there's the time to construct an ADC yourself as Arduino doesn't have the required analog voltage resolution and Raspberry Pi doesn't have an AD input at all. Yikes!
The electrical heater I'll build using some thyristor and a metal wire which has some resistance. Those can't be expensive! I've used a thyristor control for the alarm a year ago, so at least it should be pretty straight-forward.
I also need some way to measure input electric power or current. If I know the characteristics of the metal wire for the heater at different temperatures I probably could just measure the time. Sounds a bit sketchy. Ok, so I need some amp meter.
Finally it's the reactor containment. I'll use a stainless steel pot for the inner part. I'll put some sand in the bottom and some brick pieces to lie on. For outer container (holding the water and the inner container) I might use another stainless steel pot despite obvious thermal leak as it's hard to find a good-sized ceramic pot. Around the whole thing I'll put some plastic foam which must withstand the 92 or so degrees of the seething water. On top a foam slab and I'll place the reactor on a normal Swedish cork coaster.
So in total around 400€ for the initial experiment. Not too foul, but still a lot more than I had anticipated.
It probably won't look very different to Parkhomov's reactor (the container on the right):
Then some tweaking and making sure I collect data correctly and I should be good to go. It probably will take another month to get everything delivered and assembled, crap! Why must all the interesting things be so damn hard? Rossi's going to sell to mass market while I'm still trying to get my homebrew cement to stick to the ceramics tube.
I'm also a bit scared of the chemicals, but I'll try to keep my spirits high and enjoy the ride. If you're interested in participating, write me at info@pixeldoctrine.com.
