tungsten carbide properties

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>

Hi all,

A nice table of properties for tungsten carbide is at:

http://www.tungsten-carbide-dot-com/carbide.htm

It is not magnetic, apparently, so the skin depth may be reasonable.  It is
only 9% as electrically conductive as copper so short fat electrodes are
preferred.  Perhaps water cooled copper rods (pipes) with a tungsten
carbide face brazed on would be nice.  

I wonder if any disks of the material are commonly available that would be
good for brazing onto copper pipe caps?  (I assume copper can be brazed
without just melting down...) I'll have to pull out the giant MSC
catalog...  Cutting or machining the stuff is probably far from
desirable...  I tried lead/tin soldering and that does not work.  Tungsten
faces for this prototype gap is what I am looking for:

http://hot-streamer-dot-com/temp/ProtoSTSG.jpg

That gap can be filled with water to control the temperature and has nice
faces for field distortion triggered gap things...

I wonder if copper sulfate and electricity could plate them with copper so
they could be easily soldered.  With water cooling, the solder would not
melt.  Maybe Mike H. knows :-)

Such electrodes may simply never wear out or need maintenance.  Ted had to
clean is haunted house gaps every two hours last year so trying to help him
out...

Surprisingly, it is fairly thermally conductive at around 85 W/m-k.  Silver
is 415 and copper is 389.

Cheers,

	Terry