Re: Ammonia spark gap ?

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

Original poster: "Luc by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <ludev-at-videotron.ca>

Hi Duncan, Jason, all



> Like the reverse of the Haber process!  It sounds like a good enough
> idea to me, only better be sure you've got no leaks, good ventilation
> etc round the gap when you're filling up from the cylinder.  If
> something goes horribly wrong and you get a face-full of ammonia
> believe me you'll know all about it (found that one out the hard way a
> long, long time ago.  Not nice.)  Perhaps a safer and cheaper way,
> since you won't need much ammonia, would be to heat household ammonia
> solution gently and pass the vapour through a tube filled with silica
> gel to dry it.
> 
> Dunckx
> Geek#1113 (G-1)


Household ammonia with silica was my first idea before I read
Jason post. I know, the danger is real with ammonia. When I was
young a family living near my house have a really old freezer
using ammonia one night the system broke and start to leak the
result was a dead baby and a blind little sister. I had use 30%
ammonia solution at job for an old teletype color photo process:
just a sniff of that stuff is like a hit of an hammer between
your eyes.




> Good idea, but there are a couple of problems:
> 
> 1) Firstly, the Nitrogen + Hydrogen is not a standard chemical reaction. It
> is in equilibrium, which means that depending on ambient conditions, you
> will have a certain amount of H2 and N2 as well as NH3. the problem is this:
> The equation for this reaction is 6H2 + N2  <-> 2NH3 (I think). The high
> pressure side is the side with the H2 and N2 gasses, so if you run the whole
> thing in a container, it will produce a very small amount of nitrogen and
> hydrogen because the equation moves towards the low pressure NH3 end
> (because there are less moles of gas on the NH3 side and gas takes up the
> same volume per mole regardless of its density) Therefore the high
> temperatures and pressures will mean that regardless how much ammonia gas
> you put into the container, you will get almost no hydrogen and nitrogen to
> dissociate. (for more info or a better explanation mail me off list)


Tx Jason you convince me and save me a lot of trouble ;-) I
really mean it.

> 
> 2) Hydrogen is very light and will quench very fast, but will easily form
> plasma, the reason that much of the suns mass is H plasma and not, for
> example, lead plasma. Therefore you will get a plasma stream in your SG -
> not exactly what you want.
> 
> 3)The whole thing gets very hot (especially with plasma) and there is no way
> to cool a sealed container
> 
> 4) The glass world probably crack under the heat.

It's true but my first idea is not a seal system and any way a
seal system is possible to cool I saw many example in industry:
it's possible to have a kind of blow gap with a gas pumping
circuit across an heat exchanger.

By the way I finally find information on the web the problem is
that I search for amonia instead of ammonia :-(


Cheers,

Luc Benard