Fixing Fukushima - 02

Today we took a good look at the lab area and discussed how we were to augment the equipment, with what I had brought and what we needed to get on a shopping trip, to enable us to finish the pellet press and get other tests ready to go.

A look at Slobodan Stankovic’s HHO test rig and generator

Slobodan’s test rig is really neat with well positioned sample holders and rails for computer controlled insertion, there are spectrometers spanning from the UV to the IR and a neat little electric arc igniter. We discussed getting the parts for fume extraction and extra camera placements, given some of the planned experiments and desired data monitoring requirements. The custom built electrolyser is really clean and compact with sufficient flow to conduct the tests we need to do.

Shopping trip

We took a trip to Hornbach, a European centric home improvement and building supplies chain where we secured most of the parts we needed for the pellet press amongst other things. What we could not source there was some suitably sized steel sections and so we sped off to De Brunner Acefer which was an industrial scale steel section supplier.

Everyone there was very friendly and after a bit of asking around, they let us take two perfectly sized off cuts from the scrap bin for our needs, we thanked them kindly and went to the workshop for a bit of machining time.

Machine shop

At the machine shop, I did the best I could to cut a series of approximately 1cm x 2cm x 2cm sections of the Calcium Carbonate for our testing needs by way of a large hacksaw. Sure, a band saw or proper stone cutting rig would have been great, but sometimes you have to work with what you have. Some less than perfect chips produced will be fine to set up detectors and check the basic material response.

Also, 2mm and 4mm holes were drilled in the balance of the 10x10x2cm block to test potential capillary action of the gas.

Unlike cutting the stone with a hacksaw, making 4mm and 2mm holes with a bench drill was really easy.

Pellet press complete

Very satisfyingly, all the parts came together to make a very nice pellet press, very similar to that which I saw in Moscow at the beginning of 2015. Here you can see Slobodan very satisfied with his work.

I think we are ready for the limelight.