All right, I priced Nafion membrane and I'm still kind of in shock. $150 for a square foot? Excuse me, 30 x 30 cm. This exemplifies the type of protection our patent system gives to capitalist pigs, for Dupont probably makes that film for about 11 cents in material... Second sourcing would lead to rapid development and adoption of fuel cells in our world... Half-a-Pint's still ranting.
So what's the back-up plan? The clearest first choice looks like sulfonated polystyrene. Chemists use it in their chromatography columns. No problem. Lo and behold, it's even in water softeners, as the sodium salt, crosslinked with divinylbenzene. OTC and easy. Well, I don't have a water softener, or I could just go and dip out some of the beads, squish them down with heat until they melted onto a fiberglass or cellulose fabric, and have my membrane.
I could pretend to have a water softener, and go get a handful or so of that resin. Here the structure of the economy gets in my way again. Water softeners seem to come in a standard size, 32,000 grains, one cubic foot, 52 pounds where I live. What will I do with the extra 51 3/4 pounds of resin beads? I got friends, but it's not easy to come up with a cover story for taking their water softener apart.
Hmm. Guess I'll need to go to some real chem supplier, and get a rational quantity of cation-exchange resin, dowex or whatever. I just hate to deal with those people, for private reasons, plus I'd have to get ready for another outrage when I find out what it costs. Can I build this stuff for myself?
Seems like if I ground up some polystyrene foam and stuck it in some sulfuric acid, and heat it a bit, I'd get a bunch of black sticky crap that I could call sulfonated polystyrene. I would spend a lot of time making a great mess, trying to get it to harden up and adhere to the backing material. It just seems doubtful that I would ever be willing to use anything like that in my electrochemical cell, for fear of contamination, leaks, etc.
I wonder if polyphosphoric acid might work as a membrane material, I make that by heating naval jelly, but in my highly alkaline medium I would expect it to simply dissolve away. Hate to get stuck this way. Any beez have any suggestions for me?
a half a pints a half a pound a half a world a half a round
Sidearm n. Flask neck tube.