by Doug Coulter » Sun Jan 09, 2011 11:59 am
Haven't found any to try, and I've heard of it too. So, not a clue whether it works for this. Anyone have a small sample they want tried?
Ah, I see they have it at McMaster, a mere $368 for a 1" by 1' rod. Ow! They don't sell tubing, just various solid pieces. You'd have to bore it out.
You might be able to get away with just a little bit, though, just enough to protect the ends of things, which is where the more conventional materials fail.
I'd think it was pretty robust stuff, but being slippery might mean it's hard to vacuum seal across, dunno.
What seems to happen to every other insulator (other than pure alumina) is the hydrogen, which acts like it's insanely hot (I never liked that particle energy to temperature conversion baloney though) chemically reduces the stuff back to metal(s), replacing the oxygen most insulators have -- just like an ore smelter, but H works better than coke. Nitrogen does tend to bond to things better, but in my experience, chemically it likes itself better than most anything else, really would rather be N2 than in some other compound. Having to displace a couple at a time could make that harder to do, I suppose.
What happens with alumina is some of it gets changed to aluminum hydroxide, which is still an insulator, and subsequently evaporates, so alumina isn't perfect either, just much better than any glass or quartz and most other ceramics I've tried.
FWIW, the reason I don't like the glib math to translate eV to a temperature is that we're talking apples and oranges. Thermal motion is random, all degrees of freedom (including spin for non symmetric molecules). eV implies that all the energy is directed along a single direction vector, not random. So the assumptions that creep in make the conversion wrong in some cases.
As far as nitrogen goes, if you run the math on most high explosives (not gunpowder) where one of the products is N2, you find that more energy percentage than most think is simply due to the N's getting back together, and not that much from burning a fuel in an oxidizer (which also happens more slowly). The really quick HE's, like PETN tend to have shapes that allow the N's to hit easily "for some reason", which in turn releases the other stuff to do its thing.
I guess we'd just have to try some, deliberately put a piece "in harm's way" and see what happens to it. In my case, that could be a pretty easy test to do if I had some. McMaster says you can machine it with carbide tooling, but I'd guess you would have issues with it staying in the chuck if it's slippery, as they say. I have to be pretty careful with graphite, but since it machines so easily, the forces applied are low too, so it's at least possible.
Heck, hit boron hard enough with protons and maybe you get a little free fusion from that!
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.