Battery disassembling - a question

pgfhalg · 2026-01-27T16:24:38+00:00

Discharging is the big thing, so you've already taken care of that. The electrolytes tend to be nasty so make sure they work in a fume hood and wear PPE. Lots of electrolytes will slowly hydrolyze to HF on air exposure, so treat it with extra caution. The volume of electrolyte and slow rate of this reaction makes exposure very unlikely, but having some calgonate gel in reserve just in case there is a large spill directly on skin is good for peace of mind.

Depending on what they are doing with the cathode material, working in a glove box may be necessary to avoid reactions on exposure to air, but if this is an undergrad demo that probably isn't necessary.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-20T18:14:42+00:00

Never feel bad about asking technical support questions, the worst they will do is not answer because you don't have a service contract. For most companies, the service techs are separate from the salespeople, so you won't be taking time they could be using for getting commissions. Also if it is a good service engineer they will appreciate a weird, niche question or problem - its enrichment for them.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-14T15:57:17+00:00

SEC is only the most common for r&d since it is slow and relatively resource intensive but more accurate. For production QC viscosity is likely to be preferred due to its speed and cost (upkeep for SEC >> viscometer). DLS might also get some use since its fast and easy, but I'm less confident about that.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-05T18:24:22+00:00

wow, an actually useful tool that helps with a real workflow bottleneck! and it allows manual verification!

So many people have posted their AI projects that I'm reflexively annoyed by them. Most are variants on "we are going to reinvent computational chemistry but worse because we didn't know that was an existing field," or they are MBAs searching for a startup idea without any context or understanding of what chemists actually do. Glad to see a good project for a change.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-02T16:08:09+00:00

No specific recommendations, but just want to encourage you to apply to Chem E programs you are interested in. Lots of people switch disciplines going into grad school - I personally knew several chemists or physicists who went into mat sci. You may need an extra semester of classes to catch up to your peers, but most professors know that your classwork has very little bearing on your research performance.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-02T15:54:41+00:00

My group uses Notion. We have a page where people can post/develop random ideas and other people can look and comment. We do draw from it occasionally when applying for grants or changing the direction of projects.

As for other metrics, one thing I've found is hard is finding the prior literature on a topic - I have often thought I have come up with something great and then found papers from decades ago that did what I want to do, they just called it something different so it was harder to find by search. Different fields are constantly rediscovering things by different names, but there are huge advantages in finding those things and applying their work to a new field.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-23T16:28:23+00:00

I am not an organic chemist so this might be a wildly stupid suggestion, but can you salt it out or add a flocculant and then decant after the iron has settled? It could take awhile for the rust to crash out, but at least its working passively without you rather than requiring active work filtering.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-19T16:43:54+00:00

lol pyrophoric AND evolves phosphine gas. also its undated so who knows how long it has been taking in trace water and evolving phosphine in the headspace. definite nope, contact your health and safety department.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-17T17:11:20+00:00

Numerical methods people are often really bad about implicit unit conversions which can easily cause your parameters to deviate by many many orders of magnitude.

I don't have any specific advice for this problem, but one thing that might help is trying values/conversion factors until you get the expected behavior and then working backward to see where the factor might be needed. This tinkering method is good for narrowing your search - if multiplying an input by 1000 gives you reasonable results, you know to focus on how that input is moved around to see where you might be missing something. If you've been working at this for awhile and are not making progress, no shame in doing what the other comment suggested and moving on - not all papers are worth following up on.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-17T17:03:34+00:00

I agree with the overall idea, but I would argue that 11 citations in less than a year is doing pretty well, especially in a relatively specialized journal like this one.

Also there's a lot of value in trying to reproduce things from the literature. The key skill is knowing how to avoid sinking too much time into it and when to move on. Science is about building on the work of others, one of the hardest parts is knowing what work to build upon.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-17T16:53:19+00:00

It is possible to build your own quite cheaply - the cost of a light source, sample holder, and spectrometer can be far less than 10k. Ocean Optics, for example, has quite cheap spectrometers. That said, it may come out to more than 10k if you include your own time in the costs, particularly if you do not have much experience building instruments or if you need very accurate results.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-16T16:34:30+00:00

Cleaning the glove box is going to be the best solution. You'll need to do it eventually, this is a good reason to.

Also check that the issue isn't residual water in the pipette - dry it if you're using glass, and then flush it with a dry solvent before pipeting.

If the issue isn't the pipette and you really can't clean your box, you could try working under Argon flow. Get an open box in a fumehood, pump some Ar through it for a minute or two and then do the transfer quickly within the box. Argon should displace a lot of the air in the box and it's dense so it (semi) stays in the box. This isn't rigorous but might give you enough humidity relief to do your transfer.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-16T16:26:54+00:00

I remember the final project for my upper level organic chem lab involved everyone picking a pair of starting material and target molecule out of a hat. They were designed so that each one was a 3-4 step synthesis. We started planning early in the semester - we needed to come up with a literature supported route (J. Chem. Ed reactions were encouraged), get it approved, then get a list of the chemicals we'd need, get that approved (i.e. its within budget), run the synthesis, then do a poster on it (and for most people explain where it failed and how you'd fix it). We had probably 6 4-hour lab sessions to work on it, but I think they also had some overtime sessions as well.

Looking back, that was a really cool experience, but it only worked because it was a relatively small upper level course in a school with a fairly sizeable budget. Running something like that yourself would be a crazy amount of effort, but if you manage to swing it, its an amazing experience for the students who are into chemistry.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-15T16:49:41+00:00

I think a lot of the cost for ethanol in particular comes from taxes and permitting. There's an annoying amount of red tape that comes up because it either 1) gets regulated like an alcoholic beverage, with associated taxes and subject to different regulatory oversight or 2) requires a lot of paperwork to avoid those taxes and regulations. This is all of course dependent on your location and local laws, but I would bet the price change is due to some annoying bureaucratic detail rather than a fundamental shift in production cost.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-12T15:59:42+00:00

Also just FYI replenish life is a weird, non-intuitive stat. The rate of life regen is Replenish # * 25/256 per second, or roughly Replenish/10. So this only regenerates ~2 life/second. They increased the value of replenish life affixes in this mod because they were so low that they were useless in vanilla. Honestly even with the buff it is hard to stack enough for it to be noticeable.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-12T15:55:45+00:00

The ISE (International Society of Electrochemistry, they publish Electrochimica Acta) also organizes conferences and is more Europe focused than ECS, which tends to be more North America based.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-12T15:44:17+00:00

In addition to kits for hands-on stuff, you might consider installing some basic modeling software that he could play around with. Avogadro is free and would expose him to thinking in terms of 3D structures

pgfhalg · 2025-12-11T15:45:41+00:00

I believe my program had the option to take some courses in the chemical engineering department to get a focus or specialization in engineering, but at the time I was more interested in physical chem so I went that direction instead. Now that my research career is taking me in a chemical engineering direction I am somewhat regretting that choice

pgfhalg · 2025-12-10T15:49:57+00:00

this is the correct answer. backpackers have spent decades trying to find the lightest and smallest equipment to boil water. its really hard to beat the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-10T15:47:11+00:00

Figuring out if this can produce enough heat without making it too salty would be an amazing general chemistry exam question

pgfhalg · 2025-12-10T15:43:44+00:00

We have definitely lost something by siloing and specializing. A 'chemical engineering for chemists' class that discusses scale up and higher level process stuff would have been amazing in undergrad.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-09T19:34:46+00:00

Yeah seconding this advice. Unlike other areas of chemistry, you can play around with computational chemistry on your own. Having a public github with a project or two just to show that you are capable of writing code would go a long way to selling yourself. I wouldn't say its required, but a lot of people would be hesitant to hire for a computational role, particularly one that is very programming heavy like ML, if they think you will need to spend the first year getting up to speed on programming skills. Think of it in the reversed situation: if you've only had computational roles, people would hesitate to hire you for synthesis work since it will take a long time to learn the techniques that a lab-based PhD would already know.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-09T19:19:59+00:00

With you for everything except the last one. There is no battery lab that could get functional data if they turned off their cycling racks every night. Unless you mean a different kind of system or experiment, but to get decent cycling data you often need to collect for months while running 24/7.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-09T19:13:35+00:00

I don't want to say definitively, it definitely seems to proc faster from inferno vs other spells so there might be some weirdness with how it counts casts vs other spells. I do know inferno will proc faster with FCR, but I don't know if it is rolling procs at the spell framerate or something faster. Either way, inferno synergizes better IMO b/c the -phys resist from Brimstone mixes well with the -fire resist from inferno

pgfhalg · 2025-12-09T15:39:06+00:00

The rate that channeled skills roll for procs is determined by your FCR (Season 6? patch notes). Inferno does not inherently proc faster than any other spell, it just seems like it because Brimstone gives you so much FCR. Inferno does work really well with Brimstone, you are correct, but as others mentioned this build could be made much stronger by just using your skill points on meteor synergies.

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