The run started at 5:30PM (i.e. 1730) on day 1. The first "0" on the x-axis represents midnight, the end of day 1. By counting zeros you can see that the experiment ran over most of 9 days, ending at about 5PM on day 9. The experiment starts with a 20 mA charging current and the cell at room temperature. This charging current resulted in an input power of about .05 watts which is indicated by the fact that the Pin trace (purple) is just above the zero line. These conditions were maintained for about 27 hours (until about noon on day 2). At that time, the temperature in the experiment chamber was raised to 50C. All pertinent components of the CF experiment are located in the experiment chamber (i.e. pump, cell, tubing, and electrolyte reservior). The 50C temperature was maintained for the remainder of the experiment.
The 20 mA current was maintained until about 0700 on day 4. At that time the current was increased to 50 mA which resulted in a Pin of about .1 watts.
At about 0700 on day 5 the current was increased to 100 mA, resulting in a Pin of about .4 watts.
At about 0700 on day 6 the current was increased to 150 mA, resulting in a Pin of about 0.8 watts. This current was maintained until about 0700 on day 8 when the current was turned off (i.e the cell was disconnected from the power supply). The system ran with zero input power for the remainder of day 8 and until about 1700 on day 9.
The Pflow trace (cyan) tracks the Pin trace very closely (within 0.05 watts) during the entire run. The Pnlc trace (red) is considerably less well-behaved, especially in the first half of this run, but generally tracks the other two traces. Apparently, little or no recombination within the cell was occurring (I forgot to measure the flow rate of gas escaping during this experiment).
The yellowish trace is Troom and shows how our energy-saving thermostat lets the building warm up about 2C every night (outdoor temperature is almost always above 30C this time of year in Austin).
The vertical spikes that occur at 1/4 and 1/2 scale on the x-axis are perturbations in the Pnlc trace caused by a pause in normal program execution that occurs when the display is automatically rescaled along the time axis.
Suggestions for future experiments with these beads would be appreciated. Please send them to little@eden.com