Re:Trade secrets of the oldest family firm in the US (2012)
by ectoplasm on Sunday July 19, 2015 @03:30AM
(#9910346)
If you centrifuge salt water you'll get a concentration gradient and if it's saturated at the end you'll get salt crystals. Alloys aren't solutions, so it won't work, but you'll still get a gradient. You could iteratively refine by removing the unwanted half from two spins and combining the wanted halves for a third spin. I'm not sure this is practical...
Re:Trade secrets of the oldest family firm in the US (2012)
by wycx on Sunday July 19, 2015 @05:43AM
(#9910623)
Do people actually do this? Can the accellerations you reach with laboratory centrifuges induce sufficient concentration gradients in salt solutions? Surely the salt begins dissolving as you stop accellerating?
Re:Trade secrets of the oldest family firm in the US (2012)
by ectoplasm on Monday July 20, 2015 @12:13AM
(#9913958)
No, people don't do this in practice, and I haven't seen it done, but it could be done if you had the right equipment and a salty enough solution. Just decant the water at the end, salt doesn't dissolve immediately. I don't know how fast you'd have to go.
However, you could think of a mass spectrometer as working slightly along those lines: send charged ions though a curved magnet, and vary the magnetic field to steer the mass (i.e. the element) you are interested in to the detector.
The easiest way to determine the composition of a cymbal would be to use a handheld XRF analyser-that is a convenient method scrap metal yards use to identify alloys. If you are willing to trade time for precision & accuracy, you could use ICP-MS or ICP-OES or laboratory XRF.