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...
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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.