Tried growing them after this post made it to the HN last time.
Killed about two months on this and nothing good came out of it. Got some crystals, sure, but definitely nothing that is even in the same ballpark as in the post.
It all sounds simple, in principle, but requires skills and experience. Like making a good carbonara or decent croissants. It's all in the technique.
Distilled water is effectively demineralized... Not perfect... technically it's collected steam from boiling water, so it kills most bacteria and leaves most other material or minerals that can't be carried by steam.
I hadn't considered that steam could carry tiny particles of minerals, but it's obvious now that you point it out. So demineralized water would probably be closer to pure H2O. I've never noticed demineralized water at my grocery store, but maybe that's just because I've never looked. But I will next week!
microplastics and forever chemicals both show up in clouds and rainwater, so I'm guessing they're both in distilled water, but I wonder if at least the microplastics are removed from demineralized water
In the USA it is almost always labeled distilled water.. I've never seen "demineralized water" advertised as the alternate methods are relatively new (at a competing price point).. but they would likely just be called purified, and you'd have to look at the label.
Purified water may or may not be demineralized, depending on the method used to purify.
Basically any other form of bottled water is about as regulated as homeopathic remedies... Short of killing people, nobody really watches them. This is part of the reason why distilled water is recommended for home medical use like CPAP machines or Neti pots, with purified as second best (though it COULD be equal or better, the term is too generic)
Did you document your failure? I'm honestly curious -- the author of the post mentions some of their false starts, but I think a description of what you tried and what didn't work could be valuable (even if you didn't do an extensive root cause analysis). There are a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacks here trying to suggest what you did wrong, but unless someone has tried and failed themselves I don't think there's a lot of value in the feedback.
At the very least, all containers used for growing crystals should pass the water break test. That requires substantially better cleaning than a casual wipe down with an old sponge & some dish soap.
When I read about growing crystals online, I always have to think of the old 4chan "prank" that under the promise of beautiful crystals instructs the unsuspecting reader to brew some chloramine gas.
I don't know, should we? Over here, potassium permanganate became a regulated substance only about 10 years ago so I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 more years, sodium hypochlorite too stops being sold over the counter.
Now, lest this comment of mine becomes too upvoted, here is another controversial take to counterbalance it: some things can be used almost exclusively only to kill people, like guns, unlike knives. Yes, you can stab or cut someone with a knife, but you can stab or cut many other things than humans for useful and helpful effects while the gun allows you too... put small, deep holes into things from a distance, with not-so-great accuracy? At the very best, you can sit in an arm-chair with your hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, but I feel strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of your room would be improved by it.
It's still alive in some form - the user database was migrated and old accounts can be accessed on the new site through a per-user token. If you had an account you may still be able to get the token and get into the new site. I haven't finished the transfer myself, though.
Despite seeing this before it’s always a joy to be brought back to this site. It feels like the old internet did in terms of content, but has the high quality presentation that the modern internet is capable of. It’s a real treat.
This was posted before ages ago, and I suspect I know the answer, but I have to ask -- has anyone here successfully done this?
I had grand designs to use ethanol as an anti-solvent to accelerate crystal growth, and I bet you can guess how much progress I made towards that goal. Maybe I've lost my hacker mojo entirely and should be expelled from this site forever.
1. Build a quartz crucible inside an inert argon atmosphere
2. Heat it to 2600F/1400C
3. Melt your highly pure silicon in it
4. Add in a seed at the top that the rest of the silicon can crystalize around
5. Now comes the tricky part that requires some experimentation: Pull out the seed very carefully while rotating it, so that an ingot forms around it as you keep pulling
I genuinely think that was one of the more amusing exchanges I found on HN. There is just such a weird level of.. it could very well be a deadpan joke, but also a well-meaning, helpful response.
This made me realize that I don't mind humor in HN comments when they're genuinely clever.
This is opposed to what you often see on Reddit where the "funny" comments are just chains of some meme/common phrase and display no ingenuity (though, to be fair, I did once find those comments funny).
Well, clearly your first problem is that you want it to be that large in the first place. 30cm ought to be enough for everyone, if it's good enough for TSMC it's good enough you.
Everyone knows TSMC can't make the newest AI chips that have to multiply a 1,000,000,000x1,000,000,000 matrix every clock cycle. What if you're trying to compete with Nvidia?
Look up making Rochelle's salt, it's relatively straightforward to carry out in a kitchen using essentially the same equipment outlined in this article.
Great tip! Making Rochelle's salt definitely looks very doable. I found a video on YouTube that grew crystal and used it as mic on a guitar. Sounds pretty good to be honest! Though the form factor is a bit odd - a bulky crystal blob :D
https://youtu.be/8QP7F1VT1rw?si=guMAa-oof6xQCgol
The first step says to use sea salt. I thought the defining feature of sea salt is that it was going to be a collection of minerals that happened to be dissolved in the ocean water collected that day.
Practically speaking I assume little impact, but would you not want to start with more pure NaCl?
i'm guessing you can add dilute solutions of sodium fluoride and calcium chloride dropwise to a large beaker of water being constantly stirred, with a seed crystal in it? fluorite has a very non-negligible water solubility of 15 mg/liter and a reasonably high melting point, so intuitively i'd think this should be easy and fast
maybe the ingredients are hard for you to get tho, in which case you might be reduced to generating hydrogen fluoride from fluorite and an acid, then bubbling the gas into the beaker
the standard industrial method sounds like it would be pretty annoying to do in your garage:
> However single crystals for industrial applications are usually grown by solidification from a melt. The so-called Stockbarger-Bridgeman and the vertical gradient freeze processes are used for industrial manufacture of single crystals. The crystals are grown in a drawing oven and in a vacuum of 10^-־4 to 10^−5 mbar in the Stockbarger-Bridgeman method. A crystalline raw material is melted, so that a homogeneous single crystal is obtained with exacting control of temperature.
> In order to make the single crystals up to now the crystalline raw material is slowly heated in a vessel to the volatilization or evaporation temperature of water of about 400° C. and is maintained at this temperature in order to keep it free of water for some time. Additive scavengers, such as PbF2, SnF2 or ZnF2, are used to remove oxygen from the raw material. The added scavengers react with the oxygen present in the raw material and arising partially by oxidation and/or hydrolysis to form easily volatile oxides, which escape at these temperatures. After that a so-called refinement during a single week at 1450° C. usually is performed followed by a multi-week cooling to about 1200° C., in which the desired crystal is solidified from the melt. The single crystal so obtained is then cooled in a first slow cooling phase and then cooled to room temperature in a second accelerated cooling phase after the first cooling phase.
In kindergarten you can grow a bunch of interlocked small crystals. It's difficult to make a nice big one, as a sibling comment complains.
(We made a big one in high school, but it was AlK(SO4)2 instead of NaCl. They have a different shape. I'm not sure if they have other properties that make it easier. Kids may drink or eat it, I'm not sure if AlK(SO4)2 is safe enough for kindergarten. It was a side project that took a few month.)
The article here is the "advanced" version that is necesary to make big crystals. These kind of stuff usualy get traction here since forever, so it's not surprising that it got to the front page (multiple times). (Bonus points for nice photos.)
Killed about two months on this and nothing good came out of it. Got some crystals, sure, but definitely nothing that is even in the same ballpark as in the post.
It all sounds simple, in principle, but requires skills and experience. Like making a good carbonara or decent croissants. It's all in the technique.