Good evening my fellow scientists it is Monday July 2nd 2018. I want to give you an update on this week's progress on an all iron battery. For those of you who are new here we have been working on developing a battery with an iron anode and an iron salt cathode. We've also been trying to manufacture the separator that goes between those two electrodes. For the separator we've tried aggro's, we've tried naphion, naphion is expensive and high performance and we want something that we can make ourselves but is nonetheless better than aggro's which turned out to be somewhat lackluster. We centered on a polymer with the property of naphion that has it immobilized acid group. Since naphion worked well we thought maybe we'd try mimicking it to some extent. So we made a hydrogel polymer of a chrylamide and acrylic acid and we tested it in a concentration cell. So it looks like this. On one side of that cell iron 2 is going to go to iron 3 and on the other side iron 3 is going to go to iron 2. It is a very low capacity low voltage cell but it should let us test how quickly that separator allows the cell to just leak and discharge itself. So we've tried naphion, we've tried agar this week, we tried the polyacrylamide co-acrylic acid, co-pollomer. This coming week we're going to try a nanopore polymer with 16 nanometer pores and what I think is a polypropylene membrane we're going to compare all four but so far let me go through with you how we made this a chrylamide acrylic acid co-pollomer. So we started with a chrylamide and a acrylic acid which are somewhat modestly hazardous chemicals. We then add a radical initiator. You can see the little radical there on that second acrylic acid molecule. That radical propagates across until you have a very long chain of these immobile acrylic acid and a chrylamide moieties. That performed somewhat intermediate between the naphion and the agar. So somewhat intuitively a hydrogel like agar with an immobilized acid group like naphion was about halfway in between and it loses about 0.4 volts per day compared to the 0.2 and 0.8. Little tough given the unevenness of that curve but we're sort of calling it halfway in between based on on the range we chose to average. So this leaves me a little bit torn. The acrylamide acrylic acid co-pollomer isn't something that you want to do in your garage it involves a radical initiator. We use ammonium per sulfate and organic amide called temid. These are not things you want to have laying around. Acrylamide is modestly carcinogenic so this probably isn't garage level chemistry but on the flipside I want this to be something that can be made at least as much as possible from scratch not specialty battery equipment and supplies. So my last gamut for a hobbyist friendly separator one could make oneself as a paper impregnated with sodium polyacrylate and that polymer is available as a sort of absorbent for disposable diapers it absorbs a lot of weight in water it's a kind of gel material that's all to the good it's very cheap that's good if it performs as well as our homemade polymer I think I'm gonna call that the best home brew option and then suggest that for higher performance we use a professional membrane call it good. So until we get our sodium acrylate we're going to push on making more iron soluble in that solution we're gonna update you with the progress on the sodium acrylate the nanopore membrane and the higher concentrations of iron next week. Thank you for tuning in we appreciate all of your help especially those of you who kicked into the crowdfunding campaign thank you very much TNICO for all this hard work and we will see you next week