[Amps] Water Types

[Ian White GM3SEK]

Robert B. Bonner wrote:
> Well except for H30 and OH.  Yikes Some of you have heard of H3O 
>right?  German Heavy water experiments (its radio active) and OH is 
>Light water.

Sorry, that's completely wrong - you're confusing ions (same nucleus, 
different number of electrons) with isotopes (different number of 
neutrons in the nucleus).

Ordinary H2O is electrically neutral, but it dissociates very slightly 
into the oppositely charged ion pair H-plus and OH-minus. H+ is a 
positively charged hydrogen atom, missing an electron; OH-minus is the 
hydroxyl ion that took the missing electron.

Neither H+ nor OH- can exist in isolation from the surrounding water 
molecules. As a gesture towards this fact, some chemists choose to write 
"H3O+" instead of H+, meaning it's an H+ with exactly one H2O attached. 
Others say that's not accurate either, so they continue to write H+ .

Whatever. The important fact is that its slight natural ionization means 
even the purest water has some very small electrical conductivity.


The radioactive isotope you're thinking of is tritium, usually written 
(superscript 3)H. It doesn't come into the purified water story at all.



>It has been commented here that what cut the grand canyon?  Water? Well 
>I'll tell you.  D.I. water is the most Corrosive in a solvent sense of 
>any of the waters.  It grabs everything and eats it away under flow. 
>Its almost something to be afraid of.

Definitely - pure water wants nothing more than to dissolve stuff and 
become impure.

I used to know people who operated heat exchangers between pure water 
and radioactive liquid sodium, kept apart by the smallest possible 
thickness of metal. All their problems were with corrosion from the 
water side; compared with water, liquid sodium was a pussycat.



-- 

73 from Ian GM3SEK