As I get older, I find that certain pathways of thought that I have become too comfortable with must occasionally be abandoned and new paths forged through the jumbled jungle that is my brain.
Some of you may have noticed that I have had very little if anything to say about current density since the great bipolar/unipolar amperage computation debacle a couple of weeks ago. It was cause for a great deal of consternation, and then meditation on a range of info, concepts, and gut feelings.
So, without further ado, this is what I figured out about unipolar reactors...
Because of the fact that multiple plates of a given polarity residing in a single group are hardwired together, their entire emissive surface area, meaning both sides of inner plates and the in-facing side of end plates, must be considered as the area of Faraday calculation for the 1/2 amp per square inch maximum.
When I realized this, it suddenly became very clear why Larry struggled at 115 amps to get the Mag Beast to break 102F, and why the original BioBeast when getting blasted with 145 amps was not even discernibly above ambient.
I'll break it down for you... The original BioBeast had 4 groups, with 21 plates per group- and to keep things clear, simply think of it as 20 plate FACES of EACH polarity. Each plate FACE has 45sq.in. of emmisive, or wet area. Now comes the truly mind numbing part that popped my eyes open from a deep meditative state.
20 FACES X 45sq.in each = 900sq.in.... 900sq.in. of a single polarity in a single group. Now, you know what happens next, right? I thought so... We assign 1/2 amp per square inch to that number, and come up with an astonishing 450 amps to operate it at full current density.
To put this in another context for easier visualization, think of it like this...
+______[+-]_[+-]_[+-]_[+-]______- Where each plate, 8 of them for the sake of visualization in this instance, is 900sq.in.. From an electrical standpoint, this is what is happening in a unipolar reactor.
Apologies for taking so long to gain enlightenment.