Having been vaping two weeks and blowing out my first atty on Friday, I'm a little taken aback at how often the attys are going to have to be replaced. I think it should be possible to improve upon the current e cigarette designs considerably, and there are a lot of great ideas here and I don't really have time to try any of them. I will generally probably continue to buy the necessary stuff to make it possible.
That being said, I thing it should be possible to make a vaporizer that uses a ceramic heating element rather than nicrome wire. I've read the "atomizer re-builder" thread with much interest and saw mention of the "SunRod" heaters which apparently are an encased nicrome heater and got me thinking why not take it to the next level and use ceramic heating?
Without going into the electronic theory, ceramic heating uses a material called Barium Titanate which has the interesting ability to self limit. That is, it will only heat to a certain temperature at which point it stops heating. This could be a great thing, how much battery power is wasted with overheating the atomizer?
I took the time today to perform a small experiment with a broken ceramic heater, the fan had quit working and I kept it thinking that I might be able to repair it or re-purpose the heater core. I disassembled the heater, and pried apart the heater core, and chipped off a chunk of the ceramic thinking I had found the answer to all our vapping prayers.
I pulled out an old PC power supply I re-purposed (do you see a pattern here) for a low voltage supply and clipped the chunk of ceramic with alligator clips and plugged in the PS. Nothing, not even a degree of temperature difference.
So.. after a bit more thought it occurred to me that the voltage isn't high enough to make this work. After all the heater core was designed to run at 120v house current. It also make sense that a ceramic material would require higher voltage to pass electricity though it. I took the best high voltage, low amperage power supply I could come up with on short notice which was a board from a disposable camera. I removed the tank capacitor and hooked the ceramic piece up to leads from this, the output voltage should be around 300 volts. The ceramic passed the voltage and seemed to have heated up very slightly!
Although it should be possible to miniaturize the electronics to increase the voltage sufficiently to energize a ceramic heater, I don't think that many would want to be placing this sort of power in their mouth. So I think the question is how low of a voltage can a ceramic material be designed to work at?
Also, I should point out Barium titanate is a mildly toxic material and should be handled with due caution. If it were to be used in an atty, I would probably put it into a stainless steel tube with a center-line wire as the anode/cathode.
That being said, I thing it should be possible to make a vaporizer that uses a ceramic heating element rather than nicrome wire. I've read the "atomizer re-builder" thread with much interest and saw mention of the "SunRod" heaters which apparently are an encased nicrome heater and got me thinking why not take it to the next level and use ceramic heating?
Without going into the electronic theory, ceramic heating uses a material called Barium Titanate which has the interesting ability to self limit. That is, it will only heat to a certain temperature at which point it stops heating. This could be a great thing, how much battery power is wasted with overheating the atomizer?
I took the time today to perform a small experiment with a broken ceramic heater, the fan had quit working and I kept it thinking that I might be able to repair it or re-purpose the heater core. I disassembled the heater, and pried apart the heater core, and chipped off a chunk of the ceramic thinking I had found the answer to all our vapping prayers.
I pulled out an old PC power supply I re-purposed (do you see a pattern here) for a low voltage supply and clipped the chunk of ceramic with alligator clips and plugged in the PS. Nothing, not even a degree of temperature difference.
So.. after a bit more thought it occurred to me that the voltage isn't high enough to make this work. After all the heater core was designed to run at 120v house current. It also make sense that a ceramic material would require higher voltage to pass electricity though it. I took the best high voltage, low amperage power supply I could come up with on short notice which was a board from a disposable camera. I removed the tank capacitor and hooked the ceramic piece up to leads from this, the output voltage should be around 300 volts. The ceramic passed the voltage and seemed to have heated up very slightly!
Although it should be possible to miniaturize the electronics to increase the voltage sufficiently to energize a ceramic heater, I don't think that many would want to be placing this sort of power in their mouth. So I think the question is how low of a voltage can a ceramic material be designed to work at?
Also, I should point out Barium titanate is a mildly toxic material and should be handled with due caution. If it were to be used in an atty, I would probably put it into a stainless steel tube with a center-line wire as the anode/cathode.
