[Terrapreta] Char sorption of water.

[Greg and April]

Interspaced at the ************* .


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Gerald Van Koeverden 
  To: Greg and April 
  Cc: Terrapreta at bioenergylists.org 
  Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 21:35
  Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Char sorption of water.


  I am not claiming scientific validity.  Just exploring an observational phenomenon that it seems nobody else has noticed.  (I haven't had any responses from anyone who says that it doesn't work for them.)

  ******************
  If you say so, but this is one of those cases where the compleate oppisite is true as well - lack of reports does not either comfirm or deny what you report.    I'm just saying that it isn't evidance one way or the other, that there is a chemical reaction going on.    That is why I was pointing out that a more scientific approch would be helpful.
  ******************


  It does make common sense that for charcoal to be an integral part of soil habitat, that a water continuum should exist between the two.  Facilitating the transformation of charcoal from hydrophobic to hydrophilic (or at least 'hydro-neutral') characteristics might be key to establishing new terra pretas more quickly..


  ******************

  There are several common materials that I can think of, that can start off hydrophobic and then become hydrophilic - peat moss is one of them.    You can have the devils own time trying to wet down completely dry peat, but once it is wet, it will stay wet for a long time.

  A friend of mine on an aquaponics list, reported that one time ( as an experiment into the possible use of charcoal as a growing substrate ) he put some lump charcoal in a mesh onion sack, and tossed it in a tank of water, and while it floated at first, in a couple a days it sank, and when he fished it out of the tank, it held water surprisingly well.    He said if the charcoal wasn't so expensive, he would have tried it as substrate since it ( the charcoal ) was much lighter than the gravel normally used as the growing medium.

  Is the char, like well dried peat, in that a physical change has to occur, or does it require a chemical change?    A chemical change should be easy to document ( with the use of distilled water, any chemical changes should show up as trace elements in the water after the reaction ), where as a physical change, may require the services of a powerful microscope.

  Greg H.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /attachments/20080307/6a908b15/attachment.html