Monday 7th June

I had two good meetings.

One with Shri Rajebhosale, Chief Manager, Agroone of Sakal Group in his office. We discussed the setting up of experiments in Nanded, and decided to plan the first public demonstration in Kolhapur between 22nd and 30th June 2010.

Then I visited the Garware College to set up experiments with Prof. Chikate. He took me to Prof. Gupta who said that I need to write an email to the Head of Department Prof Natu, get his approval and then only we can conduct the experiments. I was under the impression that this was already done by Prof Chikate. Anyway I had to wind up the whole setup and had to leave with no experiments. I was a bit disappointed.

Then visited the Scientific instruments shop and bought Potassium Nitrate which is a qualitative regent for Cl ions, went to Appap Balwant Chowk and bought a couple of books on "Quantitative Chemical Analysis".

The planned visit and meeting with Dr. Satish Pardeshi was the best part of the day. He has a big experimental group with 7 Ph. D. students in Pune University Chemistry Department. He was very enthusiastic and co-operative. After checking out 3 locations (terrace, vcanteen, his lab) we settled on a 4th location outside his lab. With the help of his Ph.D. students, set up a small burning bio-briquette experiment and lo and behold found the presence of Chlorine ions in the smoke. We had a series of experiments and he suggested that the use of Ammonium Chloride as a cloud seeding agent. It sublimates at low temperatures (around 300 deg). He demonstrated it by a crucible experiments and the vapor condenses as a white substance on any glass. Its marathi name is "Navsagar" (New ocean!) , and it is used as in kalhai. It used to be used in Bootleg liquor manufacture ! This may be the best discovery. To use NH4Cl as a cloud seeding agent. Kudos to Prof. Pardeshi. Later we had tea with all his students. They all are doing some experimental interesting stuff. He agreed to be part of the research team.

Also I discussed the possible use of "samidha" used in Varunyagnya. They are twigs Amba, Wad, Umbar and Erand. Interesting all these give out chick, that is have latex in it. My burning of old tires also has latex in it. How important is "latex" in cloud seeding?

I explained to them the concept of virtual water told to me by Ms. Rohini Nilekani. An I said that by burning biomass, we are releasing the "virtual" water and converting it to real water.

At night looked up NH4Cl properties of NH4Cl on the web. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_chloride and http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=12125-02-9&Units=CAL&cTG=on&cIR=on&cTC=on&cTZ=on&cTP=on&cMS=on&cTR=on&cUV=on&cIE=on&cGC=on&cIC=on&cES=on&cDI=on&cSO=on is very good as it sublimates at 300 deg centigrade. In fact it dissociates into NH3 and HCl. Both of these are lighter than air. Thus it will go up very high in the atmosphere. I need to set up an experiment immediately for this.

Organised and uploaded a lot more pictures on the Picassa site. This is going to take a while. Have more than 9000 pictures with 20 GB capacity.