Abstract
ON Tuesday, November 12, the Faraday Society held a discussion on the above subject, attended by a very representative gathering of the various aspects of it, theoretical and experimental. After a foreword by the president, Sir R. Hadfield, on the great war, the discussion was opened by Prof. Alfred W. Porter, who emphasised that the term “occlusion” includes, in reality, a number of phenomena: chemical combination, simple or compound solid solution, surface adsorption accompanying solution, surface condensation unaccompanied by solution, and inclusion of gas forming blowholes visible to the naked eye or microscope. The difficulty of distinguishing between these several types was illustrated by the case of the occlusion of hydrogen by palladium, the nature of which, even at the present day, is still an unsettled problem. Amongst phenomena due to occlusion are the passivity of iron and the associated fact of the embrittling of iron by caustic soda. But there are other phenomena of more theoretical interest, such as the Volta effect, which has often been attributed to condensed layers of gases. By the experiments of O. W. Richardson and of Langmuir on thermionic emissivity, the question of the origin of the Volta effect has been completely reopened.
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The Occlusion of Gases in Metals . Nature 102, 234 (1918). https://doi.org/10.1038/102234a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/102234a0