Some surprising (to me, anyway) developments.

I had originally planned to build an ultrasonic power supply with plans, schematics and whatnot, and come to find one on eBay for $50. This unit will supply 385 watts, which is much more than the 50-watt unit I had planned to build. And it will save me hours of designing, testing, and building.

After discovering that there are several names for what is essentially the same thing (thank you, eBay!), I redid my literature search and found this paper titled "Sonochernical Fixation of Nitrogen" where a graduate student at Ottawa does much of what I am proposing to do.

I haven't had time to read the paper in detail (only skimmed), but from a first impression of his experimental setup I'm guessing that he is not using a very high energy density (ie - the watts per square cm of his sonification is low), and he's sparging the gasses through a frit instead of using a pass-through probe with concentrator.

(It means he used a sort of aquarium air stone to bubble the gasses up through the solution. I didn't know either, I looked it up.)

So it *may* be that I'm looking in places where people have looked before, which means that my probability of success has dropped dramatically.

My original plan was to design a hobbyist-grade ultrasonicator that could be used for home sonochemistry experiments. That's a pretty interesting project in its own right, and I've always known that it's unlikely that I'll find anything.

Maybe in a few months will be the first "hackaday prize" entry featured as a "Hackaday Fail" :-)