Found this post by Breaktru on his modders forum, an exchange on Nickel between him and Brandon from Evolv:
Some people have asked about the concerns of using pure nickel wire for coils. Here is what Brandon of Evolv has posted in the Facebook beta group:
OK so John and I have been seeing quite a few emails concerned with the Nickel wire used with the DNA 40. We decided to write a response that I think may be interesting to all of you. Feelfree to steal from it any or all parts to drive away the hypothetical Nickel boggeyman
Original email:
Hi, Off the back of your announcement today of the new DNA 40 board and it's ability to control the temperature of a nickel coil, there has been much concern on vaping forums about the use of nickel wire as a coil. Here is an exert of some of the comments: "Bad, bad idea. Look up the toxicology of nickel and ask if you want to heat that and inhale the result. I won't. " "Nickel is relatively chemically unreactive to some things, but not to others. It reacts very rapidly with carbon monoxide. And nickel carbonyl is really evil crap. And heating any organic flavour is going to resul in some carbon monoxide production. " "So in your opinion using nickel or nichrome as heating wire for vaping is dangerous? I don't know enough about it to judge if you're right or wrong. I hope you're wrong because I think this about to be the next big thing in vaping. This technology is going to start popping up in mass market devices very soon and some premade atties are going to come with nickel rather than nichrome. " Are you able to allay any of these concerns over using nickel wire? Is there a specific type or grade of nickel we use? Does nickel wire pose any more harm than Kanthal A1? Kind regards
Our response:
We agree Nickel Carbonyl is truly evil crap. Fortunately, there isn't any here.
Point 1: We aren't generating carbon monoxide. The whole point of temperature protection is to, well, protect from elevated temperatures. Heating doesn't generate carbon monoxide. You have to be getting combustion or pyrolysis. And you have to be combusting in a fuel-rich (less oxygen that stoichiometric) environment. Like a cigarette. We never get anywhere near combustion temperature, and even if we did (say, one turned the temperature limit up to 2000 degrees) the environment in an atomizer is oxygen rich, not fuel rich. So you would get carbon dioxide, not monoxide. To get pyrolytic decomposition of the fluid into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, we would want a coil temperature of about 1500F and you'd need to have it sealed off from air completely.
Point 2: If this was a problem, we would have already seen it. The Mond process you describe (nickel ore to nickel carbonyl to nickel metal) is how one refines nickel from ore. The commercial coils are already 80% nickel and run at higher temperatures when they dry out. If we were getting nickel carbonyl production, that would refine the nickel out and we would end up with a porous wire with only 20% chromium left. That's not what happens.
Point 3: Given that all the real research, vapor analysis and long term studies that have been done to this point have been done with commercial cigalikes, all of which use nichrome coils (80% nickel and not at all protected from overheating) if there was a substance as toxic as nickel carbonyl in the vapor, the anti-ecig forces would be screaming that from every rooftop. Nobody has found any, even in devices that aren't temperature controlled. One study did find some metallic nickel and metallic chromium from pitting in the vapor steam, so they were obviously looking for metallic compounds.
I'm attaching the Goniewicz research paper which is one often cited by those on both sides of the e-cigarette safety debate. The study looked at products using nichrome heating coils. And yes, they measured nickel. The study also looked for carbon monoxide in the vapor stream and found none. Zero. The following excerpt is from the study:
"The amounts of toxic metals and aldehydes in e-cigarettes are trace amounts and are comparable with amounts contained in an examined therapeutic product."
Dr. Michael Siegel said of the Goniewicz paper:
"The most important finding in this study (that the authors failed to acknowledge) was that all of the trace levels of metals they found in e-cigarette aerosol were within permissible exposure limits for FDA approved inhalable drugs and devices (e.g. nicotine inhaler, asthma inhalers) per Pharmacopeial Convention."
Basically it boils down to anything a Nickel 200 coil would do, a nichrome coil would already be doing (and worse due to higher temperatures) and nichrome coils are the only ones that have been studied in any meaningful detail by the real scientists, labs and MDs.
What Kanthal is or is not doing, we cannot say as we haven't really studied it.
What is a problem with the commercially available nickel 200 wire is they use a particularly nasty tasting oil in the drawing process. So if you roll a new coil without degreasing the wire first, you initially get a nasty taste from that oil. A good washing with acetone or simple green, followed by rinsing in water, solves that problem. But that is something to point out if people are reporting weird chemical tastes when they first try it.
Thanks,
Brandon
Evolv, LLC
