From: Bob Higgins
* JB: Then you are mistaken. The purity is immaterial – the porosity is everything. Of course, if MFMP used a fused tube then that is another design flaw. * BH: The tube MFMP used is a high purity, high (near theoretical) density alumina tube Well, there you have it ! You have made clear that there a second part of the problem – and another intrinsic design flaw. There is no scientific reason to make these kinds of major changes in a successful experiment, and then to defend them to the point of irrationality, when the positive results did not happen. The tubes of Rossi and Parkhomov are sintered alumina. Sintered alumina has just enough porosity -- 7-8% to allow proton diffusion. The experimenters may not have chosen porous tubes for that exact reason, but that doesn’t matter in the end. Why they chose sintered alumina is not important - since it works. Nor does it matter where --- in the reactor --- the experimenter “thought” the reaction was occurring, unless there is proof that the experimenter really understands what is going on. No one understands this reaction, as best I can tell – so in any replication, the main thing that can be done is to duplicate. The MFMP did not duplicate. It does little to try to defend these changes “logically”, since the end result was a null experiment. Maybe the next run will be positive, but as of now, it appears that the changes which are at variance to the successful runs - are the crux of the problem. In both the successful experiments, there was porous alumina together with nickel-based resistance wire. In the unsuccessful MFMP reaction the was non-porous alumina and there was no nickel in the resistance wire. It does not take a genius to understand that these two differences could be responsible for the lack of success since we have 20 years of papers to use to help in an analysis. We know the gainful Ni-H reaction is proved – going back to Thermacore, and that it requires hydrogen in contact with nickel – lots of nickel. For the Thermacore gas phase experiment, they used hundreds of feet of nickel capillary tube to get 50 excess watts. It is incomprehensible to think that far less nickel will give far more excess heat, simply by raising the temperature. Bottom line: the sub-gram of nickel fuel is NOT sufficient in my opinion, and based on past experiments which did produce gain. And yes – this is my opinion and you can and will ignore it. But I would be remiss in not putting it forward and trying to emphasize how much stronger the scientific logic is - than to say basically “we made major changes, got null results, but the changes we made are defensible.” Jones
