A hot new topic, so to speak, in physics these days is called "magnetic reconnection" but there is fringier history for it going back many years to Tesla which includes the identical phenomena.
A common example of magnetic reconnection would be the Northern Lights or solar flares. When magnetic fields, or the field lines, in a plasma break apart, they often recombine with explosive force and a shock wave forms which seem to have anomalous energy. There has been a suggestion that Mills' sun-cell device with its high amperage is benefiting from magnetic reconnection in addition to dense hydrogen formation (assuming it works). Peter Graneau popularized a water arc gain (claimed) - and there are numerous other claims for net energy gain in electric arcs. A new research device, know as FLARE has recently come online at Princeton to study magnetic reconnection so we are seeing a convergence of conventional physics with the fringe https://phys.org/news/2018-03-powerful-device-puzzling.html#jCphttps://phys.org/news/2018-09-longer-dark-scientists-uncover-source.html#nRlv Perhaps the experiments will open up a better understanding of the thermodynamics in the context of alternative energy. Magnetic reconnection phenomenon is embodied in the Alfvén wave, named after Hannes Alfvén, a type of MHD wave in which ions oscillate in response to a "restoring force" (which essentially means the observers have no clue) ... <g>. Anyway, the mysterious restoring force seems to operated by way of an inherent tension on the magnetic field lines, like a spring but asymmetric.The sonic component is called "magnetosonics".. The "restoring force" of magnetic reconnection is most likely a subset of ZPE which would be a source of non-nuclear gain and which can turn up anywhere an arc discharge is seen. This is probably why the addition of a permanent magnetic field to an arc discharge can amplify the apparent gain. On a larger scale, magnetic reconnection gain is seen in the sun's corona. It is unclear why the temperature of the corona is so much hotter than the sun itself. Some of that excess heat has been attributed to dense hydrogen formation by Holmlid and Mills but perhaps it is a combination of both.
