On Aug 25, 2007, at 12:36 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
If they claimed the rate of gas evolution was higher than the input
_power_ could account for that would also be interesting. But they
don't -- they claim it's higher than the Faradic rate, which is
based on the CURRENT ALONE. With voltage something like five times
higher than the minimum needed to make the reaction go it's no
violation of anything to get out more gas than the "Faradic" rate
-- it just requires that a different mechanism be at work, such as,
say, pyrolysis in tiny hot spots on the electrodes (just to pull
one possibility out of the air). Until the evolved gas volume is
too large to be accounted for by the input POWER (rather than the
input CURRENT), it's not exciting news.
Note that the claim of cold fusion is very different: Power out is
larger than electrical power in. That's the big news; the
occasional violation of the Faradic gas evolution rate is rarely
mentioned as more than a footnote in most CF papers.
Violation of the Faradaic gas evolution rate happens all the time in
modern electrolysers, which work on the combined effects of
electrolysis and heat.
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
