In reply to Mike Carrell's message of Fri, 4 Apr 2008 13:05:57 -0400: Hi, [snip] >MC: My understanding of the Rowan work was that they had $75,000 for a phase >1 project and worked their tails off trying to set up the necessary >experiment, including buying laboratory vacuum gear off of eBay. They were >looking for critical spectral lines in the glare of the lines from hot >hydrogen when they ran out of money. They wanted to measure thrust directly, >but did not have the funds and NASA declined to fund a Phase 2 project. The >useful force can be small for a deep space probe: what counts is very high >velocity gas output applied continually over extended periods, as in an ion >thruster. Standing Bear is rilght, somesthing as energetic as the BLP >reaction *should* be valuable for a deep space thruster, but that particular >experiment did not make the grade. > >When Mills' work becomes more accepted, perhaps this application can be >revisited. > >Mike Carrell [snip] From their report, I got the impression that their results were minimal at best. This doesn't surprise me, as they used neon as the catalyst. They could hardly have made a worse choice, and I told them so. In reply they said that they did this in consultation with BLP. Reading between the lines, I got the impression that Mills had just discovered that neon could work as a catalyst, and was happy to have someone else pay the expense of an experiment to see how well it worked.
The ionization energy of Ne+ is 40.962 eV. At the time Mills tried to cobble together an explanation where this matched the total energy lost by H in dropping to the H[n=1/2] (which it does - almost), however that contradicts his own theory where the energy hole has to be a multiple of 27.2 eV. It makes much more sense that neon only works as a catalyst in a three body reaction:- Ne+ + Ne+ + H =====> Ne++ + Ne++ + H[n=1/4] (2 * 40.962 = 81.924, which is close to the m=3 catalyst value - 81.6 eV). However this reaction is a poor choice for several reasons:- 1) The first ionization energy of Ne is 21.5645 eV, which is higher than that of Hydrogen, so Ne+ is continually being reduced to Ne by the Hydrogen, which makes Ne+ (the catalyst ion) scarce in the plasma. 2) It's a three body reaction, which means that you need two of those scarce Ne+ ions concurrently to make it work. 3) When you do get two Ne+ ions together with an H atom, one of them is more likely to steal an electron from the H atom, than the pair is to trigger shrinkage. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://users.bigpond.net.au/rvanspaa/ Competition (capitalism) provides the motivation, Cooperation (communism) provides the means.
