At 08:40 AM 10/29/2009, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 03:43 AM 10/29/2009, Michel Jullian wrote:
2009/10/28, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com>:
> ...I believe that Earthtech has a very accurate
> calorimeter. If they got no excess heat, that would make their
> finding of no radiation quite understandable!
Not so. Detecting excess heat takes far more nuclear events than
detecting radiation with a SSNTD, at 24 MeV per event you need 10^10
events _per second_ to produce the 10 mW the best calorimeter can
detect!
Certainly it is possible that there would be radiation without
detectable excess heat, but there is a very important point that
Earthtech seems to have not addressed clearly. They claimed to
observe "SPAWAR pits," but then the pits that they observed appear to
be, to me, chemical damage, the "hamburger" as the Russians call it,
at the cathode, and then background pits immediately beyond the edge
of the hamburger. The hamburger has a fairly crisp edge. The
resemblance between it and radiation damage is weak. But SPAWAR, and
another Galileo replicator, show other kinds of pitting that
Earthtech did not report. One problem could be the silver cathode.
SPAWAR reports no back side pitting with silver, plentiful with
platinum, and copious with gold. SPAWAR also long reported low damage
with H20 and high with D20, Earthtech reports similar results with H20 and D20.
It seems to me that they did not see "SPAWAR pits" at all, but rather
chemical damage, and that the cause is some process variation that
resulted in no nuclear activity. As to calorimetry, it's one thing to
accurately measure total excess heat, it's another to identify heat
itself at the cathode. SPAWAR codep does appear to generate heat at
the cathode, the cathode becomes warmer than the electrolyte,
indicating heat being sourced there, whereas the cathode should be
low resistance compared to the electrolyte and so almost all Joule
heating would be in the electrolyte. (Though maybe it would be more
intense at the interface?)
The problem with the Earthech replication is that it can be
interpreted to impeach the SPAWAR conclusion of radiation detection,
when it's more likely that they didn't create NAE. And that's of
concern, itself. What was different? I'd say we need to know, but
Earthtech doesn't seem to have pursued the question. The only major
difference I've seen is that they appear to have used half as much
PdCl2, in the single run claimed as a Galileo replication, while
their cathode may have been (possibly) larger than the SPAWAR
cathode. With the silver cathode, it's hard to tell if they got NAE
at all, because back side pitting is low with silver. If they had
used gold, with no back side pitting over background as they
reported, the probability would become very high that there was no NAE.
It's crucial to develop other signatures of NAE, one is not enough
for rapid development in this field. It doesn't matter greatly if the
other signatures "prove" nuclear activity. It does matter if they are
strongly associated with NAE. That's why I'm looking for sound,
because SPAWAR has reported anomalous shock waves detected by a piezo
detector made into a codep cathode. These are ultrasonic, and I don't
know if I'll see them with sensors taped to the cell, but I'm going
to look. Likewise light emission should theoretically be there, if
indeed palladium is melting as SPAWAR has claimed. So I'm looking for
that. I'll be looking for temperature elevation as well; I'd like to
directly measure the cathode temperature, but I don't think that's
going to be possible in my first pass. But at least I'll be measuring
electrolyte temperature close to the cathode, and close to the anode.
Any other ideas? I'm getting pretty excited about using a mylar
window, because of what might be found. Consider the cathode wire
which is in contact with the mylar windwo. I expect that the
palladium deuteride deposit that builds up will be flat against the
mylar, I may be able to see the wire itself, in the middle of the
deposit, which would build out along the mylar, and which would have
a thickness that decreases with distance from the wire. If NAE arises
at some specific depth, *maybe* I'll see flashes of light only along
a line or region that corresponds, roughly, to that depth. I'll want
to arrange the LR-115 detectors so I can remove and replace them in
exactly the same position, and they will provide a somewhat diffused
radioautograph of the wire, I expect, which may also provide some
location information.
