http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2010/34/343inexplicableclaims.shtml
This is a discussion of the Violante
presentation,
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2004/ICCF11/pres/64-Violante.pdf
Here, I will comment on the Krivit report,
pointing out how he has misunderstood and/or
misrepresented research in the field.
3. Inexplicable D-D "Cold Fusion" Claims From Italy
By Steven B. Krivit
For 21 years, a subgroup of LENR researchers has
hypothesized a D+D > 4He + ~24 MeV (heat) cold
fusion reaction to explain the excess heat and
helium-4 measured in some LENR experiments.
That's misleading; here the Violante presentation
is discussed, and it does not do anything more
than, in one figure, plot excess heat onto a plot
of helium measurements using the 24 MeV Q-value,
a convenient way to show that the measurements
are consistent with this. But that's the only
mention of d-d fusion in the article, in the
caption for the plot. What the report emphasizes is:
The accordance between revealed 4He and produced
energy seems to be a clear signature of a nuclear
process occurring in condensed matter.
The paper is not about the theory. It's about correlation of heat and helium.
Attempts to measure experimental values of
MeV/4He were considered very important by the
subgroup because the group members thought such
attempts would help validate their hypothesis of
a D-D cold fusion reaction in LENR experiments.
That's mind-reading, like that done by Gary
Taubes fifteen years ago. Rather, there have
indeed been attempts to determine heat/helium
ratio, beginning with Miles in the early 1990s,
and it's certainly of interest! In particular,
Preparata had predicted that helium would be
found, whether or not the rest of his theories
were correct. What has actually been said is that
the heat/helium measurements are "consistent"
with the heat expected from helium production
from deuterium as a fuel. They are not proof that
d+d is the exact reaction, and there has not yet
been, to my knowledge, sufficient work to nail
down the actual ratio; what has been found is
ample to be able to state that results are
"consistent" with the expected Q value, given
experimental error and the very real probability
of some level of unrecovered helium.
At the October/November 2004 11th International
Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science
meeting in Marseilles, France, a group led by
Vittorio Violante (ENEA Frascati) presented a
graph (shown below) from its presentation
"<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2004/ICCF11/pres/64-Violante.pdf>Review
of Recent Work at ENEA," which claimed
reasonable experimental agreement with the ~24
MeV prediction of the D-D "cold fusion"
reaction. The graph shows the results of three
runs of the groups experiment C3. Violante gave
a
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/DOE2004/Aug23-2004DOE-ReviewMeeting.pdf>presentation
with the same name on Aug. 23, 2004, to the
Department of Energy and its LENR review panel.
"Reasonable experimental agreement" means within
roughly a factor of two of the predicted value.
Note that this is a prediction, not from the
reaction itself, but from energy released per
helium atom of it is formed, by whatever
reaction, from deuterium. There are other ways of
creating helium that would not involve deuterium,
perhaps, such as by neutron absorption by heavier
nuclei and resulting alpha radiation, but this
would run into the difficulty of the apparent importance of using deuterium.
For whatever reason, the presentation does not
appear to have impressed the DoE reviewers, and
the report itself mangled what solid evidence was
in the main text of the Hagelstein report paper,
instead focusing on a completely garbled and
incorrect report based, I figured out, on the
Appendix, which was difficult to read and understand.
New Energy Times contacted Violante for more
information about this experiment and the data
reported. He directed us only to the related
paper
"<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/library/2005/2005Apicella-SomeResultsAtENEA.pdf>Some
Recent Results at ENEA" and explained that it
was published in the ICCF-12 proceedings. [1]
Unfortunately, this paper gives only a little
more information. But it does confirm that the
Violante group did do calorimetry.
The graph below is, in fact, largely but not
entirely illogical. The authors intended this
slide to support their claim of reasonable
experimental agreement with the prediction of
the D-D "cold fusion" reaction. This article
will examine and investigate the differences
between the slides apparent meaning and its
real meaning.
(<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2010/34/ENEA-ViolanteEV-4He-Fall2004-100.jpg>Click
here for full-size image of the graph.)
They don't state that claim. Rather, in order to
present the energy data in the same plot as the
helium data, some conversion factor would need to
be used. They picked an obviously useful one, a kind of baseline.
Fig. 1 - Violante groups claim of reasonable
experimental agreement with the prediction of
the D-D "cold fusion" reaction. Presented at
October/November 2004 ICCF-11 meeting in
Marseilles. "Laser-3" experiment shows
misleading appearance of close agreement between theory and experiment.
The graph doesn't make that claim and the
presentation doesn't make that claim. There are
only three helium measurements and three energy
measurements. One of the energy measurements is
clearly an outlier, the energy was not much more
than a tenth of that shown in the other two, and
the helium level was not quite so low. The
apparent coincidence ("close agreement") is
really buried in the noise, if you look at the
error bars and come to understand the chart. I'm
afraid that Violante et al did not make that
easy. This was a slide presentation, and the
later paper a conference paper, and not necessarily carefully done.
However, if you showed me three measurements,
where, say, a theory predicts a result of X, and
two of the measurements are roughly 2*X, and one
is roughly X, I'd hardly call this an "appearance
of close agreement." It's merely interesting, but
the figure of X is quite likely artifact, because
most other experiments in the field report more
like 2X, with values declinine with increased
effort to recover all the helium, approaching, in the extreme, X.
New Energy Times takes the graph at face value
and assumes the following facts to be true:
* The green circles represent measured values of excess heat.
Krivit elsewhere contradicts this, claiming that
they did not actually do calorimetry. At press
time for this report, Krivit has not responded to
resolve this contradiction. :-)
* As confirmed in the published paper, the
measured values of excess heat are 23.5 kJ, 3.4 kJ and 30 kJ.
* The measured values of excess heat were
obtained and reported rigorously.
* The label "Expected values" is illogical;
the authors cannot have predicted how much
excess heat the three runs of experiment C3
would produce. We assume it is wrong.
Krivit completely misunderstood this. It's a
device for representing correlated heat on a plot
of helium measured. (Actually, the helium
measured must have been translated to some figure
that represents, in some way, all the helium
extracted, if it is based on samples and not
somehow processing the entire contents of the
cell, but Krivit doesn't consider this and it was not reported.)
"Expected values" simply means the helium levels
expected if (1) all the helium were recovered,
apparently, and (2) helium were formed with a
release of heat of 24 MeV. They do not mean
"expected" in the sense that Krivit reads, that
somehow these values were expected before the
experiment. It means "expected if the Q value is 24 MeV/He-4"
* The red triangles represent measured
helium-4 produced in the experiment.
* The label "Background" and the light blue
line are largely irrelevant to the issue of
measured excess heat to the number of 4He
atoms, assuming the experiment is well-isolated from the environment.
No. No attempt was made to remove background
helium, it appears. So when the measured energy
was converted to expected helium per the 24 MeV
Q-value, the background level was added, as
generated helium would add to background helium.
* The measured values of produced helium-4
are shown correctly on the graph. In the text
of the paper, the authors did not state the
helium-4 measurements in either the text or in
a table; instead, they directed readers to this graph, identified as Figure 22.
There are a number of things they did not state,
which I regret. They did not explicitly state the
process for converting the measured heat into a
predicted value for helium, beyond noting the Q-value used.
* The values of the helium-4 shown on the graph were measured accurately.
Well, the value for the low-energy experiment,
Laser 3, is pretty loose. When you realize that
the figures include background, and that what is
really being seen as excess helium is only what
is above the blue line, you can see that the
measurement is quite loose, the error bars are
about as far apart as the center is above the background.
* The measured values of excess heat are
represented graphically in proportion to one
another and are linear, despite the fact that
authors failed to display the scale for excess heat.
They did not need a scale, though they could have
supplied one and it might have made the chart
easier to read. The scale would have begun with zero at the blue line!
*
* The value shown for 23.5 kJ is located
incorrectly, assuming that the points for 30.0
kJ and 3.40 kJ are shown in the correct location and are displayed linearly.
What's more likely is that the value of 3.40 kJ
is not accurately placed. I come up with these
values for the green dots, and the actual placements of the green dots:
Laser 2: 1.18 x 10^16 atoms, chart placement: 1.20, offset 0.03
Laser 3: 0.64 x 10^16 atoms, chart placement: 0.72, offset 0.08
Laser 4: 1.34 x 10^16 atoms, chart placement: 1.27, offset 0.07
There is one problem. With each experiment, the
background was separately measured. What if the
background correction used for the expected
helium were different for each point? The
background level in the chart could be merely for
general information, but they did have to
calculate the plot positions somehow, using
background, and since they had specific
background for the particular cell, it would not
be surprising if they used it. To come up with my
"green values," I used a figure simply taken from
the general background line. In fact, had they
used for each calculation the measured
background, it would have been better. So I think
they did that, and this would explain the small
discrepancies in the chart. I don't think they were asked the right questions!
* Ordinarily, two sets of data values are
depicted on a single graph to show the relationship between the values.
That's one way to do it. It's not the only way.
The way they used would have been fine, in fact,
if they had simply explained how they did it.
Indeed, if there were different background
corrections, it would be about the only way to
present the data clearly. They could have also
done a "best fit" calculation and reported that
Q-value. It would have been just as impressive,
particularly if they had also reported each individual Q-value.
* The plotted points for the helium
measurement and the plotted points for the
excess heat, as shown, have no relationship to
each other, and they cannot and should not be compared.
That's just plain incorrect. They are a means of
showing how close the measured value for helium
agrees with the 24 MeV value which is simply one
possible prediction, a handy one and certainly of
interest. As it turns out, only one point is
close (and it, in fact, undershoots the expected
value, though the error bars are horrific.) The
others are consistent only with a hypothesis of
retained helium, not measured. Generally, it's
considered that up to half the helium is not
recovered and measured. Krivit challenges this
hypothesis, but, I'd say, not successfully; in
this he follows Larsen's critique of McKubre's work.
But there is a lot more work than just that of
Mr. McKubre; this whole topic is covered by Storms in his 2007 book.
* The plotted points for the helium
measurement and the plotted points for the
excess heat have a logical relationship
(MeV/4He), and this relationship can and should be compared.
* In the six years this graph has been in
the public domain, the authors have not announced any errors or retractions.
I see no major errors in the graph. It's a little
sloppy, perhaps, though not greatly. More
problematic is that the method of generating the
"expected" values isn't detailed, and the
necessary information that the helium
measurements are total helium, as measured, and
not "increased" as implied by the caption, is
missing. But the chart makes no sense if it isn't
total helium. (That is, the excess energy plots would be way off.)
In an e-mail exchange with Violante on Jan. 24
and 25, 2010, New Energy Times explicitly asked
Violante for the values of measured helium-4
because they were not specifically stated in the paper.
Sure. However, those numbers were reasonably
apparent from the graph. Missing is the analysis
that produced the error bars. I.e., what was
actually measured and what was calculated?
Violante provided ambiguous and conflicting responses to questions.
Perhaps. Certainly it seems that Krivit didn't
understand the responses, but it's also quite
possible that Violante did not understand the
questions, or, indeed, the motivation behind the
questions, which can make a difference.
After three unsuccessful attempts to get a
straight answer from Violante, we decided to
rely on the numbers in the graph. We read from
the graph the following values of helium-4 atoms
produced: 0.90, 0.72 and 1.05 E+16 atoms.
No. That's total helium measured, not helium
"produced." Key point. And that is the midpoint.
Actual measurement value, with error bars known
from other evidence, such as calibration of the equipment, etc.? Probably.
I come up with somewhat different values, but
it's not important. Definitely, I'd want to have
seen, in the paper, the actual values. How much
space would three numbers have taken up? And
then, if there were separate background
measurements (they were taken!), those too should have been given.
We also asked Violante twice to explicitly state
his measured values of excess heat/helium
(MeV/4He). The first time, he said he did not
understand but gave the following puzzling response.
Perhaps that's because he didn't measure excess
heat/helium. It's a calculated value, and in this
case, it involves converting the excess heat in
kilojoules calculated from integrating the
calorimetry excess power over the run, to MeV,
and dividing it by the helium atoms found -- after subtracting background.
"The produced energy per event is 24 MeV,"
Violante wrote. "The expected values (green
points) are estimated on the basis of such a value."
This is probably a language problem. He means
that "The green points were estimated from
calculated excess heat using a value of 24 MeV
per helium atom, then adjusted for background."
He just didn't state the background adjustment,
perhaps he thought it was obvious....
I understand Krivit's dilemma, it was not obvious.
His response suggested he had concluded that the
MeV/4He value for the heat measured in his
experiment definitively was ~24MeV/4He.
No, it's almost certain that is not what he
intended, and certainly it is not what his
experiments determined. I'd suggest that what
people say be interpreted so as to make sense,
and, given the paper and presentation, the
"suggestion" doesn't make sense. He did not
"measure" 24 MeV. He merely used that figure as a
means of presenting the data consistently for the three experiments.
His dogmatic attitude was unfortunate, in
light of the two decades of invective directed
toward researchers in this field for being "true believers."
And this becomes entirely offensive. There was no
"dogmatic attitude," at least not in what Krivit
has reported to us. Merely some difficulty,
apparently, in communication, and I'm not
terribly surprised. The "dogmatic" accusation
came up awfully easily. Was it there already, a
lurking hypothesis looking for confirmation?
Speculation. But consistent with other evidence
in this whole issue of New Energy Times.
In an attempt to remove any potential ambiguity,
we asked him a second time: "What are the
measured MeV/4He values for Laser-2, Laser-3 and Laser-4?" He did not respond.
I don't know why. But I could guess. It can be
hard to communicate with a bulldozer bent on blazing a trail through your work.
Nonetheless, we continued our analysis based on
the excess-heat values stated in the paper,
which match with the values shown in the text labels of the graph.
We calculate the heat per helium-4 atom and get
16.30, 2.95 and 17.83 Mev/4He. The data are shown below in Table 1.
Unfortunately, it is likely Krivit did not factor
for background. I did, using the value of 0.555 x 10^16, and came up with
Laser 2: 35 - 60 MeV, midpoint 45 MeV
Laser 3: 9 - 17 MeV, midpoint 12 MeV
Laser 4: 30 - 49 MeV, midpoint 37 MeV
Now, did I make some mistake? Good chance. I did
the calculations several times, wrong, until I
was finally satisfied. The good news: except for
the outlier, Laser 3, which also had the lowest
excess heat and so also the least reliable helium
figure, the results for Laser 2 and Laser 4 are consistent with other work.
Table 1: Values of helium-4, excess heat from
ENEA-Violante groups experiment C3 series.
Based on this information and our assumptions,
New Energy Times constructed a modified version of the Violante graph.
And since garbage in, garbage out, the whole
thing is a muddled mess that Krivit then uses to
seriously impeach Violante's work.
[...]
Even if we assume that "background" is somehow
relevant, and it has not yet been subtracted
from the helium values displayed on the graph,
it does not improve the authors' case.
Table 3: Values of helium-4, excess heat from
ENEA-Violante groups experiment C3 series with
0.55 ppm "background" subtracted.
Table 4: ENEA-Violante experiment C3. Measured
MeV/4He vs. MeV/4He predicted by the D-D "cold
fusion" reaction with 0.55 ppm "background" subtracted.
Here Krivit comes up with roughly the same values
as I calculated. Nice to know I didn't completely screw up.
Six months after the Violante group presented
the graph at the Marseilles ICCF conference, it
added new text to the graph, as shown below.
Fig. 3 - The graph shown by the Violante group
at American Physical Society meeting in March
2005 states, "The expected amount of increasing
of 4He is in accordance with the energy gain by
assuming a D+D = 4He + 24MeV reaction. 4He
stripping from cathode increases the correlation with produced energy."
The new label on the above chart, "Anodic
erosion of Pd," incorrectly implies that the
large underlying difference between the
researchers theoretical prediction and their
experiment for Laser-3 is coherently explained
by the helium retention hypothesis invented by
SRI and MIT researchers. Unfortunately, in the
previous article, "The Emergence of an
Incoherent Explanation for D-D "Cold Fusion," we
showed that hypothesis to be unsupported and
contradicted by more than 100 years of experimental evidence.
Krivit is not a scientist, he's a journalist, and
he's drawing conclusions well outside his
expertise. I'm also not a scientist, per se, I am
certainly not an expert, but I can see through the errors.
What Krivit has done is to completely discard the
"expected helium" values projected from the
excess heat measurements. I found that those
green dots seemed to be imprecisely placed, but I
used a constant value of 0.555 x 10^16 (a little
higher than Krivit). The researchers, I'm
guessing, used the actual background measurements for each experiment.
And then they noted that Laser 3 involved
"stripping," and I'd have to look back at the
description of this experiment to see how it was
different. But Laser 3 is so far down in the
noise that I'm not sure it means much.
Violante told New Energy Times that experiment
C3 was performed in June 2004. Two months later,
at the invitation of the SRI and MIT
researchers, he presented his recent (at the
time) results at the Aug. 23, 2004, Department of Energy LENR review.
So it was very fresh, and the report may have been put together in a hurry.
Because SRI researchers were co-authors of
Violante's 2004 presentation and 2005 paper and
because DARPA funding, through SRI, made its way
to ENEA through a collaborative relationship
between SRI and ENEA, the Violante group may
have been influenced by the erroneous helium
retention hypothesis of the SRI and MIT researchers.
And Krivit may be influenced by his delusional
attachment to some strange interpretation of Widom-Larsen theory.
Helium retention is highly likely, it's accepted
by Storms, and Krivit (and Larsen, apparently,
which may be where Krivit gets this from, he
credits Larsen) has completely confused the
insolubility of helium in palladium with some
idea that palladium could not "retain" helium,
when, in fact, if the helium is generated inside
the palladium, and comes to rest there, it will
stay there *unless* it is in a fractured lattice.
Or the palladium where it is sitting melts. The
reaction site and where the helium nucleus comes
to rest will normally be somewhat separated.
And this is going to be the case no matter how
the helium is generated, unless it is somehow
generated with very low energy, so that it stays
put. Which is insanely unlikely.
This ENEA experiment clearly shows production of
helium-4 as a result of some nuclear process,
and it shows clear evidence of excess heat.
However, the measured data does not support the
claim that it provides strong support for the
hypothesized D-D "cold fusion" reaction.
The point of the ENEA experiment was not to
support some particular hypothesized reaction,
and perhaps that's why Violante had some
difficulty understanding and responding to
Krivit's questions. The point was indeed simply
that excess heat and helium are correlated. Get
more excess heat, get more helium. The numbers
for the two most solid experiments were quite
close, and match reports from other groups well.
Laser 3 was an outlier, and the amount of heat
was low, it's entirely unclear what happened with
it. And it's also quite possible that the
background measurement for that run was different.
Indeed, it is irritating that full information is
not disclosed. Perhaps if someone asks Violante nicely....
On Jan. 25, 2010, this writer e-mailed Violante
and asked for the measured values of helium produced from experiment C2.
We received a confusing answer.
Several times now, Krivit has claimed that an
answer was confusing, but given his own
confusion, it would have been better to report
the actual answer! Maybe someone else would have understood it!
On Jan. 25, 2010, this writer again e-mailed
Violante, asking, "What is the amount of helium
produced from Laser 2, 3 and 4 experiments?"
Violante answered, "For the three points in the
plot, we have: 0.35E+16, very close to 0.1E+16
(not well drawn in the plot) and 0.50 E+16 atoms
respectively. This means 19.22, 3.4 and 13.5 KJ.
He[lium] recovery for points 1 and 3 is around 60%."
Violante here acknowledges that the plot is "not
well drawn." That could fit with a hypothesis
that this was quickly put together.
Here, Violante is indeed reporting "helium
produced." He has subtracted background, which
can be inferred to be 0.55, 0.65?, 0.55. Perhaps
it is all 0.55 background, since he acknowledges the badly drawn point.
"This means ..." refers to expected excess heat
at 24 MeV, I suspect. I haven't checked.
This writer requested the values a third time:
"How much new helium was measured in Laser-2, 3
and 4. I do not want to know what is in the
plot. I do not want to know how much you expected."
Violante responded, "In terms of new atoms the
result is an amount of He[lium] ranging from
1E+15 up to 5e+15 atoms. This is obviously a
preliminary result that needs additional research work."
By now, I suspect, Violante is thoroughly
confused at what Krivit wants. Did Violante
report the actual measurements or did he just
take the numbers off the graph, as Krivit
implies? He must have been looking at actual
numbers, because if he had just taken numbers
from the graph, he would not have commented on
how badly the Laser 3 point was plotted. In any
case, Violante had answered Krivit's question,
and then simply added the expected heat from those numbers, it was dicta.
This writer responded to Violante, reminding him
that he had, since 2004, represented the
measurements of helium-4 atoms from this series
of experiments in the range of E+16 and that now
he was stating to this reporter that his group
had measured helium-4 atoms only in the range of E+15 atoms.
Krivit is, again, completely confused. The total
helium measurements were in the range of 0.74 to
1.05 x 10^16, but the *produced* helium, the
amount over background, was 0.1 to 0.5 x 10^16.
Moving the decimal point over, that is "1E+15 to
5E+15," as Violante says. There is no discrepancy at all.
This sudden change an entire order of
magnitude smaller is inexplicable, given that
the authors have not announced any errors or
retractions about this graph in the last six years.
This is truly appalling, and I'd highly recommend
that Krivit immediately apologize for
considering, say, 0.5 x 10^16 to be anything
different from 5 x 10^15, and then accusing the
authors of lack of integrity over it.
Indeed, I'd recommend that he reconsider his
entire approach, and *get himself an editorial
review board* that actually functions. A writer
who is his own editor has a fool for an employee.
At least if he is going to function on the level
that Krivit functions on, as a professional.
New Energy Times asked Violante one additional
question: "Is there any comment you would like
to make, not about the preliminary nature of the
research but about your published
representations of this experiment to the scientific community?"
As we went to press, New Energy Times had received no response from Violante.
It's no wonder. I'd probably have thrown up my
hands in despair by this time myself, though I can be pretty persistent.
