At 03:33 PM 5/12/2010, Roarty, Francis X wrote:
On Wed, 12 May 2010 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax said
I think so. There are cavities involved, likely. However, they are
not supplying any energy, apparently, rather they *configure* the
reacting ingredient or ingredients. We know that the reaction rate
increases with temperature. I suspect that the energy required --
there must be energy required, but energy is not the only
"ingredient" -- is generally supplied by ordinary heat.
Abd,
I don't think the heat is ordinary or it would dissipate see quote
from Moddel paper below,
No, by "ordinary heat" I mean the movement of molecules and atoms at
the involved temperature. That is a distribution of energies, so a
given molecule may have more or less than the mean energy which is
present at a given temperature.
The "heat" is not "used" to generate energy.
Suppose that some reaction requires a certain energy to occur. That
energy is present from the collision velocity of two reactants, if
they are moving rapidly enough. Suppose that we put these reactants
together at a temperature that is below the temperature necessary for
the average molecule to have the necessary energy. What will the
reaction rate be? Will it be zero?
Let's suppose that the reaction is exothermic. However, a single
molecular reaction will not raise the reaction rate enough to cause
the reaction to self-propagate. An ignition source, though, could
raise the reaction rate in an area in contact with it, causing the
reaction to them propagate.
A stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gas at room
temperature the mixture is stable, the gases do not combine. However,
given an ignition source, the mixture will rapidly combine (if it's
dense enough). It explodes. Now, there is some level of combination
that occurs in the un-ignited mixture, but the rate of this is low
enough that the mixture doesn't spontaneously ignite. It may be (I
don't know), that the formed water molecules are dissociated as
rapidly as they form.
In the case of cold nuclear fusion, the energy necessary to
*catalyze* it need not be anything more than the kind of energy that
would cause some level of combination of hydrogen and oxygen in a
mixture as described.
I don't think that ZPE is relevant to cold fusion. But since we don't
know, with any level of certainty, what is going on in the CF cells,
beyond some clear evidence that there is deuterium fusion (not
necessarily d-d fusion!) taking place, nothing can really be ruled out.
As I've described, one potential candidate for a fusion reaction is
known, the Tetrahedral Symmetric Condensate, which is formed when
four deuterons and their electrons (or, I think, three of the
electrons works) form a tetrahedral configuration of a certain size.
My sense of this is that this is a compressed form, a cluster like
this would not stay together if unconstrained. To compress it takes
energy, but since we are only talking about two molecules, the energy
involved would be the relative velocities of the two molecules in
collision. This kind of energy is available thermally. It is nowhere
near enough to cause fusion, itself, it simply puts the nuclei and
electrons into a position where they can collapse to a Bose-Einstein
condensate and then, according to Takahashi's calculations,
spntaneously fuse 100% to Be-8.
