At 04:22 PM 2/22/2011, Charles HOPE wrote:
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<<mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com>a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
[...] I'm designing and constructing a single, very specific
experiment, that anyone could replicate with about $100 and a power
supply. But this work is not designed to "prove cold fusion." All it
will do, if the replication succeeds, is show a few neutrons per
hour. (The design is, I hope, insensitive to normal charged particle
radiation, and will effectively exclude background.)
Will that $100 include neutron detection?
Yes. It will include a stack of LR-115 SSNTD material. Cheapest way I
know to detect neutrons!
The material is 100 microns of polyester with 6 microns of red
cellulose nitrate. Like CR-39, though with somewhat different
characteristics, cellulose nitrate is disrupted, weakened by charged
particle radiation.
The stack will have at least two layers of this film, if it's just
two, two pieces will be front-to-front, making a sandwich:
Polyester, CN, CN, Polyester.
The stack is held to the outside of the acrylic experimental cell
with two acrylic rods in opposite corners along one side, the two
pieces are effectively pin-registered, and then are held down against
the cell by another piece of acrylic pushed over the same pins.
LR-115 is sold for neutron detection, through knock-on protons, which
probably account for the bulk of the back side tracks seen by SPAWAR.
Like CR-39, it is developed by etching with sodium hydroxide. It does
not require as high an etching temperature, nor as long an etch time.
The thin detector layer seems to give quite crisp track images; many
or most tracks are etched entirely through the red layer, so they
stand out, unlike the situation with CR-39.
Generally, charged particle radiation, unless it's high energy, would
not make it through the acrylic cell wall (1/16"), nor through the
polyester layers.
The plan is to assemble the detector stack when setting up the cell,
before that, the pieces of film are kept separately. So background
radiation from cosmic rays, radon, etc., in storage, will only
produce a single track, nothing matching on the other film. What I
will be looking for is coincident tracks, that cross from one
detector layer to the next. These would not be background, generally,
only actual immediate background during the experiment would cross.
In addition, I may be able to obtain vector and energy information.
If I'm lucky, I might see some triple tracks.
This is dry configuration, the cathode will be held against the
inside of the cell wall, instead of being held against the CR-39 as
in the Galileo protocol.
At this point, since I have not run this experiment, I'm not selling
kits, but all the materials are available, including LR-115 by the
sheet. A 9x12 cm sheet is $27.90, plus shipping, probably about $5
for priority mail to anywhere in the U.S. I also have food grade
NaOH, which seems good enough....
http://lomaxdesign.com/coldfusion/
