At 06:04 PM 6/23/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Let's see you find one substantive error in this paper:
<http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf>http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf
Cude, when he quoted Jed and responded to him, omitted this citation.
However, in my commentary to him, lo and behold, I referred to
P13/P14. Which is part of the subject of that paper.
I'd be very interested in what Cude would have to say about it.
Beware, Joshua, this isn't necessarily what it looks like at first
glance, you need to understand the entire setup or you will fall into
some easy, and incorrect, assumptions, as Barry Kort did on
Wikiversity, talking about this work.
I think (?) you may have commented about the supposed lack of HAD in
this experiment. I'm not sure what HAD has to do with much, because
the experimental conditions of HAD are not necessarily universal, and
if an experiment is operating on the edge of what will show the
effect, shutdown might be quite rapid, but there is something that
looks like HAD in P13/P14 (i.e., in P14). The shutdown looks fast
because of the scale. It looks to me like the heat declined over an
hour. How that compares with the time constant of the calorimeter, I
don't know, but maybe it's in the paper somewhere. What I do see is a
period of modest heat, after shutdown, lasting for maybe four hours,
which, given the rapid fall before that, would be significant.
You can see that calorimetry noise or whatever it is increases with
the hydrogen control during the high current period, that seems
reasonable. The hydrogen settles down immediately. I wouldn't make a
big deal out of this, this is close to the noise. The signal with the
high current density is not close to the noise, it's obviously above it.
This was an appearance of what I've called the chimera. From the
characteristics of this beast, you can understand why so many othe
researchers failed to see it. Are you aware of the controls involved,
and how this shows, at the same time, the clear appearance of the
FPHE, and why so many people would miss it?
Just to explain the chart a little, P13 and P14 were electrically in
series, P13 is a hydrogen control and P14 uses heavy water. These are
closed cells with recombiners. Flow calorimetry was used, so the
cells were maintained at constant temperature. The electrolytic
current, steady state, before this excursion, was such to cause very
high loading, well over 90%, I understand. (Early negative
replications appear to have been satisfied with 70%, to get higher
loading takes special palladium and possibly the use of Tafel
poisons. Hey, my $30 for the LANR Colloquium was well spent. Now I
can say "Tafel poison.")
For extra credit (actually to get a basic grade here), how many times
did McKubre et al run that current profile before they saw the
chimera, all of them at high loading?
This does not show "fusion," what it shows is the heat anomaly called
the FPHE. Very difficult to set up, difficult to maintain. But it
clearly exists, and these kinds of reports are now from many, many
researchers. What nails this, though, is helium. And that's another
question, eh? Helium is the nuclear product that was sought, and the
standard arguments about helium are so much fluff, because the
evidence shows correlation with heat, so allegations of leakage,
besides being implausible as shown in some the work, such as
McKubre's Case study, or Violante, where helium rises above ambient,
would not show correlation with excess heat. As has been pointed out,
"excess heat" doesn't mean that a cell showing it was hotter than
other cells, because experimental conditions varied. It means that
heat out was shown, by calorimetry, to be greater than heat in.
'Splain this thing to me, okay. I'll be busy till next Wednesday....
