Peter Heckert <[email protected]> wrote: BTW, there is an elegant method to see if the steam is dry: Dissolve a > marker substance in the water, salt or sugar or something else. When the > input concentration is known, the concentration in output water can be > measured and compared. > When the steam was dry then the output concentration in condensed water > must be near zero. > Pons and Fleischmann used that method. >
They did indeed. They had a ready-made marker in the cell: the lithium salts in the electrolyte. They did this two ways: 1. I believe they checked the condensate. If they didn't I recall other people did, in other boil-off tests. 2. They confirmed that nearly all the of the lithium was left in the cell, washing out the cell and measuring the amount of lithium in the water. They could not account for a very small amount of lithium that ended up in the glass of the cell walls. You could do this with the Rossi cell but there is no ready made marker. I guess you could add something to the reservoir. I would use ordinary salt. Not much, because you don't want to gum up the machine or corrode it. - Jed
