At 11:47 PM 7/2/2012, Rich Murray wrote:
SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of
external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich
Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
Coldfusionnow.org posted the following video today: 68 minutes April, 2012
Robert Duncan discusses experiments at Sidney Kimmel Institute for
Nuclear Renaissance
http://coldfusionnow.org/robert-duncan-discusses-experiments-at-sidney-kimmel-institute-for-nuclear-renaissance/
I've been unable to view this video,
unfortunately. I view most videos on my iPhone
and the presentation seems to be incompatible with my iPhone version....
Robert V. Duncan shows a slide from SPAWAR Navy lab (Pamela
Mosier-Boss) that claims a 6 kv DC electric field from plates external
to a wet conducting electrolyte has effects within the electrolyte --
but the reality in simple electrostatics is the electric field exists
in the two plastic walls of the cell, between the liquid and the two
external plates, i.e., a simple double capacitor setup, with no field
in the conductor (electrolyte) that connects the two charged
capacitors.
Yes. I have the paper by Mosier-Boss, Szpak,
Gordon, and Forsley, that was published in the
2008 ACS LENR Sourcebook, which refers to the
effect of electric and magnetic fields on "heat
generation and the production of nuclear ash," as
"explored by earlier researchers. In those
earlier reports, the experiment was gas phase,
and it seems most work was with magnetic fields,
plus the gas phase electric field work described
involved, presumably, a low voltage field, since
it was applied across the length of a Pd sheet.
This paper refers to prior work examining the
"effect of external electric and magnetic fields"
on the Pd/D codeposition process." They mix up
electric and magnetic field results. Technically,
there is no error, at least not in the paper,
since they do not state a value for the electric
field, they refer only to an "external electric
field." However, Rich is correct. The external
electric field is almost certainly not "visible"
to the location of the alleged effect, the cell
cathode. This problem is not true for external
magnetic fields, which do penetrate the materials and are present.
The error is in the interpretation of the effects. The primary paper is
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakStheeffecto.pdf
The paper title is The effect of an external
electric field on surface morphology of
co-deposited Pd/D films
This is a very useful piece of work. It shows
that an "effect" may appear, when subjective
judgments are involved, that does not exist,
i.e., that is based on something other than the
particular hand-waving involved.
Can we be sure that there is no actual effect of
the electric field? Well, no. However, if there
is an effect, it is almost certainly not through
what is discussed in the article, which seems to
assume the presence of the electric field inside
the cell, which is assumed to be 2500
3000 V cm-1.
From other reports, the total voltage is about 6000 V.
The field strength (v/cm) seems to be a value
calculated from the total voltage divided by the
distance between the external plates used to set
up the field. However, the region of interest
(the cell contents) is filled with electrolyte.
Electrolytic current is flowing in the
electrolyte, and the resistance of the
electrolyte would be known to the experimenters,
from the current and voltage involved. The
current starts out at "1 mA per cm&2".
Bottom line, the voltage across the cathode and
anode in the early phases of codeposition, by
their approach, is less than 2 volts. That is an
actual voltage between two points intermediate
between the locations of the high voltage plates.
The analytical error is quite shocking, I
understand why Rich is exercised about it. For
the record, it would indeed be useful if an
author of the original paper were to retract the
conclusions and clarify the matter of absence of
the high voltage field inside the cell. As Rich
points out, that voltage is almost entirely
across the plastic cell walls. Because of
leakage, there might be some current in the
electrolyte, but I'd expect it to be in the
nanoamp range, swamped by the electrolytic current and voltages.
However, Rich goes on to speculate in a different direction:
There may be small leakage currents through the plastic walls that
short out the two capacitors, allowing unexpected currents to flow
through the electrolyte, applying high voltages to many tiny
locations, creating localized and evolving damage, thus generating
sporatic unexpected local heat and depositing elements from all parts
of the cell within these complex, scattered micro regions.
Um, very highly unlikely. The plastic walls are
intact, or electrolyte would leak out. They have
high dielectric resistance. If this is acrylic,
it's about 1/16 inch thick. Current will be very,
very low. If there is leakage current, the
current will create a voltage drop. It will not
create "sporadic local heat." Basically, that
field does nothing. If Rich wants to assert that
it does something, well, that kind of contradicts his thesis, eh?
He should stick with what's clear. It was an
error in the first place to suspect any kind of
effect from an "external electric field." They
were apparently thinking about gas phase work,
and even that was misapplied. My guess is that
they did suspect an effect of a magnetic field
(and there is other evidence for that) and so
decided to test both electric and magnetic
fields. They just didn't accomplish it, because
it's impossible to create a high voltage electric
field in a conductive liquid, without having at
the same time high currents and other dramatic phenomena.
High local fields may exist under some
conditions, it's been speculated that high field
strengths might exist at the tip of dendrites
that can form on the cathode. But that would be a
high voltage field over a very short distance,
the net voltage would be quite small. At the
dimensions involved, the conductive electrolyte
is no longer something that can be thought of as uniform....
And then, another speculation:
If micro and nano bubbles of H2 and O2 start forming and moving around
in the cell, their recombination on the increasingly corroded, complex
surfaces of the cathode can be shown to easily generate enough energy
to melt tiny volumes on the surface -- exactly the problem with nozzle
erosion in the engineering of H2-O2 liquid fuel rockets.
Exactly the problem that doesn't happen in cold
fusion electrolytic cells, at anything like the
levels needed. I've seen this hypothesis proposed
by a particular pseudoskeptic. He uses it to
explain away even the back-side pits on CR-39.
Basically, he imagines this mini-explosion that
creates a shock wave that propagates through the
CR-39 and that causes material to be blown off on
the back side. Without similarly damaging the front side at the same location.
What is being shown by Duncan, I think, are
familiar images where it appears that the
palladium surface melted, or more than melted.
There is a hole in the surface, with what appears
as molten ejecta. These have been reported by
many, and have nothing to do with the electric field error.
There is a lot of unwarranted speculation on all
sides about the appearance of codeposition
cathodes. I find it difficult to come up with any
plausible explanation other than a very intense,
highly localized heat burst, for the *many*
reports of what certainly looks like what would
be left if a spot got very hot, hot enough to
vaporize some palladium and melt adjacent palladium.
Without any specific analysis, Rich is here
buying the concept of bubbles of explosive
mixture D2/O2 (it's not H2 here) floating around
the cell. It's absolutely true that if such a
bubble contacted any palladium, it would
doubtless explode. However, those bubbles don't
exist. Oxygen bubbles and deuterium bubbles are
floating around the cell, circulating, but the
motion of these bubbles is such that they will
almost all rise. Very few would mix. Few would approach the cathode.
But suppose one does. How large is this bubble?
The "craters" are on the order of 10 microns
across, I think. The bubble would not be buried
in the cathode material, it would come up to it
and contact it, and would be ignited through the
catalytic action of palladium. This is a tiny
amount of explosive mixture, immersed in
heat-conductive electrolyte, against a
heat-conductive material, the cathode. It would
generate a flash of light, but little force. A
bit of hot gas would exist for a moment *outside
the cathode*, at the surface, very rapidly cooled
by the heavy water it is immersed in (and the
product of the combusion is heavy water, this
would be like sparging steam). Most of the heat
would never be transferred to the cathode.
Pseudoskeptics have been coming up with
preposterous explanations for cold fusion
observations for more than twenty years. They
have never actually demonstrated that these
explanations are real. In the few cases where an
experimental observation was involved, such as
Lewis' claim that CF results were due to
inadequate stirring, it's been conclusively shown
that this was an artifact of Lewis' own cell
design and did not apply to the methods used by Pons and Fleischmann.
It would be relatively simple to test theories of
recombination. Simply create some bubbles and see
if the cratering effect can be observed. Nobody
has ever done this. It's far easier to sit in an
armchair and dream up "possible explanations,"
and lots of these have been published, that are,
once one knows the actual conditions in CF cells,
they are just as preposterous as the "electric
field" proposal in the SPAWAR work.
Look, these are all details. There are two basic facts, well-established:
1. There are plenty of reports of excess heat
that could not be artifact; there is a heat
effect, it is no longer possible to support a
claim that this is mere calorimetry error. One
die-hard skeptic, Shanahan, still clings to what
he calls "Calorimetric Constant Shift," ignoring
that the shift he talks about, while
theoretically possible, would not be systemic,
and would not apply to all forms of calorimetry
used. Even Shanahan, when nailed down,
acknowledges that something unknown is involved here.
The first fact was known and confirmed within a
year of the original announcement. The history is
very well explained by Beaudette. Beaudette also
exposes an early error: the assumption that
anomalous heat must be caused, if real, by a
nuclear reaction, and not just any nuclear
reaction, but one of a specific set of known
reactions that would then have other expected
effects. Since those effects were not seen (such
as fatal levels of neutron radiation from the
observed anomalous heat), there *must* be an
error in the calorimetry. That the original claim
was *not* of "nuclear fusion," per se, but an
"unknown nuclear reaction" -- "nuclear" being
assumed from the levels of heat observed -- is ignored.
2. Whenever PdD anomalous heat has been observed
and helium has been measured, the two results have been found to be correlated.
The first measurements of helium were anecdotal
and no attempt was made to correlate them with
heat. Pons and Fleischmann, Beaudette reports,
allowed themselves to be lured into a public
challenge over whether or not helium would be
found in the cathodes. They believed the reaction
was in the bulk, so they believed that helium
would be trapped in the cathodes. As it probably
would! But they began to realize, apparently,
that the reaction was surface, and that therefore
if any helium were trapped, it would only be near
the surface. As the implications of this dawned
on them, they withdrew from the challenge, which
certainly did not help their image!
So it was left to Miles to actually do the work
on this. Miles ran a number of Pons-Fleischmann
class cells, observing excess heat from some of
them, and sampled the cells for helium, sending
it off for analysis, blind. Miles continued with
this work for some time, ultimately, Storms
reports, he took 33 samples. 12 of these samples
came from cells that were not showing excess
heat. None of these cells showed anomalous
helium. 21 cells were showing anomalous heat, and
18 of these showed anomalous helium.
(A lot of work in cold fusion has mixed
exploration with controlled experiment. In this
case, two cathodes were Pd-cerium alloy, and
these showed some heat, but no helium. One cell
suffered a loss of power during the experiment,
which may have led to a heat artifact. But Miles
includes these cells in his analysis -- as was
proper. You don't select your data after seeing
it! The correlation is extremely strong even including those 3 cells.)
Miles has been confirmed, though, I've often
written, there is a lot of work remaining to be
done. Storms estimates the results from twelve
research groups as indicating a heat/helium ratio
of 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4, but I've seen no evidence
that this is a neutral evaluation, it's got to be
a bit seat-of-the-pants. Huizenga, though,
writing in the second edition of his book, called
Miles results amazing, that a heat/helium ratio
would even be within an order of magnitude of the
deuterium fusion value of 23.8 MeV.
Again, skeptics like Shanahan attempt to explain
this away. Shanahan says that CCS could be making
the calorimetry incorrect, but neglects to
explain how calorimetry error would cause helium
error matching it quantitatively. He basically
says, "garbage in, garbage out," but correlation
is a powerful tool for finding causal connections
even in the presence of high noise.
The closest thing I've seen to an explanation
with primitive legs is an idea that when a cell
is hotter, it might leak helium more. However,
this runs into two problems: some of this work
involves helium found at above ambient. Some of
the work, in fact, did not attempt to exclude
amibent helium at all, it was looking for
*elevated* helium. Leaky seals would not elevate
helium above ambient. The other problem is that
some of the work was run constant-temperature,
with flow calorimetry. There is no elevated
temperature associated with excess power in these
approaches. There is merely less heating of the
coolant, the reduction of heating is the "power generated in the cell."
The second experimental fact -- and this is now
the published position in the peer-reviewed
literature, the skeptical position entirely
disappeared years ago -- shows that the heat is
nuclear in origin. It still does not tell us the mechanism.
We don't know what the mechanism is. There are
"plausible theories," Storms wrote, in his 2010
review in Naturwissenschaften, but none that
explain all aspects of the phenomenon. Storms has
himself come up with a theory, but it is missing
critical features and *appears to be contradictory to known physics.*
I find it unlikely that the true mechanism will
actually "overturn" established physics. The
rejection in 1989-1990 was not based on
contradiction with known physics, but only with certain assumptions.
Huizenga's book was titled, "Cold Fusion:
Scientific Fiasco of the Century." He didn't know the half of it!
Beaudette goes over this in excruciating detail.
Beaudette is available free for download, or you
can buy it. If I were reduced to bying a single
book on this field, and were content with being a
bit behind on the latest developments and
insights, I'd buy Beaudette -- and I did. I like a real book in my hands....
The pseudoskeptics crow that there hasn't been
any change in fifteen years, attempting this to
make this into an argument that it's pathological
science. It's true that there hasn't been a
*major* change, if we exclude the unverifiable
claims from Rossi et al -- which will be
game-changing if confirmed -- but that is because
continued investigation of the effect without
adequate theoretical knowledge of how it works is extremely inefficient.
It has come to the point where some of the easy
avenues have been exhausted. It's possible, to be
sure, that the Fleischmann Pons Heat Effect will
never be practical, the conditions might be
inherently too chaotic and difficult to sustain.
But we won't know until we know what is causing
this effect. And that is probably going to take
the best minds in quantum field theory, and a lot
of work. The physicists have mostly been uninterested for years.
Scaredy cats!
There is research needed that was recommended by
both DoE panels (1989 and 2004) that has never
been done. If "scientists" still need proof that
the effect is real, fine. Attempting to find the
artifact in all this calorimetry and helium
measurement stuff, through controlled experiment,
would be real science. But given all that has
come down, I think it a waste of time at this
point, and I see no inclination among cold fusion
researchers to attempt to do more than has been
done already, given that what was done already
has been quite adequate to establish the reality
of the phenomenon, for anyone who wants to know,
and it still wasn't enough to satisfy the skeptics.
The research that needs to be done is research to
explore the parameter space, and to find other
correlated effects and conditions besides those
known. It'a amazing how much research could
easily have been done by tacking on a few
measurements to what was already done. However,
with funding having become very tight, and with
the constant search to find increased reliability
and output power, needed for practical
application, not for the science of it, these
things were not considered important.
For example, is there a correlation between
tritium and excess heat? For years, I thought,
from what I'd read, no, there is not. Then I
started to look closer. Experiments that looked
for tritium were generally looking for proof of
nuclear origin. Lots of workers found tritium,
but did not necessarily measure heat at the same
time. Were tritium samples taken from cells in
series that showed excess heat for some cells?
Apparently, yes. Miles probably did this at China
Lake. But he simply reports that the tritium
levels were not "commensurate with the heat."
This was "intellectual contamination" from the
d-d fusion hypothesis. That hypothesis predicts
so much heat with so much tritium. Since so
little tritium was found, it was simply dismissed
as irrelevant to the heat production. The actual
data was not reported. We don't know.
Some theories of cold fusion predict that if
there is hydrogen contamination in the cell
(which there always is, to some degree), the same
process that is normally fusing deuterium to
helium -- producing commensurate heat -- will
also fuse hydrogen and deuterium and the
particular mechanism, it's asserted, would make
some tritium. (Actually, I'd think it would be
He-3, but ... I'll let theorists come up with
their own theories!) It's complicated, but ... we
don't know if there is a correlation between heat
and tritium, nor do we know the effect of H/D
concentration on tritium. Basic facts. Simple. Unknown.
SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of
external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte
Yes. I haven't seen it. Maybe I'll ask. "Pam,
your slip is showing." Or maybe not. It's not
necessarily polite, and we don't really need it.
We know that these electric field experiments were misguided.
For all I know, the high electric field sitting
on those cells kept the lab cat away (or people
were more careful approaching the cells and so
there was less disturbance). Or whatever. It's
just that there was not a high electric field
strength inside the cells, nothing at all like
the value for v/cm reported in the original paper.