Well, there's a saying in Zen about swallowing the Niagara Falls in one gulp -- perhaps a tsunami of verbal arguments by Lomax may float visions that are plausibly contrary to the visions aired by Murray -- but the possiblities of micro and nano level storage and release of chemical energy by bubbles on the Pd surface, increasingly rough, complex and chaotic with time, need to be tested, not just persuasively discussed.
Returning to, ahem, discussion... I'm assuming that minute bubbles of O2 would adhere to the Pd by normal molecular attraction, the Van der Waals quantum interaction of outer electrons between O2 and Pd, just like bubbles in soda pop or a glass of water, sticking to surfaces, perhaps forming a hemisphere, while the ignition would occur very quickly, since rough Pd is a catalyst -- now, many here can estimate the speed of burning roughly by invoking the nonequilibrium velocity distribution at the burning temperature in complex fast-moving nonlinear combustion next to or on a surface within electrolyte -- too fast for heat dissipation via conduction or convection -- A sphere stuck to a surface has radial symmetry, pointing at the surface -- so my hunch was that a jet or bipolar jet might ensue -- heat transfer would be by radiation and then by kinetic impact of new H2O molecules moving at many km/sec, the speed inside the fierce burning in H2-O2 liquid rocket engines -- so one bubble would vaporize at least it own volume of Pd surface, releasing the H stored at 1 to 1 loading ratio, which would make a momentary enriched environment for the next O2 bubble -- need data for how crowded these bubbles can actually get in the electrolyte next to the cathode, especially if they are positively charged, and thus attracted to the cathode -- so Murray's logic is, if the micro craters are via chemical energy, then therefore a lot of the O2 micro bubbles are positively charged -- time for a quick micro experiment... only experiment can find the distribution of H2 and O2 micro and nano scale bubbles, and survey complex, unpredictable corrosion effects -- recall that acoustic cavitation can erode ship propellers. I suggest that experiments should be as tiny as possible, looking to view the details of events real-time, one by one, as has been so fruitful in nuclear physics since Rutherford looked at the distribution of flashes on a fluorescent screen for hours from alpha particle bombardment of a thin metal film in 1911, proving the incrediby small size and huge density of the nucleus, as well as of the alpha (helium nucleus) particle. Methinks Storms, Rothwell, and Lomax proclaim too much re the heat-helium correlation. Especially, is there any device in the world today that is generating unexplained excess heat? publicly, reliably ? If not now, how recently? Time will tell, 23 years after 1989...
