At 04:29 PM 7/4/2012, Rich Murray wrote:
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.
It's not actually important enough to be worth the effort, my opinion.
My "Zen" comment is that I may be trying to raise the water level in
a well by tossing snow into it.
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 --
Great idea. The problem is that as soon as the bubble hits loaded Pd,
the Pd will catalyze immediate combustion. It does that, you know.
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 --
So you have this reaction creating steam at the point of contact of
the bubble and the palladium. This would blow the bubble away from
the palladium.
No, to get a major heat release, quickly, which is what vaporizing
palladium would require, you have to have an explosive mixture in the
bubble. And from what I remember of the math, there is barely enough
energy to accomplish melting the palladium, all of the available
energy must be transferred to the palladium, in that small volume,
with little escape. I don't see any way.
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.
Rich Murray is standing on his head to explain away a minor effect,
the signs of occasional high local heating seen on codeposition
cathodes. It's not utterly impossible that this is due to
recombination there, but recombination is limited to a small fraction
of the energy involved in these experiments. Remember, these people
keep track of orphaned oxygen.
We'll get to the real point below.
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.
When I started tooling up, I bought a piece of cadmium sulfide, I
think it is, film and watched, under a microscope, the flashes from a
bit of Am-241 liberated from an old smoke detector. There should be
flashes of light from an active codep cathode. I also plan to listen
for sound, SPAWAR has reported transient shock waves from a codep
cathode built on a piezoelectric sensor. I just plan to pop a piezo
mike on the outside of the cell and look at around 100 KHz. Some day soon....
The goal is not to prove cold fusion. These signs don't do that. They
are what one researcher calls "tells." That is, symptoms that a
reaction is occurring. If tells can be identified, the research can
accelerate. As it is, it can take weeks to run one experiment. Letts
is working on an approach that seems to produce results relatively
quickly, but he's still looking at days, really.
Methinks Storms, Rothwell, and Lomax proclaim too much re the
heat-helium correlation.
It's crucial. Cold fusion researchers have themselves not realized
the significance of heat/helium. Or if they know it, they certainly
have not emphasized it. That's the situation I found in 2009 when I
became involved with the cold fusion community, and so I encouraged
Storms to write a paper on heat/helium. He submitted it for
publication and the editor of the journal came back with a request
for a full review of cold fusion. Hence "Status of cold fusion
(2010)," which does cover the heat/helium issue better than ever
before done in print. And I got to see my name in a journal that
Einstein published in. Way cool, and thanks, Dr. Storms.
This is the importance.
We could already make the case that the evidence for a nuclear
reaction from calorimetry was overwhelming (by the mid 1990s), but
this is indirect evidence of a nuclear reaction. Maybe there is some
other unknown phenomenon. Further, each individual calorimetric
result can be challenged. Maybe there was some mistake. That wears
thin, when we are talking about 153 papers in peer-reviewed journals
showing anomalous heat, against a smaller number of published
"negative replications."
And, of course, a "negative replication" *is*, intrinsically, a
replication failure, a failure to replicate. That should have been
obvious. A phenomenon is never shown to be an illusion by failure to
see it. Ever. N-rays and polywater were not debunked by replication
failures, they were discredited by replication *success*, coupled
with controlled experiment that showed prosaic origin for the
original observations.
Rich knows that this kind of replication was never accomplished with
cold fusion. Instead, what we have is a *huge* body of work that
shows, clearly, that there is a phenomenon, widely reported, with
certain characteristics. One of them is that it's devilishly
cantakerous. You can think you have *exactly* the same conditions,
but now you see it, now you don't.
Hearing that, a lot of people think immediately that this signal must
be close to noise. No, it is not. When it appears, it is
unmistakeable. It is way above noise. You can find an image of SRI
P13/P14 on the web, it was republished, in color, in the Hagelstein
et al review paper attached to the 2004 U.S. DoE report on LENR.
Cold fusion researchers were quite competent at what they did. They
were not necessarily competent or skilled at publicity or promotion.
In fact, they were lousy at it. Look underneath the hood with
P13/P14. Why was this image so convincing to McKubre? He was, after
all, an independent consultant at SRI, retained by the Electric Power
Research Institute to find out if there was anything to this cold fusion flap.
P13 was a light water control. It was placed in series with P14, a
heavy water experimental cell. That is, the same current was passed
through both cells. The same calorimetry was used for both. This was
flow calorimetry. The cells were closed, with recombiners.
Many of the early replication failures did not measure loading ratio,
it was not understood that there was a threshold effect. The FPHE was
apparently not seen below a loading of about 90%. Until the work of
Pons and Fleischmann, it was not known that it was possible to get
such high loading ratios, the normal limit was 70%. From what we now
know, it was completely predictable that those early replication
attempts would fail. This was one difficult experiment, and getting
such high loading took months, and lots of stuff happens with months
of electrolysis. Any bit of junk in the cell ends up on the
cathode.... it can be a mess.
Anyway, both cells were loaded, they monitored it, to over 90%. This
loading was maintained with a trickle current.
Then they had a current protocol, that stepped up the current. In the
plot, you can see, with P14, how the generated heat steps up with the
current, it's quite clean. No big deal, you might think. So power
increases with increased current. Why is this surprising?
Well, you can see in that chart, the increased current in the light
water control only increases the noise. There is little or no excess
power. To McKubre, with his experience, this chart, all by itself,
ices the issue. The excess heat is real. The dependence of excess
heat on current density is well known. It's not a universal
characteristic of cold fusion, but this is the norm in the
Fleischmann-Pons experiment.
But there is more. That current excursion was not the first one in
the experimental series. There were two previous ones. Unfortunately,
the data was not preserved and presented with the third. That's
because they saw nothing.
Again and again, I've heard cold fusion researchers consider a
finding of no heat a "failure," or lack of "success."
What the first two excursions show is that something is changing in
the cell. The calorimetry is the same, something is different. This
is a demonstration of the variability of the effect. We have a pretty
good idea of what is happening. Over time, the palladium deuteride
expands and contracts as it loads and deloads. It cracks. If it
cracks too much, too much deuterium escapes, the high loading cannot
be maintained. If it isn't cracked, nothing happens except for
loading and deloading. The FPHE does not happen with pure, clean,
perfect palladium lattice. Period. That was not understood until much later.
I've called what showed up in P14 the appearance of the "chimera" in
the lab, it walked up and licked McKubre in the face, then left. What
the hell was that? This was not a signal close to noise. Many
scientists, not familiar with the literature and the reports, hearing
about difficulties in replication, assume that this is a signal that
will go away with increased precision. No. It's far from that. If
this is artifact, it is some kind of systematic error that affects
not just one form of calorimetry, but many.
And then we come to helium.
One of the biggest problems with cold fusion, a reason for rejection,
was that the ash was not seen. It was expected that the ash would be
tritium and He-3, plus proton and neutron radiation. If any helium
was produced, it would be accompanied by a characteristic gamma ray.
Helium was reported by Pons and Fleischmann, but as an isolated
result. Pons agreed, apparently, to allow some cathodes to be
analyzed. They expected that helium would be found in the bulk of the
cathode, they believed that the effect was in the bulk. Then they
backed out. Apparently they realized they were betting the farm on
something they did not know. They did not know if helium would be
found in the bulk. In fact, this search was undertaken, and the lack
of helium in the bulk was considered, by some, a serious obstacle to
the idea that helium was the ash. Helium is not mobile in palladium.
If it is formed in the palladium, it will stay there, for the most part.
After some early results that showed helium was indeed present in the
exhaust gases -- which always suffered from suspicion of
contamination from ambient -- Miles eventually took samples in a
consistent way from a series of FP cells, with known heat results,
and they were analyzed blind.
He found that helium was correlated with heat. He found that the
ratio of helium to heat was within an order of magnitude of the ratio
predicted by deuterium fusion to helium. That was enough to be
considered astonishing by Huizenga, who said that this, if confirmed,
would solve a major mystery of cold fusion, i.e., the ash. Huizenga
went on to predict that it would not be confirmed "because there were
no gammas."
This demonstrated the scientific error behind the ready dismissal of
cold fusion. It was assumed that if the reaction was real, it must be
a known reaction. In fact, Pons and Fleischmann had claimed, not a
known, reaction, but, specifically, an "unknown nuclear reaction."
And so it was, and so it is.
Miles was adequately confirmed. That's what Storms covered in his
2010 paper, I recommend reading it carefully.
Consider the implications of the correlation. Correlation, of the
strength found (which is high), demonstrates that the underlying
measurements are at least generally accurate. Correlation can punch
through a lot of noise. Shanahan claims that the heat measurements
are garbage, therefore the correlation means nothing. That's
backwards. If the heat measurements were garbage, correlation would
be highly unlikely. Something is obviously different about cells that
show the anomalous power of the FPHE and those that do not. The
latter don't generate helium. It's clear.
The full Miles series involved 33 samples. 12 were from cells showing
no excess heat. None of these showed helium above background. Of the
21 remaining, 18 showed excess heat and roughly commensurate helium,
and 3 showed some excess heat and no helium. Storms points out that
one of the three anomalous results involved a power failure that
could have produced calorimetry error, and the other two involved a
Pd-Ce cathode, not the normal Pons-Fleischmann experiment.
(One of the characteristics of much CF research has been a kind of
shotgun combination of a general search for "better methods,"
resulting in the variation of more than one variable at a time. This
has damaged CF research, generating piles of data with inadequate
controls, and much of the parameter space has not been well explored.
And because a subtext was often an attempt to prove reality to
skeptics, and unreliabity was considered "bad," "failed experiments"
were often not reported, creating a confused mess, where skeptics can
suspect, with some legitimacy, that only positive results are being
reported. We can see with Miles, though, that the series was
completely reported, even where there might have been an excuse to
exclude some results.)
Especially, is there any device in the world today that is generating
unexplained excess heat? publicly, reliably ?
Those are different questions. First of all, in an FPHE experiment,
the heat isn't unexplained, as to general explanation. Because of
heat/helium, we can say with reasonable confidence tha the origin of
the heat is the conversion of deuterium to helium. But the mechanism
is unknown, my opinion, some theorists disagree, and one or more of
them might be right.
The FPHE in skilled hands is reasonably reliable. That is, a skilled
researcher can see it with most cells. A Chinese review, in 2007,
found that a number of research groups were seeing 100% excess heat
in their cells. I.e, 100% of cells show excess heat. The amount tends
to be variable. I'm now seeing work, not ready for publication, that
is generally reliable even as to quantity, but, then, with the same
researcher, suddently the researcher was unable to produce the same
results as he had been seeing reliably.
Pons and Fleischmann have reported that, before they ran out of the
first batch of palladium from Johnson Matthey, they were seeing
excess heat from all cells. They did not suspect that the effect was
batch-sensitive, and thought nothing of using up the last bit of it.
When they replaced it, none of their cells showed the effect.
Remember P13/P14? The effect is sensitive to nanostructure of the
material. It's totally obvious now that they were very lucky to see
anything at all in their early work. Most palladium simply doesn't
work. But there is always codeposition, now, you can make your own
nuclear-active palladium deposit. Maybe. The electrochemistry is
still vulnerable to all kinds of hazards.
The requirement for a single design that is readily available that
always generates excess heat is artificial. It has nothing to do with
science. Obviously, for a commercial device, reliability is highly
desirable. (It's possible for some kinds of commercial devices to be
individually unreliable if many can be combined to become
statistically reliable. However, there is an additional problem. None
of the FPHE devices continue to function, after a time. Gas-loading
is where the possible commercial applications might lie. At this
point, the lack of patentability of cold fusion really starts to hurt
research, because people who are working with methods that have
commercial promise are *not* publishing their work, in general.
Because they cannot get patent protection, they go for trade secret protection.
A wild card here is Rossi et al. This is not the FP Heat Effect. It
may be LENR of some kind. Or it may be flim-flam. Again, for
commercial reasons, the necessary data to really know what is
happening is not being released. I, and many others familiar with
cold fusion research, am less than impressed by the Rossi demos, but
Rossi does have a possible commercial reason to look like a complete
con artist. Many CF researchers, from other published research, think
that NiH reactions are quite possible. However, solving the
reliability problem is quite a different matter. It would be
consistent with what Rossi has done that he does have some reaction
that sometimes produces some heat, but that it is not reliable. I
just read today that the reason Defkalion cancelled their contract
with Rossi was that Rossi could not deliver a 48-hour reactor. True?
How in the world would I know?
If you want to see excess heat, you can do it with what is known.
I've been told to expect to spend about $10,000 or so, much of it for
good calorimetry. I'm sure it could be done for less than that. You
don't actually need really good calorimetry to see excess heat. And
if you can get access to helium analysis, you have a means of
confirming your calorimetry.
There are other nuclear tells, such as low levels of tritium and
radiation. A single sign of a reaction, though, isn't adequate, and
especially its absence is not very informative. The Galileo project
saw some "replication failures," and because there was no other sign
of the reaction than tracks on CR-39 -- which can be very difficult
to analyze, as to the charged particle tracks on the cathode side,
exposed to cathode chemistry -- there is no way to know if the
failure was a failure to set up the nuclear reaction or was
intrinsic, that there is no radiation.
If not now, how recently?
It's being done all the time, by lots of research groups. Energetics
Technologies (formerly of Israel) is active at the University of
Missouri, and ET work was replicated by McKubre and ENEA, published
in the 2008 ACS LENR Sourcebook.
Time will tell, 23 years after 1989...
It was really all over, as to the basic issue of the reality of the
FPHE and it being nuclear in origin, before 2000.
The extreme skeptical position has entirely disappeared from the
journals, while there is now a steady publication rate, about two
papers pwer month under peer review, that simply assumes the effect is real.
There is a still a problem. There is still widespread opinion,
especially among physicists, that the whole thing was totally refuted
in 1989-1990. They treat it like N-rays and polywater without ever
actually looking to see if the comparison is apt.
Basic scientific problem: rejecting experimental evidence based on
lack of understood theory. Worse, based on assumption masquerading as
theory. There was not (and could not be) a theory that low-energy
nuclear reactions were impossible. Even the 1989 DoE review
recognized that such negative proof is never available.
What was possible to say in 1989 was that there was no conclusive
evidence. Within the next decade, that situation changed. There is
conclusive evidence, has been for a long time.
That you can sit in your armchair and dream up fantastic scenarios
for an artifact, that could only explain a small part of the
experimental corpus, means nothing. People are still doing that with
relativity, etc.
But, hey, a controlled experiment that replicates anomalous heat, and
especially that finds anomalous helium, correlated with the heat, and
that then demonstrates the artifact, that would be something, indeed.
It's never been done, and it's highly unlikely. I wouldn't bet on it.
