Hi Bill, Your thought about "critical volume" is intriguing and brings up the possibility of efficient self-lasing due to adsorption/desorption and catalysis. Of interest would be the violet H line at 410 nm for which there is already a secret US Navy weapon in this category. Coincidence?
This could involve the possibility of a self-generating two-gas laser where one gas is hydrogen and the other is hydrogen in the collapsed state, formed in situ and making the device efficient due to a UV emission cascade. This might explain why a hemispherical reactor is useful (assuming reflectivity is enhanced) In this regard, this old patenthttps://patents.google.com/patent/US4159453A/en and this article https://www.hindawi.com/journals/lc/2008/839873/ seem to suggest that something like this possibility has been considered before... and might explain why the Thermacore project (with the Navy) was "apparently" canceled, despite the energy anomaly. Probably worth a deeper look... Bill Antoni wrote: Jones Beene wrote: One further thought about the Thermacore runaway - is there a potential lesson there, for experiment design ? There could be one lesson which can be called - GO BIG... but also BEWARE if you go big. Perhaps there is something akin to critical mass, which is important for maximum gain, as in nuclear fission? If there is a very small but non-zero chance for hydrogen to undergo certain transitions as it's adsorbed-desorbed from the catalyst material, then more than critical mass it could be a matter of critical volume of catalyst through which hydrogen travels before something occurs. Perhaps that could explain why resonating systems are sometimes suggested to work well. They might be able to maximize hydrogen interaction events (defined as adsorption-desorption cycles) per unit of time with the catalyst. Just a simple thought. Cheers, BA
