Jones Beene wrote:
>Would someone please tell me what actually happened at
>SRI in 1992?
The phenomenon that caused the tragedy is called "recalescence" and is
related to rapid phase change in some alloys which can be aggravated by the
low inversion temperature of hydrogen - if the metal is a hydride. This was
the case at SRI.
That was not the cause of the accident. It had nothing to do with the
cathode. The accident was caused by a recombiner failure coupled with
several other failures of safety devices such as the pressure relief
valve and pressure gauge. The explosion occurred in the headspace,
not under water in the electrolyte. It was caused by a highly
improbably combination of different things all going wrong at the
same time. That is often the case with accidents. If just one link in
a long chain of events had been avoided the accident would not have happened.
The accident is described in the ICCF-3 book, part 1, pdf p. 147:
"The January 2, 1992, Explosion in a Deuterium/Palladium Electrolytic
System at SRI
International," S. I. Smedley, S. Crouch-Baker, M. C. H. McKubre and
F. L. Tanzella
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/IkegamiHthirdinter.pdf
(I think I need to fully OCR this, because I just found the words are
broken up with this font: "The Jan uary 2, 1 992, Explosion i n a
Deuteri u m.")
- Jed
