At 09:17 PM 12/12/2012, Mark Gibbs wrote:
Something I haven't seen any discussion about is the amount of
energy required to load materials with hydrogen to be used in these
various LENR/CF devices. If that energy is taken into account, are
the claims of excess energy from the operation of the devices still valid?
[mg]
This has been studied in great detail. However, there is a bit of a
misunderstanding here. Loading of hydrogen or deuterium into
palladium, for example, is exothermic. I'm not so sure about nickel.
But, certainly in the study of the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, the
study has taken into account all the known chemistry. Further, many
different types of controls have been used. And for frosting on the
cake, again with the FPHE, helium has been measured and shown to be
correlated with the excess energy. The value of the ratio is the
value expected from the fusion of deuterium to helium, and this has
been confirmed by a dozen research groups.
Above I mention that the loading of deuterium into palladium is
exothermic. So "heat after death" is particularly interesting, where
cells develop very substantial anomalous heat when the electrolytic
current, which is used to maintain high loading, is turned *off*. A
lot of heat can appear, lasting for days, sometimes. At that point,
the deuterium will start to deload, it's like evaporation, and like
evaporation, this will *cool* the cathode.
The skeptical answer to this has been the "cigarette lighter effect,"
i.e., a claim that the deloading deuterium is combusting. But there
isn't enough oxygen there for that. This would quickly extinguish
itself, if it were happening.
Look, cold fusion was discovered by expert chemists. They actually
did, Mark, know what they were talking about. Pons and Fleischmann
were not physicists and they had no experience measuring neutrons,
but they thought they could trust a neutron meter. No. So they ended
up with egg on their faces from making a claim about neutron
radiation that any expert physicists, experienced with measuring
neutrons, would not have made.
But Fleischmann was the world's foremost experts on electrochemistry,
and the calorimetry they used was about the best ever done. They were
measuring heat to the milliwatt. Their work has been confirmed with
many different approaches, and imagining that such an obvious error
as forgetting to allow for whatever went into the cell would be made
by so many experts -- cold fusion researchers are *mostly* expert
chemists -- is rather naive.
Something that is overlooked is that the FPHE is set up by loading
palladium with deuterium. That is an energy-producing process, but
maintaining the electrolysis for a long time does consume energy.
That energy ends up as the potential energy of separated
hydrogen/deuterium and oxygen. If that's allowed to escape, and if it
were not accounted for, it would be negative XP. Open cells, like
those of Pons and Fleischmann, are pretty complex to analyze, partly
because of this. SRI International, which was hired by the Electric
Power Research Institute in 1989 to research cold fusion, built their
own calorimeter, and it was not as sensitive as the work done by P&F,
but it was basically bulletproof, flow calorimetry, running at
constant temperature, not vulernable to calibration problems (on the
other hand, P&F calibrated their calorimetry with a resistor pulse
every day). SRI, and many researchers, use a recombiner in the cell,
which essentially burns the generated gas in the cell, recovering
that energy, so there is no need to compensate for it. There does
need to be an accounting for orphaned oxygen, but, again, that is a
negative contribution to anomalous power. It represents unrecombined
gas that has stored up so much energy.
People have gone over the calorimetry in this work with a fine-tooth
comb. Minor errors have been claimed or identified, but the basic
cold fusion calorimetry work stands, and if you can figure out a way
that helium just happens to match, with the FPHE, heat from the
calorimetry, other than having a common cause, well, you have a much
better imagination than I. It doesn't merely correlate, it correlates
at the fusion value. That would ordinarily be considered totally
conclusive. Skeptics have independently challenged the calorimetry
and, as well, the helium measurements, claiming that it might be
leakage, but what I've seen is that the skeptics ignore the
correlation, which actually acts to confirm both the heat and helium
measurements, at least in round outlines.
Mark, if you want to know the science here, read Storms, "Status of
cold fusion (2010)" in Naturwissenschaften. There is a preprint on
lenr-canr.org. That's a peer-reviewed review of the field in a
mainstream journal, established in 1913, now owned by Springer-Verlag
and operated as their "flagship multidisciplinary journal." That's
the state of the science. The extreme skeptical view disappeared from
the journals long ago, there have been 16 positive reviews of cold
fusion in mainstream journals since 2005.
Obviously, a lot of people haven't gotten the message. However,
scientifically, it's all over. Now, that does *not* automatically
result in practical devices. It's somewhat possible, though probably
unlikely, that the original cold fusion with PdD will *never* be
practical. I'd love to think that Nickel hydride approaches will
work, because they would be much cheaper, but there is nowhere near
the level of scientific confirmation for them as for palladium
hydride. We don't know the ash, for example, like we do for palladium
deuteride.
But cold fusion is real, at least with palladium deuteride, and
probably with other approaches as well. By the way, above I discussed
electrolytic loading. Gas loading has also been done with palladium
deuteride, and there is no "input energy." When the palladium
material is loaded with gas, it gets hot from the heat of formation
of palladium deuteride, which is a chemical effect. That heat cools
down fairly rapidly, and with appropriate materials, what continues
is anomalous. It's not been a lot of heat, but it is not there with
hydrogen. And it accumulates as to energy generated, it's very
significant. These things stay warm for a long time, long after the
chemical heat has died away.
In some of the nickel hydrogen experiments that you have been looking
at, there are lots of questions about the calorimetry, this is much
shakier work than the solid and very careful palladium deuteride work
of Pons and Fleischmann, McKubre of SRI, and others. It's
investigational work, that's why it's shaky. Quick and dirty. Efforts
are underway to do this work (Celanni in particular) with better
calorimetry. But the idea that energy to load would not be considered
was, as I wrote, naive. And it is not necessarily relevant.
Generally, all energy input to these experiments is recorded and considered.
