Cold fusion in your microwave in 10 minutes

[GIThruster]

I wondered about that but all the references I saw said pencil lead is a good source of pure graphite. UNTIL. . .I read what you're saying at Wiki. yes indeed, clay is the binder and clay does have varying amounts of iron. That's what often makes it red.

Iron in, iron out, leaves no real reason to suppose transmutation of elements unless you can show you have a significant amount more out.

Were this the case, one supposes you could use just the pencil lead and no powdered charcoal to get the same result.

Seems though, to really know you'd need a serious chemical analysis of both the reactant and product, and you'd want to perhaps start by seeing if there's enough iron in the graphite to make it move with a strong magnet.

[Rick Meisinger]

I quickly read through the PDF and didn't see this noted. Can you find the claimed before and after elemental/isotopic composition, and transcribe it here?

I thought I remembered seeing it in the pdf, but it is not there, sorry. Looks like the best thing to do is to do a test and see how it comes out.

[Torulf2]

I have ordered pure graphite powder. But the quartz tubing comes in 4 feet length= 121.92cm. My mikro oven is 28cm vide.
Can I divide quartz tubing in same way as pyrex tubes?

[Enginerd]

I quickly read through the PDF and didn't see this noted. Can you find the claimed before and after elemental/isotopic composition, and transcribe it here?

I thought I remembered seeing it in the pdf, but it is not there, sorry. Looks like the best thing to do is to do a test and see how it comes out.

I had a bit of time this morning, so I looked again, and it appears there is some (alleged) data in the pdf...

"Transmutation of medical‐quality titanium is shown in Table II, after a 6 min. treatment. The data is taken from the surface sample. (Two surface samples were taken, yielding similar results.) Electron beam microanalysis was used to analyze the composition of a clean quartz sphere."

Table 2 with (alleged) before and after composition is found on page 36.

As a last example, the test results of the plasma treatment of “red sludge” are shown on Table III. This sludge is a by‐product of aluminum production, rich in minerals and metals. Most of it is iron and silica, but there are a number of rare‐earth metals in it, too. The sample was a 5 g lump of slightly wet sludge. It has been exposed to the plasma for 3 minutes at the bottom of the acoustic resonator, in air, at atmospheric pressure. After the treatment the melted, oxidized remnants were given to an accredited company to be examined by a quadrupole mass spectrometer. Column 4 of Table III shows the new composition after treatment. The sludge underwent a significant change; the ratio and the difference before and after the treatment is shown as well.

Under ordinary circumstances the volatile materials such as mercury should disappear, and other materials with high boiling points should be enriched, but not in this case. Here lithium was enriched by 20%, (melting point 277 oC.) The ratio of magnesium tripled (melting point 660o C), as did the phosphorus content (melting point 44o C); the potassium content increased 17 fold. The highest yield was copper. (Its melting point is about 1000 oC). It was enriched 430 fold. Gallium was enriched by 50%, but its melting point is 30 oC! Palladium was enriched 13 fold. (Its melting point is 400 o C).

Certainly the comparison has to be taken with a pinch of salt, as gases were not analyzed at all, and volatile materials were allowed to evaporate and escape from the system.

Table 3 with (alleged) before and after composition is found on page 37 and 38.

[D Tibbets]

hmmmm... not even our sun can fuse iron... most probably Silicon at most...

Sun cannot fuse to iron.

As far as elemental / isotope measurements. The charcoal, pencil 'lead'- graphite, and quartz all have their contaminates. All three materials have to be considered in before and after analysis. Certainly a plasma could sputter all sorts of material off of the quartz tube surface in addition to what is in the charcoal (phosphorus, sodium, potassium, etc.) and lead pincil material.

Dan Tibbets

[GIThruster]

Contaminates are all a tiny fraction of a percent. The claim was 10% of the reaction product was iron. The only source that might come close to that is the iron in the clay in the pencil lead, but even that is pushing it.

Really, there's no way to know until someone does a thorough chemical analysis of both the reactants and the products.

[Torulf2]

One possibility is that the graphite contains lots of iron in a non magnetic compound and that microwaving change it to an magnetic compound.

[D Tibbets]

One issue not yet mentioned is the power output of the claimed fusion. Even if there were no unstable and/ or radioactive intermediates, and no gamma or neutron radiation, there still may be as much as a few MeV of heat energy released per reaction. This heat energy would be ~ 1-10 million times greater than chemical reactions. If the video suggests perhaps 0.1 g of iron produced, that would be equivalent to perhaps ~ 1 million g, or one kiloton of TNT burning per 3 minutes or ~ 5 Kg per second. The oven would have melted or exploded. Even if the yield was only a few thousand times that of TNT, that would still have been equivalent to ~ 5 g of TNT per second. Major melting of the quartz tube at least would occur over three minutes. And of course the mixture in the tube would have probably been fused (in a heat sense, not a nuclear) or even vaporized.

Dan Tibbets

[Coolbrucelong]

WOW!
Not only does microwave assisted plasma cause red sludge to fuse it also alters common quartz tubing so it can withstand and contain astronomical amounts of heat and radiation!

[Tom Ligon]

Mass spec would not be my first choice for detecting iron in carbon. I would expect a forest of peaks, dominated by multiples of 12 AMU, but with the isotopes of carbon, plus a fair number of intermediate peaks due to hydrogen, hydroxyl, maybe even methyl groups tacked on for confusion. You could find a few peaks in the 54 to 58 range and declare victory if you wanted to ignore the rest.

More appropriate would be x-ray flourescence or a related method (energy dispersive spectrometry in an electron microscope is good), or atomic absorbtion spectrometry. Although simply burning some of the product and viewing it via an optical spectrometer would probably be enough.

For cheap and quick, there are some semi-micro quantitative analysis wet chemistry methods that, while easy to throw off with contamination from sloppy techniques, can readily detect iron. That was Chem 101 back when I was in school.

[Tom Ligon]

I seem to recall quartz tubing being difficult to score with a normal steel file, but it quaked in fear when I pulled out my diamond files. It may not break with as clean an end as Pyrex or flint glass, but it will break.

The stuff is difficult to fire polish to smooth the ends. It takes very high heat and it incandesces brilliant white when it finally gets hot enough.

I believe I finally got a water-wetted diamond tile cutting saw, which did neat work cutting both quartz and alumina tubing. These are down in the $50 range now, or you could use a diamond cutoff wheel on a mini die grinder.

[ladajo]

I have seen quartz used in some pretty intensive environment applications. Neat stuff.
I think it may be up to this task.

I have considered trying to talk my wife into sacrificing the kitichen microwave...she is still teething a bit over my magnet trials with my son's plasma sphere. It survived, but I had a franken rig on the garage bench for a few days. Final result, I needed higher density coils to get any real visual effect to the plasma. I got some minor, but nothing to write home about. Maybe one of these days I will go back with a massive bundle of alarm wire running off the battery charger and give it another go.

Ok, back to topic...

[Skipjack]

Corundum should do just fine.

[Torulf2]

The cost may not be to large. I will made the first tests with equipment I already have. Then I can see watt I need to buy.
I also have an not excellent but working Gieger counter I think to use during the test.
A correction. "Potassium ferrocyanide trihydrate" and Fe gives blue colour. "potassium thiosynate" gives red.

[Torulf2]

Its seems the biggest miracle of this devise is the destruction of energy.
For explain ( or for make excuses ) for this you may suggest the missing energy is consumed by fusion making stabile heavy nucleus, atomic numbers 29-83. Maybe I can make gold from carbon?