10KW LENR Demonstrator?

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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Jboily
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Post by Jboily »

chrismb wrote:
Axil wrote:What is “being partisan” mean? Am I somehow saying something you don’t want to hear?
It means taking certain things as true which others claim but have no evidence for it on one particular interpretation of a thing, whereas you choose not to accept as claimed things that the doubters of that thing say.

In this case you are taking it one step beyond that, which is to actually start trying to construct what could possibly be in this 'reactor' of Rossi's. You'll probably end up designing something which he did not. Anyway, you are in full unmitigated support for whatever Rossi has done in that 'reactor' as if it were a true innovation, rather than thinking about what it could be that it isn't a true innovation.

Rossi says [paraphrase] "I'm generating power from an unknown reaction" and I say "He may be generating power from a known reaction that may not be fully understood", and you are choosing the former and have yet to make a comment as to why it might be the latter.

So what you are doing isn't researching the subject, because it is unbalanced nor has a disprovable null hypothesis.
Please allow me to interject some comments here.

I think Axil is taking a good path to understand what going on. It is not a mater of being pro or against it. It is a mater of be open minded.

Personally, I am an engineer, so my approach is that as long as a process works, I really do not care if the theory is correct or not. The important to me is to apply the technique correctly in a safe manner.

Now, physicists will argue to the end until they agree about the model that represent the reaction is the correct one, which is fine to me, but it should not be at the expenses of discrediting some working processes on the basis that they do not fit accepted theories.

Now, it is not only Rossi that has succeeded in observing effect in Ni-H systems. So, the reaction in partially confirmed independently. I think the best approach here is to see that this reaction is fully confirmed, and that the technique becomes wildly disseminated so that it cannot be lost due to some dramatic events.

Tom Ligon
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Post by Tom Ligon »

Chris,

Since you don't think Rossi's contraption works, why worry that Axil's will differ from it?

The history of invention does include a number of inaccurate attempts to copy that actually work better. Supposedly the US lost a lot of ships in WWII to Japanese torpedos that were better than ours, with the legend being they were built based on a misunderstanding of how the British did it.

Not that there are not many more examples of bad copies that work badly, or bad originals.

Rossi's device does not seem all that different to me than any number of LENR attempts, some of which actually seem to do something (we don't know what, exactly). Without some curiosity and tinkering, how will we know what? Maybe Axil will build one that is not all covered with tape.

Jocelyn, you and I appreciate tinkerers like Faraday, who's homopolar generator clearly could not work but did.

tomclarke
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Post by tomclarke »

Jboily wrote:
chrismb wrote:
Axil wrote:What is “being partisan” mean? Am I somehow saying something you don’t want to hear?
It means taking certain things as true which others claim but have no evidence for it on one particular interpretation of a thing, whereas you choose not to accept as claimed things that the doubters of that thing say.

In this case you are taking it one step beyond that, which is to actually start trying to construct what could possibly be in this 'reactor' of Rossi's. You'll probably end up designing something which he did not. Anyway, you are in full unmitigated support for whatever Rossi has done in that 'reactor' as if it were a true innovation, rather than thinking about what it could be that it isn't a true innovation.

Rossi says [paraphrase] "I'm generating power from an unknown reaction" and I say "He may be generating power from a known reaction that may not be fully understood", and you are choosing the former and have yet to make a comment as to why it might be the latter.

So what you are doing isn't researching the subject, because it is unbalanced nor has a disprovable null hypothesis.
Please allow me to interject some comments here.

I think Axil is taking a good path to understand what going on. It is not a mater of being pro or against it. It is a mater of be open minded.

Personally, I am an engineer, so my approach is that as long as a process works, I really do not care if the theory is correct or not. The important to me is to apply the technique correctly in a safe manner.

Now, physicists will argue to the end until they agree about the model that represent the reaction is the correct one, which is fine to me, but it should not be at the expenses of discrediting some working processes on the basis that they do not fit accepted theories.

Now, it is not only Rossi that has succeeded in observing effect in Ni-H systems. So, the reaction in partially confirmed independently. I think the best approach here is to see that this reaction is fully confirmed, and that the technique becomes wildly disseminated so that it cannot be lost due to some dramatic events.
Of course axil is free to do whjat he wants, but the parallel here is with other pseudoscience masquerading as science, getting credibility it does not observe.

If, on similar lack of evidence, somone claimed to have a device which would talk to spirits, would your approach be so openhanded?

The claims here are similarly extraordinary, the experimental evidence very similar to that relating to spiritualism early this century. Lots of people have tried it, many strange effects observed, some people are convinced it is real, no evidence that stands up.

I will sit up and take notice if the experimental results support W-L theory, specifically:
(1) Cu decay gamma's observed after apparatus is switched off.
(2) external gamma source shielded by apparatus when working (the W-L reason for lack of gammas is that "slow electrons" shield them much better than lead. this itself is an easily testable prediction).

Or if even one experiment produces results not explicable conventionally.

Best wishes, Tom
Last edited by tomclarke on Mon Jan 31, 2011 8:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

tomclarke wrote: If, on similar lack of evidence, somone claimed to have a device which would talk to spirits, would your approach be so openhanded?
Oh puleeze!

Comparing an alternate way of achieving what we KNOW to exist (fusion) with something that has no basis in fact (spirit communication) is ludicrous! Think of an example that isn't so totally ridiculous please.

You may have a bit of a point, but this comparison ruins it.

Jboily
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Post by Jboily »

Axil wrote: I see Silicon (ash - abbreviated Si) copper (ash - undocumented peak between nickel and zinc) and cobalt (secret catalyst and/or ash? - abbreviated Co). Is that what you’re asking?
Axil,
Here is an other interesting reference where we can see spectra of a producing Ni sample versus a nonproducing sample.
http://www.enea.it/com/ingl/New_ingl/pu ... _Italy.pdf
(English version) See page 177 figure 3, top graph.

It looks like there is an extra peak (close to 0 KeV) in the nonproducing Ni sample. What would this be? Could it be a element that poison the reaction? There do not seem to have Co in there!

Cheers,

jb

parallel
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Post by parallel »

Interview by New Energy Times of Ing. Rossi
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2011/ ... yzer.shtml

tomclarke
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Post by tomclarke »

KitemanSA wrote:
tomclarke wrote: If, on similar lack of evidence, somone claimed to have a device which would talk to spirits, would your approach be so openhanded?
Oh puleeze!

Comparing an alternate way of achieving what we KNOW to exist (fusion) with something that has no basis in fact (spirit communication) is ludicrous! Think of an example that isn't so totally ridiculous please.

You may have a bit of a point, but this comparison ruins it.
Not at all. The evidence for spiritualism at start of last century was a good deal stronger than that for CF (or weak force blah blah) now.

Admittedly given what we now know spiritualism would be very low, in my book, but the common factor is believing in an exciting, plausible, but unsupported hypothesis to explain a miscellaneous set of data which have varied mundane solutions.

Axil
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Post by Axil »

The requirement at startup to heat the nano-powder is another detailed clue to what is happening inside the Rossi catalyst.

By analogy, when any hydrocarbon is set afire, it must undergo a phase transition from a solid or a liquid to a gas. It is the gas that burns and not the liquid or solid. You can put out a match in gasoline or jet fuel, it is their vapor that is combustible.

So too for the Rossi catalyst, for it to “catch fire” it must undergo a phase transition.

IMO, one metal that undergoes a phase transition in this fashion is cobalt.
The ASM Metals Handbook, Desk Edition, 2nd Ed (Appendix 2, page 113) lists the allotropic transformation at 1 atm for elemental cobalt as alpha phase(FCC crystal structure) above 422 deg C , and epsilon phase (HCP crystal structure)at and below this temperature.
The Rossi catalyst was engineered in the early 1990’s and may not be configured so that the cobalt core is in the FCC crystal structure.

Today cobalt nano-particles can be built in any of its three crystal structures. This initial crystal structure phase configuration is a function of how the nano-powder is manufactured.

Once a Rossi small portion of the Rossi powder hits a temperature at or above 422C it starts to burn and the heat production of the small portion gradually spreads to the bulk of the nano-powder.

Once in full “combustion mode” when the entire collection of nano-powder is in the FCC crystal structure, then the burning is self sustaining.

To shut the reaction down, the bulk of the nano-powder must be cooled to under 422C; the bulk of the powder drops into the HCP crystal structure and the reaction stops.

So sorry…please excuse me…its just my opinion.

Axil
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Post by Axil »

Jboily wrote:
Axil wrote: I see Silicon (ash - abbreviated Si) copper (ash - undocumented peak between nickel and zinc) and cobalt (secret catalyst and/or ash? - abbreviated Co). Is that what you’re asking?
Axil,
Here is an other interesting reference where we can see spectra of a producing Ni sample versus a nonproducing sample.
http://www.enea.it/com/ingl/New_ingl/pu ... _Italy.pdf
(English version) See page 177 figure 3, top graph.

It looks like there is an extra peak (close to 0 KeV) in the nonproducing Ni sample. What would this be? Could it be a element that poison the reaction? There do not seem to have Co in there!

Cheers,

jb
According to the Rossi camp, H2 and D2 don’t mix. The poison could be a small amount of the contraindicated hydrogen isotope.

Nickel alone can catalyze of LENR reaction just like plutonium can produce some heat. What is needed is a “chain reaction” where the catalytic action is extreme and self sustaining…a run away chain reaction that can produce a explosion of energy release.

Steven B. Krivit tells a story of a cold fusion meltdown in

http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/ ... piantelli/
Piantelli has an exciting story to tell of another experiment that, for few hours, was out of control. It was sometime around September 1993, before Piantelli-Focardi group’s first published paper on the subject. Around 7 in the evening, he looked at the monitor for the experiment. Something didn’t look right. The temperature was increasing rapidly. He wasn’t sure what to do. Should he kill the experiment, and if so, how would he stop it?

A rapidly increasing temperature in an enclosed steel container could be a big, big problem. He was afraid. He wondered whether he should leave the building. Instead he called Focardi in Milano—at 2 in the morning—and asked, “What should I do?” This was before Piantelli knew about the poisoning effect of deuterium. But Focardi came up with a workable idea: introduce nitrogen. And it worked. It stopped the uncontrolled temperature rise and killed the experiment.

Piantelli didn’t know how hot the experiment had gotten before he killed it because the monitor eventually blacked out. However, the metal thermocouples inside the cell melted. This told him that the temperature exceeded 1450 C. Understandably, he was angry because these experiments take a long time to run and he had to abandon it prematurely.
“It’s not good when they run too hot,” Piantelli said. “400 C is a much better range.”

Thanks for the reference.

Nik
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Gentlefolk, Please !!

Post by Nik »

Well, we've got the Italian team making remarkable but scarily vague claims that seem 'Beyond Theory', possibly based on surface properties that may, perhaps, exhibit unexpected synergic effects. Catalysts are funny that way...

We also have BLP invoking 'Hydralinos' which appear to flout quantum physics, cosmology etc etc and, so far, seem impossible to replicate independently. We've discussed their issues else-where: Until you can buy a litre of high-grade hydralinos from eg Merck, few researchers dare give credence...

We have the best and brightest in the field simultaneously trying to falsify those dubious claims, match the work and improve on it, preferably without the media circus that surrounds such claims...

Situation reminds me of the German scientists handed the first magnetron recovered from a downed RAF bomber: Despite their astonishment, they soon realised it complied with known physics, but in a most elegant and robust implementation, vaguely analogous to the venerable Dynatron valve...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynatron

Per Clarke's Laws, 'Magic' is just covert high-tech. The converse is the ever-present potential for trickery, snake oil and all that jazz...

I really, really want to see sustained nuclear fusion go mainstream. The upside solves many terrestrial problems and opens the solar system...

IMHO, based on 'good science', the polywell approach currently has the greatest potential for near-term success. Should anything novel come of 'hydrinos' and their ilk, I'll be delighted. Meanwhile, if you don't mind, I'll cry, 'Insufficient Data !!' and remain suitably skeptical...
---

ps: I'm reminded that the inventors of polyethylene had horrendous problems reproducing their own work. They either got a pot full of the white stuff, or the reagents just sat and sulked. Took them a while to establish that the reaction needed just the slightest trace of oxygen to initiate the process...

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

tomclarke wrote: Not at all. The evidence for spiritualism at start of last century was a good deal stronger than that for CF (or weak force blah blah) now.

Admittedly given what we now know spiritualism would be very low, in my book, but the common factor is believing in an exciting, plausible, but unsupported hypothesis to explain a miscellaneous set of data which have varied mundane solutions.
Am I to understand from this that you believe that ghosties and goolies and things that go bump in the night are real? Do you watch Ghost Hunters as anything more than hilareous entertainment?

The fact that folks 100+ years ago thought they were real is no more pertainant to today's discussions than that folks used to hold the phlogiston theory dear.

True, it is incumbant upon whoever is showing such a system to demonstrate that mundane answers are not sufficient before looking for exotic ones. But persuming they have done due diligence, and I have trouble believing that ALL researchers in this field have failed to do due diligence, there seems to be soming odd happening here. IF so, certainly you would be interested in understanding possible explanations, no?

Axil
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Post by Axil »

Regarding the suppler of Rossi’s nano-power: Powder nickel: Gerli Metalli – Milan


I believe that the nano-catalyst that Rossi is using is Commercial of the shelf (CATS).


If you knew the proper specification, you could go to your local catalyst supplier and order the Rossi nano-power right off the shelf without the hassle of nano-powder fabrication.

This specification comprises such characteristics as diameter is nanometers, shape, internal structure including crystal structure, and material(s)


You see, all catalysts operate in a chemical environment. They are bathed in vegetable oil, ethanol or whatever.


Nobody puts a catalyst in a steel can and runs hydrogen through it, and does the other things that the Italians do: applied magnetic fields, applied electrostatic fields, startup heat and so on.


Like a fantasy football fan, I am handicapping the game that is to come (the Rossi reveal) to see how close I can get to the final score: the Rossi nano-powder spec. Great fun!

tomclarke
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Post by tomclarke »

KitemanSA wrote:
tomclarke wrote: Not at all. The evidence for spiritualism at start of last century was a good deal stronger than that for CF (or weak force blah blah) now.

Admittedly given what we now know spiritualism would be very low, in my book, but the common factor is believing in an exciting, plausible, but unsupported hypothesis to explain a miscellaneous set of data which have varied mundane solutions.
Am I to understand from this that you believe that ghosties and goolies and things that go bump in the night are real? Do you watch Ghost Hunters as anything more than hilareous entertainment?

The fact that folks 100+ years ago thought they were real is no more pertainant to today's discussions than that folks used to hold the phlogiston theory dear.

True, it is incumbant upon whoever is showing such a system to demonstrate that mundane answers are not sufficient before looking for exotic ones. But persuming they have done due diligence, and I have trouble believing that ALL researchers in this field have failed to do due diligence, there seems to be soming odd happening here. IF so, certainly you would be interested in understanding possible explanations, no?
Indeed some LENR reserchers have replicated experiments critically - they discover possible mundane explanations. If there were a replicatable clearly non-explainable effect everyone would sit up & take notice.

There are some weird effects in LENR systems. The trouble is they don't seem nuclear weird. No transmutation (evidence all evaporates when tested), not enough heat to rule out chemical, no radiation signature.

So there is as yet no reason to expect way out LENR theories which strain credibility to be true. Were there real evidence, rather than a collection of unusual but not very surprising effects, it would be different.

And spritualism in early 19th century similarly has a collection of unusual effects, with an explanation involving spirits that convinced many people (inclding scientsists) at the time, but turned out to be bunk.

At best, LENR evidence is "nuanced". :)

icarus
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Post by icarus »

So there is as yet no reason to expect way out LENR theories which strain credibility to be true. Were there real evidence, rather than a collection of unusual but not very surprising effects, it would be different.

And spritualism in early 19th century similarly has a collection of unusual effects, with an explanation involving spirits that convinced many people (inclding scientsists) at the time, but turned out to be bunk.
Replace a few key nouns and it sounds like you just penned a perfect obituary for anthropogenic global warming in retrospect some 10-15 years from now.

Gaia spirits, lack of experimental evidence, hype, gravy train ... its got it all boy.

nferguso
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Comment from Delta Ohm

Post by nferguso »

I submitted a question to Delta Ohm srl:
Sirs,

I have a question regarding the suitability for a particular purpose of one of your instruments, the Delta OHM # HD37AB1347 Indoor Air Quality Monitor. The purpose is to measure accurately the relative quantity of steam to liquid water aerosol in a gaseous exhaust. The exhaust consists exclusively of water or steam - no other gasses or other substances.
I am concerned that, though the instrument may be suitable for measuring the ratio with respect to volume, it isn't quite sensitive enough to measure the ratio with respect to mass. I am concerned about this because of the great difference in specific density between steam and liquid water (1600X). The gas flow might contain an insignificant amount of liquid by volume, yet by mass the liquid could constitute the great majority of the exhaust's mass. It is that condition that I need to detect. Yet some instruments might not be capable of sensing that case.
Can you tell me if I am correct in this concern, or if the HD37AB1347 can measure the ratio of specific densities in the exhaust with reasonable accuracy? I'm thinking +/- 10% is more than enough.
Thank you very much for your advice on this question.
Ms. Valentina Meneghini responded:
Thank you for your inquiry.
Actually we regret to inform you that we do not have any instrument among our production which is suitable for your application.
Any further information about our instrument is available on our website, where you can also download any data sheet as well as the general catalogue
The response implies that there is no way to know if the exhaust of their device is purely steam, or if the bulk of it (by mass) is liquid aerosol. If the latter, then even assuming that the liquid is near 100 deg C, the power claimed is off by a factor of at least 6, or ~2kW vs. ~12kW. Perhaps someone with experience in the dynamics of teapots could guess what's actually in the exhaust?

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