10KW LENR Demonstrator?

[Joseph Chikva]

I have given you MY definition several times.

Does your definition differ from conventional?

[tomclarke]

tomclarke

OK - I agree BEC can have liquid behaviour. But idea of BEC at such high temperatures is more than absurd.

It does seem pretty absurd. However Prof. Kim in an earlier paper argues that there is an appreciable statistical probability of BEC formation in a nano scale metal grain at higher temperature if the grain boundaries isolate the metal crystalite from the surrounding material. While the paper is wild speculation it does predict that cold fusion should work better at lower temperatures in the Pd-D system.

see the paper here:

http://www.physics.purdue.edu/people/fa ... _BECNF.pdf

Coulomb screening is real. But you can't get much of it from a lattice because the spatial scale is all wrong due to 2000 X mass difference between electrons and nucleons.

After the January announcement by Rossi I decided to debunk his claims rigorously and reviewed the available literature.

The issue of coulomb screening inside metal lattices is of obvious importance. Most of the literature reports observe coulomb screening of a few hundred keV, however this paper caught my attention:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/9n60323527114l0t/

These experimenters use a MeV Li ion beam to probe a Pd foil loaded with H and observe 300keV screening they then repeat the experiment after applying tensile stress to the foil and observe up to 2.8keV of screening!

I consider this experiment to be fairly credible and in my opinion it shows that a small change of lattice energy on the atomic scale may have disproportionately large effect on the nuclear scale.

Sorry for tardy reply.

This is a really nice, well-written paper. Some points:
They are getting 3keV screening but slightly higher values have been observed elsewhere, so this is not new.

The attribution of increased cross-section over predicted to a screening potential is not justified. The error bars in this paper are high and some other effect could be causing the relative increase in cross-section of 40% at 300keV.

All these measurements are presumably difficult because at lower energies where the increase in cross-section would be larger the cross-section itself gets very small.

So my conclusion is:

yes there are ways to increase cross-section in lattices

they may well be due to effective electron screening potential, but could be due to lens effects etc

The effects here are what you might expect (though 3kev sounds high it is not equivalent to 3kev electron in lattice) and much much smaller than what is needed for CF.

I agree, what the CF people should be doing is studying all this stuff and trying to work out what are these effects and how to optimise them.

Best wishes, Tom

[cg66]

http://institute.lanl.gov/ei/LADSS/lect ... laytor.pdf

Claytor is an established resercher. But very far out of his area doing this stuff. Of course, he may be an expert on calorimetry & detecting very small quantities of tritium. Or he may, outside his normal area, overlook trivial contaminants like sources of natural tritium...

Given the low power outputs claimed, and short run times, the T produced as reaction product would have to be very low concentration. Somone else can do the calculations.

BTW Claytor apprently did some work in this area in the 90s.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/LibFrame2.html

Claytor, T.N., et al. Tritium and neutron measurements of a solid state cell. in NSF/EPRI Workshop on Anomalous Effects in Deuterated Materials. 1989. Washington, DC.

Claytor, T.N., et al. Tritium and Neutron Measurements From Deuterated Pd-Si. in Anomalous Nuclear Effects in Deuterium/Solid Systems, "AIP Conference Proceedings 228". 1990. Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT: American Institute of Physics, New York.

Claytor, T.N., D.G. Tuggle, and H.O. Menlove. Tritium Generation and Neutron Measurements in Pd-Si Under High Deuterium Gas Pressure. in Second Annual Conference on Cold Fusion, "The Science of Cold Fusion". 1991. Como, Ita: Societa Italiana di Fisica, Bologna, Italy.

Claytor, T.N., D.G. Tuggle, and S.F. Taylor. Evolution of Tritium from Deuterided Palladium Subject to High Electrical Currents. in Third International Conference on Cold Fusion, "Frontiers of Cold Fusion". 1992. Nagoya Japan: Universal Academy Press, Inc., Tokyo, Japan.

Claytor, T.N., Tritium Production from a Low Voltage Deuterium Discharge of Palladium and Other Metals. J. New Energy, 1996. 1(1): p. 118.

Claytor, T.N., D.D. Jackson, and D.G. Tuggle, Tritium production from low voltage deuterium discharge on palladium and other metals. Infinite Energy, 1996. 2(7): p. 19.

Claytor, T.N., et al. Tritium Production from Palladium Alloys. in The Seventh International Conference on Cold Fusion. 1998. Vancouver, Canada: ENECO, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT.

[tomclarke]

http://institute.lanl.gov/ei/LADSS/lect ... laytor.pdf

Claytor is an established resercher. But very far out of his area doing this stuff. Of course, he may be an expert on calorimetry & detecting very small quantities of tritium. Or he may, outside his normal area, overlook trivial contaminants like sources of natural tritium...

Given the low power outputs claimed, and short run times, the T produced as reaction product would have to be very low concentration. Somone else can do the calculations.

BTW Claytor apprently did some work in this area in the 90s.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/LibFrame2.html

Claytor, T.N., et al. Tritium and neutron measurements of a solid state cell. in NSF/EPRI Workshop on Anomalous Effects in Deuterated Materials. 1989. Washington, DC.

Claytor, T.N., et al. Tritium and Neutron Measurements From Deuterated Pd-Si. in Anomalous Nuclear Effects in Deuterium/Solid Systems, "AIP Conference Proceedings 228". 1990. Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT: American Institute of Physics, New York.

Claytor, T.N., D.G. Tuggle, and H.O. Menlove. Tritium Generation and Neutron Measurements in Pd-Si Under High Deuterium Gas Pressure. in Second Annual Conference on Cold Fusion, "The Science of Cold Fusion". 1991. Como, Ita: Societa Italiana di Fisica, Bologna, Italy.

Claytor, T.N., D.G. Tuggle, and S.F. Taylor. Evolution of Tritium from Deuterided Palladium Subject to High Electrical Currents. in Third International Conference on Cold Fusion, "Frontiers of Cold Fusion". 1992. Nagoya Japan: Universal Academy Press, Inc., Tokyo, Japan.

Claytor, T.N., Tritium Production from a Low Voltage Deuterium Discharge of Palladium and Other Metals. J. New Energy, 1996. 1(1): p. 118.

Claytor, T.N., D.D. Jackson, and D.G. Tuggle, Tritium production from low voltage deuterium discharge on palladium and other metals. Infinite Energy, 1996. 2(7): p. 19.

Claytor, T.N., et al. Tritium Production from Palladium Alloys. in The Seventh International Conference on Cold Fusion. 1998. Vancouver, Canada: ENECO, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT.

It means he is a CF enthusiast. I have not looked at these papers. But it is unlikley they will be more convincing than all the CF papers I have looked at, which offer bad methodolgy or unconvincing results or both.

Does somone think Claytor's stuff should be looked at?

I found this in 30s googling (from claytor cold fussion tritium):

I sent messages to Claytor requesting clarification on his methods, as
I have what I think is a reasonable explanation, but he broke off
communications.

---
Kirk Shanahan {My opinions...noone else's}
Reply to this Message
[Scroll to Parent Message] [Open Message Tree] David Spain - 05 Dec 2004 23:33 GMT
> {snip}
>
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> ---
> Kirk Shanahan {My opinions...noone else's}

Since you aren't getting any response from Claytor can you share
with us what you think your reasonable explanation is? I'm curious.

BTW I don't think there's any way this work can be classified as CF.
The only thing in common between Claytors' work and CF is the use
of palladium in some experiments.

Dave
Reply to this Message
[Scroll to Parent Message] [Open Message Tree] Kirk Shanahan - 06 Dec 2004 13:18 GMT
{snip}

> Since you aren't getting any response from Claytor can you share
> with us what you think your reasonable explanation is? I'm curious.

In a nutshell, the experiment is essentially a plasma experiment.
Plasmas are used to clean metal surfaces, which, unless you heat to
>1000C, are usually oxide covered. In the presence of hydrogen,
you get surface hydroxls, which will come off as water under various
conditions, including a plasma.

The on-line tritium detectors Claytor used are suceptible to
interferences, especially from water, that give false positives.
Further, Claytor calibrated his equipment. How can you calibrate a
tritium detector without introducing tritium? (Technically, he could
have calibrated a supposedly identical sensor, and applied the
calibration to the one he actually used assuming they would be
identical. This is a point he never made clear.) If the instrument
had been calibrated with T, then T could have come off due to the
plasma. Or, the plasma could simply produce gases that cause the
detector to respond.

Claytor says he checked for that, but if I simply accept that, that's
'science by assertion'. I don't do that, so I asked him about his
procedures. He responded cursorily, and I asked for further
clarification as I felt my concerns were not adressed. That's when he
quit replying.

The other thing Claytor did was to collect samples and do LSC to find
T. However, his signals are again at trace level, like so much of CF
research, and the LSC technique is prone to interference effects, so I
was a bit worried about that as well, as I am with all the T
detections reported to 'prove' CF.

The point is, as soon as Claytor knew he wasn't going to be able to
brush me off with simplistic assertions, he quit communicating.

> BTW I don't think there's any way this work can be classified as CF.
> The only thing in common between Claytors' work and CF is the use
> of palladium in some experiments.
>
> Dave

I agree. That it is called such is a specific example of the problem
in the field where people take _any_ positive claim and add it to the
stats that 'prove' CF is real. The field needs to be subdivided into
various classes of experiemtns, all which contain anomalies. Each
type needs to be considered separately. Once the specific type is
undestood, what is going on may end up being seen in other types as
well, or maybe not...it just depends.

---
Kirk Shanahan {My opinions...noone else's}
Reply to this Message
[Scroll to Parent Message] [Open Message Tree] Bruce Scott TOK - 08 Dec 2004 16:41 GMT
|> The point is, as soon as Claytor knew he wasn't going to be able to
|> brush me off with simplistic assertions, he quit communicating.

There is a lot of behaviour like that also in mainstream science. It
happens when a lot of people are in over their heads, trying to seem to
be smart when they are no longer current.

Remember, papers are counted, not read. Make lots of noise with bad
papers (especially in PRL) and you have a nice, fat resume.

[discusion of 'cherry picking' snipped... that's a problem in the
mainstream, too, especially when experimentalists don't know enough
about theory to tell a bad one, and vice versa]

[Crawdaddy]

Tomclarke

The attribution of increased cross-section over predicted to a screening potential is not justified. The error bars in this paper are high and some other effect could be causing the relative increase in cross-section of 40% at 300keV.

This is true, but if this is not due to experimental error then it is an example of large changes at the nuclear scale resulting from forces applied at the scale of the entire atom.

Since the energies, length scales, and time scales of involved in applying tension (inter atomic interaction) are many orders of magnitude different from those at the nuclear scale, the observed results are very significant for cold fusion in my opinion. Effects that bridge the large gap between chemical reactions (inter-atomic) and nuclear reactions strengthen arguments for cold fusion.

The effects here are what you might expect (though 3kev sounds high it is not equivalent to 3kev electron in lattice) and much much smaller than what is needed for CF.

I agree that no cold fusion can occur in this system. But the external applied force in this experiment is so small (it might even be difficult to measure any change in the lattice constants of the alloy under such tension), that the possibility of extending the result is obvious.

It is for reasons like this, along with the many other papers of similar quality published in the field of cold fusion and related areas that lead me to take a more balanced view of the possibility of the e-cat being genuine.

Thank you for the discussion.

[tomclarke]

Tomclarke

Quote:
The attribution of increased cross-section over predicted to a screening potential is not justified. The error bars in this paper are high and some other effect could be causing the relative increase in cross-section of 40% at 300keV.



This is true, but if this is not due to experimental error then it is an example of large changes at the nuclear scale resulting from forces applied at the scale of the entire atom.

Since the energies, length scales, and time scales of involved in applying tension (inter atomic interaction) are many orders of magnitude different from those at the nuclear scale, the observed results are very significant for cold fusion in my opinion. Effects that bridge the large gap between chemical reactions (inter-atomic) and nuclear reactions strengthen arguments for cold fusion.

Well I am a little outside my comfort zone here, but I think you are wrong about nuclear.

Consider the effect of lattice atomic potential on incoming ions. This will bend ions slightly (more for lower energies). Suppose this bending had the effect of making it more likely that ions will have a direct hit on a target proton? This is not a nuclear-scale effect, but still alters apparent cross-section in an energy-ependent way.
Maybe any such effect is too small to be significant? Or maybe not. But tension would change it.


So the reason for hope here is that +3kev is respectable and if mechanism can be understood it can be optimised. But it is still way too low to help CF.

[KitemanSA]

So Dan,
I have asked several times and you have not done so, but now I think you must... DEFINE "FUSION". Until you do, we cannot have a meaningful conversation. I have given you MY definition several times. What is yours?

Dan?

[Kahuna]

This was pointed out on Vortex and I think worth a quick mention here. Note the (presumably) Production E-Cats in the picture at the top of the linked article. They appear to be all dressed up for the ball in a very nice red, gray and black suit. They also appear to not be sporting the chimney of the demo version we have seen to date.

This seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a scam, but I guess it might lend credibility for some.

http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=2004

[Crawdaddy]

tomclarke

Consider the effect of lattice atomic potential on incoming ions. This will bend ions slightly (more for lower energies). Suppose this bending had the effect of making it more likely that ions will have a direct hit on a target proton? This is not a nuclear-scale effect, but still alters apparent cross-section in an energy-ependent way.
Maybe any such effect is too small to be significant? Or maybe not. But tension would change it.

I am also outside my comfort zone in this area, but it seems improbable to me. If I have time, I will see if there are any literature reports. From my uninformed perspective it seems to me that the huge energies and extremely short wavelengths of the Li ions make this effect very unlikely.

[D Tibbets]

KitemanSA, have you even read any of the many links I provided? Argue their conclusions, not mine. As far as as stellar neucleosynthesis by the rp, rn and sn processes, I have already provided several links. I will endeveor to find a more indisdputable one.

A very straight forward and documented situation in massive stellar evolution. The burn, H, He, C, O, etc. up until the iron group is reached. At that point the heat engine shuts down, they gravitationally collapse and then explode due to complicated shockwave interactions, etc. Why does this occur, if nucleosynthesis beyond the iron group (Fe56, Ni58, Ni62) could continue to produce heat to support the core of the star?

Dan Tibbets

[KitemanSA]

KitemanSA, have you even read any of the many links I provided?

Yes, and except where they assume stellar evolutionary process (which are not necessarily the same as solid state processes) they all agree with my statements.

You provided as the first link in your prior post a page called "FurryElephant". I propose we discuss that page section by section. To begin:

Pushing protons together increases potential energy
Imagine pusing two protons closer and closer to each other. They repel each other because they are both positively charged so you have to do more and more work as they get closer. Energy and work are equivalent ideas.

If you let the protons go then they fly apart again, so you get the energy back. Because you can get the energy back we say that you store potential energy as you push protons together.

The maximum potential energy is when they are quite close together and it's zero when they're a long way apart. Low energy means more stable. If the protons don’t touch then the stable, low-energy state is for them to be a long way apart.

So far, so good. Nothing to discuss here, right? So the next section is:

Like falling into a well
When two protons are close enough the strong force binds them tightly together. It’s as if they’ve fallen down a deep well and the potential energy has suddenly become very negative.

In other words once nucleons are bound in a nucleus then the stable, low energy state is for them to stay bound.

Again, nothing to discuss.

Negative potential energy is energy you didn't have to put in
Potential energy is normally defined to be negative for attractive forces and positive for repulsive ones. Only attractive forces, like gravity and the strong force, bind systems together. All bound systems have negative potential energy.

Wow, they got this one right! Things are looking up

Animation of the solar system as an example of a bound system. All bound systems have negative potential energy.
When the protons aren’t bound in the nucleus you store potential energy by pushing the protons together. When the protons are bound in a nucleus you store potential energy by pulling the protons apart, provided they don't unbind.

You have to do more work pulling the nucleus apart than you had to put in squeezing the protons together to make it. Energy is released when the protons bind together because the total potential energy of the system is reduced.

This is what I have been saying all along by the way.

The energy seems to come from nowhere because the strong force suddenly attracts the protons when they are very close.

So far it is agreeing with what I said. Any contention with what this has said so far?

So this has been a pretty boring (read uncontentious) beginning to the section by section. Any concerns? Shall we go on?

[D Tibbets]

KitemanSA, some more references about the nuclear binding energy per nucleon relationship, nucleosynthesis, etc.
The video is perhaps useful to change your perspective.

The Facts on File of ASTRONOMY
by: Valorie Illingsworth & John O.E. Clark
Copyright 2000 by Market House Books Ltd.

From pp 290

...
Even higher temperatures will trigger reactions by which almost all elements up to a mass number of 56 can be synthesized. The iron- peak elements, ie 56Fe, 56Ni, 56Co, etc., represent the end of the nucleosynthesis sequence by nuclear fusion: further fusion would require rather than than liberate energy because nuclei with this mass number have the maximum binding energy per nucleon.

http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/tharriso/ast110/class19.html

Iron is the heaviest element that can be created through a fusion process in which energy is released, as is shown in (a similar figure) Figure 17.14 You can fuse iron with other elements to create lead or uranium, but this absorbs energy instead of releasing it. Iron is the end of the road!

:


http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/fo ... nd-evolve/

Supernovae Leave Behind Neutron Stars or Black Holes
Main sequence stars over eight solar masses are destined to die in a titanic explosion called a supernova. A supernova is not merely a bigger nova. In a nova, only the star's surface explodes. In a supernova, the star's core collapses and then explodes. In massive stars, a complex series of nuclear reactions leads to the production of iron in the core. Having achieved iron, the star has wrung all the energy it can out of nuclear fusion - fusion reactions that form elements heavier than iron actually consume energy rather than produce it. The star no longer has any way to support its own mass, and the iron core collapses. In just a matter of seconds the core shrinks from roughly 5000 miles across to just a dozen, and the temperature spikes 100 billion degrees or more. The outer layers of the star initially begin to collapse along with the core, but rebound with the enormous release of energy and are thrown violently outward.

And if you want to watch a U-tube video that shows the relationship between fusion and fission energy output and the nuclear binding energy per nucleon chart watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTkojROg-t8

Dan Tibbets

[icarus]

So, not an espresso machine?

[Axil]

tomclarke

OK - I agree BEC can have liquid behaviour. But idea of BEC at such high temperatures is more than absurd.

It does seem pretty absurd. However Prof. Kim in an earlier paper argues that there is an appreciable statistical probability of BEC formation in a nano scale metal grain at higher temperature if the grain boundaries isolate the metal crystalite from the surrounding material. While the paper is wild speculation it does predict that cold fusion should work better at lower temperatures in the Pd-D system.

see the paper here:

http://www.physics.purdue.edu/people/fa ... _BECNF.pdf

Coulomb screening is real. But you can't get much of it from a lattice because the spatial scale is all wrong due to 2000 X mass difference between electrons and nucleons.

After the January announcement by Rossi I decided to debunk his claims rigorously and reviewed the available literature.

The issue of coulomb screening inside metal lattices is of obvious importance. Most of the literature reports observe coulomb screening of a few hundred keV, however this paper caught my attention:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/9n60323527114l0t/

These experimenters use a MeV Li ion beam to probe a Pd foil loaded with H and observe 300keV screening they then repeat the experiment after applying tensile stress to the foil and observe up to 2.8keV of screening!

I consider this experiment to be fairly credible and in my opinion it shows that a small change of lattice energy on the atomic scale may have disproportionately large effect on the nuclear scale.

Sorry for tardy reply.

This is a really nice, well-written paper. Some points:
They are getting 3keV screening but slightly higher values have been observed elsewhere, so this is not new.

The attribution of increased cross-section over predicted to a screening potential is not justified. The error bars in this paper are high and some other effect could be causing the relative increase in cross-section of 40% at 300keV.

All these measurements are presumably difficult because at lower energies where the increase in cross-section would be larger the cross-section itself gets very small.

So my conclusion is:

yes there are ways to increase cross-section in lattices

they may well be due to effective electron screening potential, but could be due to lens effects etc

The effects here are what you might expect (though 3kev sounds high it is not equivalent to 3kev electron in lattice) and much much smaller than what is needed for CF.

I agree, what the CF people should be doing is studying all this stuff and trying to work out what are these effects and how to optimise them.

Best wishes, Tom

...yes there are ways to increase cross-section in lattices

First some background

although one might first think “the finer the better” because the finer the powder the more surface area per volume you get, this is not the case. Because in order to reach useful reaction rates with hydrogen, the powder needs to processed in a way that leads to amplified tubercles on the surface of his nano-powder.

The tubercles are essential in order for the reaction rate to reach levels high enough for the implied total power output per volume or mass to reach orders of magnitude kW/kg – this level of power density is required for any useful application of the process.

Rossi tells that he worked every waking hour for six months straight, trying dozens of combinations to find the optimal powder size for the Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat. He further stresses that specific data about the final optimal grain size cannot be revealed, but can tell us that the most efficient grain size is more in the micrometer range rather than the nanometer range.

Rossi is using tubercles to increase the cross-section of his reaction well over what can be produced in a well ordered nickel lattice. A tubercle is a mound created on the metal’s surface. Rossi is using these tubercles to disrupt the regularity of the nickel lattice to increase the strength of the atomic bonds of the nickel atoms.

When there is a lattice defect on the surface of a lattice, the coordination number (CN) of the atoms that form the defect decreases. As a result, the remaining atomic bonds shorten and deform; this increases the strength of the remaining bonds of the nickel atoms on the walls in and around the tubercles.

These atomic CN imperfections induce bond contraction and the associated bond-strength gain deepens the potential well of the trapping in the surface skin. This CN reduction also produces an increase of charge density, energy, and mass of the enclosed hydrogen contained in the relaxed surface skin imperfection. This increased density is far higher than it normally would be at other sites inside the solid.

Because of this energy densification, surface stress and tension that is in the dimension of energy density will increase in the relaxed region of the disruption lattice bonds.

For example, when a phonon wave breaks upon the surface imperfection, it is amplified by the abrupt discontinuity in the lattice and is concentrated by the increased bond-order-length-strength (BOLS) of the nickel atoms that form the walls of the cavity.

This tight coupling allows the thermodynamic feedback mechanism to control and mediate the reaction. It also amplifies and focuses the compressive effects that phonons have on the hydrogen contained in the lattice defects. These defects increase the intensity of the electron screening because of the increased bond tension inside the defects.

Nano-defects are very tough. This toughness and associated resistance to melting and stress is conducive to the production of high pressure inside the defect.

Rossi has stated that his temperature of his nano-powder can reach 1600C before it melts. Nano-powder usually melts well below the 1350c melting point of bulk nickel in a regular lattice. This revelation informs us how much Rossi has increased the strength and available atomic bond tension in his nano-powder.

The smaller the dimensions of the lattice surface defect, the greater is the multiplier on the hardness and the resistance to stress compared to the bulk material. These multiplier factors can range from 3 to 10 based on the properties of the bulk material.

Multilayer sites that penetrate down through many lattice layers are more resilient than surface defects. There toughness is proportional to the detailed topology and therefore not generally determined.

There is a certain minimum size which one reached reduces the hardness of the nano-defect site. This size is on the order of less than 10 nanometers.

[Giorgio]

For example, when a phonon wave breaks upon the surface imperfection, it is amplified by the abrupt discontinuity in the lattice and is concentrated by the increased bond-order-length-strength (BOLS) of the nickel atoms that form the walls of the cavity.

What you are describing here is a Venturi effect applied to a Phonon wave.
While this could have a slight assonance with actual physics I doubt that it can really happen in the way you tried to describe.

This tight coupling allows the thermodynamic feedback mechanism to control and mediate the reaction.

This makes no sense. What thermodynamic feedback mechanism?