Merged Cold Fusion Claims

[barehl]

BTW, I think the Geiger counter measurements are nothing but a Red Herring. None of the materials used are unstable isotopes so no fission will be taking place. The only way you could get fusion at room temperature would be to use muon injection which they obviously are not doing. However, even with muon injection, nickel is already at a low energy point very close to iron which is the lowest. So, you would actually have to add energy to get nickel to fuse.

 

[Craig B]

So, you would actually have to add energy to get nickel to fuse.

This was pointed out years ago in this thread. The other problem is the absence of detectable radiation. If any sort of transmutation was taking place commensurate with the claimed energy output, would copious radiation not be emitted?

 

[ben m]

nickel is already at a low energy point very close to iron which is the lowest. So, you would actually have to add energy to get nickel to fuse.

That's not true. Nickel + proton --> copper would be exothermic for any stable Ni isotope. You're right that Ni is near an energy minimum, but the proton is so far from the minimum that the reaction is energetically favorable. (Put another way, the reaction gets a huge energy gain from getting rid of the proton, and a small energy cost from moving the rest of the nucleons very slightly away from a very shallow minimum. The two effects add up to exothermic.)

 

[marplots]

Shrug. All I can do is quote the paper:



So there's actually less nickel than I had originally thought.

I'm still wondering if the tube itself participates in the reaction. In the pictures, I can't tell that the tube is entirely inert.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

That's not true. Nickel + proton --> copper would be exothermic for any stable Ni isotope. You're right that Ni is near an energy minimum, but the proton is so far from the minimum that the reaction is energetically favorable. (Put another way, the reaction gets a huge energy gain from getting rid of the proton, and a small energy cost from moving the rest of the nucleons very slightly away from a very shallow minimum. The two effects add up to exothermic.)

And how much energy input is needed to get a loose proton capable of fusing with a nickel nucleus?

 

[WhatRoughBeast]

One of the graphs shows clipping at about 1,300 C which suggests that the thermocouple is a type K which is good up to about 1,250 C.

NIST and Omega Engineering beg to differ. http://www.omega.com/temperature/z/pdf/z204-206.pdf

And see my comments about clipping below.

These thermocouples only produce about 41 microvolts per degree Centigrade. This means that by the time you hit 1,250 C, you have less than 1/20th of a volt.

Slightly more, actually.

There are several problems with this. The first is that the voltage is very weak so it requires amplification. And, because of this, you need proper filtering to avoid picking up line noise or radio interference. The very first thing you do is twist the wires together to reduce AC noise. Notice that the wires coming from the thermocouple are not twisted. I would guess that there is inadequate filtering but this may not be much of a problem since the reading can be averaged with the computer.

All true but none obviously applicable. The "thermocouple amplifier" shown in the instrumentation photo (slide 8) is obviously home-built. As such, there is no way to determine what filtering is used, nor is there any description of the processing performed by the computer.

A type K is linear from about 0 C to 1,000 C. Above 1,000 C, the voltage increase drops. So, the temperature is likely correct up 1,000 and then low above that.

True enough, but the linearization coefficients are well known. Without description of the computer processing it is unknown if linearization occurs.

Since we see the graph hitting 1,300 C with clipping,

The behavior of the temperature near 1300 C may be clipping and it may not. The quality of the graph on slide 12 is simply not adequate to tell, one way or another.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually reaching 1,455 C which is the melting point of nickel.

Given that the melting point of nichrome is nominally 1400 C, with the highest reported version I can find at 1430 C, I would.

With that said, it seems clear that the data does not support the claim that

This shows that the reactor is producing heat during this time at the kilowatt level without any electric heater input.

First, and most obviously, the anomalous temperature (1250 C indicated) is comparable with the temperature produced with a heater power of 400 watts. This is hardly "kilowatt level".

More importantly, if the imputed reaction is producing 400 watts of heat, when combined with the 500 watts of heater power being provided this implies a total heat production of ~900 watts, and the temperature should have reached somewhere in the neighborhood of 1700 to 1800 degrees. Instead, the measured temperature never exceeds 1300 C, which is a reasonable value for the heater power alone.

Worse, the power levels shown in slide 18 are clearly synthetic, and the lack of real power data is extremely suspicious. Compare with slide 14.

The temperature fluctuations shown just before the "anomalous" section of slide 12 are, I believe, easily explained. The nichrome heater wire was beginning to fail. As a break occurred, the temperature would drop, the wires would contract and reestablish contact, which would cause the temperature to rise and break the wire again, etc. This is essentially a thermal relaxation oscillator. Again, the absence of real power data for this period should raise a large red flag. An uncharitable explanation is that the wild fluctuations in reported power data were considered evidence that the power measurement device had failed, and the data was discarded, to be replaced with computed values which seemed more appropriate.

 

[ben m]

And how much energy input is needed to get a loose proton capable of fusing with a nickel nucleus?

13.7 electron volts turns a hydrogen atom into a loose proton, but that's not what you meant.

A loose proton capable of getting past the Coulomb barrier into the nickel nucleus? Yeah, that's 10 MeV or something. (And when it gets there, the energy comes out as gamma rays.) But the reaction is exothermic (if you can make it happen, you get more energy out than in), which is what I was correcting barelh on.

 

[Didymus]

A loose proton capable of getting past the Coulomb barrier into the nickel nucleus? Yeah, that's 10 MeV or something.

This abstract from 1938 suggests that protons accelerated to 6 MeV can fuse with nickel and produce copper. This reaction dosen't produce net energy since many protons must be accelerated to produce one fusion reaction.

http://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.54.1021

 

[Craig B]

This abstract from 1938 suggests that protons accelerated to 6 MeV can fuse with nickel and produce copper. This reaction dosen't produce net energy since many protons must be accelerated to produce one fusion reaction.

http://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.54.1021

1938? Has anything happened in the field of nuclear physics since 1938?

 

[marplots]

1938? Has anything happened in the field of nuclear physics since 1938?

Nickel and protons haven't changed much since then.

 

[Craig B]

Nickel and protons haven't changed much since then.

If that is true, why are nickels worth so much less now?

 

[Didymus]

1938? Has anything happened in the field of nuclear physics since 1938?

Yes, quite a lot. However, the point is that "mainstream physics" had discovered that hydrogen and nickel could fuse into copper, albeit under rather extreme circumstances and without a net energy output, over 70 years before Rossi started touting the e-cat.

 

[tsig]

Yes, quite a lot. However, the point is that "mainstream physics" had discovered that hydrogen and nickel could fuse into copper, albeit under rather extreme circumstances and without a net energy output, over 70 years before Rossi started touting the e-cat.

I've got a mixture of chemicals* and it's an over unity device. A weak electric current generates a tremendous force.

*stick of dynamite.

 

[ben m]

1938? Has anything happened in the field of nuclear physics since 1938?

One thing that happened since 1938 is that knowledge of various Coulomb barriers has become so commonplace, that observing one isn't worth publishing by itself.

I used to do nuclear accelerator experiments and Coulomb barriers were just trivially-obvious facts about the system. Some of your beam is always hitting walls and baffles and apertures in the beampipe. Run a low-energy, heavy-ion beam and such strikes do nothing other than make heat. Turn the energy up a bit, or switch to a lighter beam, and suddenly you're over the Coulomb barrier and there are gamma rays everywhere and the radiation-protection guy tells you you can't go back into the accelerator hall. Ho hum, another Coulomb barrier. But in 1938 it was worth writing a paper about.

 

[Didymus]

But in 1938 it was worth writing a paper about.

To put things in context, the cyclotron, which could accelerate protons to MeV energies, wasn't invented until 1932. In 1938, blasting various elements with 6 MeV protons and figuring out what resulted was new, cutting edge physics. Perhaps not Nobel material but someone had to be the first to do it and publish it.

 

[Craig B]

Turn the energy up a bit, or switch to a lighter beam, and suddenly you're over the Coulomb barrier and there are gamma rays everywhere and the radiation-protection guy tells you you can't go back into the accelerator hall.

The testers of the ecat don't seem to have been troubled by such interventions from their radiation protection guy. Maybe he was having a snooze.

 

[marplots]

One thing that happened since 1938 is that knowledge of various Coulomb barriers has become so commonplace, that observing one isn't worth publishing by itself.

I used to do nuclear accelerator experiments and Coulomb barriers were just trivially-obvious facts about the system. Some of your beam is always hitting walls and baffles and apertures in the beampipe. Run a low-energy, heavy-ion beam and such strikes do nothing other than make heat. Turn the energy up a bit, or switch to a lighter beam, and suddenly you're over the Coulomb barrier and there are gamma rays everywhere and the radiation-protection guy tells you you can't go back into the accelerator hall. Ho hum, another Coulomb barrier. But in 1938 it was worth writing a paper about.

That's what happened to Doc Bruce Banner.

 

[barehl]

NIST and Omega Engineering beg to differ.

I'm not sure how they differ by agreeing with me. The link you provided says: – 200 to 1250°C

Slightly more, actually.

1/20th of a volt is 0.050 millivolts. The sheet you linked to says 0.051 millivolts. Thank goodness you corrected that.

Given that the melting point of nichrome is nominally 1400 C, with the highest reported version I can find at 1430 C, I would.

Okay, we can discuss this further. Your melting point for common nichrome is accurate. But, I should mention something else. There is a common reaction that occurs when you have nickel and aluminum together. Aluminum melts at 660 C. When you get to about 800 C, the aluminum will begin reacting with the nickel, forming Ni3Al. This gives off so much heat that it will melt the nickel and can even reach temperatures over 1600 C. This test uses Lithium Aluminum Hydride but I would suspect that something similar is occurring. For example, perhaps it is forming Ni3Al and Lithium Hydride.

Instead, the measured temperature never exceeds 1300 C, which is a reasonable value for the heater power alone.

And yet the paper itself says: For the initiation of the process the tube must be heated to temperatures of 1200-1400°C.

Worse, the power levels shown in slide 18 are clearly synthetic, and the lack of real power data is extremely suspicious. Compare with slide 14.

Clearly synthetic? The only thing I noticed is that for some reason they changed the scale from watts to kilowatts between the charts.

 

[barehl]

That's not true. Nickel + proton --> copper would be exothermic for any stable Ni isotope. You're right that Ni is near an energy minimum, but the proton is so far from the minimum that the reaction is energetically favorable. (Put another way, the reaction gets a huge energy gain from getting rid of the proton, and a small energy cost from moving the rest of the nucleons very slightly away from a very shallow minimum. The two effects add up to exothermic.)

Perhaps I'm confused but let's give it a try.
We start with Ni 58
We add one proton (although I have no idea where this is supposed to come from).
And now we get Cu 59 which has a half life of 81 seconds. It will release a beta particle and become Ni 59.

To get something stable with copper we need Cu 63 or Cu 65. Where are we supposed to get all that mass from?

 

[davefoc]

I don't know. For me it generates more question than it solves. Why would any reaction *abruptly* stops ? No more reactant ? But then it should drop down in log, depending on how much the fusion reactant are left. Instead you see a brutal stops after some minutes, and that drop within less than 1 minutes toward zero.

Furthermore stops me if I am naive here, but seeing the energy required for nuclear reactions, there is no reason to think it would "suddenly" starts at 1000°C. i expect a gaussian temperature distribution in kinetic energy, therefore below 1000°C, say at 800°C or 900°C, a smaller proportion at the edge of the distribution would react. Starting at 1000°C make no sense. Also if the reaction is self sustaining at 1000°C then it should continue and then decrease as reactant goes lower in quantity, or when reactant is surrounded by ashes and less and less reaction statistically happen, collision frequency drops. In other word I suspect it should not brutally decrease in linear fashion as it does. Now I may be nitpicking something which we would see if we zoomed in the last minutes, but it looks far too constant until that point and then drops.

So yes, I am skeptical seeing at the picture. This is instead what i would expect if there was a heat source which would be tuned down at some point 8 minutes before the end, then stopped at the end.

This seems like an insightful comment. The temperature rise in the chart looks like what one would expect if one increased the power in steps. The claim is that they didn't put in enough power to produce the observed temperature gain (the input power was about 350 to 400 watts less than the observed power based on the graph).

But when the power is removed after the reactor fails the temperature drops precipitously by about 100 degrees. Why didn't whatever reaction that was causing this excess heat continue to generate heat? But then the temperature remains at about 100 degrees above the maximum for eight minutes. So now the reaction that was allegedly producing 350 to 400 watts above the input power now produces almost 800 watts for eight minutes?

A phase change has been suggested as the cause of the steady temperature after the power is removed. That seemed plausible to me but it sounds like that idea has been questioned.

My apologies in that I am probably repeating things that people have already said but I am just now getting up to speed on this thread and the issues.

The graph that I am referring to:
https://html1-f.scribdassets.com/58x3c5z8g04a70ox/images/12-f8f510e3ab.jpg

I notice that people are referring to slide numbers. Which link are these slide numbers referring to? Is slide 12 the equivalent of this figure?

WhatRoughBeast's comment about the temperature oscillation near the end of the graph looking like the result of the beginning of the failure of the nichrome wire seemed likely to be correct to me. I've seen similar kinds of thermal oscillations when I was an engineer.

barehl's comment about the heat given off by the reaction of aluminum and nickel seemed interesting to me because there seems to be the beginning of a run away reaction of some kind just before the reactor failure. The temperature rose about 50 degrees from the beginning of the time the input power was raised to 500 watts to the time when the reactor failed. But again why the precipitous temperature drop after the input power is removed and why did a reaction that was claimed to be producing 350 to 400 watts all of a sudden jump to 800 watts?

ETA: The theory that the anomalous heat output was caused by a chemical reaction has been questioned because supposedly there wasn't enough reactants put into the reactor to create the reported heat gain. Is this correct? So some kind of misrepresentation about the amount of reactants is necessary if a chemical reaction is responsible for the reported heat gain?