Merged Cold Fusion Claims

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The first thing to understand about the Lockheed unit is that it is a first generation prototype. They are hoping that they can build a new prototype each year and get to a working model in five generations around 2020. The Lockheed design depends on using a lithium blanket to create tritium. The lowest temperature reaction is Deuterium/Tritium. Deuterium is available but tritium is not.

The JET facility in the UK got an output of 2/3rds of the input energy. It's going to start-up again this year after extensive upgrades. Who knows, maybe it will get close to unity. If it did produce over unity energy then that would be a good sign for ITER because it will use the same technology. The TFTR at Princeton got 510 million C. You need about 800 million for good D-T reactions. ITER is also derived from TFTR.

The ITER is also not expected to be running until 2020. But, it won't actually produce any power; it is expected to produce 10x as much energy as put in. The earliest derivative of ITER that might produce power would be close to 2030. ITER uses the combined expertise of all of the top research projects. This may or may not be enough.
 
Kid Eager said:
I do believe youre getting somewhat carried away.

The "do not understand" part is more along the lines of "do not have the information to arrive at a conclusion", mainly because Rossi has done everything possible to avoid the use of controlled, repeatable independent measurement methods.

There's been so much flim-flam in the experimental design and controls so far that whilst an *appearance* of overunity can be achieved, the lack of sustainability leaves the question open (if one were to take a most generous interpretation).

it would be great if Rossi did pull a rabbit out of his hat. His apparent incompetence in experimental design and measurement does, however, suggest otherwise...
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If you "do not have the information to arrive at a conclusion", how can you claim fraud?
 
pteridine said:
Actually, water loss by boiling is not a good way to measure heat. Heating a large mass of water is. A nice system would heat the water from RT to 50C, minimizing measurement error with a substantial delta T and allowing ready calculation of heat output as the Cp of water is reasonably constant over that range.
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It has greater error bars, but it's an acceptable method, IMO.
 
Craig B said:
Eight minutes of off line energy production, at the end of a very long run connected to an electric power supply. Only manifesting itself at above 1000 degrees, following the moment when the heater suffered a failure.

I want more data. But yes, if it is producing over unity power, I am extremely pleased.
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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.
 
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Craig B said:
What would be the significance of that in terms of interpreting the data?
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I'm not sure I understand your question. The claim is that energy is being produced because the temperature drops to a plateau and stays there for 8 minutes. That would match a phase change curve where the material is in a liquid state. The temperature drops until it begins solidifying and then the temperature will stay at that level until all the material has solidified. In other words, the plateau would not be proof of any energy output.
 
barehl said:
I'm not sure I understand your question. The claim is that energy is being produced because the temperature drops to a plateau and stays there for 8 minutes. That would match a phase change curve where the material is in a liquid state. The temperature drops until it begins solidifying and then the temperature will stay at that level until all the material has solidified. In other words, the plateau would not be proof of any energy output.
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Thanks. Your last sentence answers my question.
 
marplots said:
Mine too.
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And mine as well.

But now I have another one. What is the material that is suspected of undergoing a phase change which maintains the temperature?

The melting point of nickel is 1453 degrees
The melting point of LiAlH4 is 150 degrees
The melting point of aluminum is 660 degrees
The melting point of lithium is 180 degrees

I just read through the article linked to above again:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/254323365/ParkhomovPaper-20150129-English

I must be missing something. They seem to have calculated the heat gain based on the notion that the only source of energy is the electrical energy input. Is this right?

That seems like a calculation that is so obviously bogus that I feel like I must not understand something here.

LiAlH4 sounds like a reactive substance that could generate significant energy. Is the energy it generates as it disassociates and the lithium reacts with water and the hydrogen reacts with oxygen not a possible explanation for all the alleged heat gain?

ETA: If their claim is that the possible reactants aren't being used up could they just run the same experiment again with the reactants they recover from the first experiment?

ETA2: I ignored oxidation of the aluminium as a possible source of heat, but perhaps even that is a possibility. I looked up the ignition temperature of thermite and it sounds like it is about 2200 degrees so if something like that is going on here it would need to be some kind of reaction that could be initiated at a lower temperature. But all of this idle speculation is useless if the people that conducted the experiment didn't analyze what compounds were left at the end of the experiment and based on that make an estimate of how much heat was generated through routine chemistry.
 
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I think the observation is significant and I am discussing things that are at the limit (or perhaps beyond the limit) of my ability to understand what is going on so perhaps my comments are useless.

Solidifying nickel doesn't quite fit the reported data which shows the temperature stabilizing at about 1200 degrees. But perhaps there is some compound that has formed which has a melting point of about 1200 degrees or there is some kind of measurement error that is not correctly reporting the temperature of the nickel.

But the big elephant in the room here to my not well informed eyes is how much heat is generated by the compounds that the experiment begins with.

It is interesting to me that this experiment is very similar to the BlacklighPower kinds of experiments even down to the inclusion of nickel but BLP does make an attempt to account for heat generated by the reactions of the compounds.

My suspicion is that the BlacklightPower experiments are flawed because they do not understand exactly the chemistry that goes on in their experiments. BlacklighPower also claims over unity heat gains. The BLP experiment that I would find probative is if they were able to run the same experiments over and over using recovered energy to recreate the reactants. Of course, this assumes that BLP is not committing outright fraud which is possible as well.

In the case of the experiment described in the link above it sounds like people are just putting reactants into a heated crucible and assuming the reactants aren't contributing any heat to the experiment.

Fun fact: BLP sued Wikipedia to get the names of some of the people that have edited the Wikipedia BLP article.

ETA: Maybe the phase change is a gas condensing into a liquid?

ETA2: As a little background, BLP's explanation for the anomalous heat gain is that some of the electrons in the hydrogen involved in the experiments are dropping below the normally accepted ground state energy level to form what BLP calls hydrinos. When the atoms drop to this lower energy state they emit ultraviolet light according to BLP (hence the name of the company). There is zero mainstream science support for this notion.
 
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davefoc said:
And mine as well.

But now I have another one. What is the material that is suspected of undergoing a phase change which maintains the temperature?

The melting point of nickel is 1453 degrees
The melting point of LiAlH4 is 150 degrees
The melting point of aluminum is 660 degrees
The melting point of lithium is 180 degrees

I just read through the article linked to above again:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/254323365/ParkhomovPaper-20150129-English

I must be missing something. They seem to have calculated the heat gain based on the notion that the only source of energy is the electrical energy input. Is this right?

That seems like a calculation that is so obviously bogus that I feel like I must not understand something here.

LiAlH4 sounds like a reactive substance that could generate significant energy. Is the energy it generates as it disassociates and the lithium reacts with water and the hydrogen reacts with oxygen not a possible explanation for all the alleged heat gain?
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Since the core is specified at 1 g of nickel, and 100 mg of LiAlH4, it's not at all clear that focusing on possible chemical reactions is productive. And no, dissociation/reaction is not even remotely an answer. Oxidation of 100 mg of aluminum would give ~6kJ.

And the phase-change suggestion, while it seems reasonable from the graph, has real problems if you look closely at the graph. Temperature stays constant for 8 minutes, at a temperature level produced (assuming electrical input only) of about 500 watts. That implies that any phase change will release roughly 250 kJ. That's equivalent to condensing 100 g of water (from 160 liters of steam), but at 1000 C.

I think it's one of those experiments that needs to be repeated until it's understood.
 
Okay, we can go over this in detail if you like. One gram is about the weight of a small paper clip. I couldn't weigh that accurately without a lab scale. I didn't see a lab scale in the pictures so I have my doubts about that.

I would imagine that most know what a BB gun is. Based on the density of nickel, 1 gram is 1.25 BBs. I'm somewhat puzzled about this. His tube has a hole 5mm in diameter. The 1 gram of test material would only take up about 6mm in the center and yet the tube is 120mm long. The pictures also show the heating coils wrapped all the way out near the ends.

Based on this, I would probably guess that the actual test quantity is more like 10 grams which would fill half the tube.
 
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. 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.

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. 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. Since we see the graph hitting 1,300 C with clipping, I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually reaching 1,455 C which is the melting point of nickel.
 
If you look at the picture of the broken apparatus after use, you can see the end of one of the plugs. The length looks consistent to me with having half the tube length filled.

Also, his ammeter setup doesn't look clean to me. If he is reading low because of power draw from the thermocouple amplifier then he would actually be putting more energy in than his estimate.
 
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