use very thin Pd film cathode as base of long very thin glass tube cell, allowing particles to go down through back to back thin plastic film detector sheet: Lomax: Murray 2012.07.05

[Rich Murray-2]

use very thin Pd film cathode as base of long very snall glass tube
cell, allowing particles to go down through small back to back thin
plastic film detector sheets: Lomax: Murray 2012.07.05

https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/#drafts/1384b2a0b5d728a9

Well, friend Abd Lomax, your review is a clear, cogent, very well
presented argument for heat-helium correlation in many DPd
electrolytic cells, to which I have to concede with a "maybe so,
deserves immediate further research" position --

I'm glad to learn you are still trying to show an anomaly or two with
a simple cell that replicates the D-Pd codeposition SPAWAR results --
wouldn't finding large number of particle tracks at the same locations
of back to back thin very thin plastic films be sufficient proof --
one of your great ideas -- especially if the number of tracks grow
with time in different runs, and if you can link that to variations in
input current from run to run.

I now imagine a fixed very small, very thin Pd cathode as the base of
a tiny square or round glass tube holding the electrolyte with the Pt
anode maybe pretty far up at the high end, just to provide plenty of
length to study the electrolyte for bubbles or convection from heat --
the bottom side of the cathode, thin enough to allow a good number of
particles to pass through, rests on back to back very thin detector
films -- then after a run, the micropits in the Pd can be compared
with the tracks in the etched detector films -- allowing conclusive
proof of something happening, whether rare, common or always.

You can do control runs with radioactive grains on the Pd cathode with
and without codeposition.

Next, have a device move the entire cell slowly in an XY raster
pattern during a week run to cover the whole 2D field of a biface
recording film about 1 cm X 1 cm -- then you have a time history of
particle emission tracks to compare to the accumulation of micropits
on the interior side of the Pd film.

Tiny mikes can record microsounds at the edge of the Pd cathode,
allowing software to locate the sources each second with precision by
triangulation.
The webcam and XY scanner would be the most costly components, in mass
production

Instead of doing all this by yourself, focus on assembling an online
network to do it fast, doing public recruitment, fund raising,
planning, execution, analysis real-time online, allowing public
discussion by all comers.

Naturally, study simple magnetic field effects.

within mutual service,  Rich


Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [hidden email]
10:01 AM (5 hours ago)

to vortex-l, me

At 04:29 PM 7/4/2012, Rich Murray wrote:

Well, there's a saying in Zen about swallowing the Niagara Falls in
one gulp -- perhaps a tsunami of verbal arguments by Lomax may float
visions that are plausibly contrary to the visions aired by Murray --
but the possiblities of micro and nano level storage and release of
chemical energy by bubbles on the Pd surface, increasingly rough,
complex and chaotic with time, need to be tested, not just
persuasively discussed.

It's not actually important enough to be worth the effort, my opinion.

My "Zen" comment is that I may be trying to raise the water level in a
well by tossing snow into it.


Returning to, ahem, discussion...

I'm assuming that minute bubbles of O2 would adhere to the Pd by
normal molecular attraction, the Van der Waals quantum interaction of
outer electrons between O2 and Pd, just like bubbles in soda pop or a
glass of water, sticking to surfaces, perhaps forming a hemisphere,
while the ignition would occur very quickly, since rough Pd is a
catalyst -- now, many here can estimate the speed of burning roughly
by invoking the nonequilibrium velocity distribution at the burning
temperature in complex fast-moving nonlinear combustion next to or on
a surface within electrolyte -- too fast for heat dissipation via
conduction or convection --

Great idea. The problem is that as soon as the bubble hits loaded Pd,
the Pd will catalyze immediate combustion. It does that, you know.


A sphere stuck to a surface has radial symmetry, pointing at the
surface -- so my hunch was that a jet or bipolar jet might ensue --

So you have this reaction creating steam at the point of contact of
the bubble and the palladium. This would blow the bubble away from the
palladium.

No, to get a major heat release, quickly, which is what vaporizing
palladium would require, you have to have an explosive mixture in the
bubble. And from what I remember of the math, there is barely enough
energy to accomplish melting the palladium, all of the available
energy must be transferred to the palladium, in that small volume,
with little escape. I don't see any way.


heat transfer would be by radiation and then by kinetic impact of new
H2O molecules moving at many km/sec, the speed inside the fierce
burning in H2-O2 liquid rocket engines -- so one bubble would vaporize
at least it own volume of Pd surface, releasing the H stored at 1 to 1
loading ratio, which would make a momentary enriched environment for
the next O2 bubble -- need data for how crowded these bubbles can
actually get in the electrolyte next to the cathode, especially if
they are positively charged, and thus attracted to the cathode -- so
Murray's logic is, if the micro craters are via chemical energy, then
therefore a lot of the O2 micro bubbles are positively charged -- time
for a quick micro experiment...

only experiment can find the distribution of H2 and O2 micro and nano
scale bubbles, and survey complex, unpredictable corrosion effects --
recall that acoustic cavitation can erode ship propellers.

Rich Murray is standing on his head to explain away a minor effect,
the signs of occasional high local heating seen on codeposition
cathodes. It's not utterly impossible that this is due to
recombination there, but recombination is limited to a small fraction
of the energy involved in these experiments. Remember, these people
keep track of orphaned oxygen.

We'll get to the real point below.


I suggest that experiments should be as tiny as possible, looking to
view the details of events real-time, one by one, as has been so
fruitful in nuclear physics since Rutherford looked at the
distribution of flashes on a fluorescent screen for hours from alpha
particle bombardment of a thin metal film in 1911, proving the
incrediby small size and huge density of the nucleus, as well as of
the alpha (helium nucleus) particle.

When I started tooling up, I bought a piece of cadmium sulfide, I
think it is, film and watched, under a microscope, the flashes from a
bit of Am-241 liberated from an old smoke detector. There should be
flashes of light from an active codep cathode. I also plan to listen
for sound, SPAWAR has reported transient shock waves from a codep
cathode built on a piezoelectric sensor. I just plan to pop a piezo
mike on the outside of the cell and look at around 100 KHz. Some day
soon....

The goal is not to prove cold fusion. These signs don't do that. They
are what one researcher calls "tells." That is, symptoms that a
reaction is occurring. If tells can be identified, the research can
accelerate. As it is, it can take weeks to run one experiment. Letts
is working on an approach that seems to produce results relatively
quickly, but he's still looking at days, really.


Methinks Storms, Rothwell, and Lomax proclaim too much re the
heat-helium correlation.

It's crucial. Cold fusion researchers have themselves not realized the
significance of heat/helium. Or if they know it, they certainly have
not emphasized it. That's the situation I found in 2009 when I became
involved with the cold fusion community, and so I encouraged Storms to
write a paper on heat/helium. He submitted it for publication and the
editor of the journal came back with a request for a full review of
cold fusion. Hence "Status of cold fusion (2010)," which does cover
the heat/helium issue better than ever before done in print. And I got
to see my name in a journal that Einstein published in. Way cool, and
thanks, Dr. Storms.

This is the importance.

We could already make the case that the evidence for a nuclear
reaction from calorimetry was overwhelming (by the mid 1990s), but
this is indirect evidence of a nuclear reaction. Maybe there is some
other unknown phenomenon. Further, each individual calorimetric result
can be challenged. Maybe there was some mistake. That wears thin, when
we are talking about 153 papers in peer-reviewed journals showing
anomalous heat, against a smaller number of published "negative
replications."

And, of course, a "negative replication" *is*, intrinsically, a
replication failure, a failure to replicate. That should have been
obvious. A phenomenon is never shown to be an illusion by failure to
see it. Ever. N-rays and polywater were not debunked by replication
failures, they were discredited by replication *success*, coupled with
controlled experiment that showed prosaic origin for the original
observations.

Rich knows that this kind of replication was never accomplished with
cold fusion. Instead, what we have is a *huge* body of work that
shows, clearly, that there is a phenomenon, widely reported, with
certain characteristics. One of them is that it's devilishly
cantakerous. You can think you have *exactly* the same conditions, but
now you see it, now you don't.

Hearing that, a lot of people think immediately that this signal must
be close to noise. No, it is not. When it appears, it is
unmistakeable. It is way above noise. You can find an image of SRI
P13/P14 on the web, it was republished, in color, in the Hagelstein et
al review paper attached to the 2004 U.S. DoE report on LENR.

Cold fusion researchers were quite competent at what they did. They
were not necessarily competent or skilled at publicity or promotion.
In fact, they were lousy at it. Look underneath the hood with P13/P14.
Why was this image so convincing to McKubre? He was, after all, an
independent consultant at SRI, retained by the Electric Power Research
Institute to find out if there was anything to this cold fusion flap.

P13 was a light water control. It was placed in series with P14, a
heavy water experimental cell. That is, the same current was passed
through both cells. The same calorimetry was used for both. This was
flow calorimetry. The cells were closed, with recombiners.

Many of the early replication failures did not measure loading ratio,
it was not understood that there was a threshold effect. The FPHE was
apparently not seen below a loading of about 90%. Until the work of
Pons and Fleischmann, it was not known that it was possible to get
such high loading ratios, the normal limit was 70%. From what we now
know, it was completely predictable that those early replication
attempts would fail. This was one difficult experiment, and getting
such high loading took months, and lots of stuff happens with months
of electrolysis. Any bit of junk in the cell ends up on the
cathode.... it can be a mess.

Anyway, both cells were loaded, they monitored it, to over 90%. This
loading was maintained with a trickle current.

Then they had a current protocol, that stepped up the current. In the
plot, you can see, with P14, how the generated heat steps up with the
current, it's quite clean. No big deal, you might think. So power
increases with increased current. Why is this surprising?

Well, you can see in that chart, the increased current in the light
water control only increases the noise. There is little or no excess
power. To McKubre, with his experience, this chart, all by itself,
ices the issue. The excess heat is real. The dependence of excess heat
on current density is well known. It's not a universal characteristic
of cold fusion, but this is the norm in the Fleischmann-Pons
experiment.

But there is more. That current excursion was not the first one in the
experimental series. There were two previous ones. Unfortunately, the
data was not preserved and presented with the third. That's because
they saw nothing.

Again and again, I've heard cold fusion researchers consider a finding
of no heat a "failure," or lack of "success."

What the first two excursions show is that something is changing in
the cell. The calorimetry is the same, something is different. This is
a demonstration of the variability of the effect. We have a pretty
good idea of what is happening. Over time, the palladium deuteride
expands and contracts as it loads and deloads. It cracks. If it cracks
too much, too much deuterium escapes, the high loading cannot be
maintained. If it isn't cracked, nothing happens except for loading
and deloading. The FPHE does not happen with pure, clean, perfect
palladium lattice. Period. That was not understood until much later.

I've called what showed up in P14 the appearance of the "chimera" in
the lab, it walked up and licked McKubre in the face, then left. What
the hell was that? This was not a signal close to noise. Many
scientists, not familiar with the literature and the reports, hearing
about difficulties in replication, assume that this is a signal that
will go away with increased precision. No. It's far from that. If this
is artifact, it is some kind of systematic error that affects not just
one form of calorimetry, but many.

And then we come to helium.

One of the biggest problems with cold fusion, a reason for rejection,
was that the ash was not seen. It was expected that the ash would be
tritium and He-3, plus proton and neutron radiation. If any helium was
produced, it would be accompanied by a characteristic gamma ray.
Helium was reported by Pons and Fleischmann, but as an isolated
result. Pons agreed, apparently, to allow some cathodes to be
analyzed. They expected that helium would be found in the bulk of the
cathode, they believed that the effect was in the bulk. Then they
backed out. Apparently they realized they were betting the farm on
something they did not know. They did not know if helium would be
found in the bulk. In fact, this search was undertaken, and the lack
of helium in the bulk was considered, by some, a serious obstacle to
the idea that helium was the ash. Helium is not mobile in palladium.
If it is formed in the palladium, it will stay there, for the most
part.

After some early results that showed helium was indeed present in the
exhaust gases -- which always suffered from suspicion of contamination
from ambient -- Miles eventually took samples in a consistent way from
a series of FP cells, with known heat results, and they were analyzed
blind.

He found that helium was correlated with heat. He found that the ratio
of helium to heat was within an order of magnitude of the ratio
predicted by deuterium fusion to helium. That was enough to be
considered astonishing by Huizenga, who said that this, if confirmed,
would solve a major mystery of cold fusion, i.e., the ash. Huizenga
went on to predict that it would not be confirmed "because there were
no gammas."

This demonstrated the scientific error behind the ready dismissal of
cold fusion. It was assumed that if the reaction was real, it must be
a known reaction. In fact, Pons and Fleischmann had claimed, not a
known, reaction, but, specifically, an "unknown nuclear reaction." And
so it was, and so it is.

Miles was adequately confirmed. That's what Storms covered in his 2010
paper, I recommend reading it carefully.

Consider the implications of the correlation. Correlation, of the
strength found (which is high), demonstrates that the underlying
measurements are at least generally accurate. Correlation can punch
through a lot of noise. Shanahan claims that the heat measurements are
garbage, therefore the correlation means nothing. That's backwards. If
the heat measurements were garbage, correlation would be highly
unlikely. Something is obviously different about cells that show the
anomalous power of the FPHE and those that do not. The latter don't
generate helium. It's clear.

The full Miles series involved 33 samples. 12 were from cells showing
no excess heat. None of these showed helium above background. Of the
21 remaining, 18 showed excess heat and roughly commensurate helium,
and 3 showed some excess heat and no helium. Storms points out that
one of the three anomalous results involved a power failure that could
have produced calorimetry error, and the other two involved a Pd-Ce
cathode, not the normal Pons-Fleischmann experiment.

(One of the characteristics of much CF research has been a kind of
shotgun combination of a general search for "better methods,"
resulting in the variation of more than one variable at a time. This
has damaged CF research, generating piles of data with inadequate
controls, and much of the parameter space has not been well explored.
And because a subtext was often an attempt to prove reality to
skeptics, and unreliabity was considered "bad," "failed experiments"
were often not reported, creating a confused mess, where skeptics can
suspect, with some legitimacy, that only positive results are being
reported. We can see with Miles, though, that the series was
completely reported, even where there might have been an excuse to
exclude some results.)


Especially, is there any device in the world today that is generating
unexplained excess heat?  publicly, reliably ?

Those are different questions. First of all, in an FPHE experiment,
the heat isn't unexplained, as to general explanation. Because of
heat/helium, we can say with reasonable confidence tha the origin of
the heat is the conversion of deuterium to helium. But the mechanism
is unknown, my opinion, some theorists disagree, and one or more of
them might be right.

The FPHE in skilled hands is reasonably reliable. That is, a skilled
researcher can see it with most cells. A Chinese review, in 2007,
found that a number of research groups were seeing 100% excess heat in
their cells. I.e, 100% of cells show excess heat. The amount tends to
be variable. I'm now seeing work, not ready for publication, that is
generally reliable even as to quantity, but, then, with the same
researcher, suddently the researcher was unable to produce the same
results as he had been seeing reliably.

Pons and Fleischmann have reported that, before they ran out of the
first batch of palladium from Johnson Matthey, they were seeing excess
heat from all cells. They did not suspect that the effect was
batch-sensitive, and thought nothing of using up the last bit of it.
When they replaced it, none of their cells showed the effect. Remember
P13/P14? The effect is sensitive to nanostructure of the material.
It's totally obvious now that they were very lucky to see anything at
all in their early work. Most palladium simply doesn't work. But there
is always codeposition, now, you can make your own nuclear-active
palladium deposit. Maybe. The electrochemistry is still vulnerable to
all kinds of hazards.

The requirement for a single design that is readily available that
always generates excess heat is artificial. It has nothing to do with
science. Obviously, for a commercial device, reliability is highly
desirable. (It's possible for some kinds of commercial devices to be
individually unreliable if many can be combined to become
statistically reliable. However, there is an additional problem. None
of the FPHE devices continue to function, after a time. Gas-loading is
where the possible commercial applications might lie. At this point,
the lack of patentability of cold fusion really starts to hurt
research, because people who are working with methods that have
commercial promise are *not* publishing their work, in general.
Because they cannot get patent protection, they go for trade secret
protection.

A wild card here is Rossi et al. This is not the FP Heat Effect. It
may be LENR of some kind. Or it may be flim-flam. Again, for
commercial reasons, the necessary data to really know what is
happening is not being released. I, and many others familiar with cold
fusion research, am less than impressed by the Rossi demos, but Rossi
does have a possible commercial reason to look like a complete con
artist. Many CF researchers, from other published research, think that
NiH reactions are quite possible. However, solving the reliability
problem is quite a different matter. It would be consistent with what
Rossi has done that he does have some reaction that sometimes produces
some heat, but that it is not reliable. I just read today that the
reason Defkalion cancelled their contract with Rossi was that Rossi
could not deliver a 48-hour reactor. True? How in the world would I
know?

If you want to see excess heat, you can do it with what is known. I've
been told to expect to spend about $10,000 or so, much of it for good
calorimetry. I'm sure it could be done for less than that. You don't
actually need really good calorimetry to see excess heat. And if you
can get access to helium analysis, you have a means of confirming your
calorimetry.

There are other nuclear tells, such as low levels of tritium and
radiation. A single sign of a reaction, though, isn't adequate, and
especially its absence is not very informative. The Galileo project
saw some "replication failures," and because there was no other sign
of the reaction than tracks on CR-39 -- which can be very difficult to
analyze, as to the charged particle tracks on the cathode side,
exposed to cathode chemistry -- there is no way to know if the failure
was a failure to set up the nuclear reaction or was intrinsic, that
there is no radiation.


If not now, how recently?

It's being done all the time, by lots of research groups. Energetics
Technologies (formerly of Israel) is active at the University of
Missouri, and ET work was replicated by McKubre and ENEA, published in
the 2008 ACS LENR Sourcebook.


Time will tell, 23 years after 1989...

It was really all over, as to the basic issue of the reality of the
FPHE and it being nuclear in origin, before 2000.

The extreme skeptical position has entirely disappeared from the
journals, while there is now a steady publication rate, about two
papers pwer month under peer review, that simply assumes the effect is
real.

There is a still a problem. There is still widespread opinion,
especially among physicists, that the whole thing was totally refuted
in 1989-1990. They treat it like N-rays and polywater without ever
actually looking to see if the comparison is apt.

Basic scientific problem: rejecting experimental evidence based on
lack of understood theory. Worse, based on assumption masquerading as
theory. There was not (and could not be) a theory that low-energy
nuclear reactions were impossible. Even the 1989 DoE review recognized
that such negative proof is never available.

What was possible to say in 1989 was that there was no conclusive
evidence. Within the next decade, that situation changed. There is
conclusive evidence, has been for a long time.

That you can sit in your armchair and dream up fantastic scenarios for
an artifact, that could only explain a small part of the experimental
corpus, means nothing. People are still doing that with relativity,
etc.

But, hey, a controlled experiment that replicates anomalous heat, and
especially that finds anomalous helium, correlated with the heat, and
that then demonstrates the artifact, that would be something, indeed.

It's never been done, and it's highly unlikely. I wouldn't bet on it.

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