At 02:15 PM 9/1/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I am sorry to rain on this parade, but I do not think the prospects for a commercial cold fusion project are good. I would love to be proved wrong on this.
To my mind, there are two possibilities: the project will succeed, or cold fusion is an error that managed to look good for reasons we don't understand
I have never seen an amateur experiment worth looking at.
That's because no amateur experiment was ever designed like this.
I have enough trouble trying to get professionals to do this, and they always have difficulty during the experiment. Cold fusion is always harder than it looks. If you are going to do anything, you should focus your efforts on encouraging skilled professionals to try this experiment.
That will be part of it! Basically, the project is to figure out and document *exactly* what a successful experiment involves.
Let's say it's codeposition. There are many, many factors.... how would we address them?
(1) purity of materials. The kit will supply the materials of the require purity.
(2) cell preparation. The cells in the complete kit will be prepared according to the protocol, and if the protocol doesn't work, it will be modified until it does. The protocol will be mind-bogglingly precise, complete, characterizing every identified variable.
(3) electrode structure and form. Again, what we would be doing is manufacturing the devices according to specifications, the specifications will come from, and be reviewed by, successful researchers, I assume. And then the prototypes and early manufactured devices will be tested by them. Their job will be to confirm that it works, and if it doesn't work out of the box, to make it work and document what they did so that it does work.
(4) operating protocol: voltages, currents, timing. Programmable power supply, also controlled by the recording computer. Preprogrammed. Experimenters can change the programs but, of course, no guarantee that it works, then.
The kit will be available to amateurs, but ... also to professionals and anyone wanting to see a replication of a cold fusion experiment. Nothing like this has been tried, Jed.
Among the competent researchers, there has been little effort put into pure replication, because that's not where the potential reward is. The reward will come, they think -- and they are correct -- from figuring out how to scale the effect up and make it commercially useful.
What I'm saying is that a commercial opportunity has been overlooked, probably because it's a minor opportunity. Kits that replicate cold fusion experiments. I believe that there is a market. The world is vast, the market doesn't have to be large. This would make a crackerjack high school science fair project, and there are parents who would buy it, especially once there is a little buzz.
Skeptics will buy it to prove that cold fusion is bogus. They will try to figure out what the trick is, how we make it seem like there is a nuclear effect. Will they succeed? Isn't that an interesting question?
He Jing-Tang reported multiple groups achieving 100% success by 2007. Okay, how do they do it? I think codeposition is one of the techniques that works, and it works quickly, and it should theoretically be cheap; if the cell is small, the materials will be very cheap.
Instead of scaling up, Jed, scale *down*. The SPAWAR cells massively damage the CR-39 chips. Okay, make them smaller and run them for a shorter time! (unless you want to detect neutrons, but smaller still should work). Is it possible to cycle them? I.e., run the cells for a time, plating the palladium on the electrode. Then reverse polarity and dissolve the palladium, then run back with the original polarity and run the experiment again.... (These cells would have a recombiner in them. Small, they could be sealed and operated in a protective container that would contain any explosion, plus they'd have pressure-relief valves and pressure sensors, I'd think.) Sealed cells are appealing because they can be made to work by design, without worrying about such details as leakage of humid air into the cell, etc.
The key to all cold fusion experiments is the materials. If you know how to do electrochemistry (or gas loading, or whatever the technique is) and can get good materials the experiment is likely to work. If you cannot get good materials it does not matter how skilled you are or how many times you try. If I knew how to get good materials I would get them. I once tried to buy some of the Johnson Matthey "Type A palladium" that Martin used to recommend, but I did not have the money for a $50,000 minimum order.
Codeposition. Palladium chloride. Can be purchased in small quantities. Bypasses the quality of palladium problem, because it creates the palladium cathode as the necessary thin layer. Efficient, because it's a surface effect, so all you need is surface with a suitable substrate.
In my opinion, the most promising technique at the moment is the nanoparticle experiment first done by Arata and recently replicated by Kitamura. I believe this is highly dependent upon the material. If you can find someone to make a material is likely that it will work. I am trying to persuade several people to try making some material.
Well, Jed, you or they would have a *market* for it.
The calorimetry employed by Arata and Kitamura was abominable, but it was abominable in different ways which I hope cancel out one another. I believe these results are real despite the problems. I wish I could persuade someone to try this experiment using reasonable 19th or 20th century calorimetry. Never mind 21st century; I want something more convincing than Lavoisier would have rigged up in one afternoon.
What I find amazing is that there is basic missing data, obvious to this amateur. What steady energy release will cause the measured sustained temperature differential?
It's possible to estimate the thermal resistance of the Arata cells, by figuring it back from the heat-of-formation of palladium deuteride. 7 grams of palladium releases a certain amount of heat when loaded with deuterium at a certain pressure. Assuming constant thermal resistance to ambient, we should be able to estimate the thermal resistance, and then to estimate how much energy is involved in maintaining a four degree C temperature differential for 3000 hours. My impression is that it's a lot. But why this crucial data is missing from the publications is beyond me. They could take a cell and put a resistor in it and calibrate it, easily.
I certainly understand why there is skepticism about the Arata report! I agree, the result is striking and simple. But we depend completely on Arata's say-so, is the problem. He doesn't care about that, you know why, but the rest of the world does.
Without absolute thermal resistance being known, or a calibration showing what heat release in the cell it takes to maintain the observed temperature differential, perhaps there is some effect where, with deuterium, some of the heat of formation is only released very slowly. With very high thernal resistance, this could explain the phenomenon. (Maybe! It seems a stretch, why the rapid settling, why the striking difference with deuterium vs. hydrogen, why the very steady state for such a long time, showing little or no sign of decline, as we'd expect from some kind of discharge phenomenon, as the potential energy was released, and the amount remaining declined, the rate would be expected to decline and thus the temperature differential would decline.)
It's a different approach, almost the opposite of what was done with all the research, but taking full advantage of the best research and expertise.
While an Arata cell iis not ideal for the cheap kit, it should still be, I'd guess, doable for a few hundred dollars a cell. That's higher than I'd like, by quite a bit, because I'd like to make the actual cells cheap enough that experimenters could buy more than one or two.
Anyway, first subscriber to the list signed up: the comment was
An ongoing commercial LENR project, even if it begins as a toy, student demo, or test procedure- is long overdue.
My thoughts exactly. So now there are two. That's what new ideas start with, Jed. Two people. Any others? Two is enough to start....
The really cheap kit would be the biological transmutation one. Nobody has, to my knowledge, replicated Vyosotskii's claims. The hardest part, I'd think, would be the Mossbauer spectroscopy, and my guess is that some university lab would be glad to get a little income to cover expenses, a grad student's time, and help pay for the equipment. If the volume were large enough, we could buy one of those spectrometers. Or build one, it's not a difficult measurement, you need a Co-57 source, an accurate gamma detector, and a linear motor to drive the source toward or away from the test sample at a known velocity. I did this in sophomore physics lab at Caltech, that's why I recognized the significance of Vyosotskii's findings, I'm not sure that others get it.
What else is needed for that kit? The culture. And I'd assume we'd need cooperation from Vyosotskii. He specifies a particular strain, as I recall, but I couldn't figure out of this strain was available. On the other hand, once one has the strain, you can grow more.
In some ways, the bio kit would be the most appealing. It might attract biology types.....
The "mainstream" goes ballistic over biological transmutation. However, once one accepts that palladium might set up some unusual conditions, it's not a big leap to imagining that a protein could do something like that, create a literal reaction channel that would guide deuterium moleculse into the right configuration. It could run on the normal concentration of deuterium in water. Speculation.....
