Alain Sepeda <alain.sep...@gmail.com> wrote: > > As far as i know, NiH heat anomaly was known sine 89 with some ignored > experience by Piantelli. > in 93 I have been reading among the thousands of abstracts on CF, few > results about NiH , yet like everybody of that time I took them as minors... >
It was not ignored. Many people made sincere, sustained efforts to replicate Ni-H. Most of them failed. A few succeed in producing minor effects, close to the noise. These might have been experimental error. The consensus was that power density was inherently low for some unknown reason. Pd-D continued to look like a better research tool. The original Mills/Thermacore paper shows something like 50 W coming from a tremendous mass of Ni, enough to fill a large garbage can. People were unable to replicate Piantelli. When Rossi applied the Arata nano-particle technique to Ni, he succeeded in producing much higher power density. That was a "game changer" as they say in politics. Rossi deserves a great deal of credit for that. He made one of the most important contributions to the field. It may seem like a small step, applying Arata's idea to another material, but it is actually a giant leap because: 1. It is lot harder to accomplish than it sounds. I can summarize it in a single sentence, "apply the Arata technique to nickel" but that describes years of effort. 2. There must be thousand of permutations and combinations of techniques that might be tried, and that seem promising. We could have hundreds of different research groups spending a billion dollars a year trying them out, one after the other. Rossi somehow knew which one to try. He ignored all the other potential variations and went right to one that turned out to be very promising. - Jed
