Speaking of CETI and Patterson, did you know that besides nickel and palladium
coating the beads, JP used copper chloride to initially treat them? This is in
the recipe that turned up after his death.
This copper molecule was used for a completely different reason, ostensibly;
and since it was not deemed by anyone to be active – like the Ni and Pd were,
and it could easily have been overlooked. Moreover, Cu was there an ion, and it
could have migrated outward to alloy with the Nickel… if there was enough of it.
If copper chloride was inadvertently not added in a particular batch, or added
in too low a concentration, this would NOT have registered as meaningful at the
time. And this factoid may or may not be relevant now. But in the event that
this is of those rare occasions where your commentator is proved to be as
accurate as he thinks he always is, read on:
If you have followed alternative energy for some time, you may realize that
there is slight potentially gain to be had (on paper) from the decomposition
of water into hydrogen and oxygen at standard temperature and pressure -
followed by recombination, as we have mentioned several times here. This cannot
happen in practice of course.
The standard potential of the water electrolysis cell is only 1.23 V at 25 °C
at pH 0. It is also 1.23 V at 25 °C at pH 7 based on the Nernst Equation (see
Wiki entry). On recombination, however there is a gain of ~.02 eV (on paper and
at 100% current efficiency) … but of course this gain is not usable in practice
because the neither the high pH nor the low pH is practical, and also the rate
of decomposition at the standard potential is incredibly low, since the extra
.02 eV must come from ambient heat. Chemistry as we know is fully conservative.
CAVEAT– it is a mistake to conflate Volts and electron-volts - eV. When this is
done, we must assume that every molecule participates - but for present
purposes, we are really only making a case for something else (read on). 100%
current efficiency will be presumed for now.
In practice, high volume water splitting requires about 1.9 V potential (you
often see 1.45 V listed as the minimum potential) and the resultant thermal
efficiency is about 85% for the best cells. The curious thing to many is that
we know that the binding energy of two hydrogen atoms, when they form H2 on the
cathode is much higher: 4.5 eV…
… so one might think that splitting water could be gainful, under the right
conditions. No way, Jose. Chemistry is fully conservative and as it turns out
the H-OH bond energy is itself actually 5.2 eV and that is four times more than
the voltage potential required to completely split water. This is where QM
comes into play in normal chemistry. The discrepancy is rationalized this way:
when you split water, most of the energy required really does not come from
your input power, which as you remember is less than 2 V. potential (with the
CAVEAT). In fact, most of the required energy comes from the recombination of
two atoms of hydrogen into the molecule, AFTER the splitting. In QM terms that
energy has been “borrowed” before it is repaid. When it is borrowed it MUST be
repaid or else the reaction is quenched.
OK. This is oversimplified for a particular purpose – an attempt at verbalizing
the importance of a recently mentioned paper vis-à-vis the Rossi experiment,
where molecular hydrogen is introduced to a spillover catalyst. Remember, this
H2 molecule is bound by 4.5 eV so in order to split it to atomic hydrogen, in
the spillover process, this catalyst faces a daunting task. Spillover is not
favored, energetically, but it does happen routinely, and most of that is due
to the long ‘Boltzmann’s tail’ of the energy distribution and QM time shifting.
This is why the Romanowski finding could be so important, as a first step in
understanding the Rossi effect. Yes, that Romanowski paper is a ‘model’ and not
an experimental finding, but it is a high level simulation, and should be
accurate. Rossi may have inadvertently proved it. The “sim” which they
performed in two ways professes to show that about 3.2 eV of catalytic energy
is available to split the H2 molecule when one uses the best spillover catalyst
– which is a copper-nickel alloy, similar to the alloy known as constantan,
which is unique in its own right.
This is new, folks and it blows me away in importance ! In fact, the spillover
catalyst which has most often been used in LENR, going back to PF is of course
palladium. By comparison, Palladium supplies about .3 -.4 eV of catalytic
power, compared with 3.2 eV for constantan. Wow. Copper alone has a negative
spillover function.!
Wow, wow, wow. It took me all of those paragraphs to finally get down to the
point of this posting.
Chemistry, as we know is fully conservative, but if you can set the stage
properly with chemistry that is highly favorable, energetically - then in place
of needing QM time
