Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
Values are found in some work substantially higher, but it is generally consistent with a theory that the actual reaction Q is the deuterium value, but roughly half if the helium is being trapped in the cathode or otherwise escaping detection. Helium *is* apparently trapped in the cathode, near the surface, consistent with origin at or near the surface. Helium is not found in the bulk of the cathode. If helium is born near the surface with a little kinetic energy, it will ion-implant itself in the palladium and helium is generally not mobile in palladium at these low temperatures. McKubre was able to coax some or most helium out of the cathode by cycling loading/deloading. I've suggested dissolving the cathode to release the helium, but this has not been done to my knowledge. It's an area where plenty remains to be done. For a review of the helium work, see Storms, Status of cold fusion (2010), Naturwissenschaften. There is an as-published preprint on http://lenr-canr.org. The finding of helium correlated with heat is amply replicated. See Storms. Storms estimates from the data that the Q is 25 +/- 5 MeV/He-4, but I haven't seen a rigorous analysis. There is quite a bit of variability, easily due to the difficulties in capturing all the helium. At 04:21 PM 7/4/2012, Eric Walker wrote: On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: Actual experimental results are more toward double, the value, over 40 MeV/He-4, which very likely reflects the difficulty in capturing all the helium (if helium is not captured and measured, particularly if it remains trapped in the palladium), then there is less helium reported, and the value of heat/helium goes up proportionally. Abd, I find this a very interesting result. Â What is the variability here? Â How reliable is the 40 MeV figure? Assuming for the moment that the 40 MeV/4He result is solid and can be reliably replicated, and going with helium as a predominant non-radiative byproduct, what does this say about the reactions involved? Â Does it mean that there would need to be more than helium generation, or is there a way to work out helium generation that produces this level of energy? Eric
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
We do not know what the reaction is. Storms proposes that d e d (two deuterons with an electron in between) are trapped in cracks in the Pd, and that a slow process results in fusion with release of energy as a series of X-rays resonant in the crack. I and, I suspect, most physicists, don't think much of the slow fusion concept, but helium was proposed early on as the ash, by Preparata, and Miles, who found the correlation, considered his work a validation of Preparata's theory. Basically, a known fusion reaction is d + d - He-4 plus gamma. The energy released, mostly in the gamma, is 23.8 MeV. The first problem with this is that this is a *very* minor branch, d + d prefers to go to tritium plus a proton (50%) or helium-3 plus a neutron (50%). The second problem is that, on the face, this requires high energy to overcome the Coulomb barrier. But some kind of catalysis, as Storms is proposing, might overcome that, as happens with muon-catalyzed fusion. The third problem is that the gamma is necessary in the helium branch, to conserve momentum. These are the classic theoretical problems of cold fusion conceived as d + d. There are other possibilities. In particular, Takahashi has done the math for a multibody problem, finding that four deuterons, as two deuterium molecules (with the electrons), arranged in a tetrahedral configuration with very low relative momentum, will collapse into a Bose-Einstein Condensate and fuse within a femtosecond. This would form a Beryllium-8 nucleus, which will ultimately decay into two helium nuclei. If nothing else has happened, the two nuclei would each have 23.8 MeV of kinetic energy. That would be alpha radiation, which would still be low-penetrating. But that radiation is not seen. The Hagelstein limit (named after his 2010 paper) is about 20 KeV, for any major charged particle radiation from PdD cold fusion. It is possible for the excited Be-8 nucleus to shed most of its energy by photon emissions at low enough energies to satisfy the Hagelstein limit, before it fissions. I'll add that, probably, nobody knows what to expect if fusion occurs within a Bose-Einstein Condensate. Takahashi's study is simply of a single possibility. The real reaction may be more complex, there are some signs that 6D may be active instead of 4D. (To answer an obvious question about this theory, this could not happen with pure liquid or solid deuterium (i.e., at very low temperatures), because the two deuterium molecules cannot approach closely enough, it requires some kind of confinement to manage that. Takahashi, in his study, assumes confinement in the palladium lattice. Storms points out -- cogently -- that the lattice itself is unlikely to be the site of the reaction, and points to cracks, which could explain a lot about cold fusion, the famous lack of control and variability. Takahashi's idea, though, would probably work with some cavity for confinement other than a lattice site.) At 04:27 PM 7/4/2012, Eric Walker wrote: I wrote: Assuming for the moment that the 40 MeV/4He result is solid and can be reliably replicated, and going with helium as a predominant non-radiative byproduct, what does this say about the reactions involved?  Does it mean that there would need to be more than helium generation, or is there a way to work out helium generation that produces this level of energy? To answer my own question (using what you've already hinted at): One way to get at this figure would be to allow a large amount of the helium to escape.  Then it would seem like the residue was responsible for the entire balance of the heat, when in fact some of it resulted from escaped helium. Eric
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
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
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
Wait! Suddenly you admit that the authors don't believe the field is 3000V/cm within the electrolyte? Maybe you should read the paper again in order to fully understand it. Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2012 01:25:36 -0500 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com; vortex-l@eskimo.com From: a...@lomaxdesign.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 At 12:00 PM 7/4/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: Your argument assumes that the there is no air gap between the dielectric and the charged plates. It also assumes that the electrolyte behaves like a regular 100ohm resistor. The plates are against the cell walls. Sure, you can make up an air gap. It would be small and have almost no effect on the analysis. Yes. The electrolyte, within bounds, behaves somewhat like a resistor. In fact, the resistance changes under real conditions, it's noisy, as I mentioned. Noisy resistor, and there is capacitance in parallel and in series with the resistor, if you want a more complete model. The details are completely swamped by the magnitude of the problem. The effect on the electrolyte and all that is immersed in it is minute. And I seriously doubt the competence of anyone who asserts otherwise, after seeing the problem. I very much doubt that anyone from SPAWAR will defend that paper, and I do think it likely that we will see some comment. It was just an error, and it does not impeach the vast bulk of their work. In this case, where the movement of ions in electrolyte is dominated by diffusion and mixing from the gas bubbles generated by redox reactions at the two, in solution, electrodes the electrolyte does not behave like a 100ohm resistor. Your treatment of the system as two dielectrics sandwiched between three metal plates is not sufficient to describe the system. That isn't my description of the system. It is two dielectrics between two metal plates, not three, and between the two dielecrics (acrylic) is an electrolyte, that is, water with a substance dissolved so that it will conduct a substantial current with a modest voltage. Absolutely, modeling the electrolyte with a resistor is primitive. But the difference in the behavior of the electrolyte, due to error in this model, with respect to the division of the high voltage across the three regions, will be insignificant. You don't know if mixing and diffusion within the electrolyte and the extremely low mobility of solvated ions would allow an external electric field to exist within the electrolyte and allow electrophoretic and other field induced effects to influence the near surface of the Pd film. I know that an equipotential surface exists inside the cell that will totally screen any effects on this cell from what is beyond that. The current from the high voltage supply, through the electrolyte, will be in the picoamp range, that is completely necessary, because the only conduction path is through two plates with very high resistance. This current is totally swamped by noise from many sources. Likewise the voltage experienced by the electrolyte stemming from the high voltage supply. Finlay, don't immolate yourself on trying to be right. You know enough to get into trouble, to make up complex explanations that ignore the obvious. The electrolyte is a decent conductor, the LiCl salt has been added for that purpose, and that purpose alone. Ohms law still applies with current, voltage, and resistance through an electrolyte. Power dissipation is still current times voltage. Kirchoff's Law still applies with electrolytes. Finally, the only mention of the strength of the electric field in the paper: the cell placement in an electric field (2500–3000 V cm-1) refers to the entire cell, it does not refer to the field within the electrolyte. The authors never assert that the field strength is 3000 V/cm within the electrolyte. The cell is placed in an electric field with that strength before the cell is placed in it. In fact, with the cell in place, loaded with electrolyte, the field strength becomes much quite a bit higher, within the acrylic, and far, far lower within the electrolyte. They imply that the field within the cell would be substantial enough to affect cell chemistry, when the field within the cell is actually truly miniscule, swamped by noise in the other sources of voltage, specifically the electrolytic power supply, as well as the electrochemical phenomena taking place. Basically, there is a region about an inch wide. It is between two plates. The plates have 6 KV between them. The cell is placed in that space. The electric field is no longer uniform, as it was before the cell was placed. Specifying the electric field strength, instead
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 11:41 AM 7/5/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: Wait! Suddenly you admit that the authors don't believe the field is 3000V/cm within the electrolyte? Maybe you should read the paper again in order to fully understand it. No. While I'm not a mind reader, it does appear that the authors believe there is an electric field within the cell, created by the external field, that would exert forces on the surface morphology, they refer to this again and again. They never estimate the field whose effects they are seeing. The only statement of field intensity is the 2500-3000 V/cm. value. There is no discrimination between placing the cell in an electric field, and what field might actually affect the contents of the cell. It's extremely odd. The appearance is that they assume that there would be some effect within the cell, some significant force exerted, and exerting a force was their goal. When I read a paper, I often read it with some interest in mind. I'd seen this paper before, but never read it with full attention and full critical resources. When Rich made his notice about SPAWAR's alleged failure to respond, I looked for the original work and came back to this paper. I simply read it, this time, looking for values, and saw that the paper had a lot of explanatory text that was general, like the effect of the field on different parts of the cell will be different for each part. That's not a quote, it's an example of the kind of text. I.e., a lot of fluff. There is no coverage of different effects shown by different parts. Really, Finley, look for what this paper actually shows. Is what is claimed supported by the evidence reported? Has anyone ever confirmed any of this? Is it at all plausible? What exactly is the effect of an electric field on the deposit? Is it described clearly and discriminated from the obvious wide variation seen *regardless*? If their goal was to show an effect of a force on the cathode, applying an *external field* would not be a way to do it. That applies no force, there would have to be an internal field, which is not possible separately from there being an internal current, if there is a conductive electrolyte containing the cathode. Want a force? Well, one could fun high electrolytic current across the cell --- independently from the regular electrolysis. That high current would likely affect the cathode. It would exert an electric field effect. Definitely. SPAWAR has done work with external magnetic fields. Those fields penetrate the cell, practically as if the cell materials aren't there. There are known effects of a magentic field. Nobody else has ever shown an effect from an external electric field. And I doubt anyone is going to try. This paper provides no reason to do so! There is no comment on any possible enhancement of the heat effect or any other possible nuclear effect. This appeared in an electrochemistry journal. It was presumably of some interest as to shifts in the complex deposits formed with PdD codeposition or deposition/evolution. It has some pretty pictures. For comparison, there is one image of a non-electric field deposit that doesn't look a whole lot different from one with a field, and then lots of various images of complex structures, with an implication that these are related to the electric field. No real survey of what structures are found under either condition. But once we realize that the external electric field cannot be exerting any significant force on the cathode, we know that any possible DC electric field effect is completely buried deeply in the noise that does exist because of the electrolysis current (electrolysis is pretty noisy, the resistance varies substantially as bubbles are generated and released), we can easily see that the effects ascribed to the electric field must have some other cause, or don't exist, they are just illusory, as easily happens with subjective reports of difference. There is a possible other cause, this is a high-voltage source from a television, I think, and those often have a high-frequency element because of how the high voltage is generated. There may be a level of vibration in the cell, possibly above the audio range, I don't know what it would be. That vibration of the cell at some frequency would affect morphology is quite believable. Easy to test. But probably not worth the effort! There is *so* much else to do, with much greater implications. Rich Murray noticed the error, and, this time, brought it up, I think, because Duncan referred to some SPAWAR images. Then Rich confused this electric field work with other work where the little volcanos are shown, and came up with speculations about how leakage of the high voltage could somehow sneak into and burn holes in the cathode. Nope. Totally irrelevant, those volcanos are not part of this work, apparently (though maybe there is some reference or image elsewhere). The
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
I think the explanation offered by Jeff is pretty good. As long as a significant electric field is within the cell conductive region charged ions will be driven by that field in such a manner as to eliminate it. This concentrates the electric field so that it appears across the non conductive plastic. The final system has 3000 volts across each of the two plastic insulators with a drive of 6000. This assumes that there is a balanced system with equal insulators. Dave -Original Message- From: Finlay MacNab finlaymac...@hotmail.com To: vortex-l vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Tue, Jul 3, 2012 11:40 pm Subject: RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 I think your assessment is spot on Jeff. The only question in my mind is whether or not the mixing of the electrolyte caused by the evolution of gas at the working electrode might generate a varying electric field by redistributing the ions in solution. Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 23:17:01 -0400 Subject: Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 From: hcarb...@gmail.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Here are my two cents from reading up on dielectrics: With the 6000 V capacitor isolated from the electrolyte by the plastic, the electrolyte acts as a dielectric which reduces the E field in the electrolyte almost to zero in the middle but increases the the capacitance of the capacitor. If there is zero ionic current then I assume there has to be zero E field in the center of the electrolyte. As soon as the 6000 V is applied, there is a momentary current in the electrolyte and a polarization of the dielectric electrolyte. After that there is zero current assuming the plastic is an infinite insulator. So the positive ends of the water molecules are facing the negative plate of the capacitor and the negative ends of the water molecules are facing the positive plate of the capacitor. Initially, positive ions travel towards the negative plate and vice versa. But as the positive ions build up near the negative plate, they start to repel any newly arriving positive ions and therefore there must be an increasing positive ion concentration with decreasing distance from the negative plate at steady state. I'm not an electrochemist so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or not quite correct. you can see some details on dielectrics here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/dielec.html http://www.physics.sjsu.edu/becker/physics51/capacitors.htm I assume the water molecules nearest the electrodes feel the strongest orientating E field compared to the center of the electrolyte. I'm in the process of trying to replicate Randell Mills electricity generating CIHT device which has a Lithium Bromide, Lithium Hydride electrolyte. Somehow Mills is creating electricity during the production of hydrinos. Should have it up and running in 2 months. Details here: http://zhydrogen.com/?page_id=620 Jeff On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 10:23 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 07:26 PM 7/3/2012, MarkI-ZeroPoint wrote: There was one figure which shows the visual manifestations photographed from the experiments, with the theoretical model of the E-flds (on the right). It was very clear that fields were present in the electrolyte, as one could see the manifestations of the field-lines in the photographs taken of the area above the electrodes. Electrolyte concentrations varied from 0.02 to 0.08M KCl. I believe LENR typically uses 0.1M, so just slightly more conductive than this reference. Now, this experiment was done using AC, 100Hz to 1 Hz. First of all, the work being criticized uses a DC field. AC is considerably more complicated. AC will, for example, effectively pass right through the acrylic wall. If this was 6000 V AC, at 10,000 Hz, and if it actually had some available current, the thing would blow up! Secondly, there is no question that electric fields exist in the electrolyte. But not fields of a few thousand volts per cm, produced by the external field. The external DC field has, essentially, no effect on the fields in the electrolyte, which are, in this experiment, produced entirely by the electrolytic voltage.
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
after some thinking I realized I made a few wrong statements - see below On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 2:18 AM, David Roberson dlrober...@aol.com wrote: I think the explanation offered by Jeff is pretty good. As long as a significant electric field is within the cell conductive region charged ions will be driven by that field in such a manner as to eliminate it. This concentrates the electric field so that it appears across the non conductive plastic. The final system has 3000 volts across each of the two plastic insulators with a drive of 6000. This assumes that there is a balanced system with equal insulators. Dave -Original Message- From: Finlay MacNab finlaymac...@hotmail.com To: vortex-l vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Tue, Jul 3, 2012 11:40 pm Subject: RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 I think your assessment is spot on Jeff. The only question in my mind is whether or not the mixing of the electrolyte caused by the evolution of gas at the working electrode might generate a varying electric field by redistributing the ions in solution. Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 23:17:01 -0400 Subject: Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 From: hcarb...@gmail.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Here are my two cents from reading up on dielectrics: With the 6000 V capacitor isolated from the electrolyte by the plastic, the electrolyte acts as a dielectric which reduces the E field in the electrolyte almost to zero in the middle but increases the the capacitance of the capacitor. I am not an electrochemist but this is my speculation. There are two mechanisms which decrease the E field in the middle of the electrolyte. The E field is reduced by the dielectric properties of the electrolyte and by charged species (ions) that move towards the plates. The water is a dielectric because the water molecule is a dipole with a positive and a negative end. After (1) the water molecules align with the electric field and (2) after the ions travel towards the plates, there is no further current due to the 6000 V. But what if the water was replaced with a nonpolar fluid and had zero charged species (ions)? Then there would be an E field in the middle of the electrolyte - approaching the same E field as in a vacuum when the electrolyte approaches a dielectric constant of 1 (same as a vacuum). Benzene is a liquid and has a dielectric constant of 2.2 while water has a high dielectric constant at 80. So fill the SPAWAR cell with benzene and the E field in the center of SPAWAR's cell will be much higher. Also, at steady state, there will be zero current in the electrodes that are physically in the electrolyte (i.e. touching) due to the 6000 V capacitor outside the cell (i.e. not touching). If I call the electrodes in the solution plates A and B, then plate B will become more positively charged than A and any charged species (ion) traveling from the center of the electrolyte towards plate A is trying to reach the 6000 V plates, the ion is not trying to complete the circuit between plates A and B. Not sure what this means for the issues Duncan is raising since I'm trying not to get bogged down in details and I'm trying to focus on my experiment replicating Mills's CIHT. from Wikipedia: -- Solvent classifications Solvents can be broadly classified into two categories: polar and non-polar. Generally, the dielectric constant of the solvent provides a rough measure of a solvent's polarity. The strong polarity of water is indicated, at 20 °C, by a dielectric constant of 80.10;[citation needed]. Solvents with a dielectric constant of less than 15 are generally considered to be nonpolar.[4] Technically, the dielectric constant measures the solvent's ability to reduce the field strength of the electric field surrounding a charged particle immersed in it. This reduction is then compared to the field strength of the charged particle in a vacuum.[4] In layman's terms, dielectric constant of a solvent can be thought of as its ability to reduce the solute's internal charge. If there is zero ionic current then I assume there has to be zero E field in the center of the electrolyte. As soon as the 6000 V is applied, there is a momentary current in the electrolyte and a polarization of the dielectric electrolyte. After that there is zero current assuming the plastic is an infinite insulator. So the positive ends of the water molecules are facing the negative plate of the capacitor and the negative ends of the water molecules are facing the positive plate of the capacitor. Initially, positive ions travel towards the negative plate and vice versa. But as the positive ions build up near
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 11:46 PM 7/3/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: Sorry, I fail to see why the voltage drop is 3kv across the acrylic layer. Why is that exactly? There are three regions involved, between the plates that are connected to a high voltage supply, 6 KV. There is the first cell wall, 1/16 inch (1.6 mm) thick, made of acrylic plastic. Call this R1. There is about an inch (25 mm) of electrolyte, which is not pure water, but which has an electrolyte dissolved in it, lithium chloride. Call this R2. There is the opposite cell wall, the same as the first. Call this R3. The resistances of R1 and R3 are roughly 1.6 x 10^14 ohms each. That's a roughly calculated value from the properties of acrylic. The resistance of the electrolyte, R2, is on the order of 100 ohms. Easy to measure, routinely measured, voltages and currents are known. Consider these three resistances in series, with 6 KV across the assembly. Use Ohm's law to calculate the voltage across each resistance. You will find that the voltage is equally divided between the two plates, at about 3 KV per plate. The voltage across the electrolyte is low. The current would be 6000/(3.2 x 10^14) or about 2 x 10^-11 amps, that's 20 picoamps. The voltage across R2 would be 2 nanovolts. To measure this if there were no other activity in the system would be quite difficult. Microvolts are bad enough. But maybe you could do it. However, there is electrolytic current added to the electrolyte by the experiment. It might be a current at initial plating on the order of a milliamp, the voltage would be under two volts at first. The noise in the power supply would be well above the level of voltage from the HV source. Current flow through an electrolyte is complex, as you know. But we don't need to go into that complexity. At steady state, DC, the electrolyte will behave as a somewhat noisy resistor. (And at this stage of electrolysis, the noise would be low, it gets noisier, later, when deuterium gas is being evolved.) There is a parallel capacitance, but it has practically no effect. Bottom line: in his basic thesis, Rich is correct. The external plates with a high voltage on them can be expected to have no effect on the electrolytic activity. It looks like the SPAWAR team simply overlooked this consideration, we could do a whole study on the psychology of cold fusion; suffice it to say that this was a human error, and an understandable one. What is surprising is that this made it past peer review. If the claimed experimental result were verified, we'd have to start to look for some flaw in this argument. However, reading the paper, I don't see that the result is clearly established even in the paper. It's asserted without showing the basis of the analysis. It appears to be subjective. Now, these researchers had looked at a lot of cathodes. Variation in cathode appearance can be great, depending on very subtle conditions that are difficult to control. This is the big problem with the electrochemical approach to cold fusion, it's extraordinarily difficult to control the conditions. However, how important is Rich's objection? In another post today, Rich speculates about all kinds of fantastic phenomena that he thinks might happen if the high voltage leaks through the plastic. I suspect that he links this in his mind to some of the reported phenomena, but he's made a huge error himself. He thinks, it seems, that the use of an external high voltage field is common, such that it could explain effects reported. No, that was pretty much an isolated experiment. SPAWAR did not continue to use an HV field. This published paper was simply a report of something that seemed anomalous to them, an effect of an external electric field on codeposition morphology. It's a hiccup in an avalanche of findings. There is no leakage through the plastic. This plastic is not riddled with ionized radiation tracks. (It would be murky, not clear, and those tracks would not stay ionized, Rich has confused the ionization which is caused by charged particle passage, which disrupts the plastic structure, with some sort of permanent ionization which would facilitate current flow. No, that doesn't happen. The ionization will resolve itself rapidly; after all, the plastic does conduct. What is left is simply disrupted plastic. Same material as before. Same resistance. (Rich is talking about background radiation ionization, accumulated after the polymerization of the plastic. This would accumulate very slowly, so even if it takes days or weeks for ionization to resolve (which I doubt), it would nevertheless resolve. Experimental fact: acrylic is an excellent insulator, and it stays that way for a long time. You can bet your life on it, and these experimenters did, every time they touched any part of that cell with the HV turned on. They may have avoided that, and it is *this* effect that might explain a morphological difference in
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
Your argument assumes that the there is no air gap between the dielectric and the charged plates. It also assumes that the electrolyte behaves like a regular 100ohm resistor. In this case, where the movement of ions in electrolyte is dominated by diffusion and mixing from the gas bubbles generated by redox reactions at the two, in solution, electrodes the electrolyte does not behave like a 100ohm resistor. Your treatment of the system as two dielectrics sandwiched between three metal plates is not sufficient to describe the system. You don't know if mixing and diffusion within the electrolyte and the extremely low mobility of solvated ions would allow an external electric field to exist within the electrolyte and allow electrophoretic and other field induced effects to influence the near surface of the Pd film. Finally, the only mention of the strength of the electric field in the paper: the cell placement in an electric field (2500–3000 V cm-1) refers to the entire cell, it does not refer to the field within the electrolyte. The authors never assert that the field strength is 3000 V/cm within the electrolyte. Your assertion that the authors claim that the effects result from high fields is not born out by their treatment of the electrolyte, interphase region, and bulk Pd regions of the cell. Thus your assertion that the authors' manuscript contains a shocking analytical error is not accurate. Your comment that a retraction of the paper would be useful and that the paper is an example of subjective judgements is highly inflammatory and unjustified. These comments, being insufficiently supported, are incredibly insulting to the authors of the paper and to the entire SPAWAR group. Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2012 11:12:02 -0500 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com; vortex-l@eskimo.com From: a...@lomaxdesign.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 At 11:46 PM 7/3/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: Sorry, I fail to see why the voltage drop is 3kv across the acrylic layer. Why is that exactly? There are three regions involved, between the plates that are connected to a high voltage supply, 6 KV. There is the first cell wall, 1/16 inch (1.6 mm) thick, made of acrylic plastic. Call this R1. There is about an inch (25 mm) of electrolyte, which is not pure water, but which has an electrolyte dissolved in it, lithium chloride. Call this R2. There is the opposite cell wall, the same as the first. Call this R3. The resistances of R1 and R3 are roughly 1.6 x 10^14 ohms each. That's a roughly calculated value from the properties of acrylic. The resistance of the electrolyte, R2, is on the order of 100 ohms. Easy to measure, routinely measured, voltages and currents are known. Consider these three resistances in series, with 6 KV across the assembly. Use Ohm's law to calculate the voltage across each resistance. You will find that the voltage is equally divided between the two plates, at about 3 KV per plate. The voltage across the electrolyte is low. The current would be 6000/(3.2 x 10^14) or about 2 x 10^-11 amps, that's 20 picoamps. The voltage across R2 would be 2 nanovolts. To measure this if there were no other activity in the system would be quite difficult. Microvolts are bad enough. But maybe you could do it. However, there is electrolytic current added to the electrolyte by the experiment. It might be a current at initial plating on the order of a milliamp, the voltage would be under two volts at first. The noise in the power supply would be well above the level of voltage from the HV source. Current flow through an electrolyte is complex, as you know. But we don't need to go into that complexity. At steady state, DC, the electrolyte will behave as a somewhat noisy resistor. (And at this stage of electrolysis, the noise would be low, it gets noisier, later, when deuterium gas is being evolved.) There is a parallel capacitance, but it has practically no effect. Bottom line: in his basic thesis, Rich is correct. The external plates with a high voltage on them can be expected to have no effect on the electrolytic activity. It looks like the SPAWAR team simply overlooked this consideration, we could do a whole study on the psychology of cold fusion; suffice it to say that this was a human error, and an understandable one. What is surprising is that this made it past peer review. If the claimed experimental result were verified, we'd have to start to look for some flaw in this argument. However, reading the paper, I don't see that the result is clearly established even in the paper. It's asserted without showing the basis of the analysis. It appears to be subjective. Now, these researchers had looked at a lot of cathodes. Variation in cathode
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, if one presumes that it means anything. At 12:11 AM 7/4/2012, Rich Murray wrote: I'm glad to see my post has ignited a local hot spot in Vortex-L... Some good will come out of it. I do intend to take this to the original authors for comment, privately, suggesting some sort of public comment that will resolve this issue. It's really irrelevant to any important findings in cold fusion, an external electric field may have been used in a handful of experiments, at most, out of many, many thousands. Maybe a hundred thousand. Lomax: Um, very highly unlikely. The plastic walls are intact, or electrolyte would leak out. They have high dielectric resistance. If this is acrylic, it's about 1/16 inch thick. Current will be very, very low. If there is leakage current, the current will create a voltage drop. It will not create sporadic local heat. Basically, that field does nothing. If Rich wants to assert that it does something, well, that kind of contradicts his thesis, eh? Murray: that's a pretty thin film of plastic to put 6 kv on -- local radioactivity and cosmic rays will leave subtle ionized paths across the plastic, without making tunnels that could leak the electrolyte, while then the high voltages would tend to penetrate these paths and increase the local ionization, always finding and expanding paths until routes evolve right across the film -- very thin, complex routes with all kinds of weird chemistry and physics as the 6 kv potential is brought to bear on micro and nano size structures within the walls -- still without creating routes wide enough for liquids to flow through -- so the vision becomes available for a multitude of strange processes, constantly evolving and varying as time marches on, creating anomalies -- there need to be research on whether micro and nano currents are indeed flowing along the surfaces and within the conductors and electrolyte inside these small cells -- and whether they are creating chaotic corrosion on the micro and nano scales, releasing complex chemicals and gases into the electrolyte... And hordes of scientists are misled by the results, wasting decades of research following paths that were caused by such a simple mistake, and, as a result, the real physics is missed, the entire future of humanity is lost as we all die from global warming, but a few hardy souls survive underground, building tunnels and living a new kind of life. And the mind can make up anything it likes. Doesn't make it real. Basically, acrylic is an excellent insulator. I would not advise using it in the presence of massive charged particle radiation, which will, indeed, break down the plastic. Don't use it in the presence of methylene chloride either. Don't use it above its melting point, or even close to it. Rich, you made all this up. The plastic is unaffected by that voltage, the breakdown voltage for acrylic is conservatively specified -- for safety purposes -- at 17 KV/mm. So this conservatively would be 27 KV for that thin film of plastic. It's not a thin film, this is the side of a commercial plastic box, I have a hundred of these exact boxes sitting in my lab. It's clear acrylic, used for jewelry boxes and other display. Sure, ionizing radiation will leave ionization tracks. However, those paths would remain ionized only for a very short time. Two things happen to such ionization tracks: the ionization does not remain, what remains is the disruption caused by local ionization caused by charged particle passage. Those tracks do not remain as available to conduct electricity, not for long. In order to create a path all the way through the plastic, a charged particle would have to have very high energy. And the problem with this is that as the particle energy increases above a threshold, the energy left behind *decreases*, until a very energetic particle leaves no track at all. Basically, a particle that can penetrate the plastic will not leave a track. This is why insulators like acrylic don't routinely break down from scattered cosmic rays. (there would be other effects, even if a path should open, there would be a current burst *within the acrylic wall* as the charged plastic capacitor discharges through itself. Given that the *other* piece of acrylic would not discharge at the same time, there would be no high current through the electrolyte, no overall leakage current beyond a doubling of the normal tiny current. Because this would be high-frequency, it might be detectable, if it does happen. My guess is, no. It doesn't happen. Ever.) Rich is correct about one thing: if a discharge pathway like that opened up, it would not leak electrolyte, unless and until it became a gross pathway, from a *lot* of current passage. Look at Widom-Larsen descriptions of water tree breakdown in 40 kv high voltage DC power cables with centimeters of high density polyethylene insulation over weeks and
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote: Actual experimental results are more toward double, the value, over 40 MeV/He-4, which very likely reflects the difficulty in capturing all the helium (if helium is not captured and measured, particularly if it remains trapped in the palladium), then there is less helium reported, and the value of heat/helium goes up proportionally. Abd, I find this a very interesting result. What is the variability here? How reliable is the 40 MeV figure? Assuming for the moment that the 40 MeV/4He result is solid and can be reliably replicated, and going with helium as a predominant non-radiative byproduct, what does this say about the reactions involved? Does it mean that there would need to be more than helium generation, or is there a way to work out helium generation that produces this level of energy? Eric
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
I wrote: Assuming for the moment that the 40 MeV/4He result is solid and can be reliably replicated, and going with helium as a predominant non-radiative byproduct, what does this say about the reactions involved? Does it mean that there would need to be more than helium generation, or is there a way to work out helium generation that produces this level of energy? To answer my own question (using what you've already hinted at): One way to get at this figure would be to allow a large amount of the helium to escape. Then it would seem like the residue was responsible for the entire balance of the heat, when in fact some of it resulted from escaped helium. Eric
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
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. 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 -- 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 -- 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. 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. Methinks Storms, Rothwell, and Lomax proclaim too much re the heat-helium correlation. Especially, is there any device in the world today that is generating unexplained excess heat? publicly, reliably ? If not now, how recently? Time will tell, 23 years after 1989...
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
I also agree that it must be the escape of helium that causes the mismatch, and I notice that the numbers are definitely pointing in that direction. The amount of energy released per reaction should be well defined and equal to the mass deficit if the end product is helium with hydrogen as the source. As you are suggesting, reliable data must be available to support the conclusions. Dave -Original Message- From: Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com To: vortex-l vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Wed, Jul 4, 2012 5:27 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 I wrote: Assuming for the moment that the 40 MeV/4He result is solid and can be reliably replicated, and going with helium as a predominant non-radiative byproduct, what does this say about the reactions involved? Does it mean that there would need to be more than helium generation, or is there a way to work out helium generation that produces this level of energy? To answer my own question (using what you've already hinted at): One way to get at this figure would be to allow a large amount of the helium to escape. Then it would seem like the residue was responsible for the entire balance of the heat, when in fact some of it resulted from escaped helium. Eric
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 12:00 PM 7/4/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: Your argument assumes that the there is no air gap between the dielectric and the charged plates. It also assumes that the electrolyte behaves like a regular 100ohm resistor. The plates are against the cell walls. Sure, you can make up an air gap. It would be small and have almost no effect on the analysis. Yes. The electrolyte, within bounds, behaves somewhat like a resistor. In fact, the resistance changes under real conditions, it's noisy, as I mentioned. Noisy resistor, and there is capacitance in parallel and in series with the resistor, if you want a more complete model. The details are completely swamped by the magnitude of the problem. The effect on the electrolyte and all that is immersed in it is minute. And I seriously doubt the competence of anyone who asserts otherwise, after seeing the problem. I very much doubt that anyone from SPAWAR will defend that paper, and I do think it likely that we will see some comment. It was just an error, and it does not impeach the vast bulk of their work. In this case, where the movement of ions in electrolyte is dominated by diffusion and mixing from the gas bubbles generated by redox reactions at the two, in solution, electrodes the electrolyte does not behave like a 100ohm resistor. Your treatment of the system as two dielectrics sandwiched between three metal plates is not sufficient to describe the system. That isn't my description of the system. It is two dielectrics between two metal plates, not three, and between the two dielecrics (acrylic) is an electrolyte, that is, water with a substance dissolved so that it will conduct a substantial current with a modest voltage. Absolutely, modeling the electrolyte with a resistor is primitive. But the difference in the behavior of the electrolyte, due to error in this model, with respect to the division of the high voltage across the three regions, will be insignificant. You don't know if mixing and diffusion within the electrolyte and the extremely low mobility of solvated ions would allow an external electric field to exist within the electrolyte and allow electrophoretic and other field induced effects to influence the near surface of the Pd film. I know that an equipotential surface exists inside the cell that will totally screen any effects on this cell from what is beyond that. The current from the high voltage supply, through the electrolyte, will be in the picoamp range, that is completely necessary, because the only conduction path is through two plates with very high resistance. This current is totally swamped by noise from many sources. Likewise the voltage experienced by the electrolyte stemming from the high voltage supply. Finlay, don't immolate yourself on trying to be right. You know enough to get into trouble, to make up complex explanations that ignore the obvious. The electrolyte is a decent conductor, the LiCl salt has been added for that purpose, and that purpose alone. Ohms law still applies with current, voltage, and resistance through an electrolyte. Power dissipation is still current times voltage. Kirchoff's Law still applies with electrolytes. Finally, the only mention of the strength of the electric field in the paper: the cell placement in an electric field (25003000 V cm-1) refers to the entire cell, it does not refer to the field within the electrolyte. The authors never assert that the field strength is 3000 V/cm within the electrolyte. The cell is placed in an electric field with that strength before the cell is placed in it. In fact, with the cell in place, loaded with electrolyte, the field strength becomes much quite a bit higher, within the acrylic, and far, far lower within the electrolyte. They imply that the field within the cell would be substantial enough to affect cell chemistry, when the field within the cell is actually truly miniscule, swamped by noise in the other sources of voltage, specifically the electrolytic power supply, as well as the electrochemical phenomena taking place. Basically, there is a region about an inch wide. It is between two plates. The plates have 6 KV between them. The cell is placed in that space. The electric field is no longer uniform, as it was before the cell was placed. Specifying the electric field strength, instead of the total field, is pretty strange, except this is what they were thinking they were doing, they thought they were subjecting the cathode to an enhanced electric field. It's really pretty silly, I'm sure that there are some stories behind this. Frankly, if I didn't think this awfully unlikely coming from SPAWAR, I'd think the whole thing was a joke, a parody on cold fusion research. Your assertion that the authors claim that the effects result from high fields is not born out by their treatment of the electrolyte, interphase region, and bulk Pd regions of
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 11:47 PM 7/2/2012, Rich Murray wrote: SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 Coldfusionnow.org posted the following video today: 68 minutes April, 2012 Robert Duncan discusses experiments at Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance http://coldfusionnow.org/robert-duncan-discusses-experiments-at-sidney-kimmel-institute-for-nuclear-renaissance/ I've been unable to view this video, unfortunately. I view most videos on my iPhone and the presentation seems to be incompatible with my iPhone version Robert V. Duncan shows a slide from SPAWAR Navy lab (Pamela Mosier-Boss) that claims a 6 kv DC electric field from plates external to a wet conducting electrolyte has effects within the electrolyte -- but the reality in simple electrostatics is the electric field exists in the two plastic walls of the cell, between the liquid and the two external plates, i.e., a simple double capacitor setup, with no field in the conductor (electrolyte) that connects the two charged capacitors. Yes. I have the paper by Mosier-Boss, Szpak, Gordon, and Forsley, that was published in the 2008 ACS LENR Sourcebook, which refers to the effect of electric and magnetic fields on heat generation and the production of nuclear ash, as explored by earlier researchers. In those earlier reports, the experiment was gas phase, and it seems most work was with magnetic fields, plus the gas phase electric field work described involved, presumably, a low voltage field, since it was applied across the length of a Pd sheet. This paper refers to prior work examining the effect of external electric and magnetic fields on the Pd/D codeposition process. They mix up electric and magnetic field results. Technically, there is no error, at least not in the paper, since they do not state a value for the electric field, they refer only to an external electric field. However, Rich is correct. The external electric field is almost certainly not visible to the location of the alleged effect, the cell cathode. This problem is not true for external magnetic fields, which do penetrate the materials and are present. The error is in the interpretation of the effects. The primary paper is http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakStheeffecto.pdf The paper title is The effect of an external electric field on surface morphology of co-deposited Pd/D films This is a very useful piece of work. It shows that an effect may appear, when subjective judgments are involved, that does not exist, i.e., that is based on something other than the particular hand-waving involved. Can we be sure that there is no actual effect of the electric field? Well, no. However, if there is an effect, it is almost certainly not through what is discussed in the article, which seems to assume the presence of the electric field inside the cell, which is assumed to be 2500 3000 V cm-1. From other reports, the total voltage is about 6000 V. The field strength (v/cm) seems to be a value calculated from the total voltage divided by the distance between the external plates used to set up the field. However, the region of interest (the cell contents) is filled with electrolyte. Electrolytic current is flowing in the electrolyte, and the resistance of the electrolyte would be known to the experimenters, from the current and voltage involved. The current starts out at 1 mA per cm2. Bottom line, the voltage across the cathode and anode in the early phases of codeposition, by their approach, is less than 2 volts. That is an actual voltage between two points intermediate between the locations of the high voltage plates. The analytical error is quite shocking, I understand why Rich is exercised about it. For the record, it would indeed be useful if an author of the original paper were to retract the conclusions and clarify the matter of absence of the high voltage field inside the cell. As Rich points out, that voltage is almost entirely across the plastic cell walls. Because of leakage, there might be some current in the electrolyte, but I'd expect it to be in the nanoamp range, swamped by the electrolytic current and voltages. However, Rich goes on to speculate in a different direction: There may be small leakage currents through the plastic walls that short out the two capacitors, allowing unexpected currents to flow through the electrolyte, applying high voltages to many tiny locations, creating localized and evolving damage, thus generating sporatic unexpected local heat and depositing elements from all parts of the cell within these complex, scattered micro regions. Um, very highly unlikely. The plastic walls are intact, or electrolyte would leak out. They have high dielectric resistance. If this is acrylic, it's about 1/16 inch thick. Current will be very, very low. If there is leakage
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
It should be noted that in an electrolyte the current results from a chemical reaction at the anode and cathode (in this case the generation of hydrogen and oxygen) there are no free charge carriers in the solution itself. The cations and anions are bound together by electrostatic attraction and exist inside cloud quasi organized solvent molecules. Electrolyte ions do organize on the surface of electrodes to screen the electric field at low potentials (most of the voltage drop in an electrochemistry experiment happens within the first nanometer of the electrode surface). At the high fields quoted in the linked paper, I cannot imagine how the electrolyte could screen the applied field. It seems reasonable to me that an electric field could exist inside the cell, since electrolytes do not have free charges that can migrate to the surface of the dielectric. Electrolytes do not conduct electrons, they accept electrons and donate electrons. There are no charges flowing through the solution, just reactions at the electrode surface. Now I must get back to my electrodeposition experiment. Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 16:15:05 -0500 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com; dunca...@missouri.edu; rmfor...@gmail.com From: a...@lomaxdesign.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 At 11:47 PM 7/2/2012, Rich Murray wrote: SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 Coldfusionnow.org posted the following video today: 68 minutes April, 2012 Robert Duncan discusses experiments at Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Renaissance http://coldfusionnow.org/robert-duncan-discusses-experiments-at-sidney-kimmel-institute-for-nuclear-renaissance/ I've been unable to view this video, unfortunately. I view most videos on my iPhone and the presentation seems to be incompatible with my iPhone version Robert V. Duncan shows a slide from SPAWAR Navy lab (Pamela Mosier-Boss) that claims a 6 kv DC electric field from plates external to a wet conducting electrolyte has effects within the electrolyte -- but the reality in simple electrostatics is the electric field exists in the two plastic walls of the cell, between the liquid and the two external plates, i.e., a simple double capacitor setup, with no field in the conductor (electrolyte) that connects the two charged capacitors. Yes. I have the paper by Mosier-Boss, Szpak, Gordon, and Forsley, that was published in the 2008 ACS LENR Sourcebook, which refers to the effect of electric and magnetic fields on heat generation and the production of nuclear ash, as explored by earlier researchers. In those earlier reports, the experiment was gas phase, and it seems most work was with magnetic fields, plus the gas phase electric field work described involved, presumably, a low voltage field, since it was applied across the length of a Pd sheet. This paper refers to prior work examining the effect of external electric and magnetic fields on the Pd/D codeposition process. They mix up electric and magnetic field results. Technically, there is no error, at least not in the paper, since they do not state a value for the electric field, they refer only to an external electric field. However, Rich is correct. The external electric field is almost certainly not visible to the location of the alleged effect, the cell cathode. This problem is not true for external magnetic fields, which do penetrate the materials and are present. The error is in the interpretation of the effects. The primary paper is http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakStheeffecto.pdf The paper title is The effect of an external electric field on surface morphology of co-deposited Pd/D films This is a very useful piece of work. It shows that an effect may appear, when subjective judgments are involved, that does not exist, i.e., that is based on something other than the particular hand-waving involved. Can we be sure that there is no actual effect of the electric field? Well, no. However, if there is an effect, it is almost certainly not through what is discussed in the article, which seems to assume the presence of the electric field inside the cell, which is assumed to be 2500– 3000 V cm-1. From other reports, the total voltage is about 6000 V. The field strength (v/cm) seems to be a value calculated from the total voltage divided by the distance between the external plates used to set up the field. However, the region of interest (the cell contents) is filled with electrolyte. Electrolytic current is flowing in the electrolyte, and the resistance of the electrolyte would be known to the experimenters, from the current and
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 03:44 PM 7/3/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: It should be noted that in an electrolyte the current results from a chemical reaction at the anode and cathode (in this case the generation of hydrogen and oxygen) there are no free charge carriers in the solution itself. The cations and anions are bound together by electrostatic attraction and exist inside cloud quasi organized solvent molecules. Electrolyte ions do organize on the surface of electrodes to screen the electric field at low potentials (most of the voltage drop in an electrochemistry experiment happens within the first nanometer of the electrode surface). At the high fields quoted in the linked paper, I cannot imagine how the electrolyte could screen the applied field. It seems reasonable to me that an electric field could exist inside the cell, since electrolytes do not have free charges that can migrate to the surface of the dielectric. Electrolytes do not conduct electrons, they accept electrons and donate electrons. There are no charges flowing through the solution, just reactions at the electrode surface. Now I must get back to my electrodeposition experiment. An ounce of experiment is worth a pound of theory. Or even a ton. Now, I'd love to be wrong here. However, I remain unconvinced, and obviously so does Rich. The objection is an obvious one, so one might think there would be a definitive answer somewhere. I see, however, that Mr. MacNab may have confused himself with his own knowledge. The situation has nothing to do with free charges that can migrate to the surface of anything. The mode of conduction is irrelevant. An electric field *does* exist in the cell. It is complex, and varies from location to location. If the statement about the first nanometer is true, we could be looking at a field strength there of more than 10^7 V/cm. Much higher than the field from the high voltage supply. But just for a nanometer. Here is the problem. Electric fields are measured relative to some potential. There is only one electric field at any given location. How do we know what the electric field is at a location? Well, we can use a voltage probe. That won't tell us the field, we will need to use two probes for that, which will give us the potential difference between the two locations. We can use a bridge to measure potential difference without any need for current to flow through the probe, complicating things. So if we stick two probes into the electrolyte, on either side of the cell, when we have this 6 KV sitting across the cell, what voltage will we need to place across the probes, so that the current through them is zero? In the electrochemical cell, I'll predict this. The voltage will be very low, probably less even than the voltage between the anode and cathode, if Mr. MacNab's statement about the voltage drop is true (and I have no reason to doubt it). Imagine, though, that it would instead be thousands of volts. This is at zero current. But thousands of volts across two probes -- electrodes -- in a conductive electrolyte? If you had the available current, the thing would blow up! (In fact, here, the high voltage power supply is from a TV set, there is only low available current.) So the voltage across the probes would be very low, perhaps millivolts. If the probes were in contact with the cathode and anode, respectively, it might be a few volts, whatever the electrolysis voltage is. There is no screening of the field. There is just the shorting of a portion of the field, by the electrolyte. The current from the HV supply is very low, it might be picoamps. [I estimate it below] If we plot the field with a series of measurements, we'd find that there is about 3 KV across a cell wall, about 1/16 inch thick. Acrylic plastic, probably. Then there is a very low voltage across the electrolyte. then there would be another 3 KV across the opposite wall, giving us a total drop across the cell of 6 KV. The cell wall is about 1.6 mm thick, and with 3 KV across it -- which could easily be measured -- that's 19 KV/cm. Looking for the electrical properties of acrylic, I found that it has a bulk resistance of 1.6 X 10^16 ohm-cm . We might be looking at about 16 cm^2 for each plate. I get on the order of 1.6 x 10^14 ohms per piece of acryclic. Current for 3 KV would be about 5 x 10^10 amps, or 500 pA. That is the leakage current through the acrylic. Breakdown voltage for acrylic is 17 KV/mm. That's probably a minimum guarantee. 170 KV/cm. Actual breakdown would not normally occur until substantially higher voltage. (I've tested actual breakdown voltage, it was, under the situations I was testing, over double the specification or more.) If the acrylic does break down, all bets are off. The current though the acrylic would go way up, but the supply, though, won't supply much current. The current from the electrolysis supply will probably still be greater. I.e.,
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
As far as Finlay's statement that There are no charges flowing through the solution. I would qualify it by saying that there are no electrons flowing thru the solution, but for a simple electrolyte such as NaCl, the NaCl dissociates into Na+1 and Cl-1 ions in solution and they *are* influenced by the E-flds within the electrolyte. I have done considerable RF/microwave measurements of the electrical properties of electrolytic solutions in our noninvasive glucose technology, and there most certainly is an E-fld present, but again, this is an AC system, not DC. -mark From: Finlay MacNab [mailto:finlaymac...@hotmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2012 1:45 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 It should be noted that in an electrolyte the current results from a chemical reaction at the anode and cathode (in this case the generation of hydrogen and oxygen) there are no free charge carriers in the solution itself. The cations and anions are bound together by electrostatic attraction and exist inside cloud quasi organized solvent molecules. Electrolyte ions do organize on the surface of electrodes to screen the electric field at low potentials (most of the voltage drop in an electrochemistry experiment happens within the first nanometer of the electrode surface). At the high fields quoted in the linked paper, I cannot imagine how the electrolyte could screen the applied field. It seems reasonable to me that an electric field could exist inside the cell, since electrolytes do not have free charges that can migrate to the surface of the dielectric. Electrolytes do not conduct electrons, they accept electrons and donate electrons. There are no charges flowing through the solution, just reactions at the electrode surface. Now I must get back to my electrodeposition experiment.
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
A quick web-search verifies that E-fields most assuredly CAN exist in conductive electrolytes. for both DC and AC conditions. Electric fields in an electrolyte solution near a strip of fixed potential http://jcp.aip.org/resource/1/jcpsa6/v123/i13/p134705_s1 Excerpt from Abstract: Electrostatic fields produced by flat electrodes are often used to manipulate particles in solution. To study the field produced by such an electrode, we consider the problem of an infinite strip of width 2a with imposed constant potential immersed in an electrolyte solution. Influence of electrolyte composition on the effective electric field strength in capillary zone electrophoresis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8529611 and this one: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/259274/1/PhysRevE_III.pdf I was going to include some piccys, but even though black-n-white, they were too large. There was one figure which shows the visual manifestations photographed from the experiments, with the theoretical model of the E-flds (on the right). It was very clear that fields were present in the electrolyte, as one could see the manifestations of the field-lines in the photographs taken of the area above the electrodes. Electrolyte concentrations varied from 0.02 to 0.08M KCl. I believe LENR typically uses 0.1M, so just slightly more conductive than this reference. Now, this experiment was done using AC, 100Hz to 1 Hz. -Mark
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
To clarify: An electrolyte does not conduct. Chemical reactions occur at the electrodes that accept and give up electrons. Current flows through the metal conductors between the anode and cathode. When I say that the voltage drop occurs withing around 1nm of the electrode (the debye length), that is only the case for low voltage experiments on the order of the red-ox potentials for a given electrochemical reaction. At 6kV this would not necessarily be true. Because the ions in the electrolyte of much much lower mobility than electrons in a metal conductor they may not be able to effectively screen the high applied fields, especially if the solution is being mixed (a quick search of the literature did not yield a relevant example at high field) . If the fields were oscillating, the E field would definitely be felt within the electrolyte (this is what I would have done). When you say: The situation has nothing to do with free charges that can migrate to the surface of anything. The mode of conduction is irrelevant. I fail to understand what you mean. The only reason that the field inside the electrolyte can be zero is if charge carriers migrate to the surface of the cell to screen the bulk of the electrolyte from the externally applied field. I don't believe your example of probing the electrolyte with two probes and a bridge is relevant to this experiment, since the external electrodes are not in contact with the electrolyte, no chemical reaction can take place, and so no current can flow, the field can only be screened by the build up of charged ions at the cell walls. Maybe you can explain it in a way i can understand. What would happen if you had two metal plates separated by an air gap, then you applied a 6kv bias between them, and then put your two probes into the air gap? Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 19:13:40 -0500 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com; vortex-l@eskimo.com From: a...@lomaxdesign.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 At 03:44 PM 7/3/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: It should be noted that in an electrolyte the current results from a chemical reaction at the anode and cathode (in this case the generation of hydrogen and oxygen) there are no free charge carriers in the solution itself. The cations and anions are bound together by electrostatic attraction and exist inside cloud quasi organized solvent molecules. Electrolyte ions do organize on the surface of electrodes to screen the electric field at low potentials (most of the voltage drop in an electrochemistry experiment happens within the first nanometer of the electrode surface). At the high fields quoted in the linked paper, I cannot imagine how the electrolyte could screen the applied field. It seems reasonable to me that an electric field could exist inside the cell, since electrolytes do not have free charges that can migrate to the surface of the dielectric. Electrolytes do not conduct electrons, they accept electrons and donate electrons. There are no charges flowing through the solution, just reactions at the electrode surface. Now I must get back to my electrodeposition experiment. An ounce of experiment is worth a pound of theory. Or even a ton. Now, I'd love to be wrong here. However, I remain unconvinced, and obviously so does Rich. The objection is an obvious one, so one might think there would be a definitive answer somewhere. I see, however, that Mr. MacNab may have confused himself with his own knowledge. The situation has nothing to do with free charges that can migrate to the surface of anything. The mode of conduction is irrelevant. An electric field *does* exist in the cell. It is complex, and varies from location to location. If the statement about the first nanometer is true, we could be looking at a field strength there of more than 10^7 V/cm. Much higher than the field from the high voltage supply. But just for a nanometer. Here is the problem. Electric fields are measured relative to some potential. There is only one electric field at any given location. How do we know what the electric field is at a location? Well, we can use a voltage probe. That won't tell us the field, we will need to use two probes for that, which will give us the potential difference between the two locations. We can use a bridge to measure potential difference without any need for current to flow through the probe, complicating things. So if we stick two probes into the electrolyte, on either side of the cell, when we have this 6 KV sitting across the cell, what voltage will we need to place across the probes, so that the current through them is zero? In the electrochemical cell, I'll predict this. The voltage will be very low, probably less even than the voltage
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
Hey Mark, Very interesting links (although I dont have full access to the second one). From: zeropo...@charter.net To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 17:26:13 -0700 A quick web-search verifies that E-fields most assuredly CAN exist in conductive electrolytes… for both DC and AC conditions. Electric fields in an electrolyte solution near a strip of fixed potential http://jcp.aip.org/resource/1/jcpsa6/v123/i13/p134705_s1 Excerpt from Abstract:“Electrostatic fields produced by flat electrodes are often used to manipulate particles in solution. To study the field produced by such an electrode, we consider the problem of an infinite strip of width 2a with imposed constant potential immersed in an electrolyte solution.” Influence of electrolyte composition on the effective electric field strength in capillary zone electrophoresis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8529611 and this one:http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/259274/1/PhysRevE_III.pdf I was going to include some piccys, but even though black-n-white, they were too large. There was one figure which shows the visual manifestations photographed from the experiments, with the theoretical model of the E-flds (on the right). It was very clear that fields were present in the electrolyte, as one could see the manifestations of the field-lines in the photographs taken of the area above the electrodes. Electrolyte concentrations varied from 0.02 to 0.08M KCl. I believe LENR typically uses 0.1M, so just slightly more conductive than this reference. Now, this experiment was done using AC, 100Hz to 1 Hz. -Mark
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 07:26 PM 7/3/2012, MarkI-ZeroPoint wrote: There was one figure which shows the visual manifestations photographed from the experiments, with the theoretical model of the E-flds (on the right). It was very clear that fields were present in the electrolyte, as one could see the manifestations of the field-lines in the photographs taken of the area above the electrodes. Electrolyte concentrations varied from 0.02 to 0.08M KCl. I believe LENR typically uses 0.1M, so just slightly more conductive than this reference. Now, this experiment was done using AC, 100Hz to 1 Hz. First of all, the work being criticized uses a DC field. AC is considerably more complicated. AC will, for example, effectively pass right through the acrylic wall. If this was 6000 V AC, at 10,000 Hz, and if it actually had some available current, the thing would blow up! Secondly, there is no question that electric fields exist in the electrolyte. But not fields of a few thousand volts per cm, produced by the external field. The external DC field has, essentially, no effect on the fields in the electrolyte, which are, in this experiment, produced entirely by the electrolytic voltage.
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 08:02 PM 7/3/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: To clarify: An electrolyte does not conduct. Chemical reactions occur at the electrodes that accept and give up electrons. Current flows through the metal conductors between the anode and cathode. An electrolyte does conduct. That is, there is movement of charge. That is all that conduction means. Finlay, you are not being careful. I suggest you try it. When I say that the voltage drop occurs withing around 1nm of the electrode (the debye length), that is only the case for low voltage experiments on the order of the red-ox potentials for a given electrochemical reaction. Sure. The experiment is a low voltage experiment, by the way. The palladium deposition in this work is often done below the potential at which heavy water will evolve deuterium at the cathode. At 6kV this would not necessarily be true. You aren't kidding. The thing would explode if somehow you maintained 6 KV across the cell. Because the ions in the electrolyte of much much lower mobility than electrons in a metal conductor they may not be able to effectively screen the high applied fields, especially if the solution is being mixed (a quick search of the literature did not yield a relevant example at high field) . If the fields were oscillating, the E field would definitely be felt within the electrolyte (this is what I would have done). Well, there is work with oscillating fields, but they are oscillating the electrolytic current. You seem to have a concept of an electric field that is different from how such fields are understood by electronic engineers and physicists. You ask a question below that is actually quite easy to answer. When you say: The situation has nothing to do with free charges that can migrate to the surface of anything. The mode of conduction is irrelevant. There is no surface here, not that is defined. There is a conductive medium, it has a certain resistance. Current flows through it when there is a potential across it (actually such electrolytes can also generate potentials, I won't go there.). Ohms law is obeyed. I fail to understand what you mean. The only reason that the field inside the electrolyte can be zero is if charge carriers migrate to the surface of the cell to screen the bulk of the electrolyte from the externally applied field. No, any region of low potential screens the field. You are making it much more complicated than it is. Imagine a line between the two high-voltage plates. Imagine an equipotential region inside the electrolyte, parallel to the plate, the line crosses that region. Let's assume, to keep this simple, that the equipotential region is larger than the high voltage plate. How can the high voltage on the other side of this equipoential region affect *any* region beyond the equipotential region? This is DC, remember. There is a very high voltage drop across the acrylic, about 3 KV. That's a done deal! The voltage doesn't then rise up! I don't believe your example of probing the electrolyte with two probes and a bridge is relevant to this experiment, since the external electrodes are not in contact with the electrolyte, no chemical reaction can take place, and so no current can flow, the field can only be screened by the build up of charged ions at the cell walls. This is how to measure voltage! Because no charge movement is involved, the whole issue about charge carriers is irrelevant. That's why a bridge is used, in fact. In practice, what is needed is a very sensitive current meter, which is zeroed out by applying the reference voltage and adjusting it until the current is zero. A bridge here just means that current is measured, and the experimental voltage is measured by opposing it with a known voltage, such that no current flows in the circuit. Maybe you can explain it in a way i can understand. Sure, I hope. What would happen if you had two metal plates separated by an air gap, then you applied a 6kv bias between them, and then put your two probes into the air gap? Air conducts electricity. If the air conducts uniformly, the resistance of the air will be even and the voltage will uniformly decline, linearly, between the plates. The bridge will measure the voltage accordingly. In the subject example, there are three regions between the plates. Two regions are filled with acrylic, which has very high resistance, higher than air, if I'm correct. And then there is the electrolyte, which has relatively low resistance. The voltage gradient is directly proportional to the current times the resistance per unit length. That's simply another version of Ohm's law. In an elecric circuit, we do not need to know what voltages are present elsewhere in the circuit to know the relationship between current, voltage, and resistance, in one leg of the circuit. Electric field strength is just another name for voltage gradient.
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
Here are my two cents from reading up on dielectrics: With the 6000 V capacitor isolated from the electrolyte by the plastic, the electrolyte acts as a dielectric which reduces the E field in the electrolyte almost to zero in the middle but increases the the capacitance of the capacitor. If there is zero ionic current then I assume there has to be zero E field in the center of the electrolyte. As soon as the 6000 V is applied, there is a momentary current in the electrolyte and a polarization of the dielectric electrolyte. After that there is zero current assuming the plastic is an infinite insulator. So the positive ends of the water molecules are facing the negative plate of the capacitor and the negative ends of the water molecules are facing the positive plate of the capacitor. Initially, positive ions travel towards the negative plate and vice versa. But as the positive ions build up near the negative plate, they start to repel any newly arriving positive ions and therefore there must be an increasing positive ion concentration with decreasing distance from the negative plate at steady state. I'm not an electrochemist so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or not quite correct. you can see some details on dielectrics here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/dielec.html http://www.physics.sjsu.edu/becker/physics51/capacitors.htm I assume the water molecules nearest the electrodes feel the strongest orientating E field compared to the center of the electrolyte. I'm in the process of trying to replicate Randell Mills electricity generating CIHT device which has a Lithium Bromide, Lithium Hydride electrolyte. Somehow Mills is creating electricity during the production of hydrinos. Should have it up and running in 2 months. Details here: http://zhydrogen.com/?page_id=620 Jeff On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 10:23 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 07:26 PM 7/3/2012, MarkI-ZeroPoint wrote: There was one figure which shows the visual manifestations photographed from the experiments, with the theoretical model of the E-flds (on the right). It was very clear that fields were present in the electrolyte, as one could see the manifestations of the field-lines in the photographs taken of the area above the electrodes. Electrolyte concentrations varied from 0.02 to 0.08M KCl. I believe LENR typically uses 0.1M, so just slightly more conductive than this reference. Now, this experiment was done using AC, 100Hz to 1 Hz. First of all, the work being criticized uses a DC field. AC is considerably more complicated. AC will, for example, effectively pass right through the acrylic wall. If this was 6000 V AC, at 10,000 Hz, and if it actually had some available current, the thing would blow up! Secondly, there is no question that electric fields exist in the electrolyte. But not fields of a few thousand volts per cm, produced by the external field. The external DC field has, essentially, no effect on the fields in the electrolyte, which are, in this experiment, produced entirely by the electrolytic voltage.
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 11:47 PM 7/2/2012, Rich Murray wrote: Robert V. Duncan shows a slide from SPAWAR Navy lab (Pamela Mosier-Boss) that claims a 6 kv DC electric field from plates external to a wet conducting electrolyte has effects within the electrolyte -- but the reality in simple electrostatics is the electric field exists in the two plastic walls of the cell, between the liquid and the two external plates, i.e., a simple double capacitor setup, with no field in the conductor (electrolyte) that connects the two charged capacitors. A writer interpreted no field in the conductor (elecrolyte) to literally mean no field. Here, it means no significant voltage gradient. There will be such a gradient in any conductor with non-zero resistance and any current flowing. However, the point here is that the voltage gradient set up *by the external field* will be tiny, almost certainly undetectable, not the kilovolts per cm that was claimed in the SPAWAR paper. A field of kilovolts per cm, if maintained across a significant distance in an electrolyte such as used in the SPAWAR experiments, would result in extremely high currents, it would create a plasma.
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
I think your assessment is spot on Jeff. The only question in my mind is whether or not the mixing of the electrolyte caused by the evolution of gas at the working electrode might generate a varying electric field by redistributing the ions in solution. Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 23:17:01 -0400 Subject: Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 From: hcarb...@gmail.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Here are my two cents from reading up on dielectrics: With the 6000 V capacitor isolated from the electrolyte by the plastic, the electrolyte acts as a dielectric which reduces the E field in the electrolyte almost to zero in the middle but increases the the capacitance of the capacitor. If there is zero ionic current then I assume there has to be zero E field in the center of the electrolyte. As soon as the 6000 V is applied, there is a momentary current in the electrolyte and a polarization of the dielectric electrolyte. After that there is zero current assuming the plastic is an infinite insulator. So the positive ends of the water molecules are facing the negative plate of the capacitor and the negative ends of the water molecules are facing the positive plate of the capacitor. Initially, positive ions travel towards the negative plate and vice versa. But as the positive ions build up near the negative plate, they start to repel any newly arriving positive ions and therefore there must be an increasing positive ion concentration with decreasing distance from the negative plate at steady state. I'm not an electrochemist so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or not quite correct. you can see some details on dielectrics here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/dielec.html http://www.physics.sjsu.edu/becker/physics51/capacitors.htm I assume the water molecules nearest the electrodes feel the strongest orientating E field compared to the center of the electrolyte. I'm in the process of trying to replicate Randell Mills electricity generating CIHT device which has a Lithium Bromide, Lithium Hydride electrolyte. Somehow Mills is creating electricity during the production of hydrinos. Should have it up and running in 2 months. Details here: http://zhydrogen.com/?page_id=620 Jeff On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 10:23 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 07:26 PM 7/3/2012, MarkI-ZeroPoint wrote: There was one figure which shows the visual manifestations photographed from the experiments, with the theoretical model of the E-flds (on the right). It was very clear that fields were present in the electrolyte, as one could see the manifestations of the field-lines in the photographs taken of the area above the electrodes. Electrolyte concentrations varied from 0.02 to 0.08M KCl. I believe LENR typically uses 0.1M, so just slightly more conductive than this reference. Now, this experiment was done using AC, 100Hz to 1 Hz. First of all, the work being criticized uses a DC field. AC is considerably more complicated. AC will, for example, effectively pass right through the acrylic wall. If this was 6000 V AC, at 10,000 Hz, and if it actually had some available current, the thing would blow up! Secondly, there is no question that electric fields exist in the electrolyte. But not fields of a few thousand volts per cm, produced by the external field. The external DC field has, essentially, no effect on the fields in the electrolyte, which are, in this experiment, produced entirely by the electrolytic voltage.
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
At 10:17 PM 7/3/2012, Jeff Driscoll wrote: Here are my two cents from reading up on dielectrics: With the 6000 V capacitor isolated from the electrolyte by the plastic, the electrolyte acts as a dielectric which reduces the E field in the electrolyte almost to zero in the middle but increases the the capacitance of the capacitor. Arrggh. A dielectric is an insulator. The electrolyte is not an insulator. This system is like two capacitors with a common plate. The two dielectrics are the two cell walls. The common plate is the electrolyte in the cell. There are then two outer metal plates. If there is zero ionic current then I assume there has to be zero E field in the center of the electrolyte. There is significant ionic current from the electrolytic current generated by the cell power supply. There is very little current through the cell walls. There is not zero ionic current. There are two currents here, the electrolytic current from the normal operation of the electrolytic cell, it's on the order of 1 mA maybe up to 500 mA. There is a current in addition to this, from the high voltage supply, based on the leakage through the acrylic, I estimated at about 0.5 nA. That is less than a million times smaller. Undetectable under the experimental conditions. As soon as the 6000 V is applied, there is a momentary current in the electrolyte and a polarization of the dielectric electrolyte. After that there is zero current assuming the plastic is an infinite insulator. That is correct. This is why I mentioned DC. When the voltage changes, current will flow until the dielectric becomes polarized. Basically, current will appear to flow through a capacitor until the capacitor is charged. What is happening is that charge is building up on the plates. There need not be any actual current flowing *through* the capacitor, but the effect is as if there were. So the positive ends of the water molecules are facing the negative plate of the capacitor and the negative ends of the water molecules are facing the positive plate of the capacitor. This has confused the electrolyte with the dielectric, i.e., the plastic. Immediately next to the acrylic, there would be some level of polarization of the water. But the field strength within the water would only be tiny, far less than full polarization would represent. The water, in this cell, is essentially at ground potential. And that's interesting in itself. Is the HV supply isolated, floating, or is it 6 KV with respect to ground? If the latter, then there is no voltage across one cell wall, and 6 KV across the other. It really doesn't make any difference. There is no discernable electric field inside the cell, within the electrolyte, from the external high-voltage field. Maybe it's homeopathic.
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
Sorry, I fail to see why the voltage drop is 3kv across the acrylic layer. Why is that exactly? Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 21:49:25 -0500 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com; vortex-l@eskimo.com From: a...@lomaxdesign.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claimsof effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 At 08:02 PM 7/3/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote: To clarify: An electrolyte does not conduct. Chemical reactions occur at the electrodes that accept and give up electrons. Current flows through the metal conductors between the anode and cathode. An electrolyte does conduct. That is, there is movement of charge. That is all that conduction means. Finlay, you are not being careful. I suggest you try it. When I say that the voltage drop occurs withing around 1nm of the electrode (the debye length), that is only the case for low voltage experiments on the order of the red-ox potentials for a given electrochemical reaction. Sure. The experiment is a low voltage experiment, by the way. The palladium deposition in this work is often done below the potential at which heavy water will evolve deuterium at the cathode. At 6kV this would not necessarily be true. You aren't kidding. The thing would explode if somehow you maintained 6 KV across the cell. Because the ions in the electrolyte of much much lower mobility than electrons in a metal conductor they may not be able to effectively screen the high applied fields, especially if the solution is being mixed (a quick search of the literature did not yield a relevant example at high field) . If the fields were oscillating, the E field would definitely be felt within the electrolyte (this is what I would have done). Well, there is work with oscillating fields, but they are oscillating the electrolytic current. You seem to have a concept of an electric field that is different from how such fields are understood by electronic engineers and physicists. You ask a question below that is actually quite easy to answer. When you say: The situation has nothing to do with free charges that can migrate to the surface of anything. The mode of conduction is irrelevant. There is no surface here, not that is defined. There is a conductive medium, it has a certain resistance. Current flows through it when there is a potential across it (actually such electrolytes can also generate potentials, I won't go there.). Ohms law is obeyed. I fail to understand what you mean. The only reason that the field inside the electrolyte can be zero is if charge carriers migrate to the surface of the cell to screen the bulk of the electrolyte from the externally applied field. No, any region of low potential screens the field. You are making it much more complicated than it is. Imagine a line between the two high-voltage plates. Imagine an equipotential region inside the electrolyte, parallel to the plate, the line crosses that region. Let's assume, to keep this simple, that the equipotential region is larger than the high voltage plate. How can the high voltage on the other side of this equipoential region affect *any* region beyond the equipotential region? This is DC, remember. There is a very high voltage drop across the acrylic, about 3 KV. That's a done deal! The voltage doesn't then rise up! I don't believe your example of probing the electrolyte with two probes and a bridge is relevant to this experiment, since the external electrodes are not in contact with the electrolyte, no chemical reaction can take place, and so no current can flow, the field can only be screened by the build up of charged ions at the cell walls. This is how to measure voltage! Because no charge movement is involved, the whole issue about charge carriers is irrelevant. That's why a bridge is used, in fact. In practice, what is needed is a very sensitive current meter, which is zeroed out by applying the reference voltage and adjusting it until the current is zero. A bridge here just means that current is measured, and the experimental voltage is measured by opposing it with a known voltage, such that no current flows in the circuit. Maybe you can explain it in a way i can understand. Sure, I hope. What would happen if you had two metal plates separated by an air gap, then you applied a 6kv bias between them, and then put your two probes into the air gap? Air conducts electricity. If the air conducts uniformly, the resistance of the air will be even and the voltage will uniformly decline, linearly, between the plates. The bridge will measure the voltage accordingly. In the subject example, there are three regions between the plates. Two regions are filled with acrylic, which has very high resistance, higher than air, if I'm correct. And
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
I'm glad to see my post has ignited a local hot spot in Vortex-L... Lomax: Um, very highly unlikely. The plastic walls are intact, or electrolyte would leak out. They have high dielectric resistance. If this is acrylic, it's about 1/16 inch thick. Current will be very, very low. If there is leakage current, the current will create a voltage drop. It will not create sporadic local heat. Basically, that field does nothing. If Rich wants to assert that it does something, well, that kind of contradicts his thesis, eh? Murray: that's a pretty thin film of plastic to put 6 kv on -- local radioactivity and cosmic rays will leave subtle ionized paths across the plastic, without making tunnels that could leak the electrolyte, while then the high voltages would tend to penetrate these paths and increase the local ionization, always finding and expanding paths until routes evolve right across the film -- very thin, complex routes with all kinds of weird chemistry and physics as the 6 kv potential is brought to bear on micro and nano size structures within the walls -- still without creating routes wide enough for liquids to flow through -- so the vision becomes available for a multitude of strange processes, constantly evolving and varying as time marches on, creating anomalies -- there need to be research on whether micro and nano currents are indeed flowing along the surfaces and within the conductors and electrolyte inside these small cells -- and whether they are creating chaotic corrosion on the micro and nano scales, releasing complex chemicals and gases into the electrolyte... Look at Widom-Larsen descriptions of water tree breakdown in 40 kv high voltage DC power cables with centimeters of high density polyethylene insulation over weeks and months of exposure to the voltage, reported by Japanese scientists to show anomalous elements... By sporadic local heat I am talking about micro and and nano regions, where a nanoamp of current backed by by 6 KV can exert huge transient forces in a small place, enough to vaporize Pd... Add to that, Pd fully loaded with H or D, and consider that the reaction of 2 H with 1 O that hits the rough Pd surface will create enough energy in the nano size molecule size region to separate a Pd atom from the Pd lattice, i.e. vaporization... chemical energy thus is easily able to provide the energy to vaporise 10 micron size craters in Pd -- it would just take a 10 micron size bubble of O2 -- Bubbles this small do not float the way larger bubbles do -- being so tiny, they experience Browning motion, random jitters from random kinetic impacts from the hot electrolyte molecules, mostly H2O -- they will, however, respond to electric potentials on all scales from cm to micro cm -- so, what is the actual distribution of nano and micro bubbles of H2 and O2 and other gases after a few days of this chaotic electrochemical commotion, corroding all surfaces in contact with the electrolyte -- perhaps with bits of dust falling in from lab air, adding perhaps catalytic elements right up to uranium -- Such 10 micron bubbles would be so small that the chemical detonation wave would be single pass, reaching the whole bubble so fast that the bubble would not have time to pop off the local vaporizing Pd surface (which releases the adsorbed H right in proximity with the combustion shock wave of the O2 bubble), so that the entire explosion would be like a shaped charge stuck to the Pd -- in fact the spherical or hemispherical symmetry would tend to make a fierce, high density, central jet aimed straight at the Pd surface, uh, maybe -- so, maybe, no need to invoke nuclear nano explosions -- Murray's Law: nothing is as complex and devious as an apparently simple electrolysis experiment...
Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
MacNap: It should be noted that in an electrolyte the current results from a chemical reaction at the anode and cathode (in this case the generation of hydrogen and oxygen) there are no free charge carriers in the solution itself. The cations and anions are bound together by electrostatic attraction and exist inside cloud quasi organized solvent molecules. Electrolyte ions do organize on the surface of electrodes to screen the electric field at low potentials (most of the voltage drop in an electrochemistry experiment happens within the first nanometer of the electrode surface). At the high fields quoted in the linked paper, I cannot imagine how the electrolyte could screen the applied field. It seems reasonable to me that an electric field could exist inside the cell, since electrolytes do not have free charges that can migrate to the surface of the dielectric. Electrolytes do not conduct electrons, they accept electrons and donate electrons. There are no charges flowing through the solution, just reactions at the electrode surface. Murray: It only takes a very tiny percentage of charges, positive and negative to separate from the electrolyte onto the two opposite plastic cell walls to balance the 6 kv external electric field. That's a factoid I recall from 1960 freshman chemistry at MIT. Once micro and nano wide channels of breakdown within the 1 mm plastic walls, with 6 kv external metal plates outside the cells, evolve to actually cross the walls, then sporatic micro and nano electric currents will start to do complex things in tiny places on the surfaces and within the electrolyte within the cell -- the conducting channels in the walls may shut themselves down by melting the plastic on the micro and nano scale, invisible to the eye -- resulting in sporatic bursts of events.
RE: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02
Here's a good PDF for the static dielectric constants of electrolytes. http://downloads.olisystems.com/ResourceCD/MixedSolventElectrolytes/Dielectr ic.pdf ABD wrote: A 'dielectric' is an insulator. The electrolyte is not an insulator. This system is like two capacitors with a common plate. The two dielectrics are the two cell walls. The common plate is the electrolyte in the cell. There are then two outer metal plates. I disagree. Pure water is an *excellent* dielectric/insulator, and adding ions only makes it a LEAKY capacitor. (I remember someone telling me that the coolant used in the early Cray's was *pure* water; and did not Tesla use water-filled jugs for capacitors?). To precisely describe any dielectric, one has to consider both the energy storage aspect as well as the conductivity (resistive) aspect! To be precise, the electrolyte used in LENR experiments *is* a leaky/lossy capacitor. From wikipedia's entry on relative permittivity: Lossy medium ... relative permittivity for lossy materials can be formulated as (equation may not copy): in terms of a dielectric conductivity σ (units S/m, siemens per meter), which sums over all the dissipative effects of the material; it may represent an actual [electrical] conductivity caused by migrating charge carriers and it may also refer to an energy loss associated with the dispersion of ε' [the real-valued permittivity]. The sigma variable in the above equation is the conductivity (S/m) resulting from the mobile ions, and represents a *RESISTIVE* property to the salt solution. The dielectric constant or 'energy storage' part due to the water molecules is still present. -Mark -Original Message- From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2012 9:47 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com; vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:SPAWAR has yet to respond re simple error in claims of effects of external high voltage dc fields inside a conducting electrolyte: Rich Murray 2012.03.01 2012.07.02 At 10:17 PM 7/3/2012, Jeff Driscoll wrote: Here are my two cents from reading up on dielectrics: With the 6000 V capacitor isolated from the electrolyte by the plastic, the electrolyte acts as a dielectric which reduces the E field in the electrolyte almost to zero in the middle but increases the the capacitance of the capacitor. Arrggh. A dielectric is an insulator. The electrolyte is not an insulator. This system is like two capacitors with a common plate. The two dielectrics are the two cell walls. The common plate is the electrolyte in the cell. There are then two outer metal plates. If there is zero ionic current then I assume there has to be zero E field in the center of the electrolyte. There is significant ionic current from the electrolytic current generated by the cell power supply. There is very little current through the cell walls. There is not zero ionic current. There are two currents here, the electrolytic current from the normal operation of the electrolytic cell, it's on the order of 1 mA maybe up to 500 mA. There is a current in addition to this, from the high voltage supply, based on the leakage through the acrylic, I estimated at about 0.5 nA. That is less than a million times smaller. Undetectable under the experimental conditions. As soon as the 6000 V is applied, there is a momentary current in the electrolyte and a polarization of the dielectric electrolyte. After that there is zero current assuming the plastic is an infinite insulator. That is correct. This is why I mentioned DC. When the voltage changes, current will flow until the dielectric becomes polarized. Basically, current will appear to flow through a capacitor until the capacitor is charged. What is happening is that charge is building up on the plates. There need not be any actual current flowing *through* the capacitor, but the effect is as if there were. So the positive ends of the water molecules are facing the negative plate of the capacitor and the negative ends of the water molecules are facing the positive plate of the capacitor. This has confused the electrolyte with the dielectric, i.e., the plastic. Immediately next to the acrylic, there would be some level of polarization of the water. But the field strength within the water would only be tiny, far less than full polarization would represent. The water, in this cell, is essentially at ground potential. And that's interesting in itself. Is the HV supply isolated, floating, or is it 6 KV with respect to ground? If the latter, then there is no voltage across one cell wall, and 6 KV across the other. It really doesn't make any difference. There is no discernable electric field inside the cell, within the electrolyte, from the external high-voltage field. Maybe it's homeopathic. image001.png
