It is surprising to hear only benign comments about Mills when the issue with Mills is that there he offers far less information than Rossi and no one seems has even tried to replicate his work/claims. Never-the-less Mills reports to have raised vast sums of investment cash.
From: Jones Beene [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2016 10:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Vo]:Titanium/Hematite combined catalyst for low temperature Titanium is an excellent proton conductor which was used as an active metal host early in the history of LENR and has recently turned up in reports of overunity from Russia/Ukraine. Iron-oxide, as hematite, has famously appeared (as Shell 105) as Holmlid's preferred catalyst for hydrogen densification. The reason for this post is to propose an alternative to the Mills redundancy mechanism - suggesting that titanium, combined with Holmlid's catalyst - could be a very efficient route to UDH in low temperature experiments (not the glow tube, or the laser experiments per se). Mills and Holmlid are closer, theoretically, than you might imagine and Mills landmark patent is set to expire in 10 months. Yet, the CQM entry for titanium shows it as becoming activated after losing 5 valence electrons to open a catalytic hole at a whopping 190 eV. This is not feasible without a plasma - or so it would seem. Yet, Prof. John Dash stated (20 years ago) that titanium is more active for LENR than palladium in his cold experiments ! Izumida in 1990 published on Ti in the prestigious "Fusion Technology" and Kopecek and Dash saw "Excess heat and unexpected elements from electrolysis of heavy water with titanium cathodes" in 1996 and Bashkirov and Lipson, from Russia reported the same. Therefore, titanium LENR is not new, is active at low temperature, and success was seen in condensed matter (solid-phase) . if we assume that hydrogen must be absorbed into the cathode as a hydride. Since TiH2 is also an efficient way to get hydrogen into an experiment without plumbing - there is a simplicity advantage to using it, especially combined with other catalysts for faster "densification". Mills generally chooses 3-6 different catalysts working together. Titanium hydride has become a low-priced commodity material, at least from China (Alibaba). A kilogram of TiH2 can be had for about the price of a beer at a Giants game - and you get the metal loaded with hydrogen, fully embrittled, so to speak. And when some of the hydrogen is released from the hydride, a natural porosity is left. Back to the CQM theory. The catalytic hole at 190 eV is next to impossible to achieve without a plasma, even as a transient state in the hottest glow tube, so it would seem that Mills' theory is irrelevant. but, hold on . let's consider a special type of multibody reaction that would only work at moderate temperature. Turns out that titanium has a first ionization potential at 6.8 eV which is a quarter of the Rydberg (Hartree) energy, and is the only transition metal to have such a value, meaning that on paper, four titanium atoms operating together would express an alternative to the Mills catalytic "hole." Multibody reactions would be unlikely in gas or plasma phase, or at high temperature but in a FCC crystal structure with 14 atoms of Ti, we have a stable solid phase structure where it should be possible (on a regular basis - thousands of times per second) to have 4 electrons temporarily displaced - enough to create the required catalytic window- not as Mills suggests, but in an effective alternative so long as the hydrogen can be retained in the matrix (requiring low temperature). This multibody route can explain the comment of Dash that titanium is more active than palladium for gain. A 5-body reaction in the solid phase of a crystal should not be written off as improbable, even if a 3 body reaction in the gas phase is admittedly improbable. AFAIK - Mills has never mentioned a route which depends on 4 catalyst atoms each loosing 6.8 eV to arrive at the necessary 27.2 eV hole. Nevertheless, I think this could be viable as a route for first stage redundancy, happening at low temperature and would augment other catalysts which work at deeper levels of redundancy, particularly hematite. The downside is that as a practical matter, such a low temperature device would only makes sense if it operates to produce UDH as a fuel which would be extracted and used elsewhere, with or without a laser. The largest problem involves the chemistry of iron oxide, with which the TiH would optimize and the fact that it is reactive even as an oxide. The combination of any active metal with iron oxide brings up so-called "thermite reaction." This could happen with titanium instead of aluminum, but the trigger temperature would be greater and the chemical reaction would seem to be insignificant if the reactor is keep relatively cool. In short - the features of using titanium hydride with hematite for more efficient densification, seem to favor using low power input to "manufacture" UDH in the first of a two-step process. The proof is in the pudding, and since Mills/BLP has not focused on this route in the past, there would need to be strong evidence as the presumption is that they missed it because it doesn't work.
