Jed Rothwell wrote:
Anyway, enough silliness. I am preparing a paper by Mizuno that will be off-the-wall enough for everyone here. I hope it will be ready tomorrow. It is about his January 2005 explosion. Analysis of the computer data has revealed that it liberated about 800 times more energy than the total electrochemical energy input before the experiment. So I guess that rules out a chemical explosion, doesn't it? If anyone other than Mizuno made this claim, I would dismiss it, but he is the most honest person I have ever known, and this time, he has computer data and photos.
I am reminded again of something I ran across while digging around on Scott Little's website.
In the course of attempting to replicate Mizuno's experiment, Little collected H and O in the headspace of the cell in what I would suppose must have been stoichiometric proportions. On more than one occasion, he accidentally detonated the cell via the action of an overheated catalyst in the recombiner -- the flame ran back up the exhaust tube into the cell, and *boom*. After that he installed a flame arrester (or I should say he installed a more effective flame arrester), and subsequently detonated smaller amounts of the gas within the recombiner many times without even significantly damaging the recombiner.
These results were far, far less dramatic than what happened with Mizuno's explosion.
Yet Little's explosions were obviously exactly what I saw proposed for the mechanism of the Mizuno explosion: Catastrophic recombination of H and O in the headspace of the cell. And the result was clearly very different from Mizuno's result -- no value judgement or fancy test equipment needed to detect this difference!
That really made me wonder about what actually blew up in Mizuno's cell.
