Horace Heffner wrote:
Neither can it be assumed that there was no hydrogen in the incubator.
I doubt there was any. They usually open the incubator between runs,
to make adjustments. Also, with the outer door open the incubator is
not a bit airtight. (It is not at a constant temperature either, with
the door open.) The effluent gas was vented from the cell through
Tygon tubes out of the incubator where a sample of it was diverted
into the mass spectrometer. He confirmed after the experiment that
these tubes were not plugged up. The time was around 4:00 p.m. so
they may have done other runs that day, but I think it is unlikely
there would be any gas left in the incubator.
I will ask if they did a previous run that day.
Anyway, this discussion is irrelevant, in a sense, because there is
no question there was a huge burst of anomalous energy underwater
before the explosion, so even if the explosion was caused by
recombination of gas in the incubator, that does not begin to explain
the anomalous heat in the cell.
The blast effects do not indicate the energy came from within the cell.
I do not see how that could be. Why would the cell shatter in all
directions if the explosion was outside of it? Those cells are made
of heavy-duty glass.
A high volume low energy density blast makes sense of the blast
effects. The explosion and the excess heat can have separate causes
and separate energy sources.
It seems unlikely to me. As Bockris and Mizuno have pointed out,
recombination explosions are common during electrochemistry
experiments. They usually amount to a small pop that breaks the
emergency valve. In Mizuno's case, this "valve" is usually an
ordinary plastic drinking straw bent into a "V" shape and plugged
into two holes at the top of the cell, like a cork. It it offers
little resistance. I do not think he had a valve in this case, but
anyway, that is the extent of an ordinary explosion.
I have not yet had a chance to ask Mizuno about the x-axis label in Fig. 6.
- Jed
