This is a revised post about a special variety of nickel known as
Sherritt-Gordon. This nickel is more costly, since it is is made by
hydrogen reduction instead of smelting. Essentially this means that the
nickel is refined in a high pressure autoclave process where hydrogen
under heat and pressure are employed to refine it from ore. Normal
smelting uses carbon in air and no pressure.
The Sherritt Gordon company in Western Canada no longer makes this
product, but it is still available using the same refining process. The
working premise is that it comes "preloaded" with UDH ... but of course,
one can also simulate this.
You may be aware that Alan Goldwater has in his ongoing work for MFMP is
pre-processing his Hunter nickel under hydrogen pressure for 200 hours,
so it may end up approximating Sherritt. Sherritt uses higher pressure,
higher temperature and shorter time than Alan.
In fact, Hunter Chemical LLC sells the Sherritt Gordon type off the
shelf, but almost everyone in LENR seems to be using Hunters other
nickel - the "AH" series which is a carbonyl process (reduction by
carbon instead of hydrogen).
Notably - the AH nickel has a spikey surface which was formerly thought
to be important - but the bottom line is that no one in LENR can
reliably make the AH nickel work for excess heat, despite having "a
nano-structured surface which looks like it ought to work" - at least no
one has yet made Hunter-AH nickel work in a robust and repeatable way
and maybe Alan can do that by pre-processing.
Or you could just buy the the Sherritt Gordon nickel, which was the
type used in the Thermacore "runaway" experiment and apparently by
Randell Mills in his successful Ni-H work. That is Ahern's approach.
From earlier post:
> There is no scientific evidence that using a wide size range of
nickel powder is important or even helpful and there is good evidence
that it is not important at all.
> Rossi may say this in his patent ... i.e. that it is important - but
Rossi could not provide IH with nickel which worked -- and that is why
we have this lawsuit going on.
> The one and only nickel-hydrogen experiment of the past 28 years
which is guaranteed to have worked beyond any reasonable doubt is the
Thermacore runaway experiment in 1996 which Brian Ahern will be trying
to replicate this month.
> Other experiments in the past did work, no argument there - but the
proof of a melted stainless steel pressure vessel - in Thermacore's
experiment and the high quality of their corporate R&D team makes their
result as close to absolute proof of massive thermal gain as is
possible, given the vagaries of calorimetry.
> That certainty of the end result is one of the main reasons Ahern is
trying to replicate. The problem of course is that with success you end
up with a melted mass of steel and this makes finding a funder for the
effort very difficult. You have one swing of the bat and must hit a home
run or you lose the game.
> BTW - Thermacore used a small mesh nickel powder - not nano or
nano-structured.
> However, it was Sherritt nickel, which is special in its own way.
