JonesBeene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> The most striking thing to me from this presentation is that Mizuno was > using the nickel mesh coated with palladium early on with modest success - > but did not see the big breakthrough until going to a lower pressure regime > (and allowing the reactor itself to heat up.) > Correct. He did not see this. He discovered improvements in this order: 1. Let the reactor heat up 2. Lower the pressure somewhat 3. Put the heater inside the reactor 4. Lower pressure a great deal, down to 300 Pa He discovered these things partly by trial and error, but also by looking closely for trends in the data. I might have anticipated #1, but #4 came as a shock to me. I spent a couple of days recreating his graphs and noodling with the data looking at this. I might have done #3 just to improve the COP by using less power to heat up the cell. As I said before, that has no scientific significance. I do not know if Mizuno anticipated it might have a dramatic effect. That also surprised me, but I saw there are plausible explanations for it, such as IR stimulation, so it was not that shocking. Not like the low pressure. This demonstrates how important it is to look at small effects, and to pursue them relentlessly. Fleischmann said that when you see a small effect, "the easiest thing in the world is to dismiss it" as experimental error. The lesson here is: if you think it might be real, and not an artifact, go after it. Try to find ways to increase the size of it and make it more repeatable. PS – again it is looking more and more like the low gas pressure could be > the most important new parameter for success. > Yup.
