Jed Rothwell wrote:
One aspect of Mizuno's recent results bothers me. In some cases, he
reports significant excess hydrogen without anomalous excess heat, or
with only a little excess heat. I do not see how this could be, if
the hydrogen comes from pyrolysis. It seems to me that if heat is
causing pyrolysis, there must be far more heat than normal, so you
would expect to see both excess heat and excess hydrogen.
Just taking your note at face value down to this point, that doesn't
seem to follow. If you run a high current through an electrolysis cell
such that the electrode gets above the dissociation temperature for
water you would surely expect to see "excess hydrogen" evolved, no
matter how conventional your assumptions were. Just to emphasize the
point, the evolution of excess hydrogen appears at first blush to be due
to purely conventional reactions in Mizuno's cells.
At this point I also need to ask, how much energy does the evolution of
the excess hydrogen actually account for? As a percentage of the total
energy in, do you happen to know if it's typically on the order of 1%?
10%? 50%?
Assume there is no anomalous excess heat. In that case, because the
excess hydrogen carries off enthalpy, the total heat from the
reaction should be considerably less than the amount expected from
ordinary electrolysis. Yet the heat balance is usually close to the
expected level.
Is he not including the volume of generated gas in the heat equation?
I don't see how he could ever get it to balance if he's not doing that.
In general, as I understand it, even with low-temperature electrolysis
you can't easily tell in advance how much of the hydrogen is going to
spontaneously recombine within the cell, so without measuring the volume
of gas from the cell you must surely be in the dark about how much
energy was carried off by hydrolysis (of one sort or another). If you
don't know that, then how can you possibly tell what the net energy
balance was?
The alternative of using a catalytic recombiner inside the calorimeter
avoids the need to measure the gas volume but I don't believe Mizuno
does that. (And if he did there'd be no issue of excess hydrogen because
it would be recombined inside the cell.)
How could there be just enough anomalous heat to
split the water, carry off enthalpy, and reduce overall measurable
heat right back down to the level you see with ordinary electrolysis?
Actually, another paper reports similar results:
Iizumi, K., et al. /Heat Measurement During Plasma Electrolysis/. in
/The 12th International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear
Science/. 2005. Yokohama, Japan.
Unfortunately, I do not have permission to upload to this, but
anyway, the conclusion is:
“The energy balances during plasma electrolyses were 100~102% and a
clear excess energy could not be detected in the experiments this
time. The current efficiencies during plasma electrolyses were
115~122%. Furthermore, a small amount of CO2 was also detected
during plasma electrolyses by means of Gas Chromatograph. . . .”
Assuming these observations are correct, I think they preclude the
simple model of excess heat causing excess hydrogen. Some other
highly energetic reaction must be occurring, and this fractures the
water directly. I cannot imagine what it would be. The explosion
experienced by Mizuno during the first minutes of electrolysis is
also a complete mystery that does not fit any model or expectation. I
have a feeling the two are related.
- Jed
