Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
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.
Ah, but you would also see a heat deficit, as enthalpy was carried
off by the evolving gasses. This conventional result is shown in Fig.
21, here: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTgenerationa.pdf
Fig. 17 shows no excess heat. Unfortunately excess hydrogen was not
measured in this run. My point is, even when it is measured, it does
not seem to correlate with excess heat, or -- you might say -- it
seem to swallow up every joule of excess heat and convert it to
excess hydrogen. That makes no sense.
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.
No, because you would see a heat deficit in that case, as in Fig. 21.
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%?
8000% for brief periods. (80 times input.) For one overall run,
electrolysis alone would have produced 460 cc of hydrogen and 1470 cc
of gas was produced instead. There was no corresponding heat deficit,
but there was also no large heat excess, which I find very baffling
if the excess gas is caused by excess heat. I surmise that some third
reaction -- a high energy reaction -- directly causes both the excess
hydrogen and the heat.
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?
It is actually an enthalpy equation (not just heat), and yes he
includes everything. The heat portion seldom greatly exceeds unity.
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 . . .
That is incorrect. That is a myth spread by skeptics. In a properly
designed cell there is never any significant recombination. Some
cells are closed, with recombiners. This is partly to assuage
skeptics, but also because this reduces contamination from the
outside and simplifies calorimetry.
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.
It would not work with glow discharge. For one thing, in the paper
referenced above, he separates out oxygen from the anode, with an
inverted funnel, so you are bound to get the ordinary amount of
expected hydrogen from electrolysis. For another, free hydrogen and
oxygen from glow discharge do not readily recombine just above the
cathode in the cell. That area is too hot.
Although the free hydrogen and oxygen are not recombined, they are
measured with the mass spectrometer, so we know how much of both the
cathode is producing.
- Jed
