Okay, I figured out the notation in this Mengoli
paper, that I accidentally discussed here this morning. Title:
Mengoli, G., et al., Calorimetry close to the
boiling temperature of the D2O/Pd electrolytic
system. J. Electroanal. Chem., 1998. 444: p. 155.
The notation must be European I suppose. They use
slash when they should use parenthesis, by
American standards. So, for example, Table 4, column 1 heading is:
I / mA
which I would write: I (mA) meaning "current
measured in milliamperes." When they mean "per"
as in "milliamperes per square centimeter" they
write "mA cm-2" where I would write mA/cm-2"
Okay, putting aside the confusion, I really
should have been paying more attention to this
paper. I shall ask Mike to ask Mengoli to ask the
publisher for permission to upload it. Last time
it was denied. If I cannot get permission I
should describe it in a review because it is
spectacular. Here are some details.
"Abstract
The electrolytic insertion of deuterium into Pd
at 95°C was investigated by a simple calorimetric
technique. This involved continuous feeding of
heating power to the electrolytic cell to
maintain it isothermal with an external
thermostatic bath: any extraneous thermal
phenomenon taking place inside the cell is
directly determined by the lack of balance of the
original heating power input. It was thus found
that Pd loading by deuterium is always paralleled
by excess power generation, which largely exceeds
the electrolytic power input. After prolonged
electrolysis the loaded electrodes were found to
continue heat generation in open circuit (o.c.)
conditions. The reproducibility of the thermal
phenomenon allowed its dependence on several
experimental parameters to be investigated."
"Discussion
The major achievement of this work is to have
devised a temperature range in which the
generation of excess power is a totally
reproducible phenomenon. In fact, only a
reproducible phenomenon can be investigated
successfully, due to its dependence on the
experimental variables. Here, the dependence of
electrolysis time, current density, cathode
shape, o.c. conditions, and presence of hydrogen
in the electrolyte highlighted some correlations
which, although they do not explain the excess
power generation, may help to rationalize the
phenomenon. Attention will be focused on these correlations."
Important results:
Table 3, describing run 3:
Run duration 21 days total
Steady current density of 23 mA/cm-2 on days 1,
2, 6, 7 and 10 to 13 (8 days total)
No power (o.c.) on the other 13 days
Total input energy was 0.42 MJ, output 1.8 +/-
0.16 MJ, 4.3 times bigger. From day 14 21 (8
days) input is zero and output is 0.844 MJ; i.e. heat after death.
- Jed
