At 10:41 AM 3/25/2010, you wrote:
I presume 'embattlement' is the same as 'embrittlement'.
If you insist!
(Okay, yeah, as much as I hate to admit I made a mistake, I was
talking about what hydrogen does to metal, not about the skeptics.)
This is not a well understood phenomenon. I encountered it as
fledgling engineer when components of our 30,000 lb conveyor chain
were failing at 10,000 lb. The culprit turned out to be our plating
process for the link components. I have always wondered about a
possible relationship between hydrogen embrittlement and cold
fusion. Who knows, his research in one may lead to answers in the other.
As described in his book, Mizuno discovered evidence for cold fusion
before 1989 when he was doing embrittlement studies with deuterium
(substituted for hydrogen, for some reason). As he said in the book,
he eventually dismissed these puzzling effect, so Fleischmann and
Pons get all the credit for the discovery.
He told me that by using electrolysis, they speed up the clock and
put a lot of hydrogen into the metal in a few weeks -- as much as you
would get after years of ordinary processes. In materials research at
NIST they use similar methods to speed up the aging and destruction
of building materials.
I wouldn't know if there is a connection between embrittlement and
cold fusion, but anyway, Mizuno was able to replicate the experiment
better than others because he had been pushing hydrogen into metals
for many years. Also, because he is an electrochemist, obviously, but
I mean he just happened to have experience producing high loading.
His department at the university was Nuclear Engineering, originally
dedicated mainly to fission reactor research. Hydrogen embrittlement
is a major problem in that business.
- Jed
