At 01:41 PM 3/26/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
[I wrote]
Are there any published works showing nuclear phenomena such as
excess heat, correlated with deuterium percentage? I'm starting
with 99.9% D2O (atom percent D). What would be the difference I
should expect with 98% D2O, which is substantially cheaper? I've
seen rumors that ordinary water "poisons" the reaction. If so, at what level?
With solid Pd in the conventional FP configuration, even a little
light water poisons the reaction. I think even 1 or 2% but I do not
recall. Storms says that with electrolysis the Pd preferentially
absorbs the H atoms so the concentration of H in the lattice is soon
higher than in the starting liquid.
That is really cool. Isn't heavy water "manufactured" by
electrolysis? Couldn't this fact be used to purify heavy water?
Eventually, I'll want to find, if possible, some way to measure the
hydrogen concentration in heavy water. I should do the math for doing
it by weight.
So my exploration of this parameter would start with very small
amounts of light water, or, at the other end, by comparing light
water with a little deuterium added. Any effect? Any publications?
Heavy water is hygroscopic. (Try saying that word three times in a
row!) Meaning it readily absorbs ordinary water from the air. You
might say it wants to get back to its natural ratio of 1:6,700 atoms.
Well, it's not seeking that. It's just that this would be the
concentration in the water dissolved in air.
Anyway, people sometimes leave bottles of heavy water open to the
air during experiments, and this ruins them by reducing purity. To
prevent this with open-cell experiments, Bockris recommended
putting the heavy water reservoir in a plastic IV bag with an IV
tube leading down to the cell, with one of those itty-bitty
stopcocks at the top of the cell. You exclude air the whole way.
You dump and throw away the first small amount of little heavy
water that comes through the empty tube. Bockris also thought that
CO2 poisons the reaction. Or any kind of carbon.
I'm planning on being very careful with opening the bottles of
deuterium I have. I deliberately bought it in 100 gram bottles. Those
are available for sale already (unopened), and I'll be selling it in
25 gram vials, some as premix with lithium and palladium chlorides.
So I should be quick with the dispensing and mixing and filling of
the vials, and maybe dehunidify the space.
Storms also used an IV bag in some tritium studies, I assume for the
same reason:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEastudyofel.pdf
Those bags are clean and airtight and made to high standards, since
air or contamination might harm the patient.
Yeah. I'm simply depending, in my plan, on the evolution of oxygen
and deuterium to keep ambient moisture out of the cell. I should make
sure that there isn't a lot of head space in any containers.
Measuring humidity might not be a bad idea, to be able to detect
variability due to it. Simple, cheap to do.
Reaction poisoning will be an interesting area to explore. That's the
point of making these cells really cheap. You can try all kinds of
things, simultaneously, if you can afford enough cells. The expensive
thing is the heavy water, with simple codep cells. So ... capturing
and recycling the evolved deuterium is something I'll eventually look
at. It should not be difficult, I hope. It's not for now, though.
If I can set up a network of people working with standard cells,
research projects can be created to study variables that people are
interested in, and the results can be amalgamated.
