At 03:40 PM 5/12/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
We know that the reaction rate increases with temperature. I
suspect that the energy required -- there must be energy required,
but energy is not the only "ingredient" -- is generally supplied by
ordinary heat.
I assume this "reaction" refers to heating from the hydrogen or
deuterium that emerges from highly loaded palladium in air.
No. I'm referring to the nuclear reaction.
This reaction is what was used to make cigarette lighters with
palladium hydride, in the 19th century. When you expose highly
loaded palladium to air, the hydrogen emerges and the surface of the
palladium catalyzes recombination with oxygen in air, so the
cathode heats to incandescence, and can be used to light a
cigarette. You have to have quite a lot of palladium to pull this
off -- roughly an ounce I suppose (32 g) which is much more than
most cold fusion cathodes.
This never happens with heat after death because, as I mentioned,
there is no air or oxygen in the headspace, only water vapor. It can
only recombine in the atmosphere outside the cell.
That's correct.
Ikegami's group at the Nat. Inst. for (plasma) Fusion Science did
extensive testing of this. They got highly loaded cathodes to
self-heat, and they also heated them in air with blow torches and
other methods, trying to make them explode the way Fleischmann's
cathode did. They never got it do anything other than the standard
cigarette lighter effect in air.
Cool. Sounds like fun.
The gas will always come out of a saturated cathode. When the
cathode is submerged in water, you can see fine gas bubbles appear
on the cathode surface, looking like carbonation bubbles coming out
of solution in soda-pop at 1 atm (except they are smaller). The only
way to maintain high loading is to keep doing electrolysis, and then
you have a steady stream of gas coming out of the cathode while
other gas goes in. The gas emerges in two phases, corresponding to
the alpha and beta phase loading, which refers to the sites in the
lattice that are loaded. Assume it starts highly loaded to the beta
phase. Lots of bubbles form and emerge. The rate gradually slows
down -- which is readily apparent to the naked eye. It slows down
and down until it reaches the alpha phase, and then suddenly starts
up again, until the alpha phase deuterons are mostly gone from the
cathode. It is very difficult to purge all of the deuterons from the
lattice. There is always some left. Heating up the cathode will
increase the rate at which it de-loads, but it always de-loads on
its own, and as far as anyone knows (per Ikegami) there is no way to
speed up the rate of degassing so much that the metal explodes. Of
course there is not enough energy in the gas to make the metal melt
or vaporize, the way some cathodes have done!
Right.
(Note that it can take far less energy to make metal fracture or
explode than it takes to melt it. Fracturing is function of the
speed of energy release, and how confined the site of the release is.)
As Fleischmann pointed out, the rate of de-loading is far too slow
to account for cold fusion heat, and the total energy release is far
too small. It was ~1,700 times too small when Morrison and others
suggested this hypothesis back in 1990, and it must be millions of
times too small by now. Shanahan and his editors must be innumerate.
Nice word, that.
