Speaking of CETI and Patterson, did you know that besides nickel and palladium coating the beads, JP used copper chloride to initially treat them? This is in the recipe that turned up after his death.
This copper molecule was used for a completely different reason, ostensibly; and since it was not deemed by anyone to be active – like the Ni and Pd were, and it could easily have been overlooked. Moreover, Cu was there an ion, and it could have migrated outward to alloy with the Nickel… if there was enough of it. If copper chloride was inadvertently not added in a particular batch, or added in too low a concentration, this would NOT have registered as meaningful at the time. And this factoid may or may not be relevant now. But in the event that this is of those rare occasions where your commentator is proved to be as accurate as he thinks he always is, read on: If you have followed alternative energy for some time, you may realize that there is slight potentially gain to be had (on paper) from the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen at standard temperature and pressure - followed by recombination, as we have mentioned several times here. This cannot happen in practice of course. The standard potential of the water electrolysis cell is only 1.23 V at 25 °C at pH 0. It is also 1.23 V at 25 °C at pH 7 based on the Nernst Equation (see Wiki entry). On recombination, however there is a gain of ~.02 eV (on paper and at 100% current efficiency) … but of course this gain is not usable in practice because the neither the high pH nor the low pH is practical, and also the rate of decomposition at the standard potential is incredibly low, since the extra .02 eV must come from ambient heat. Chemistry as we know is fully conservative. CAVEAT– it is a mistake to conflate Volts and electron-volts - eV. When this is done, we must assume that every molecule participates - but for present purposes, we are really only making a case for something else (read on). 100% current efficiency will be presumed for now. In practice, high volume water splitting requires about 1.9 V potential (you often see 1.45 V listed as the minimum potential) and the resultant thermal efficiency is about 85% for the best cells. The curious thing to many is that we know that the binding energy of two hydrogen atoms, when they form H2 on the cathode is much higher: 4.5 eV… … so one might think that splitting water could be gainful, under the right conditions. No way, Jose. Chemistry is fully conservative and as it turns out the H-OH bond energy is itself actually 5.2 eV and that is four times more than the voltage potential required to completely split water. This is where QM comes into play in normal chemistry. The discrepancy is rationalized this way: when you split water, most of the energy required really does not come from your input power, which as you remember is less than 2 V. potential (with the CAVEAT). In fact, most of the required energy comes from the recombination of two atoms of hydrogen into the molecule, AFTER the splitting. In QM terms that energy has been “borrowed” before it is repaid. When it is borrowed it MUST be repaid or else the reaction is quenched. OK. This is oversimplified for a particular purpose – an attempt at verbalizing the importance of a recently mentioned paper vis-à-vis the Rossi experiment, where molecular hydrogen is introduced to a spillover catalyst. Remember, this H2 molecule is bound by 4.5 eV so in order to split it to atomic hydrogen, in the spillover process, this catalyst faces a daunting task. Spillover is not favored, energetically, but it does happen routinely, and most of that is due to the long ‘Boltzmann’s tail’ of the energy distribution and QM time shifting. This is why the Romanowski finding could be so important, as a first step in understanding the Rossi effect. Yes, that Romanowski paper is a ‘model’ and not an experimental finding, but it is a high level simulation, and should be accurate. Rossi may have inadvertently proved it. The “sim” which they performed in two ways professes to show that about 3.2 eV of catalytic energy is available to split the H2 molecule when one uses the best spillover catalyst – which is a copper-nickel alloy, similar to the alloy known as constantan, which is unique in its own right. This is new, folks and it blows me away in importance ! In fact, the spillover catalyst which has most often been used in LENR, going back to P&F is of course palladium. By comparison, Palladium supplies about .3 -.4 eV of catalytic power, compared with 3.2 eV for constantan. Wow. Copper alone has a negative spillover function.! Wow, wow, wow. It took me all of those paragraphs to finally get down to the point of this posting. Chemistry, as we know is fully conservative, but if you can set the stage properly with chemistry that is highly favorable, energetically - then in place of needing QM time reversal, you change the repayment method so that you can supply more of the “makeup” energy than was needed, and in the form of some variety of nuclear reaction, then… well, there you have it. You do not need to know what that reaction is. It is probably new physics anyway, so be content to appreciate that if you can provide the MAXIMUM amount of spillover, you will get the maximum gain, no matter what the reaction turns out to be. Cu-Ni alloy - constantan - may do that and guess what? This explains how Rossi’s fabulously lucky cost cutting idea – to use copper based materials for his reactor, paid off handsomely, whether he knows it or not. Of course, Rossi would dearly love for every experimenter to believe his assurances that the reactor is stainless, since that all but guarantees that no one will find out his secret. Unless they read Vortex. And have the stamina to slog through another one of Jones’ excruciatingly long posts :-) No pain, no gain… Jones
