Interesting NASA materials (I've posted a couple of these before):
Contract Statement of Work for LENR Support:
R1>2.1 Material investigations:
The Contractor shall investigate properties of electromagnetic materials (EM)
in support of the R4>LENR
(Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) project.<R4 Modeling shall be performed using
government owned COTS
EM modeling packages R4>to investigate resonant behavior of periodic structures
at THz frequencies.<R4"
http://foia.larc.nasa.gov/CONTRACTS/NNL07AA00B/orders.pdf
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Advanced-to-Revolutionary Technology Options for Humans-Mars
"Other alternative high thrust in-space propulsion approaches include the
afore-mentioned positrons, which, unlike anti-protons, are relatively
inexpensive to manufacture, and produce only low energy gamma radiation
which is easier to shield than neutrons. The major issue with positrons is
long term storage, which is currently under active research by the USAF.
There are also several even more exotic energetic possibilities including
isomers, LENR’s [ low energy nuclear reactions] and even ZPE [zero point
energy]. Isomers are potentially the order of 5 orders of magnitude greater
than chemical in terms of energy density but viable triggering methods are
not yet available. The LENR situation is in a major state of flux with recent
apparently successful theoretical efforts and indications of much higher
yields. There are currently several interesting approaches extant and under
study to harvest ZPE [reference 4]. Success in such endeavors would
literally change everything regarding power and energy in-the-large. Then
there are tethers and the aneutronic fusion approaches, especially p-B11 and
D-He3 Fusion, which again would have far lower shielding weights than
fission nuclear or conventional D-T Fusion systems. The concept of
utilizing anti-protons as ICF [inertial confined fusion] triggers/igniters is
also interesting. There are NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts studies of
harvesting anti-protons from the magnetic fields around the Earth where
they are captured from the solar wind.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20080008384_2008004081.pdf
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Sonoluminescence
Sonoluminescence has risen in the last decade to be a source of interest to
those outside of the ultrasonic community in an effort to either understand the
effect or to utilize some of its more interesting properties. The phenomena is
defined as being the generation of light energy from sound waves, first
discovered in the 1930’s as a by-product of early work on sonar. Originally
thought to be a form of static electricity, this glow recently was found to be
generated in extremely short duration flashes of much less than a billionth of
a second by collapsing microscopic bubbles of air. The temperature generated in
the collapsing bubbles is at least four times that of the surface of the sun.
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/sensors/PhySen/docs/AIAA5596_JPC07.pdf
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LENR
Tests conducted at NASA Glenn Research Center in 1989 and elsewhere
consistently showed evidence of anomalous heat during gaseous loading and
unloading deuterium into bulk palladium. At one time called “cold fusion,” now
called “low-energy nuclear reactions” (LENR), such effects are now published in
peer-reviewed journals and are gaining attention and mainstream respectability.
The instrumentation expertise of NASA GRC is applied to improve the diagnostics
for investigating the anomalous heat in LENR.
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/sensors/PhySen/research.htm
Still awaiting an upload of the presentation given at a LENR Workshop at NASA
GRC in 2011 [available soon].
