At 03:14 PM 12/26/2011, Mary Yugo wrote:
On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 12:10 PM, Jed Rothwell
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Vorl Bek <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Nobody ever closes the loop.
That is incorrect. Many people have closed the loop, starting with
Fleischmann and Pons. In cold fusion jargon, "closing the loop" is
called running in "heat after death" mode. Fleischmann once called
it "fully ignited," borrowing the term from the plasma fusion scientists.
Are you saying the cell runs in that mode indefinitely and at a
level which totally rules out (hopefully by several orders of
magnitude) anything other than a nuclear effect? If so, that's a
paper I'd like to read and a demo I'd like to see. If it won't run
indefinitely or at least long enough so that one can calculate the
nuclear fuel has been exhausted or largely used up, then it's
probably not what I mean by "a closed loop".
A great deal of mischief is done by applying standards for commercial
application to what amounts to, still, research efforts. Let's set
Rossi aside, there is way too much noise, a speculative amount of
heat (large by comparison with FPHE results), and no light there.
CF (FPHE) cells have produced many times the energy put into them,
but erratically. "Excess heat" is more reliable, and independently
verifiable if helium is measured (i.e., calorimetry error would not
generate correlated helium!)
HAD (Heat after death) cells are operating with no power input.
Therefore they have infinite COP. However, this doesn't rule out, at
least not immediately and obviously, that the heat is due to, say,
the "cigarette lighter effect," from stored deuterium combustion.
I.e., the cell outgasses deuterium, which then spontaneously, at the
surface, supposedly, combines with oxygen to produce heat. That
hypothesis has a few problems. For starters, there isn't nearly
enough oxygen in the cells to do that, the outgassing deuterium (and
it will outgas) would drive the relatively small amount of residual oxygen out.
(Sure, oxygen was generated stochiometrically with the deuterium, and
if the oxygen were stored in the cell with the same "pressure" as is
the deuterium, it would be quite a bit of fireworks. Devastating, in
fact. However, in open cells, the oxygen leaves the cell as it is
generated, and in closed cells, excess oxygen is still vented, my
understanding (otherwise the pressure would rise very high, as oxygen
isn't loaded into palladium. Some of the oxygen combines with
deuterium that bubbles up, in a closed cell, at the recombiner, but
the amount of deuterium in a fully loaded piece of palladium is
phenomenal. Problem is, getting energy from that without combining it
with oxygen ... I can imagine someone figuring out a way that oxygen
could slowly leak into the cell and sustain some heat, but the hot
water vapor would surely extinguish that, you'd have to work really
hard to keep that going. And none of this would make helium.)
But these cells don't go on producing heat "indefinitely." Jed knows
more about what's been done in this way, but my understanding is
that, on occasion, the cells have indeed produced more energy than
could be explained by all available chemical components. However, the
real proof of nuclear is a nuclear product, when such can be found.
(One might have a nuclear reaction with no "nuclear product," if the
product isotopes are those found naturally; perhaps the cell would
alter natural abundances, but FPHE cells don't produce massive
amounts of transmuted elements, with one huge exception: helium. They
produce helium if they are producing excess heat, in quantities that
are roughly what would be expected if the reaction causing the
anomalous heat is deuterium fusion.)
People who focus on possible commercial success often delude
themselves into thinking that if there is no readily available
commercial application, therefore the reaction must be bogus. This is
backwards.
For some years, now, I've been urging interested people to look at
the helium evidence. Storms covers it well in his book ("The science
of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction") and his Naturwissenschaften review
"Status of cold fusion (2010)." It's a nuclear reaction, all right,
though the helium doesn't tell us much more than that, for any
reaction that starts with deuterium and ends with helium would
produce roughly the same heat ratio to helium.
