I'm glad to see my post has ignited a local hot spot in Vortex-L... Lomax: Um, very highly unlikely. The plastic walls are intact, or electrolyte would leak out. They have high dielectric resistance. If this is acrylic, it's about 1/16 inch thick. Current will be very, very low. If there is leakage current, the current will create a voltage drop. It will not create "sporadic local heat." Basically, that field does nothing. If Rich wants to assert that it does something, well, that kind of contradicts his thesis, eh?
Murray: that's a pretty thin film of plastic to put 6 kv on -- local radioactivity and cosmic rays will leave subtle ionized paths across the plastic, without making tunnels that could leak the electrolyte, while then the high voltages would tend to penetrate these paths and increase the local ionization, always finding and expanding paths until routes evolve right across the film -- very thin, complex routes with all kinds of weird chemistry and physics as the 6 kv potential is brought to bear on micro and nano size structures within the walls -- still without creating routes wide enough for liquids to flow through -- so the vision becomes available for a multitude of strange processes, constantly evolving and varying as time marches on, creating anomalies -- there need to be research on whether micro and nano currents are indeed flowing along the surfaces and within the conductors and electrolyte inside these small cells -- and whether they are creating chaotic corrosion on the micro and nano scales, releasing complex chemicals and gases into the electrolyte... Look at Widom-Larsen descriptions of "water tree" breakdown in 40 kv high voltage DC power cables with centimeters of high density polyethylene insulation over weeks and months of exposure to the voltage, reported by Japanese scientists to show anomalous elements... By sporadic local heat I am talking about micro and and nano regions, where a nanoamp of current backed by by 6 KV can exert huge transient forces in a small place, enough to vaporize Pd... Add to that, Pd fully loaded with H or D, and consider that the reaction of 2 H with 1 O that hits the rough Pd surface will create enough energy in the nano size molecule size region to separate a Pd atom from the Pd lattice, i.e. vaporization... chemical energy thus is easily able to provide the energy to vaporise 10 micron size craters in Pd -- it would just take a 10 micron size bubble of O2 -- Bubbles this small do not float the way larger bubbles do -- being so tiny, they experience Browning motion, random jitters from random kinetic impacts from the hot electrolyte molecules, mostly H2O -- they will, however, respond to electric potentials on all scales from cm to micro cm -- so, what is the actual distribution of nano and micro bubbles of H2 and O2 and other gases after a few days of this chaotic electrochemical commotion, corroding all surfaces in contact with the electrolyte -- perhaps with bits of dust falling in from lab air, adding perhaps catalytic elements right up to uranium -- Such 10 micron bubbles would be so small that the chemical detonation wave would be single pass, reaching the whole bubble so fast that the bubble would not have time to pop off the local vaporizing Pd surface (which releases the adsorbed H right in proximity with the combustion shock wave of the O2 bubble), so that the entire explosion would be like a shaped charge stuck to the Pd -- in fact the spherical or hemispherical symmetry would tend to make a fierce, high density, central jet aimed straight at the Pd surface, uh, maybe -- so, maybe, no need to invoke nuclear nano explosions -- Murray's Law: nothing is as complex and devious as an apparently simple electrolysis experiment...