At 12:00 PM 7/4/2012, Finlay MacNab wrote:
Your argument assumes that the there is no air
gap between the dielectric and the charged
plates. It also assumes that the electrolyte
behaves like a regular 100ohm resistor.
The plates are against the cell walls. Sure, you
can make up an air gap. It would be small and
have almost no effect on the analysis.
Yes. The electrolyte, within bounds, behaves
somewhat like a resistor. In fact, the resistance
changes under real conditions, it's noisy, as I
mentioned. Noisy resistor, and there is
capacitance in parallel and in series with the
resistor, if you want a more complete model. The
details are completely swamped by the magnitude
of the problem. The effect on the electrolyte and
all that is immersed in it is minute.
And I seriously doubt the competence of anyone
who asserts otherwise, after seeing the problem.
I very much doubt that anyone from SPAWAR will
defend that paper, and I do think it likely that we will see some comment.
It was just an error, and it does not impeach the vast bulk of their work.
In this case, where the movement of ions in
electrolyte is dominated by diffusion and mixing
from the gas bubbles generated by redox
reactions at the two, in solution, electrodes
the electrolyte does not behave like a 100ohm
resistor. Your treatment of the system as two
dielectrics sandwiched between three metal
plates is not sufficient to describe the system.
That isn't my description of the system. It is
two dielectrics between two metal plates, not
three, and between the two dielecrics (acrylic)
is an electrolyte, that is, water with a
substance dissolved so that it will conduct a
substantial current with a modest voltage.
Absolutely, modeling the electrolyte with a
resistor is primitive. But the difference in the
behavior of the electrolyte, due to error in this
model, with respect to the division of the high
voltage across the three regions, will be insignificant.
You don't know if mixing and diffusion within
the electrolyte and the extremely low mobility
of solvated ions would allow an external
electric field to exist within the electrolyte
and allow electrophoretic and other field
induced effects to influence the near surface of the Pd film.
I know that an equipotential surface exists
inside the cell that will totally screen any
effects on this cell from what is beyond that.
The current from the high voltage supply, through
the electrolyte, will be in the picoamp range,
that is completely necessary, because the only
conduction path is through two plates with very
high resistance. This current is totally swamped
by noise from many sources. Likewise the voltage
experienced by the electrolyte stemming from the high voltage supply.
Finlay, don't immolate yourself on trying to be
right. You know enough to get into trouble, to
make up complex explanations that ignore the
obvious. The electrolyte is a decent conductor,
the LiCl salt has been added for that purpose,
and that purpose alone. Ohms law still applies
with current, voltage, and resistance through an
electrolyte. Power dissipation is still current
times voltage. Kirchoff's Law still applies with electrolytes.
Finally, the only mention of the strength of
the electric field in the paper: "the cell
placement in an electric field (25003000 V
cm-1)" refers to the entire cell, it does not
refer to the field within the electrolyte. The
authors never assert that the field strength is
3000 V/cm within the electrolyte.
The cell is placed in an electric field with that
strength before the cell is placed in it. In
fact, with the cell in place, loaded with
electrolyte, the field strength becomes much
quite a bit higher, within the acrylic, and far,
far lower within the electrolyte. They imply that
the field within the cell would be substantial
enough to affect cell chemistry, when the field
within the cell is actually truly miniscule,
swamped by noise in the other sources of voltage,
specifically the electrolytic power supply, as
well as the electrochemical phenomena taking place.
Basically, there is a region about an inch wide.
It is between two plates. The plates have 6 KV
between them. The cell is placed in that space.
The electric field is no longer uniform, as it
was before the cell was placed. Specifying the
electric field strength, instead of the total
field, is pretty strange, except this is what
they were thinking they were doing, they thought
they were subjecting the cathode to an enhanced
electric field. It's really pretty silly, I'm
sure that there are some stories behind this.
Frankly, if I didn't think this awfully unlikely
coming from SPAWAR, I'd think the whole thing was
a joke, a parody on cold fusion research.
Your assertion that the authors claim that the
effects result from high fields is not born out
by their treatment of the electrolyte,
interphase region, and bulk Pd regions of the cell.
The title of the paper? The effect of an external
electric field on surface morphology of
co-deposited Pd/D films
There isn't any "bulk Pd" in this cell, by the way.
The abstract says "The polarized PdD electrode
undergoes significant morphological changes when
exposed to an external electric field."
That implies that the electrode (cathode, in this
case) is "exposed to ... the field," wouldn't you
say? But it isn't. From the position of the
electrode, no detectable effect of the field, as
a field, would be discoverable. No detectable
force would be acting on the cathode resulting
from the field being turned on. Note that in this
experiment, the current is increased
simultaneously with the field setup, doubled to
100 mA. That will have a far greater effect.
There is no indication of controls.
How about "The effect of a homeopathic dose of
plutonium, 30X, on the surface morphology of
co-deposited Pd/D films"? Frankly, it's as
likely. More likely, in my book. But it's
obvious. Some people don't immediately see the
problem. We've seen some here who don't see it
even with presented with big blinking signs and short or long explanations.
The total electric field -- voltage gradient --
experienced by something immersed in a conductive
electrolyte, placed inside an electric field,
cannot exceed the voltage across the electrolyte.
Voltage across the electrolyte is voltage across
the electrolyte, it will cause a proportional
current to flow, in accordance with the nature of
the electrolyte. It's not a linear resistor,
that's true, but also highly misleading here. The
electric field cannot possibly cause more than a
very small leakage current to flow, I calculated
it as in the picoamp region. That is not nearly
enough to affect *anything* in the cell,
materially, there are far higher currents
present, that are thenselves noisier at much
higher levels. There is no discriminable field
found inside the cell, in the electrolyte, coming
from the high voltage supply. That supply might
have another effect, though, I mention it below.
Thus your assertion that the authors' manuscript
contains a "shocking analytical error" is not
accurate. Your comment that a retraction of the
paper would be useful and that the paper is an
example of subjective judgements is highly
inflammatory and unjustified. These comments,
being insufficiently supported, are incredibly
insulting to the authors of the paper and to the entire SPAWAR group.
Not nearly as insulting as allowing this to
stand, when anyone with half a brain and a bit of
knowledge about how electrical fields work, such
as any technician who has ever worked with high
voltage, can see the problem at a glance, should they happen to look.
Look, I have correspondence with people involved
with SPAWAR, and with the senior scientists in
the field. If I'm wrong, they will tell me, they
are not shy. I won't necessarily repeat what I
find in inquiring about this, I have some
suspicions that I'd rather not voice. Just some
political stuff. But I do intend to ask them.
It's up to them if they care about their reputation.
But I care about it anyway. Otherwise why bother
with this trivial BS? SPAWAR has done a pile of valuable work.
"Subjective judgments" Aw, Geez. I just reread
the paper more carefully. It's far worse than I
thought. There are too many problems to even
begin to address. Something went dreadfully wrong
there. But I'll start with "subjective." There is
nothing in the paper to indicate how the
differences were seen other than someone's report
that something looked different. Different from
what? There is a lot of questionable theory and
not much objective observation or data. There are
photographs showing morphology, but no controls
beyond one photo of "normal" surface. Which
doesn't look that much different from what they
show as one of the "electric field" images.
I'll point to one piece of text:
3.3. Effect of electric field
By placing an operating electrochemical cell, a part of the
field energy is transferred to the cell. In particular, the
electrostatic field affects each individual subsystems, viz.
electrolyte, interphase and bulk electrode, in a different way.
Moreover, the action may be either direct or indirect; in the
latter case, it affects a process which is not directly
connected with the presence of the electrical charge.
First of all, the first sentence is incomplete. I
think they meant to say, "by placing an operating
electrochemical cell in an electric field, a part
of the field energy is transferred to the cell."
Sure. A miniscule amount of energy is
transferred, once. It's not clear whether or not
they placed the cell in an existing field or
turned on the power with the cell operating, I
saw other text that implied the latter.
When the power supply is on, power dissipation in
the acrylic, each side, would be about 3000V x 1
pA, or about 3 nanowatts. At the same time, there
isa bout a watt being dissipated in the cell, from the electrolytic current.
I don't see what they are saying except filling
space with words. A field would have different
effects on different objects. That needs to be
said? There is no specificity here. It all
assumes that there is, within the cell, an
"electrostatic field" created by the external
field. There is no such field, not within the
electrolyte, which covers the subsystems mentioned.
I see a report that
The first noticeable effect, after placing the cell in an
electric field, is the swelling of the co-deposited PdD
material followed by a displacement toward the negative
plate of the capacitor.
Is that an effect of "placing the cell in an
electric field" (which is an odd way of
describing turning on the power, one ordinarily
attemps to avoid disturbing codeposition cells,
the plating can fall off the wire at the
slightest excuse), or is it an effect of doubling
the electrolytic current? The two actions took
place simultaneously, according to the
description at the beginning of the article.
Palladium swells as it is loaded with deuterium,
that's a very well-known effect. Increasing the
current can increase the loading and, in fact,
that's the normal desired effect of increasing the current.
The purpose of the work was to explore the role
of forces acting on the surface of a deposited
cathode in developing the complex morphology that
is found. They jump from this into an attempt to
apply a force using an "external electric field."
This implies that the field would exert some
force on the surface. They never consider the
magnitude of such a force, they seem to assume
that it would be present, giving some quite
complex reasons that don't seem to make sense.
This paper is truly embarrassing. I kind of wish I hadn't looked.
Note: a high voltage supply like that might have
some gross effect on the cell. If there is noise
in the supply, the cell might vibrate. Vibration
of the cell could certainly affect morphology.
All this has no significance with respect to cold
fusion. They aren't reporting any effect on heat
generation here, and using an "external electric
field" did not become any part of any protocol that I know of.
They believed they saw something and maybe they
did see something (perhaps that vibration effect,
just a guess of mine). As far as I know, nobody
has confirmed this work. The images are used
sometimes to show the complex surfaces of
codeposited CF cathodes, they are useful for
that. Really, as far as I can tell, these are
just SEM images of codep cathodes, no clue as to
whether or not these were active with a nuclear
reaction. One might notice that the surfaces are
quite varied. Were all these varied cathode
surfaces created with the exact same conditions?
