At 07:09 PM 7/19/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Well, Jed, you may be right. However, when I wrote that Pons and
Fleischmann only had one out of six cells work -- I really don't
recall where I got that idea, and it might be from later work,
whatever -- I was immediately corrected with a claim from someone
who was active in the field at the time that they *all* worked,
until they ran out of the original material.
I don't recall hearing that happened to F&P. But it did happen to
several others. McKubre, I think. He later used a long wire in
loading tests. As I recall he did not even cut it. I may be wrong
about that. Anyway, he pre-treated the whole thing and then tested
sections of it. He found they had very different characteristics!
There is no better proof that we do not understand Pd in detail, and
that More Research Is Needed. This also demonstrates that material
is the key and materials are variable for unknown reasons.
The whole field was nailed to the crucifix of "reliability." Once a
correlated effect was known (helium), reliability was almost
irrelevant, all that was needed was to set up an experimental series
with some percentage of cells showing adequate excess heat.
Difficult, still, but lots of researchers did it. And those that
didn't, and that still also measured helium, still created more data
for the showing of heat/helium correlation.
In any case, it's known *reasonably well* the reasons for the
variability with palladium. It is obvious that palladium shifts in
nanostructure when loaded and deloaded, in addition to structural
variations from pre-experiment fabrication. The most clear evidence
for material variability is SRI P13/P14, where the *same cathode*
twice showed no heat, highly loaded with deuterium, then, the third
time, same conditions repeated, showed a clear excess heat response,
way above noise, standing out from the hydrogen control.
Storms may be right about cracks being the NAE. It makes sense. When
the cracks are too large, the material is too leaky, it won't reach
the necessary loading. When they are too small, or the material is
perfect, no reaction. The loading stresses the material and it
cracks, but that's not very well controlled, it's difficult to
reproduce exactly.
I've suggested plating palladium on a substrate that can be
cylindrically deformed in a controlled way, to create rows of
controlled cracks that might be open and closed by changing the
deformation radius. If ideas were horses....
I *am* hot on the trail of a "tell," a sign (not known to be nuclear
in itself) that might be useful to detect CF reactions in the FPHE
without full-on calorimetry. We'll see. This field often leads down
blind alleys. But this idea seems to have woken a few people up.
