I'm trying to record a YT video today. This is much harder than doing the actual experiment.
No pains or precautions were used. Alligator clips for leads. This begs to be repeated with greater care. Old coins were cleaned with ultrasound, and the nickels were flash nickel-plated, to get closer to Romanowski, which is the main difference from Chuck's basic procedure. I think you need more than 25% Ni, but try it both ways. There's always something different :-) From: Jeff Berkowitz Jones, did you take pains to keep the wires and connections out of the electrolyte? How did you attach the wires to the coins? Did you do anything special to prepare the surface of the coins, or just use dirty old circulating nickels? ;-) Thanks! Jeff Actually, the polarity issue was one of the things that intrigued me about Chuck's results, in the context of AC. With DC and a graphite cathode, the suspicion is that carbon is participating in the heat, BUT Sites says he saw no thermal anomaly with other metals as the anode. Often, in simple experiments, one learns more by what is not seen, than by what is seen. This was the point of trying a crude replication. It requires nothing exotic to do this, and it appears that yes- there is unusual heating with the US 5-cent coins as both anode and cathode, with borax electrolyte, under AC power (~10 watts) compared to using the US penny (copper); and it is time to move this into a lab to document. Caveat, the coins are different sizes, making it difficult to compare "apples-to-apples". If you have children or grandchildren with science interests, this simple experiment could mature into a meaningful school project, if nothing else. We need to begin to educate the next generation of fringe scientists :-) and putative "excess heating" is an ideal way. Here is a classic paper to start with, keeping in mind that Ni-H appears to be demonstrably more active than Pd-D, when done correctly: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakSlenrresear.pdf In general, one would expect metal ions to migrate to a cathode, and for hydrogen to form and be released but, with good technique, a percentage of hydrogen can be retained as hydride. Essentially this can happen in the process called "co-deposition" - and when heavy water is used, the deposition of Pd positive ions onto the cathode happens with deuterons entrained, and you get instant loading. With this in mind, but using AC, one should try to suppress water splitting and Ohmic heating, by large separation of electrodes. Having read and understood the Romanowski paper, there is one other 'trick' to use. You want to get the alloy much closer to optimum, and pure copper does not form hydrides and moreover - is also "anti-catalytic" for spillover - and worst of all, is more mobile in an electrolyte - so one will benefit from having nickel wire handy as well. From: Teslaalset I wonder whether anode and cathode are mixed up here. The cathode in such setup generates Hydrogen. Using a coin as cathode enables hydrogen to merge into the coin's metal lattice. Right? Alan J Fletcher wrote: "If I had a nickel for every time" ... So ... with that caveat in mind, here's a cheap tip about what to do with another cheap tip - all those Buffalo coins you've been saving for the meter ... IOW - there is a ready source of Romanowski alloy for Celani type reactions in your pocket, or center console, as we speak. The U.S. nickel has been a cupronickel since 1913 and the composition is rather similar to Constantan: 75% copper 25% nickel with trace amounts of manganese. Romanowski would approve. Last year I had a private email from Charles (Chuck) Sites --- who has given me permission to post : I was reading Vortex-L and followed your link. I'm an old cold fusion guy but pretty much a lurker. I found your article on Rossi's E-Cat to be very interesting. Here is a story about CF, from 1984 with Pons and Flieshman announced their discovery, I was a young excited physics student, and immediately want to test the concept of CF. I didn't have palladium, nor deuterium. So I was looking for an alternative. I was thinking, Boron has a very large cross section (Q factor) and B11 could easily cold fuse given the right circumstances. So looking at what I had, what would be a good source of Ni? Not knowing it's metal makeup I choose an American nickel 5-cent piece. (75 percent copper, 25 percent Ni) This was the Anode. A source of Boron, would be Borax (Na2B4.10H2O). The cathode, I used graphite. This was hooked up to a 65 Watt 5 Volt supply from an IBM PC. To my surprise, the Nickel got extraordinarily hot. Too hot to touch, and I melted several plastic p tree dish before changing to jars. I was always able to bring pint of water to 80C after running for about 8 hours. Other metals used for the Anode, showed no indications of even being warm. (Steel, Aluminum, Copper, Zinc). So a US 5 cent piece gave great results. I even had a Geiger counter go off once, but it may have been a cosmic ray. Given that, I could never really understand how this Nickel got hot without radiation. I could never get a theory as to how it worked either, in spite of the fact that the experiment is very repeatable.
