At 07:53 PM 9/23/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote:
David Roberson <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Do you consider this an out of control cold fusion device? It
certainly has that appearance to me.
Of course it was out of control. However, as far as I know, when the
runaway reaction began the cell was undergoing electrolysis. It did
not begin to go out of control in heat after death mode. Obviously
by the time the cathode reached the table top the cell was shattered
and the cathode was in H.A.D. mode.
As I wrote, but Jed may not have read yet, Beaudette has that Pons'
son turned off the power before they left for the evening.
However, that doesn't quite make sense to me. Turning off the power
would allow loss of deuterium, which is not what they generally wanted.
HAD could explain the triggering of the event, which would be a
combination of heat high enough to break or melt the glass cell,
plus, then, combustion of the deuterium. My own analysis, such as it
is, expects that the burning of deuterium would not get the palladium
hot enough to melt, because most of the heat from combustion would
not transfer to the metal. It would be like the burner in a gas
stove: it gets hot, but not very hot, not as hot as the flame. Most
of the heat goes up in the air.
It occurred to me that if the palladium got very hot, it would burn
rapidly through the bench, and sitting on the floor, the rising
deuterium gas would burn, thus creating the *large* hole in the lab
bench (and filling the air with smoke as reported). I still find it
hard to understand why there would be so much damage to the floor.
Normally you can build a fire on concrete and it doesn't do much. So
it must have been very hot palladium, would molten palladium do it?
It may have gotten hotter than that.
This thing did not explode, it burned. (and apparently some of the
palladium vaporized, which is entirely too hot for explanation by the
burning of the deuterium, though I didn't calculate that specifically.)
To repeat, one of the difficulties of generating so much heat
chemically, quickly enough to melt the palladium, would be getting
enough oxygen quickly enough to the deuterium gas. That's why
ordinary flames are nowhere near as hot as torches where oxygen is
supplied under pressure like the combustible gas is. And a candle
flame doesn't burn the wick, except high up, where the wax doesn't reach.
There is no evidence that H.A.D. causes a runaway reaction, but the
obverse is true. A runaway reaction causes H.A.D. when it interrupts
electrolysis.
But that could amplify a runaway reaction. HAD doesn't normally melt
stuff.... However, the reaction is generally considered to increase
with temperature. There is danger of runaway there, and that may have
happened with the 1985 meltdown.
If the cell in 1985 started heating rapidly enough, the heavy water
would boil away, so even if this didn't start out as HAD, it would become that.
Actually, anyone can "cause" H.A.D. anytime while doing a cold
fusion experiment that is producing anomalous heat. Just turn off
the power. The anomalous heat continues for a while.
Sometimes. Sometimes the heat dies down pretty much with the thermal
inertia of the system. For example, look at P14 in the P13/14 pair,
when they lower the electrolytic power back to the trickle. XP
declined rapidly, back to the noise level.
This is probably not a particularly significant or important
quality. It just proves that the input power is only needed to keep
the hydride at high loading. Hydrides do not deload
instantaneously, so the reaction is bound to continue for a while.
Input power does not cause or modulate output power, except
indirectly, by loading the cathode or stimulating it with a high
temperature or flux. The ratio between the two is pretty much
meaningless, as I said. With gas loading, the ratio is governed by
the quality of the insulation. That's not profound. It is not even
interesting. There is nothing to be learned from it.
It's purely political. For research purposes, it's enough that the
calorimetry is calibrated and confirmed. It does not matter if power
is externally supplied or is looped back from output, say as
self-heating. XP is XP. Because of heat/helium -- and even before
that, from all the excellent calorimetry that has been done -- we are
beyond needing to prove there is excess heat. It's real. It is only a
question of research convenience. It's easier to control if devices
are not designed to self-power. Self-power, then, is not important
for research, but only for "killer demonstrations," which are a
commercial phenomenon, really. They tell us nothing, and if people
doubt the results, they can still doubt them with apparent
self-power, and some will.
Rossi has quite a few demonstrations he has done which convinced
some. None of them are equivalent to what exists with PdD cold
fusion: independent replication and confirmation. While most CF
experiments are not exact replications -- which some seem to want to
see -- some are, or some represent alternate ways of measuring *the
same thing*, particularly the heat/helium ratio for PdD.
Since we don't know what the product is with NiH reactions, assuming
they are real, we don't have anything like that yet for this approach.
