Technova – using Ahern’s powder recipe (Cu–Ni binary nano-particles dispersed into many ZrO2 flakes)… Here is a relevant extract from the paper.
Heat production [disappearance] is endothermic for T < 200 C sample temperature, but exothermic for T > 250C and… average heat by H gas-loading [was considerably higher than] the D-gas loading … This is fully consistent with an emerging nanomagnetism theory. It is also related to the “Reiter effect” with nickel-manganese or cobalt hydriding reactions. I have a strong suspicion that the key to the thermal anomaly in many experiments involving nickel and even palladium involves “superparamagnetism”, which is a form of magnetism found only in nanoparticles or thin-films which are ~10 nanometer thickness. How superparamagnetism translates into thermal gain is relatively easy to imagine – and a way to maximize it is also apparent. In sufficiently small nanoparticles, ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic magnetization can randomly flip direction under the influence of temperature. The typical time between two flips is called the Néel relaxation time (typically below 1 nano-sec). The result would be the same kind of inductive heating which is seen electromagnet cores, except on steroids, so to speak, due to the extreme spin flipping. QM nuclear effects are expected to occur at the same time – but to be hundreds of time lower than the heat anomaly. These alloys often contain nickel or cobalt. However, palladium easily forms superparamagnetic alloys– for a reason not yet known. When palladium and deuterium are involved – the thermal anomaly due to superparamagnetism can be masked by an eventual QM fusion reaction. The expected helium yield is expected to be a small fraction of the net heat derived from magnetic spin-flipping and in any event to be less than with protium. A problem with this hypothesis is the high temps seen > 400C which are often around or over the Curie point of the alloy. Of course, that could be a vital part of the puzzle, in that this is often a “trigger temperature” when exotherm is seen. The larger problem is “where does anomalous heat come from?” My answer to the last is that anomalous heat comes from the DCE – or the dynamical Casimir effect. There are proved relativistic effects in Casimir cavities, and that implies energy anomalies which can be either exothermic, endothermic, or both. Eventually the source of heat from DCE is not fully descriptive of the physics, since it is a proximate cause and not an ultimate cause. The ultimate cause of excess heat is thought to be conversion of a tiny percentage of proton mass into energy. Proton mass is an average, and the heavier fraction can supply energy via “magnons”… and yes – magnons are the final piece of the puzzle, since under QCD they can transfer mass into “spin waves” whenever color change happens (which is often in confined systems). Jones
