At 02:35 PM 12/6/2012, Peter Gluck wrote:
Dear Abd,
perhaps we will discuss this in a separate thread, here the main
subject is the success of one of my best friends Francesco Celani
and he has surely the vision of how to go further and his strategy
of doing the next steps and so on. Very probably such confirmations
of increasing reliability will come from many places.
I am writing now an essay entitled "Is Cold Fusion natural?" and
this will be an opportunity to establish if it is a better way to
invest creativity in more sensitive and precise measurements or
trying, even empirically to enhance and and stabilize the heat effect.
Peter
As NiH work goes, of late, Celani's project is small-scale.
My guess, though, is that the experiment might be even easier as a
demonstration if it were smaller-scale. The longer wire may break
more often, for example. One does not gain heat per unit surface area
with a longer wire. I won't go into detail, but you might get the idea.
I have an experiment that was run once, by a student. The kit I made
is shown being received in the movie "The Believers." The student ran
it. This was a Galileo protocol replication looking for neutrons,
using a gold wire cathode and LR-115 detectors, instead of the silver
wire of the original Galileo project, and instead of CR-39 as in
later SPAWAR publications reporting neutrons most prolifically from
gold wire cathodes. (But the levels were still very low.)
The SSNTDs were damaged in etching, and it is possible that they were
also underdeveloped. I don't see, so far, evidence for substantial
neutron radiation, i.e., proton knock-on tracks, but analysis is
still continuing. I've seen *one* triple-track, from apparent C-12
breakup. That could easily be from background neutrons.
In any case, this is a wire. In the Galileo project, the wire was two
inches long. But only part of the wire was close to CR-39, and to
demonstrate the effect, only a short exposed length would be
necessary. Gold, palladium chloride, heavy water -- and platinum for
the anode -- are all very expensive.
So I scaled down. This project used two half-inch lengths of exposed
gold wire, in two sections. One was observable with a microscope from
outside the cell. The other had LR-115 outside the cell on the cell
wall adjacent to the wire. Since there was half the length of wire,
the amount of palladium chloride in the electrolyte was halved, and
the currents were halved, and the total amount of heavy water was
halved, thus keeping conditions *along the length of wire* the same
as with the Galileo project protocol. The cell cost, then, was about
half of what it would have otherwise been, allowing the same budget
to run twice as many cells.
The danger of changing conditions is that somehow, some unanticipated
effect will scotch the results. That is a serious danger with cold
fusion experiments. But my judgment was that this particular change
would not. The use of LR-115 is more serious, LR-115 has a different
range of energies detected, and if the particles are too high in
energy *they will not show*. That can be addressed, and deeper
etching might be a part of that. I can see, on these chips, what
looks like "noise," or more clearly, possible tracks that have not
etched all the way through the 6 micron detector layer.
I intend to run this experiment with many more variations. The
original run was very successful in one way: the cell, with only 12.5
grams of heavy water in it, did not run out of heavy water with the
protocol used (at half-current). That was a major worry. Yes, more
heavy water could have been put it, but that requires disturbing the
cell, perhaps, and plating tends to fall off....
There is other work to be done with this experiment. Heat is not
(yet) being measured. It's possible, though, that a very sensitive
isoperibolic technique could be used. Bottom line, this is fun. And
some useful results *might* pop out along the way. There is a search
on for "accessory effects," that is, signals that the FPHE is being
triggered, but these are not "nuclear effects," rather, they are,
ideally, measurable easily. Effects like sound or light or resistance
changes, or the like. Get some of those going and all the work will
start to accelerate, as detecting the effect -- and its size -- may
become quicker and simpler, even at small scale.
