On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Sunil Shah <[email protected]> wrote:
This would produce a number of more (or less) likely chains of reactions, > that together yield the EXACT mass spectrum of the transmutation products. > I like this idea, too. Keeping track of potential transmutations is relatively recent -- perhaps the last five or ten years I think? The results are inconclusive, because there are always questions about "contamination" (I wonder in this context how much is actually contamination, however). When I was doing an informal review of some of the papers that dealt with transmutations, I came to these tentative conclusions: 1. There are some real difficulties in measuring relative amounts of transmutations. 2. The transmutations seen are across the board in terms of isotopes on the lower end of atomic masses. 3. Some transmutations are up in atomic mass or number, and others are down; perhaps mostly up, but this is just an impression. 4. In some cases it looks like there might be fission of larger isotopes happening. 5. There is little in the way of the kind of activation you would see from adding neutrons, so this doesn't seem to be a significant activity. 6. My own impression is that transmutations are generally to stable isotopes and rarely to short-lived ones. 7. A lot of the potential transmutations look like what you would get with the successive addition of protons -- X + p, (X + p) + p, etc. 8. Some of the transmutations look like what you would get with the successive addition of deuterons -- X + d, (X + d) + d, etc. 9. There's a general conclusion that the amount of energy that would be generated by the transmutations that are seen is not of the right order of magnitude to account for the heat that is measured, suggesting that transmutations are a side process. It took a while for me to go along with (7) and (8). It was only after I convinced myself that there really is something unusual happening that does not look like normal fusion that I became open to them. If these two items are true, then pinning down the specific reactions that are going on might not be a simple matter of finding a signature or two in the transmutations and then using them to constrain the possibilities. I think you would have to come up with some sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations and make some important assumptions about the rates at which these processes occur, and even then while you could gain some insight into the overall process, it would not necessarily disclose it with any assurance. Whatever that process or processes are, in the context of PdD they appear to lead to the generation of 4He (although not in every case), and in the context of NiH, no one but Rossi and Defkalion really seems to know. > (There are some downsides to this approach of course. Heat is measured > now, transmutation products are measured later. For transmutation we need > to subtract effects of external ionizing radiation (cosmic, for example), > and natural isotope spread of the bulk material, and uncertainties due to > impurities.) > I'm going to guess that the variance in transmutation measurements from one trial to another is very high. For this reason it seems like a lot of trials are needed to obtain reliable numbers for any relative ratios of isotopes before and after. Eric
