On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 3:20 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
I suspect that his calculation is in error if he in fact derived that 5 > milliwatts was the amount generated by the 1 cm cube. This would not be > enough to heat that cube significantly, certainly not enough to burn wood. > Perhaps the wood comes in contact with some of the escaping hydrogen as it > is combining with oxygen in the air. That would be about the only way to > reach the temperature that would char wood at 5 mW. > The detail about charred wood goes back to a paper by G. Kreysa, G. Marx and W. Plieth, at Dechema-Institute and the Free University of Berlin, in "A critical analysis of electrochemical nuclear fusion experiments," J. Electroanal. Chem., 266 (1989), pp. 437-50. The palladium was a sheet of 0.1 x 1 x 2 cm. When they removed the sheet from a previously operating electrochemical cell and set it on a piece of wood, they saw the temperature rise from 20 C up to 418 C within 74 seconds, after an incubation time of 15 seconds. They assume the palladium was loaded to "80 atom% of hydrogen," which I understand to mean a loading of 0.8 H per Pd atom. This run used plain hydrogen rather than deuterium. They calculated a heat flow of 35.9 W and a power density of 179.6 W cm^-1. Eric
