On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 3:34 PM, James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote:
How do you explain the correlation between He and heat in D+Pd systems? > You are probably acquainted with the following details, but I'll mention them anyway. The He/heat correlation in PdD systems can be called into question by separating the correlation into two pieces -- He, on one hand, and heat, on the other, and then dealing with them individually. We already know about how the heat results are questioned. What is interesting is how the 4He results are called into question. I've seen this done in two ways (there are no doubt others): - Did the 4He come into the apparatus through migration through the glass somewhere along the circuit? - Was the palladium already impregnated with elevated levels of 4He? If you haven't carried out painstaking experiments to rule these two possibilities out (and one gets the impression that getting a helium-clean environment is hard), I can blithely ignore the correlation because the component data is no good. If you have carried out painstaking experiments, I can look for some other fault in the experiment. Nathan Hoffman's book has the best overview I've seen of the various difficulties that go into the 4He measurements. An interesting note about the second problem -- sometimes there are whole pockets in the palladium that have 4He in them. What I think is cool about that is that it suggests that 4He is formed in discontinuous events (I'm thinking of the mini-volcanos). Eric
