I was asked off-list about details of a catalytic converter experiment which would have a good chance of demonstrating excess heat, via the Rossi effect.
Backstory: There was a trendy set of amateur experiments being promoted online back in April called the H-Cat, which seems to have fizzled, for good reason. Can it be revived in the context of Rossi? It can be revived, but it involves a fair amount of added effort. Having given this a little more thought, here is my comment on what has been done wrong, and what needs to be done differently, in order to see a robust LENR (Rossi) effect using a catalytic converter. Anyone with an ongoing H-Cat project can revive what they have already done to a higher level, using electroless nickel added to the converter - and enriched HHO (eliminating oxygen). A fair number of hands-on types were running experiments injecting HHO gas into a catalytic converters following the lead of a chap named Church, who reports producing a substantial amount of heat which he believed was an indication of more energy than is input. Then, Sterling Alan set up a site dedicated to H-Cat, raised some money, attempted water-bath calorimetry but with no OU success, and now, the project seems to have languished since it was tested at about 77% efficient. In short there is no evidence of real thermal gain to be found thus far. This is not surprising since you lose about 25% off the top by electrolysis to get the HHO and then you ruin any change of LENR by burning the H2 before it has time to react with the catalytic metal. In short, this effort was doomed from the start by two major problems, which can be solved. The first big issue is the catalysts. There should be nickel present - but nickel is actually NOT legal for use in catalytic converters in many places like Europe and parts of the USA - because the reaction with carbon monoxide creates tetra-carbonyl nickel, which is highly toxic. Copper is illegal because of the formation of dioxin. Thus, two main reactants found in Rossi's device are actually illegal in many places, and typically are not found in commercial products since manufacturers cannot afford to have a different catalyst for every market. Thus - there is no doubt that Nickel must be added to the H-Cat, but there is an easy and elegant way to do this. The larger problem with all of these efforts - is in using HHO from electrolysis. The gain in LENR comes from hydrogen interacting with nickel, but all hope of strong gain is lost when the hydrogen is fully combusted into steam by flame on intake into the converter. Since we have a stoichiometric ratio, very little free hydrogen can react with the catalyst. It is almost a no-brainer that this will fail by the design of the experiment. I should rephrase that this way: HHO from electrolysis will not demonstrate the Rossi effect, which is an oxygen free process of hydrogen interacting with nickel and other reactants. If you want to use HHO as the hydrogen source, you must eliminate about half the oxygen up front - so that the ratio is not stoichiometric, and then there will be ample free hydrogen to react with the added nickel. This hydrogen enrichment can be accomplished with a membrane which is more porous to hydrogen than to oxygen. Many tightly woven fabrics like Gore-Tex are in this category. The idea is to split the HHO into two stream, one H-rich and the other O-rich. The H-rich steam will be ported into one end of the CC and the O-rich stream can come in from a hole drilled in the side of the CC. This separation via two steams provides a supply of hot H2 to react before it is converted to steam, but in the end, it still retains all the heat of the HHO plus the added heat of Ni-H. It is a bastardized approach but it can work. On the plus side - of the H-Cat concept, the CC often contains rhodium, which seems to be active for LENR, but in general the first thing that should be done too any CC is to add nickel. The most elegant way to do this is to use electroless nickel - especially the variety containing phosphorus. There are resources online for explaining this technology. A small amount of electroless nickel which is a liquid can actually be poured into one end of the CC and allowed to absorb into the catalyst as it trickles down. This is the "washcoat" method and is actually the way the original catalyst was applied to the ceramic, but the original formula lacks nickel which needs to be added to see the Rossi effect. The phosphorus which is in electroless nickel could be a huge plus. The CC then needs to be heated with care to avoid the fumes. This should not be done without extreme caution. In the end, the idea is to have nickel metal in the CC to react with hydrogen, and also to have extra hydrogen in the HHO so that the Rossi effect can proceed. This is not an ideal setup, but in the case of Sterling Alan's experiment with the water bath, where he is seeing 77% return of input, he should be very happy to get more that that, and anything more would be anomalous, no? Will this kludge allow the experiment to exceed 100% (P-out vs P-in) ? Well, there are no guarantees and that is the holy grail goal that makes it all extremely interesting, isn't it?
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