On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 12:58 AM, frobertcook <[email protected]> wrote:
The question remains, what is the mechanism that transfers mass energy to > thermal energy at Mev levels without gammas? > As you allude, gammas were not seen in this test run. That leads me to adopt Robin's hypothesis, that it was lithium that yielded the heat this time around. When a neutron is stripped from 7Li and added to a nickel lattice site, I believe the highest Q value of the various possible reactions is ~ 4 MeV. When divided among the number of nucleons in the daughter 6Li, that comes out to about 0.6 MeV per nucleon in kinetic energy of the daughter. This number is not tiny, but I think you would not necessarily see bremsstrahlung in the way that you would for a 10 MeV proton. The mechanism itself I'm guessing is acceleration via arcing between electrically insulated grains, brought about through the current that drives the resistance heating somehow. I'm also guessing that Rossi and Industrial Heat are experimenting with deuterium-based reactions in which fast protons are generated, which they did not make use of for this demo. Those reactions are likely to produce ionizing radiation. (This was a possibility that Robin raised in an earlier thread.) Eric
