Conjectures and Questions

I have started this thread to provide a place for ideas, possibly untenable ideas, that could be investigated relating to amateur CMNS/LENR/LANR/FPE/Cold Fusion. This thread is meant to motivate experimenters and inspire protocols.

First conjecture: An aquarium heater can serve as an LENR Testbed.

Some aquarium heaters use quartz tubing. Could any such heater be converted into a testbed? Perhaps merely to test hydrogen uptake of various materials. Or to investigate material decomposition in heat cycles.

Conjecture 2: MILN objects can be repurposed as LENR reactors.

Could a spark plug insulator be gutted, filled with powders, sealed, and sufficiently heated to imitate the processes of AGP's reactor?

Could another common ceramic object, manufactured in large numbers (MILN), serve as a reactor body?

Conjecture 3: Amateur LENR experiments can be conducted without common temperature measurement tools.

If you had no thermocouple, no IR thermometer, no temperature sensing system at all, could you calculate the maximum temperature of a given reactor body and contents - knowing their materials, sizes, and shapes - for a given heating wire system?

Example: 100mm long, 10mm OD, 5mm ID, alumina tube, filled with 1.0g nickel powder and 0.1g LAH, wrapped with 150mm of nichrome type XYZ wire, fed with sufficient power (voltage and amperage measured in real-time during experiment) to reach maximum possible temperature of wire.

Logic seems to indicate that if there is enough heating wire, and sufficient heating time has been given, then a reactor body will reach a temperature near the maximum of the chosen heating wire.

Is there a way to look for heat after death *without* a thermocouple or an IR thermometer?

Reading old books about how experiments were conducted inspired this conjecture.

Imagine if the reactor continued to glow brightly enough and long enough, whenever heating power was cut, that visual inspection, that the naked eye, appropriately safeguarded by brazing goggles, could discern whether a given reactor system was an example of anomalous heat.

Such a reactor could be cycled by applying and cutting heating wire power for a very impressive demonstration at very low cost.

If a control reactor, an empty reactor, a reactor with "inert" contents were simultaneously fed with the same heating wire power supply the demonstration would take on a very interesting perspective indeed.

Conjecture 4: A quartz tube can serve as an LENR reactor vessel.

Can a reactor body, useful for LENR investigation, consist of only a quartz tube? Can metal powder prevent tube failure by absorbing hydrogen and preventing high pressure inside the tube?

Can an experiment show whether alumina is required in an AGP-like reactor?

Can common insulation like fiberglass batting wrapped around a quartz tube conserve enough heat inside the tube to allow LENR exploration?

Conjecture 5: A steel tube filled with nickel powder can help analyze the consequences of hydride decomposition inside an LENR reactor.

Can the materials used by A.G. Parkhomov be placed in a metallic tube and heated to investigate the pressures which might be seen inside the alumina tube of an AGP-like system?

Imagine a short common steel pipe with two pipe caps fitted with an inexpensive pressure gauge heated by torch.

Quote from AlainCo

today I read something about quartz that melt and is leaking H2 at some not so huge temperature... have to check. Alumina is better but have to be made sealed.
Metal also leaks then collapse at quite low temperature.

I seek experiments that definitively answer questions. Therefore, in the context of hydrogen leakage, a measurement is required.

Inexpensive sensors which are used with Arduinos can detect hydrogen leaks. See MQ8 at the link.

It is one thing to suppose that a system acts a certain way. It is a completely different thing to perform an experiment to substantiate the system's behavior.

To make the dream of LENR real requires action in the real world. That action is well thought out experiments.

See here for some melting points of materials we are discussing. I quote the page in part below:

Aluminum 660c 1220f
Nickel 1453c 2647f
Carbon Steel 1540c 2600f

Clearly a steel tube can serve to investigate Hydride pressures during decomposition. As Brian Ahern mentioned, quartz is a marginal material, though it may be useful. It is possibly too early to judge its utility.

Please understand that my aim is to clarify, and accept my apologies if this seems to attack. We are all on the same team.

As Alexander Parkhomov has stated, it is notable that he detected no hydrogen leakage, and that his reactor stayed intact - it did not burst.

QuartzAlumina

Conjecture 6: Nichrome heating wire fails when restricted under a coating of ceramic paste. If the wire is wrapped at a low enough tension and allowed to expand and contract without pulling against itself, then the wire will fail less often.

To explore heating wire failure two reactors can be compared in real-world heat cycles to test the conjecture.

AGP has noted in his most recent report, the "second report", that hotspots are slowing development - shortening experimental run times. Longer run times are critical to progress and to short-term "validation". In a recent 2 hour video Alexander showed broken reactors - failed due to hotspots.

If you make a comparison between free-to-move and under-cement wire please report it to http://ni.comli.com where other information useful to experimenters can be found.

Conjecture 7: Since reactant compounds in AGP-like reactors decompose to elements, these elements can be placed inside a reactor using a wide variety of compounds resulting in LENR effects.

Experiments need doing to determine which compounds might demonstrate LENR. Since aluminum, alumina, hydrogen, lithium, and nickel reside in AGP's testbed it makes sense to investigate compounds which are constituted of the same elements - avoiding other elements. While the ratios of elements will vary with different compounds, nevertheless much might be learned from a series of experiments involving the listed elements.

Poster to vortex-l mailing list, Axil Axil, advocates sodium and potassium as compliments to nickel in AGP-like reactor experiments. I am unaware of any experiments following his advice - as yet. He postulates that nanoparticles can form inside a reactor and that this formation is key to success.

Conjecture 8: Temperature is more important than pressure in AGP-like reactors.
Conjecture 9: Pressure is more important in AGP-like reactors.

These two may seem confusing. I am trying here to underline that temperature and pressure influence each other but are separate. Therefore, by sizing the reactor vessel and the reactor contents, experiments might demonstrate that lower pressures at operating temperatures work just as well as higher pressures at operating temperatures.

In other words, 1200C at 100 bar might prove workable and easier than 1200C at 300 bar.

Conjecture 9 is what we, at this juncture, hope against. A requirement for both high pressure and high temperature makes engineering more daunting.

Conjecture 10: Inexpensive gas sensors coupled with an Arduino can determine if hydrogen is leaking from a reactor.

Searching ebay turns up MQ-8 gas sensors. About $2 USD.

The MQ-8 detects hydrogen at parts per million levels.

To check my thinking I posted to socratic.org where one reader replied with a calculation. Summary: in a 36 liter container 10 milliliters of hydrogen is needed to reach 300 PPM.

Clearly we have very little hydrogen generated when 0.10 grams of Lithium Aluminum Hydride is heated. Yet it may be possible to detect if it is trapped in a simple conical hood above the reactor. The hope is that it will linger long enough under the hood to exceed the sensor threshold.

How to do it?

Find additional official Arduino MQ help here. Note the need for a burn-in procedure before using.