Almost as good as a patent:
My lab record that hydrogen flowing over NiO on an inert substrate will produce excess energy when heated to 830 deg C. This temperature must be controlled to maintain the atomic configuration of the NiO array and its oxidation state.
So, is 830 C a minimum? Does the configuration not tolerate higher than 830? Or is it the other way around?
Thanks for your open communications and the clear responses. This is what we all need to do-- it is literally a planetary issue.
OK, my lab notes are in folders that are stashed away where I worked before retirement. This is what I recall:
830 is a minimum.
The reactor was NiO on silica matrix stuffed into a glass tube with a periodic array of chromel alumel couples for temperature measurement. The hydrogen flow was precisely adjusted with an electronic controller. Temperature was brought up to several hundred degrees while observing the couples that were in differential and normal mode readout. The curve was linear until ~800 deg C., and then became very unusual. At exactly 830 deg C. the thermal output caused meltdown of the assembly. After all these years I still remember being awed with what I observed and also that no one was interested. The apparatus sat as a centerpiece on my desk until I retired.
The 830 has to be controlled with gas flow or the thermal runaway will destroy the NiO matrix.
I recall the exhilaration, now I'm depressed with the memory. Thanks, Longview for not treating me as a crackpot. Also, I'm near 90 but still recall pretty well.
Your recollection of this is very clear and consistent. It is important that the community of folks here see and understand your result.
Do you believe or think that the thermal runaway only stopped the process because the Pyrex tube melted? Or was there some other indication of breakdown. I assume the FiberFrax did not fail, but perhaps something about the NiO became either activated irreversibly or reached a critical point at or even well beyond 830 C?
From your initial recollection I may have received the wrong impression that if a quartz tube (for example?) had been used, the 830 C might have been substantially exceeded and the device would (or may?) not have have failed.
Here is my deduction and reading from your excellent recollections so far: As you heated the tube externally below ~800 C there was no (apparent?) positive feedback loop, and the temperature rise in that portion of the curve was essentially determined by external resistive heating. As you reached 800 C, there appeared to be internal heat production, that is the temperature rise began to be dependent not on resistive heating, but instead (began to be?) dependent on the rate of H2 flow. This process reached criticality at 830 C, so that you had to tightly regulate H2 flow, otherwise the device would rapidly rise to a supercritical level and fail due to runaway heat that may have greatly exceeded 830 C.
Kindly correct any impressions or misimpressions I am giving in the above description. Now, in retrospect, I think we in this growing LENR community see how important your much earlier results to have been. I wonder if somehow your results came down through the "folklore" around CF over the years and came around again because some actually remembered your results, or is it just a coincidence and essentially the reinvention of a similar system in Ni and H2?
In your opinion, would there have been any chance that Piantelli, Celani, Focardi or Rossi to have somehow heard or read about your results way back whenever?
I personally have experienced "being too far ahead of the field" on a couple of occasions. Not in this field (yet?), but nevertheless I recall being told that "big ideas" are not welcome or are not to be pursued. Perhaps as a youngster in the 1950s I read too much about Michael Faraday, Humphrey Davy and others in the pioneering era of electrochemistry in the early 1800s. The idea of "too big an idea" in science came as a bit of a shock, particularly from a successful scientist. And I remember reading some years back how a young graduate student had fight with her advisor to pursue a "big idea". She (Candace Pert, who passed on not long ago) succeeded in overcoming resistance from above. I now know that many young scientists in training are not so persistent or so lucky to have the right guidance.
"Here is my deduction and reading from your excellent recollections so far: As you heated the tube externally below ~800 C there was no (apparent?) positive feedback loop, and the temperature rise in that portion of the curve was essentially determined by external resistive heating. As you reached 800 C, there appeared to be internal heat production, that is the temperature rise began to be dependent not on resistive heating, but instead (began to be?) dependent on the rate of H2 flow. This process reached criticality at 830 C, so that you had to tightly regulate H2 flow, otherwise the device would rapidly rise to a supercritical level and fail due to runaway heat that may have greatly exceeded 830 C."
Your statement that I copied above is accurate. I doubt that my results or ideas were publicized much beyond my work area. How I stumbled onto this NiO on silica experiment I can't recall. I do recall the power vs. temperature plot with its surprising nonlinearity at 830 C.
Meltdown halted the experiment without much change in appearance of the green NiO. If continued I'd expect reduction of the NiO unless the hydrogen flow rate is used to control temperature.
All I'd like here is to add my small contribution and hope that this effect is studies further.
My wrap up on this:
Another example of serendipity, the chance that I'd use green NiO paint from the lab that was meant for use on ceramic for applying identification marking paint that had been long term ball milled into sub micron particle size, depositing this paint on silica as a reactor matrix, using this in a hydrogen stream in a resistance wound tube, and stumbling on the exothermic reaction at 830 C. All very serendipitous.
OEL = GAR,
Please let us know when did this work transpire? Or shall I say, what years did you observe these results?
Do you want to replicate this again? I would certainly be willing to participate. As I mentioned I have FiberFrax (not sure which grade at this point), I have a quartz tube muffle furnace with heating tape that might reach suitable temperatures. I have a thermocouple suited to temperatures not recalled or specified at this point. I have hydrogen (surely not 6 nines though) in a very outdated cylinder and I believe I may have a hydrogen regulator, somewhere. I have Raney nickel, but not the NiO your specify.... not hard to get from here to there.
The only problem is that most all of this equipement is scattered inconveniently great distances apart. But the will is there--- if you are still interested.
Longview,
I was a member of the American Spectrographic Society in the seventies and we would have discussions on what the members were working on. Fleischmann and Pons' comes to mind and their publicity probably caught my attention. This is when my work occurred. Should be replicated again and I'd be interested to participate.
Here is what's needed:
Chemically Pure NiO powder in 50/50 amyl acetate/acetone with 10% nitrocellulose as binder, thick slurry consistency, ball milled about a week in a ceramic mill.
Furnace Insulator Grade fiberFrax strips to fit muffle.
Quartz tube muffle furnace that will stabilize at 830 C.
Chromel Alumel thermocouples with potentiometer with +/- 0.1 deg C. accuracy.
Medical Grade hydrogen.
Proof of pudding = linear plot of power vs. temp into furnace until 830 C. then surge in temp. Do you have a lab. available?
“Cold fusion started in March of 1989 with the announcement of the observational facts by Fleischmann and Pons."
Well I'm confused, thought word of this was around before 1989.
For my right to this invention:
Hydrogen gas flowing over nickelous oxide on a silica substrate will produce thermal energy when the NiO is heated to about 830 C.
Fleischmann and Pons reported rare occurrence of thermal energy output from their palladium electrodes when used in their electrolysis experiments. Chance occurrence of impurities causing the correct atomic array for hydrogen permeation interaction would have been responsible. My nickelous oxide arrangement in the reactor works because of the array control on the substrate relative to the hydrogen flow.
There may have been word around certain scientific circles well before the "official" 1989 announcement. You may have been privy to some of that talk, I'm guessing. Clearly F&P were doing their "over unity" research as early as 1984 and possibly considerably earlier.
Establishing your priority is one thing which can aid in preventing others from claiming priority. That can benefit all the "little guys" by placing the underlying technology firmly in the public domain.... important because greed always comes up and some entity (a corporation with lots of attorneys, most likely) will be driven to claim recent priority forestalling broad individually motivated developmental efforts. Even though I was heartened to see a technology "whiz" apparently take a recent interest in LENR, we have to remember what his company under his direction did for a living.... and unfortunately there is little other way to put it than it "ate" smaller competitors, and the vast majority of those smaller companies were completely destroyed by the process... that is they and their often superior technology did not become part of the monolith other than perhaps as additions to the monolith's "Intellectual Property portfolio".... the underlying motive and name of the game was simply a very unecological elimination of competition.
By now I think that many of the issues with F&P work are identified. One big issue was the loading, which really makes the electrode into Pd deuteride, that is the loading must approach 100%, which can take a long time without foil-like electrodes or co-deposition of Pd with deuterium. And I believe it is widely thought that the later Pd of commerce, was much purer Pd, and for one or more reasons was not nearly as likely to be successful. This accords with your recollection.
I always recall the example where one of the "pioneers" and their group happened to hammer Pd extensively and had great resulting COP. I often think this may represent one or more of several things. Hammering with say a steel hammer can introduce tiny amounts of iron or even other minor steel constituents such as carbon very near the surface being hammered. Further it smashes the ideal crystal structure of the Pd, perhaps making "dead ends" and other unusual structures that might end up as something like Storms' Nuclear Active Environments (NAE).
But returning to priority, your work seems much more to relate to the Nickel and hydrogen work now receiving so much publicity. I am not up to date on patent law and probably never really was, in spite of some study in the area. To forestall others from patentability, at least in the USA, in circumstances like this, one could demonstrate that the claimed new invention is not new. So how does one do that? I suspect publication in any form back when you made your observations would qualify. But I imagine you probably did not publish, but perhaps may have presented a poster or some less than peer-reviewed form of "publication" at a regional or national professional meeting.
My offer to you was simply to try to put together a replication. I personally would love to pursue such an attempt. But I imagine the obstacles of time and space may make it difficult. I did mention the pieces of the potential project that I have laying around too far away, just to get it out there in this Forum that something reasonably matching your pioneering effort could be done with the appropriately motivated team. In other words the issue is not money or equipment so much as personnel, location and time.
Longview,
I'd like to work with you on replicating my first attempt with a NiO matrix related to interaction with hydrogen at 830 C. A team dedicated to this effort would be useful. My interest is not for personal recognition but directed at getting this research moving before it's too late.
Really appreciate your accurate description of pitfalls in the legal aspects.
What would it take to get a team together to prove that the reaction is real? I have the land and building necessary to set up the experiment but need the equipment.
For the record:
I want to become clear that the reaction with my reference has nothing to do with nickel. It's solely related to a matrix of nickelous oxide on fiberfrax suspended in a resistance heated furnace tube. The atomic structure of the NiO is reactive at 830 C. and requires temperature control to maintain the oxidation state of the NiO. Hydrogen gas is required for the reaction.
I'm currently in the southeast US, some of what I can offer materially is still on the West Coast. We can exchange email addresses elsewhere.
And, OK, I imagine that some of the Rossi and Lugano experiments may have inadvertently oxidized their nickel. But I appreciate your specificity, which is certainly the right thing in this sort of exploratory and confirmatory context. If you read my threads elsewhere you know that I am interested in the role of oxides specifically.... mainly with respect to immobilizing electrons which somewhat paradoxicaly seems to give unusual properties, including increased mass and so on.
Email address exchange, how is this done? My location is in the West Coast near San Francisco.
I would like to repeat the NiO experiment to confirm my initial results. The oxidation of nickel is critical for establishing the periodicity of the atomic array relative to hydrogen flow. At 830 C this must be where the structure falls in line for proton interaction.
I've not tried any sort of email address exchange here.
Why is this web becoming tangled? Deception was never intended only verification.
Perhaps it is only me, but I do not want my identity out here, at least not currently. LENR is becoming an area with powerful interests as potential or actual players. I have no problem with giving you my identity... it is this context that is problematic.
