me356: Reactor parameters [part 1]

Quote from FreethinkerLenr2

I am using Swagelok fittings too on my tubes. I have found it to be less than easy to apply the fitting to the pipe using the SS ferrules. This is likely more related to my ineptitude handling this equipment, than it is the fault of the fitting.To date I have not been able to get my (rather crude, 1-250bar) transducer to present data that seem indicating that the pressure is holding. I have also received a few aluminum ferrules, but being as it is with the melting point for that element, they seem more appropriate to apply a bit away form the hot spot of the reactor, where I attach the transducer. In the other end I have a fitting with a SS ferrule, a stop plug with a TC and ceramic paste plugging it the TC pass through.

At any rate, just my 25 cent worth:

Be very careful when mounting the fitting on the ceramic tube, and by all means, get a small stock of ferrules, aluminum too, if applicable. You may need to reuse the fitting a few times. With that said, I like the Swagelok products, and will continue to use them. Just a matter of getting used to applying it and to not force the wrench too hard, while following the guidelines of mounting ....

FreethinkerLenr2, I'm glad you are progressing.
I just noticed that you are replicating too, may be because your updates are scattered everywhere in your comments. I recommend that you also start a new thread about your work, so we can keep track of it in one place. This way more people can read and assist you. Add a lot of pictures.

Quote from Tarun

FreethinkerLenr2, I'm glad you are progressing.
I just noticed that you are replicating too, may be because your updates are scattered everywhere in your comments. I recommend that you also start a new thread about your work, so we can keep track of it in one place. This way more people can read and assist you. Add a lot of pictures.

I know. I see how it shows, when I read my text again. I cannot help myself, I need to tell the world that I too is fiddling with alumina tubes and Kanthal coils.

But I am nowhere near me356 in replication yet. I am looking into getting a stable reactor environment so I later can apply fuel. I take security very seriously, and I am still perfecting my DIY glove box so I can fuel my SS containers in a safe manner. I am still weeks away from any serious, fueled, try.

I have a space, a space that was turned into a crude workshop, but that is now almost transformed into a lab. I am getting there. When I have arrived I will share that progress, one way or another.

Quote from Ecco the Dolphin

FreethinkerLenr2: could you measure the DC resistance of the alumina tube through its thickness and make a plot of its value vs temperature? Can you detect the voltage applied to the resistor wire at high temperature? Have a read at this for reference: https://docs.google.com/docume…ARjlOpZoqg6ngbmLq83w/edit

+1 for your own dedicated replication thread, btw.

I will consider a thread when I have something worth while sharing, right now I have not.

No, the experiment you describe is not in scope for what I intend, at least not currently. Besides, the resistivity as a function of temperature as such is known, and something that must be factored in for high temperatures, so some spill over is bound to happen. Having 1-10 amps running through the coil, in retrospect, it is not so strange to find leak currents of mA, at 1000C or more, that may interfere with a TC inside the reactor, or the fuel itself.

We see what the future brings

Brian Albiston / Bob Higgins explain:
...
" I want to highly encourage you to switch to a reactor with an inner diameter of at least 5mm. "
...
" The heat lost from the fuel pellet will be proportional to the area of the fuel pellet. "
... and more.

From me: If you do not fully fill the tube, do you take care to distribute the powder all along the tube ?

I'm not claiming to be an expert in this area, but I can recognize that some mis-conceptions are floating around this thread.

I understood that you folks were trying to do a simple replication of what has been done before, no? I would think that would be a first step, Then, with a replication as a base, go on to do the best you can to make incremental changes. Major conceptual re-engineering requires more than "fiddling" to make rapid progress. The first step there is to have the best understanding possible.

Around July 3, 2015 I wrote:
"I discussed the lowered resistance of hot ceramics here awhile back. I
gave numbers and link outs. Hopefully that was useful in getting someone
to think about the issue.

And by the way 1000 ohm / cm, is hardly an electrical conductor. Even a
resistance wire such as Kanthal AF is just 1.06 ohms / cm even at 1000
C.

At 115 volts, a 10 cm chunk of 1200 C ceramic such as Al2O3 will still
see a voltage drop of 99.99%, the current distribution and hence heat
generated by that bypass will be vanishingly small. P = I squared R that
is 10 to the minus 4 squared in 10 to the minus 8 X R of 10^4. to give
less than a milliwatt of power, essentially zero heat or power for any
practical purpose. It's been some time since I did such calculations,
but the basic idea remains. It is essentially a simple application of
Kirkhoff's law, the sum of all the currents about a point is zero. We
are comparing a fairly good conductor -- hot nichrome or Kanthal, with a
very poor conductor (or fairly good insulator), hot Al2O3 or hot SiO2.

It's no contest even over short domains such as "through the ceramic to
the nickel core", where the resistance differential would still be a
factor of several hundred. (end Longview quote).

That said, if you are talking electromagnetic pulses, or electrostatic fields or even magnetic fields, they can easily pass right through a dielectric such as alumina. It would be good at this point to get the concepts correctly in hand. What is an electrical conductor,? What is an electrical insulator? What do they do to various fields?

I'm hoping all this effort at replication (great workmanship) would be guided by appropriate knowledge of the underlying, now nearly 150 year old basic physics. I like speculation as much as the next person here. But I see some lack of effort to understand the mechanisms likely to be in play. Just because "big physics" may have been wrong about LENR or CF or some other things, does not mean that it is a good idea to throw out all the rules. I hope someone with some substantial physics and electronics background will affirm that a complete re-inventing of the whole field is not advisable. If not, I guess it is just me here alone.

In a vacuum, which is approximated here by air, the changes in charge, moving or oscillating electromagnetic fields are blocked by conductors (microwave oven for example). In general a good electrical conductor will BLOCK transmission of pulses through it (that is orthogonal to the planar surface). So a conductive container will not see EM inside, or vice versa. That is the essence of a Faraday Screen. A dielectric, such as Al2O3 or SiO2 will typically transmit such pulses readily. So you all have to decide what is going on. Do you have magnetic fields of interest? Then those will be affected by ferromagnetic materials (concentrated, conducted or blocked). Do you have electrostatic fields of interest? Those will be conducted laterally or blocked orthogonally if the the surface of interest is a conductor (copper, silver, aluminum even steel). But conversely the field potential will be transmitted through an insulator such as alumina or quartz. Do you have pulses of interest? Typically they can be transmitted through a dielectric such as alumina, SiO2, PTFE (Teflon), diamond, polystyrene, glass etc.

If you have an electrically energized coil around an insulating cylinder, you can expect unimpeded magnetic fields, unimpeded electrostatic fields. The only novel electrostatic potential I can imagine there now would be if there were a substantial voltage drop across the coil. So with DC energization, one end of the coil might be a 100 volts and the other at say 20 volts (with respect to reference or ground). That potential gradient can be seen by insulating material inside the cylinder (IF IT IS NOT A CONDUCTOR). If the cylinder is at 1000 degrees C, there is still the likelihood of most of the gradient being impressed on the core materials. If the core (inside the cylinder) is conductive, then it will essentially "short" that modest potential difference, making the voltage drop largely disappear inside the cylinder, with no substantial current and no substantial thermal effects. If the core is a disrupted powder or a metal and oxide mix, then it may sustain that modest 80 volt gradient.... for what it might be worth.... noting of course that the per granule or per metal / oxide increment is a tiny fractional portion of the overall small gradient. Say one thousand granules each representing for this example one metal oxide junction, 80 divided by 1000, or 80 millivolts per granular junction.

I welcome questions. And hope we can prevent a lot of wasted time and effort.

Longview

Quote from Ecco the Dolphin

Longview: you're right, speaking of pure alumina. However, depending on its exact type, penetration of metal particles in the ceramic (volume diffusion) with temperature could decrease its resistivity significantly. When properly performed, this is one of the processes known in the semiconductor industry as doping.

The more n-doped it becomes, the more like a true conductor it will become, and the less effectively it will transmit EM fields through the surface to the interior. As a true conductor, like the steel of a typical microwave oven, such orthogonal transmission will be zero.

Please read my full post carefully. Something may not getting through. I know that field transmission through insulators, and blocking by conductors may be somewhat counter intuitive. Sometimes one just has to experience microwaves transmitting nicely through glass (with a 1/4 wave rotation) to see how much like light they are, in spite of wavelengths almost a million times longer. Or see an aluminum screen completely attenuate a microwave signal, to appreciate the effect of conductivity on EM transmission.

Keep up the good efforts.

Longview

Quote from Ecco the Dolphin

Sorry if I didn't clarify by quoting exactly what I was referring to. My comment was actually in reply to you citing yourself mentioning that alumina would see a 99.99% voltage drop at 1200 °C. Alan Goldwater saw virtually no voltage drop at about that temperature with his used alumina tube, if you've read his report. Or am I misunderstanding something there?

No voltage drop? That is a nearly perfect conductor? My point was that hot alumina (in bulk) is still sufficiently an insulator that a potential across it will see a 99.99% voltage drop--- in retrospect that probably should have read 99.9%, But the 99.99% was over the 10 cm length of my hypothetical example. Something must be seriously violating that expectation, which should be a direct outcome of the temperature v. resistance curve for alumina and other refractories. Sorry I have not read Alan's report, although you have included enough for me to get some idea, thanks.

But putting this in the context of what I am now seeing here..... since I am coming in and looking every week or two. Am I reading that some of you are taking one or another replication as possibly being a complete or partial instrumental artifact of current leakage into a TC or other instrument? Or is that also a misread?

Quote from Alan Goldwater

[...] Measurements made on 22 June 2015 appear to be close to the reference data above. The graph shows the AC current with minimum settling time at each of 15 data points. At a stable set point of 1050 (est. core temp) the current increased from 400 uA to over 1700 uA in the course of 10 minutes, and it was still rising. At 1110 C (core) leakage was 2900 uA rising to 3500 uA, then the GFCI triggered, ending the test. These measurements were made with an inside core type K bare TC in contact with the GS3 fuel, with leads twisted together and connected to the HUGnetLab DAQ ground through a Tektronix DMM254 meter. No significant DC leakage was seen.

Quote

[...]The TC leads were then connected (open-circuit) to an oscilloscope, and showed a 60 Hz sine wave, 100 volts peak to peak at ~1100 C, but only 12 volts with the cell cold. The heater was at 100 volts rms in both cases. [...]

Quote

[...] Leakage of this magnitude has a potential effect on thermocouples and other sensors in physical contact with hot alumina LENR reactors that are electrically heated. Because thermocouples are low-voltage sensors, any voltage from leakage can affect the accuracy of measurement data. In the case of the GlowStick reactors, the heater coil is AC powered, and the DAQ inputs have low-pass filtering to remove most of the induced AC voltage. This has been shown to be inadequate at higher temperature and heater voltage, and further filtering will be required for ongoing tests [...]

So to me the behavior is suggestive that under these conditions (100 VAC, 1000 C), the surface of a ceramic such as this can become quite conductive at high heats with the body remaining a fair bulk insulator (was that 1000 ohms / cm?). That surface behavior might only be seen if the volts per meter is high enough. I don't know what the minimum "leakage" path in that trial was. Thermionic emission from hot surfaces is the essence of a vacuum tube, typical plate voltages are from 90 to 1000 VDC. Typical filament temperatures are apparently under 1000 C (by my eyes). And of course the electron emitting surface is an insulating oxide in older devices, or an insulating hexaboride for perhaps the last 50 years (lanthanum, cerium and now samarium). So if one has even 100 volts AC or DC, one may launch electron currents in a vacuum. In the air I suspect it might be even easier, since 1000 C is already somewhat ionizing, and may lead to surface ionization under such electrostatic fields (100 V over ? distance). As we LENR buffs know, surfaces often have very different behavior from the bulk. Long ago, when the first blowout occurred some months back, some including me suggested arcing. Certainly a big arc follows the shortest and most ionized path, in my experience.

So if we are only talking of some sort of increased conduction on the surface of hot ceramic, I guess 100 volts could sustain high conductivity, but "perfect" that is, NO voltage drop seems like some sort of an error, or a plain old short circuit...

As far as the results instrumentally, surely leakage of milliamps to a thermocouple can throw measurements off wildly, even roast instruments. But I only have limited experience with such as bare detectors that would be so susceptible. My experience has the instrument under battery power, completely floating with respect to the TC contact material, where no current can flow to ground from the TC probe.

It seems that someone here was suggesting that leakage of current at that level (one or a few milliamps) into or through the core might lead to ACTUAL LENR. I am not saying much more about that, but that it seems like a very weak way to stimulate such reactions. Maybe that was just me reading the artefact or apparent behavior as a description of the real thing. But it may also be a hint that I with others here, suspect one might stimulate LENR by appropriate optical, phonon, magnetic, electrostatic, microwave, thermal fields / energy. But that is another post.

Thanks for sticking with me on this Ecco, I appreciate the detail.

Quote

... but rather that this effect seems large enough that a clever and deceitful person such as Rossi could have planned things out in a way that at a high temperature and sufficiently high voltage a substantial amount of power might be directly discharging into the nickel powder by design, and that this could have accidentally happened to some of the successful replicators.

F&P original experiment did all known actions needed to trigger LENR in one go; load of H into Pd, trigger the effect by heat and arc stimulation, all sumultanously. This was hard to replicate. We now know from history that the solution to successful replication and understanding was to uncouple each parameter from each other doing the actions in separate and measurable steps.

Rossi might found som clever combination that simplify his product, but for replication purposes I think separating parameters for individual test ranges is what Rossi did first, and also what all replicators of LENR should aim for first.

Therefore I agree that separating the EM/Arc-stumulation from heat-stimulation and also control of pressure is the best way forward at this stage of replications.