I don't know if you have understood that the TC don't measure the heat transfer toward the outside, but between the heating coil and the nucleus.
The nucleus is a very complex system thermodynamically, it endure phase change, chemical dissociations, recombinations, absorption, and LENR...
In fact you should rather compare TC2 and the output water temperature to estimate the heat resistance
"In fact you should rather compare TC2 and the output water temperature to estimate the heat resistance."
Are you talking to me AlainCo? This is the path than I have been walking from the very beginning until Arnaud gave me cold feet.
If this turns out to work I will have some pardons to beg for, I am afraid. But at first I would like to see some gammas. It does not matter how you upset an atomic nucleus. When it retaliates we know what it does, I am pretty sure.
The lack of gammas is a perplexing issue. By "lack" I do not mean complete lack; there are gammas that are seen from time to time, but not anywhere near an order commensurate with the heat that is developed.
I think it would be unwise, however, to pin an expectation on the appearance of gammas commensurate with heat in order to allow that the process is nuclear in nature. There are several ways one can think of offhand to avoid them -- only two-body reactions are selected; only light elements, without excited bound states, participate, etc. There may be ways we can't think of to avoid them. But perhaps out of concerns similar to yours, researchers such as Robert Duncan have referred to the whole matter as the "anomalous heat effect," avoiding the question of whether it's nuclear.
Eric, the whole point in using nuclear reactions for extraction of energy rather than chemical reactions is that the energy per reaction from a nuclear process can be millions of times greater than that from a chemical process. The energy from a chemical reaction is given off in small, life friendly packages that we call photons each carrying e.g. a couple of electron volts which we perceive as green light.
But no nuclear reaction is capable of delivering 1 MeV as half a million green photons. As we know, any type of nuclear reaction results in only a few particles. As a consequence some of the reaction products must carry high energy and it is this energy that we want to harvest without getting hurt.
High energy gamma photons can be converted to heat, but only by passing a substantial distance through dense matter (Sorry, Widom-Larsen!) which is never present in LENR experiments. Alpha and beta particles can be stopped efficiently in matter, but this process will also generate gammas or X-rays.
Therefore, nuclear reactions produce gamma rays with the same certainty that you will burn your fingers if you touch a red hot stove.
Alpha and beta particles can be stopped efficiently in matter, but this process will also generate gammas or X-rays.
X-rays are definitely seen when sought out. My impression is that they are commensurate with heat. Because they are not penetrating enough in general to escape the container, they will not be detected outside several layers of interposing material. I assume that one possible source of the x-rays is prompt particles. There could be others.
Gamma rays, if produced in quantity, would not be all that useful, as they are penetrating and therefore hard to thermalize. But that is a practical consideration. As to why they don't occur in quantity, either from primary reactions or from de-excitation of nuclei excited in inelastic collisions, is a question to be understood, to be sure. If two alphas are produced, each carrying 0.5 MeV, that will put an upper bound on an deexcitation gammas that can be produced as a byproduct. Now we're in hard x-ray territory.
I find it helpful to recall that the purported reactions are occurring in a very different environment from ones typically studied either in plasmas or in ion-bombardment experiments. One important difference is the electron charge density. Those electrons are pervasive throughout the area and possibly provide a target for EM coupling in one or another context. We should avoid unintentional overconfidence in the applicability of our current knowledge about nuclear transitions. The history of science shows over and over how unfamiliar circumstances merit careful study and can lead to exciting and unexpected results.
Alpha and beta particles can be stopped efficiently in matter, but this process will also generate gammas or X-rays.
For alphas, that is energetic helium nuclei, this is not a source of danger at the energies typically seen, or theoretically expected, that is under 30 MeV. Helium 4 alphas at 8 MeV penetrate less than a mm of water, and far less of stainless steel. The resulting impacts inside a steel vessel are thermalization only, and of course helium 4 gas. 8 MeV is a good example since the aneutronic process very thoroughly described protocols of Lipinski UGC yield two such alphas, whose combined mass is about 14,000 times that of an electron.... hence their relatively low velocity. See the middle 50 pages or so of: http://unifiedgravity.com/reso…014189799-PAMPH-330-2.pdf
The difference between the calorimeters is that GSVIT's was properly and carefully calibrated *and* the calibration demonstrated that it was both accurate and reproducible. The Russians... well, they didn't bother.
How short memories are:
QuoteGamma rays, if produced in quantity, would not be all that useful, as they are penetrating and therefore hard to thermalize.
Yet, early on, Rossi said that ALL of the excess heat generated by the ecat came from thermalization of gammas. He supposedly included lead in the ecat to accomplish this amazing feat. How soon people forget what I call rossifiction. I am sure you will say he only claimed this to mislead his competition! Hey, it worked. Defkalion went belly up.
Nor was Rossi at all tentative about this. In his illustrious and now world renown Journal of Nuclear Physics, (ROTFWL) he said:
QuoteAndrea Rossi
August 23rd, 2011 at 9:52 AM
Dear Erik Ander:
We produce gamma rays, and our energy comes from their thermalization.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
You can search this file for it, if you do not believe me: http://www.rossilivecat.com/all.html (caution, very large file, good browser and fast internet required)
QuoteGamma rays, if produced in quantity, would not be all that useful, as they are penetrating and therefore hard to thermalize.
Yet, early on, Rossi said that ALL of the excess heat generated by the ecat came from thermalization of gammas. He supposedly included lead in the ecat to accomplish this amazing feat. How soon people forget what I call rossifiction. I am sure you will say he only claimed this to mislead his competition! Hey, it worked. Defkalion went belly up.
Nor was Rossi at all tentative about this. In his illustrious and now world renown Journal of Nuclear Physics, (ROTFWL) he said:
QuoteAndrea Rossi
August 23rd, 2011 at 9:52 AM
Dear Erik Ander:
We produce gamma rays, and our energy comes from their thermalization.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
Rossi has improved his technology from 2011. Heat is required to establish a quantum tunneling connection between the nuclear reaction and the mechanism for thermalization of gammas. Rossi runs the reactor hot now and gammas go away.
No Axil. Rossi lied about gammas then and he's lying about quantum tunneling, which he knows nothing about, now. Before someone jumps on this, I can't prove the assertion. It's just the best conclusion from the small amount of available data. Anyway, Axil can explain anything ex post facto. Problem is: he doesn't predict anything testable.
What should Rossi measure on his hot cat to prove your hypothesis, Axil? And why has he not measured it?
@ Mary Hugo
I predicted the production of mesons and muons more than a year before Holmlid discovered them as a product of rydberg matter. That is good for a theory to predict so early on. I have predicted how the Cat and Mouse work based on muon production and entanglement. Rossi will release that patent in short order to verify that prediction.
Hi Mary,
It's been a while.
Yet, early on, Rossi said that ALL of the excess heat generated by the ecat came from thermalization of gammas.
I don't think I ever found the gamma-thermalization claim credible; or, if I did, it was before I knew anything about gammas.
I don't consider myself a Rossi booster, although I'm not skeptical of his whole project to the extent that you are.
Regards,
Eric
The notion that an element like nickel can undergo nuclear transformations at chemical temperatures was abandoned with the advent of modern chemistry. Still, even today some backyard researchers build small furnaces where they heat nickel and hydrogen in order to achieve just that. Poor calorimetry makes them believe that more heat comes out than they put in.
This proposition is a sitting duck to the bullets of the omnipresent skeptics. They point at the obvious fact that such transmutations must not only generate prompt gamma radiation but also would they produce radioactive reaction products. These objections are mostly just shrugged at or explained away with ad hoc theories of scientific credibility on par with that of alchemy.
But all cold fusionists are not created equal, some are more ambitious than others. Gamma radiation and radioactive ash, we have had more than enough of that in our old fusion reactors. Shurely we must be able to do better! And true enough, there are nuclear reactions that could make our dream come true. If you search for ”aneutronic fusion” you will find a few samples. A very promising candidate would be 1p + 7Li -> 2 4He + 17.2 MeV
The energy is carried off by two alpha particles in the form of kinetic energy. Only harmless helium and copious pure energy is produced. It is the nuclear equivalent of a hydrogen powered fuel cell that only emits potable water.
The kinetic energy will be gradually converted to heat through interaction with the electrons in the material that the alphas pass through, heureka!
But now optimism has run away with reason, someone is forgetting something. Those who can muster the ignorance to disregard the standard reasons that such a fusion reaction can not take place at chemical temperatures will also have to turn a blind eye to another fact. The exploding beryllium atom that you get by wedding a proton to a lithium nucleus is a powerful particle accelerator imparting a kinetic energy of minimum 8.6 MeV to the alpha particles. Some of these speeding alphas will collide with nearby nucleuses and cause secondary nuclear reactions that will produce, guess what. Yes, gammas.
And that takes us back to cold fusion square one.
Some of these speeding alphas will collide with nearby nucleuses and cause secondary nuclear reactions that will produce, guess what. Yes, gammas.
Out of curiosity (somewhat unrelated to this thread), as a thought experiment, do you have a sense of the upper limit on the energy that alpha particles in a strong flux could carry away below which their effects would be relatively harmless, when the shielding provided by the apparatus is taken into account? If you like, we can think of the energy in terms of the peak of a Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution.
