FP's experiments discussion

Quote from kirkshanahan

I'd like to see an admission from the primary CFers that their 'proof' that my CCS/ATER idea

Sorry Kirk... I am only a quaternary 4D CFer ...I cannot admit... but .I see multiple dimensions in the CFer/nonCFer saga .This is only one dimension

"

Tribalism in cold fusion research .1989 - 2019

my criticisms stand from the way the CFers act.

One other was clearly a 'cold fusioneer' (CFers), and the other wasn't.

I seriously doubt we will see the CFers doing so. They already had that chance with calibration shifts and they completely dropped the ball on that.

for the motley collection of anomalies that CFers have

but the impact of that minor difference was major in that it leads the CFers to believe they are observing CF excess power signals!

If you recall, a long time ago you asked for someone to take a look at the calorimetry of the CFers.

But the CFers instead have claimed great victory,

Lee Hansen, an anti-cold fusioneer, and as it turns out, the non-cold fusioneer"

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Fourthly, I do a lot of equilibrium chemistry, which means waiting around for things to equilibrate. reading and replying to posts fills the time when I have nothing else to do.

I guess that's one way of boosting your publication rate

Quote from kirkshanahan

Like, maybe I'm actually wrong and one of you guys will finally get a reproducible, incontrovertible result proving I do need to worry about runaway heating or radiation production.

The CFers will appreciate the input fm yr extensive equlibrium chemistry POV on dangers of the runaways/radiation production they have experienced in CF experiments for the past few years(decades)

Quote from Zeus46

I guess that's one way of boosting your publication rate

Why would reading LENR forum boost my publication rate? That does not compute...

Quote from RobertBryant

The CFers will appreciate the input

ROFL

Quote from kirkshanahan

Why would reading LENR forum boost my publication rate? That does not compute...

Well quite!

Types of claimed XHs and possible causes of error

In the present discussion about the possible errors contained in the F&P paper to ICCF3 (1), it often happens that different sources of error are mixed up. To avoid the resulting misunderstandings, it's useful first to identified the different types of excess heat claimed by F&P, which are affected by completely different source of errors.

Although F&P, and the researchers who endorsed their claims, postulated the existence of a single nuclear effect, the FPE (*), which should have been the cause of any reported anomalous manifestation (excess heat (XH) or nuclear radiation), a more careful analysis of the HX anomalies suggests that they derive from different artifacts depending on the mathematical models used to analyze the experimental data, or even from a wrong determination of these data. The mathematical models and the experimental data used by F&P and their replicators are not uniform, but varies in accordance to the experimental regime, as better clarified by Lonchampt in paragraph 3.3 of his ICCF6 paper (2). Therefore, in analyzing these source of errors, it is essential to distinguish the various regimes or phases which onset during the F&P open cell tests and the type of excess heat claimed in each of them.

The following jpeg should clarify the situation:

By putting together the (a) and (b) regimes identified by Lonchampt (for which the same relation is used, neglecting only one term for the first regime), the following 3 types of excess heat can be identified:

1) LXH - the Low-level eXcess Heat (about 1 W) that F&P claimed to occur during the entire run of their test until the cell temperature remains quite far from the boiling point. This LXH derives from the complicated mathematical model used by F&P to determine a single heat transfer coefficient k (see, for instance, equation [4] in (1)) which should take into account all heat losses at different temperatures and times. Consequently, this approach results in calibration problems due to neglecting or miscalculation of various possible side effects, such as partial recombination, droplet entrainment, etc., as has been pointed out by various authors long ago, for example Wilson (3), Morrison (4) and Shanahan (5);

2) HXH – the High-level eXcess Heat (hundreds of W) that F&P have claimed to happen when the cell is allowed to boil-off to dryness. This HXH derives from a totally different path than LXH. Mathematics is also different. In (1), the HXH math is applied in the "CALCULATION" section on page 16, in which the equations are different from those shown in the section in which F&P explained their "Method of Data Evaluation" used to calculate the LXH. However, in the HXH case the error is not in the equations, but in the input data, which are completely out of the reality. F&P assumed that half of the initial water (i.e. 2.5 moles = 45 cm3) vaporized in just 10 minutes (600 s), but in reality the water evaporated in a much longer period, lasting several hours. F&P supported their wrong assumption by showing in their videos the rapid decrease of the foam at the end of the boiling period of each cell, assuming that it was rapidly evaporating water (6). Even if not explicitly stated, F&P have hinted that this HXH was produced in all the 4 cells of the experiment described in (1);

3) HAD – Heat After Dead events have been claimed by F&P to have occurred many times, but it has been documented only for one cell in the experiment described in paper (1). More specifically, they claimed that it happened after the conclusion of the boil-off phase of Cell 2 because, as shown in Figure 8, the cell temperature remained at the boiling point for about 3 hours after the presumed opening of the circuit due to the complete dryness of the cell. It's not clear which error led to this wrong claim, but, as already shown (7), a useful hint comes from the observation that during the 3 hours of presumed HAD the electric circuit was not open at all, as indicated by the voltage, which remained above zero for all that period.

(*) It should be taken into account that the real FPE is considered to be associated with power densities greater than 1000 W/cm³, which have been claimed by F&P only in the 4 cell experiment, as said in the preface of the ICCF3 paper (1): "We present here one aspect of our recent research on the calorimetry of the Pd/D2O system which has been concerned with high rates of specific excess enthalpy generation (> 1kWcm^-3) at temperatures close to (or at) the boiling point of the electrolyte solution." This power density was calculated in 3700 W/cm³ on page 16, so it refers to the HXH only.

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(2) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LonchamptGreproducti.pdf

(3) http://newenergytimes.com/v2/l…AnalysisOfExperiments.pdf

(4) http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf

(5) http://coldfusioncommunity.net…4/SRNL-STI-2012-00678.pdf

(6) FP's experiments discussion

(7) FP's experiments discussion

Ascoli:

The critisism and misunderstandings of Wilson and Morrison were cleared in the 90's, and these two never continued their critisism afterwards.

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf

The Shanahan critisism where also answerred, but he claims some ghostly errors, and as you know, ghosts can neither be proven or disproven.

LXH - low excess heat: everything is relative, and LXH is Not low excess in itself, but compared to the end event it may be considered low.

Anyhow as Fleischmann explained, he did calculate and consider recombination and other possible artifacts.

Remember again that in the hundreds of cells over the years he never saw control cells with this behaviour, which they should If your explanation where true.

HXH : you claim to see water levels on some low quality pictures, which I do not. So you are entitled to your claims but not your " facts."

HAD - heat after death. Voltage as you refer to is not important, It's input power and energy that matters, which requires voltage And current. As seen from the graph the current goes to 0 when water is boiled off, which also means input energy goes to zero.

Heat after death must therefore have some cause to be explained at zero input electrical energy, like Continued LENR event.

Quote from oystla

The critisism and misunderstandings of Wilson and Morrison were cleared in the 90's, ...
The Shanahan critisism where also answerred, ...

The scope of my last jpeg was not to rehash the debates between the most famous critics of the field and the CF/LENR protagonists, it just was to make order in the subject of these controversies about the F&P claims on the excess heat.

It seems to me that you have no major objection on the proposed classification in 3 types.

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LXH - low excess heat: everything is relative, and LXH is Not low excess in itself, but compared to the end event it may be considered low.

I agree on this point. Even a real 20% excess heat would have been an epochal scientific discovery, and could have had also some practical uses. Of course, this also means that the claim of an inexistent 20% excess heat is an extraordinary mistake if made by world class scientists.

Anyway , from now on, let us agree that the acronym LXH and HXH stand for Lower-level eXcess Heat and Higher-level eXcess Heat with respect to the range of the XH claims made by F&P.

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Anyhow as Fleischmann explained, he did calculate and consider recombination and other possible artifacts.

Remember again that in the hundreds of cells over the years he never saw control cells with this behaviour, which they should If your explanation where true.

This is a good point. We must always remember how many hundreds of tests they ran over many years before the 1992 experiment, in order to understand the meaning of their work.

Anyway, since the 4 cell boil-off test provides the only public visual evidence of the behavior of their cells under testing, I would suggest to postpone the discussion on what F&P really saw in their early tests after a thorough examination of this 1992 boil off experiment.

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HXH : you claim to see water levels on some low quality pictures, which I do not. So you are entitled to your claims but not your " facts."

If you are referring to the explanatory "Four-cell boil-off" video (2), I too can't see the water level in correspondence of the blue arrows, because the pointed out cells are shown when there is only foam in there, so it's impossible to see any water level.

Btw, you haven't yet answered my previous question (1): what do you see in the cells, foam or liquid?

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HAD - heat after death. Voltage as you refer to is not important, It's input power and energy that matters, which requires voltage And current. As seen from the graph the current goes to 0 when water is boiled off, which also means input energy goes to zero.

I partially agree. No doubt the power depends from both voltage and current, but the current goes to zero only AFTER the boil-off and the video (2) show that the boil-off lasted until nearly the end of the presumed HAD period.

In fact the last arrow and the corresponding time (3:46) for Cell 2 - the sole cell for which a HAD event was reported - appears at 1m47s of the video time, nearly at the end of the relative video clip. The length of this video clip is represented by the wider vertical pink bar on the Figure 8 shown in a previous jpeg (3). You can see that this wider pink bar is in correspondence with the maximum of the temperature curve, almost at the end of the 3 hours period of which was highlighted the persistence at high temperature after the presumed drying-off of the cell. So, the video shows that the boil off happened at the end ot the 3 hours period reported by F&P as the HAD event. Therefore the current and the electric power were flowing until almost the end of that period. In conclusion, there was no HAD event at all.

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Heat after death must therefore have some cause to be explained at zero input electrical energy, like Continued LENR event.

Yes, I agree that it is really important to find out the cause of the F&P claim of this presumed HAD event, but I would leave an extraordinary phenomenon such as LENR as last hypothesis. There is a lot of much more mundane causes that can explain that claim, on the basis of what has been shown by F&P, and also on what has been hided.

(1) FP's experiments discussion

(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAIIZU6Oj8

(3) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from Ascoli65

Of course, this also means that the claim of an inexistent 20% excess heat is an extraordinary mistake if made by world class scientists.

This falls back on you... You are the one that claims that the best experts in the world did not have your limited understanding...

Do the inverse conclusion about your "scientific power" yourself...

Quote from Wyttenbach

You are the one that claims that the best experts in the world did not have your limited understanding...

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean, and I don't remember where I made that claim. Could you, please, explain and provide a reference?

Btw, let me ask you. What is your opinion on the "IMRA time lapse" video whose link was posted by Robert Horst (1)?

Is it liquid or foam that, for example, fills Cell 1 at 0:53 of the video (21:23:58 on the screen) and thereafter?

(1) FP's experiments discussion

The foam issue is not the only problem with the HXH (boil off) phase in the Fleischmann 1992 ICCF paper.

The Enthalpy Input calculation says:

"By electrolysis = (Ecell - 1.54) × Cell Current ~ 22,500J"

It should not be hard to measure power to an accuracy of 1 mW and to take samples every 1 mS. That means it should have been easy to measure input energy to an accuracy of 1 uJ. Why did they throw away 8 orders of magnitude and estimate input power to the nearest 100J? Did they round up or down? It is not even clear which of the 4 experiments they are talking about. Why do they not show calculations for all 4?

Similarly, they show boil off time as exactly 600 sec, not 599 or 601. But earlier in the paper, they say it was 11 minutes (660 sec). Why did they choose to round that down and make the excess power look higher instead of more conservative?

They do not show a graph of the critical 10 or 11 minutes of boil off that shows input current, voltage and temperature. They also do not show those details for the claimed 3 hours of HAD (heat after death).

I would expect a high school science project to be more careful than this.

The carelessness of the analysis for these phases does not give me much confidence about the way they analyzed LXH phase, but I did not attempt to study that part of the paper.

Is this really the best paper written to support excess heat with electrolysis? If not what is?

By the way, I do not consider myself either a skeptic or believer in CF, and do not even think it is appropriate to label people that way. We should all analyze the papers in the field and look for possible errors. It will not help the LENR field to promote the conclusions of papers with obvious flaws. I still hope that some avenues of LENR will succeed, but mostly I am still waiting for definitive papers and experiments.

Quote from Robert Horst

Is this really the best paper written to support excess heat with electrolysis? If not what is?

You could try contacting Michael Slaker in Loyola.

He seems meticulous and to have worked through the boilups etc thoroughly.

He probably even has the raw data from a few years back.

But it is not his salary paying job.. lecture/research in material science is.

'mstaker @ loyola.edu'

Quote from Robert Horst

The Enthalpy Input calculation says:

"By electrolysis = (Ecell - 1.54) × Cell Current ~ 22,500J"

It should not be hard to measure power to an accuracy of 1 mW and to take samples every 1 mS. That means it should have been easy to measure input energy to an accuracy of 1 uJ. Why did they throw away 8 orders of magnitude and estimate input power to the nearest 100J? Did they round up or down?

It is just a reasonable approximation, for goodness sake. They measured with far greater precision, but there is no point to writing "Cell Current ~22,438.6215. The extra digits of precision tell you nothing you do not already know.

Not only did they measure with great precision, they repeated the test hundreds of times.

Robert Horst:

The approximate Value of 22500 joules for input electrical energy means that the actual Value will be between 22451 and 22549 Joules.

And That means the accuracy of Fleischmann time integral of voltage and current will be within 0,22% of the real Value.

0,22% uncertainty is more than good enough since the excess heat is hundreds of percent.

And again: the excact copy performed by Lonchampt and colleauges around 1996 but with improved data logging, confirmed the F&P results.

http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LonchamptGreproducti.pdf

Quote from Robert Horst

The Enthalpy Input calculation says:

"By electrolysis = (Ecell - 1.54) × Cell Current ~ 22,500J"

It should not be hard to measure power to an accuracy of 1 mW and to take samples every 1 mS. That means it should have been easy to measure input energy to an accuracy of 1 uJ. Why did they throw away 8 orders of magnitude and estimate input power to the nearest 100J? Did they round up or down? It is not even clear which of the 4 experiments they are talking about. Why do they not show calculations for all 4?

Some weirdness here from you or them, since VXI gives power (W) not energy(J). I guess we are multiplying by some known time. But input energy accuracy will depend on the precision of Ecell and 1.54 so since they are subtracted will certainly be no better than 2 sig figures and likely a lot less. 22500 is fair enough given the precision of 1.57 on the other side.

Quote from Robert Horst

Why did they throw away 8 orders of magnitude and estimate input power to the nearest 100J? Did they round up or down?

The round up of the input energy was more than adequate, especially when compared to all the other sloppiness, unexplained input data and arbitrary assumptions contained in the calculation on page 16 of the F&P paper presented at ICCF3 in October 1992 (1). Consider that this page containes the most important result of that paper and in the whole CF history, that is the 3700 W/cm³ of specific enthalpy which is at the basis of the definition of FPE.

As already said by THH, the first line of that page is not even dimensionally correct. Well, the authors forgot to include the multiplication by time, it can happen, but the most incredible thing is that the same omission is reported at page 128 in the peer reviewed (sic) article published by Physical Letters A in May 1993 (2), many months after the ICCF3 paper!

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Similarly, they show boil off time as exactly 600 sec, not 599 or 601. But earlier in the paper, they say it was 11 minutes (660 sec). Why did they choose to round that down and make the excess power look higher instead of more conservative?

Yes, exactly. The calculation sheet reports an excess heat of 144.5 W (notice the decimal digit!), which derives from a 10% error, due to a not conservative round up in the choice of the boil off time.

But, even worse, the 11 minutes themselves didn't fit with the times written on the explanatory "Four-cell boil-off" video (3). Please, take a look at the table at the end of this previous comment (4), could you answer the beneath question?

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Is this really the best paper written to support excess heat with electrolysis?

Yes, it still is, at least for the most informed people of the CF/LENR field:

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(2) http://coldfusioncommunity.net…n-Pons-PLA-Simplicity.pdf

(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAIIZU6Oj8

(4) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from THHuxleynew

But input energy accuracy will depend on the precision of Ecell and 1.54

This constant is known to more than 2 decimal places. They listed it in this paper with 2 decimal because that is customary, just as pi is usually listed as 3.14. As I said before, additional precision would tell you nothing useful about the results. The effect is large so even at this level of precision there is no doubt the results are real.

Note that the number has a tilde in front of it, meaning "approximate." Why would anyone list an approximate number with extra digits of precision? It would still be approximate!

Fleischmann, like my late mother, used slide rules. They were used to 2-digit precision. Fleischmann would compute to 4 or even 5 digits when it served a purpose, but he and my mother both thought that younger people did not understand the meaning and purpose of precision, or the difference between precision and accuracy. They said the younger generation then growing up with calculators and computers (my generation) was obsessed with meaningless extra digits of precision. I agree, and the comments here reflect that.

My mother liked slide rules because she said "you should be able to keep a decimal place in memory." Meaning you should have a feel for numbers. She and others of that generation felt that if you can't see a result with 2-digit precision either you are doing something wrong or it may be an imaginary result. They felt that excessive precision detracts from results. It is a snare and delusion. In the 1970s a 60-something biologist I worked with was amused at a lab report listing rat body temperatures to 4 digits, measured with the newly invented electronic thermometer. He asked me "what's the matter with this picture?" I said let the rat sigh or move and the last 3 digits will change randomly. Correct!

Along similar lines, many crackpot opponents of cold fusion present highly detailed theories without first establishing whether the theories have any basis in reality -- which they do not. An impossible answer that violates the laws of thermodynamics is not improved by calculating it to 4 extra digits, or by writing 50 extra pages of idiotic blather. One paragraph -- heck, one assertion -- is all you need to see that Shanahan and Morrison are crackpots. Fleischmann showed that Morrison was wrong with "a discrepancy of a factor of ~1700." It would not be more persuasive if he said the factor is ~1692.3076. (1.1 MJ/650 J) The tilde makes that assertion ridiculous.

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf

Looks like it was a premeditated and postmeditated boiloff.

Fleischmann wrote

"The boil-off video can be seen here:

Quote from JedRothwell

Along similar lines, many crackpot opponents of cold fusion present highly detailed theories without first establishing whether the theories have any basis in reality -- which they do not. An impossible answer that violates the laws of thermodynamics is not improved by calculating it to 4 extra digits, or by writing 50 extra pages of idiotic blather. One paragraph -- heck, one assertion -- is all you need to see that Shanahan and Morrison are crackpots. Fleischmann showed that Morrison was wrong with "a discrepancy of a factor of ~1700." It would not be more persuasive if he said the factor is ~1692.3076. (1.1 MJ/650 J) The tilde makes that assertion ridiculous.

Being the expansion coefficient of water at atmospheric boiling condition equal to 1672, "a discrepancy of a factor of ~1700" adequately represents the error due to the misrepresentation of a settling-down and vanishing layer of foam as it were liquid water, which was evaporating at an incredibly high rate of vaporization, thanks to an alleged and extraordinary nuclear phenomenon.

The ridicule is not in a tilde, but in a tide of foam.