FP's experiments discussion

Quote

They were quite certain of the results, and indeed these results were soon replicated by over 100 laboratories worldwide. They were experts in calorimetry.

F&P's open cell results were subject to the artifacts that you well know, which is why replication led to most of the claimed excess disappearing, with results inside the (much lower) margin of error.

100 labs worldwide did not find any evidence of inexplicable heat or reaction at the time would have been different.

I think, as early UFO enthusiasts, you confuse "unexplained" - a fact of life given limited resources to tighten experiments - with "inexplicable except by aliens/supernatural stuff/LENR".

Mr. Thomas Clark, you might just read my entire post, including the last sentence. Your perception of "LENRitis" is overshadowed by your own "Pathoskeptitis". Really, do you think you are the only intelligent person on this blog? Why don't you treat everyone with somewhat less of an intellectually superior bias. Thank you.

In reply to Jed R.:

No, F&P drew down the ire of the scientific world because they claimed to have found a way to "infinite energy", but no one could reproduce it except by random chance. When the attempted replicators tried to get more info to do a better job at their replication, they were stonewalled with 'proprietary information' claims. People got hacked off at them over that and many over-reacted, true, but you're not supposed to publish unless you're certain what you report is easily replicated by those 'skilled in the art', especially 'publication by the press'.

For the record, I believ they found a real effect, it just has nothing to do with nuclear reactions.

Thomas Clarke wrote: "F&P's open cell results were subject to the artifacts that you well know, which is why replication led to most of the claimed excess disappearing . . ."

That is incorrect. There are no examples of that in the peer-reviewed published literature as far as I know. Which papers do you have in mind? What artifacts? An open cell would only cause a problem if recombination were not measured or accounted for. It was measured carefully, and in any case, the excess heat greatly exceeded limits of recombination in many tests.

"100 labs worldwide did not find any evidence of inexplicable heat or reaction at the time would have been different."

92 labs replicated by September 1990. F. W. Will, the director of the National Cold Fusion Institute compiled a list, which is here:

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

180 labs replicated by the mid-1990s. See the list in Storms' first book.

"Thomas Clarke wrote: "F&P's open cell results were subject to the artifacts that you well know, which is why replication led to most of the claimed excess disappearing . . .""

Actually Thomas I don't think hardly anyone ever retracted claims except for a couple of cases. I recall researchers at Georgia Tech did so. Can't recall the others....

Jed Replied:
"That is incorrect. There are no examples of that in the peer-reviewed published literature as far as I know. Which papers do you have in mind? What artifacts? An open cell would only cause a problem if recombination were not measured or accounted for. It was measured carefully, and in any case, the excess heat greatly exceeded limits of recombination in many tests."

"A Systematic Error in Mass Flow Calorimetry Demonstrated", K.L. Shanahan, Thermochimica Acta 387 (2002) 95 - shows an error in Edmund Storms Pt CF work

Comments on "Thermal behavior of polarized Pd/D electrodes prepared by co-deposition", Kirk L. Shanahan, Thermochimica Acta, 428(1-2), (2005), 207 - shows the claims by Szpack and Fleishmann are unsupportable

Reply to "Comments on papers by K. Shanahan that propose to explainanomalous heat generated by cold fusion", E. Storms, Thermochim. Acta,2006", Kirk L. Shanahan, Thermochimica Acta, 441 (2006) 210 - shows the flaws in the arguments by Storms used to ignore prior comments

Comments on “A new look at low-energy nuclear reaction research”, Kirk L. Shanahan, J. of Environ. Monitoring, 12, (2010), 1756-1764 - shows several errors on the part of cold fusioneers

non-peer reviewed - SRNL-STI-2012-00678, "A Realistic Examination of Cold Fusion Claims 24 Years Later
A whitepaper on conventional explanations for‘cold fusion’", Kirk L. Shanahan, Oct. 22, 2012

and lets not forget the papers by W. Brian Clarke (peer reviewed) showing SRI messed up their He analyses....

I notice Kirk Shanahan has listed his CF critique papers in a post on this thread (A software programmer for Westinghouse Savannah River Company).

And in his critisism,

- Shanahan chooses to ignore the preponderance of reliable scientific evidence for nuclear effects in LENR that has accumulated since 1989.

- Shanahan applies highly selective criteria to cherry-pick certain experimental data with potential deficiencies which are vulnerable to attack. He uses these as distractions to cast doubt on the entire large body of credible LENR data that lies outside the very limited subset on which he focuses his narrow lens.

Anyhow, scientists in LENR community has answerred his critique, proven his mistakes and his misunderstandings. This paper was issued in 2010. Part of conclusion:

"Indeed, peer-reviewed published papers and conference presentations have long disproved Shanahan’s chemical/mechanical suppositions regarding LENR observations. Furthermore, contrary to Shanahan’s assertions, the observed effects are often several orders of magnitude larger than the measurement errors. For example, in a variety of2experiments, the solid-state nuclear track detector background was less than1track/mm whereas the signal exceeded 10,000 tracks/mm2!

"Excess heat production in Szpak and Mosier-Boss’ electrolytic Pd/D co-deposition system was first measured by Miles and then replicated by Letts. Kitimura and Ahern have both replicated excess heat from Arata and Zhang’s gas-loaded Pd/ZrO2 nanostructures."

Ref.
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/71632

Eric, This is what he says of himself at physics stackexchange:

"I am a PhD physical chemist (U. Cal-Berkeley, 1984) currently working for the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, SC. Since 1995, I have and currently work in a group supporting our hydrogen isotope separation and purification process in the Tritium Facility of the SRS. SRNL is a DOE-lab and part of the Savannah River Site (SRS), which is a DOE-owned, contractor-operated facility built over 50 years ago as a major part of the nuclear weapons complex. In the past we made plutonium and tritium. As such I work for a contractor company but my salary is traceable to the US DOE.

Prior work/school experience includes dynamic chemical process modeling, with a brief spin-off into industrial engineering modeling, with a brief spin-off into industrial engineering modeling, analytical laboratory quality control method support (i.e. fixing broken analytical methods - lots of applied statistics), polymer chemistry (esp. DACRON), titanium dioxide chemistry, surface chemistry (school), explosives chemistry, 1H-NMR (undergrad), inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (school)."

For the sake of future interest, here is the link to the SE profile quoted above: http://physics.stackexchange.com/users/15735/kirk-shanahan.

It seems likely, but do we know that this is the same Kirk Shanahan who wrote the critiques? Also, do we know he's a software developer, in contrast to someone who just knows how to develop software and has an SE profile? His profile suggests he's a research scientist.

Oystia wrote a lot of wrong stuff that needs correcting…. I will preface his/her comments with “O:”

O:” I notice Kirk Shanahan has listed his CF critique papers in a post on this thread (A software programmer for Westinghouse Savannah River Company).”

No…but in my 32 year professional career I have done quite a bit of coding, both in the arena of dynamic chemical process modeling (think SPEEDUP and Aspen Custom Modeler) and statistical process/quality control (I automated a control charting process for analytical laboratories)…so I expect that’s why someone decided I *must* be a programmer…ROFL. (Hint: Try using Google Scholar.)

WSRC was a consortium that formed to manage what is now known as the Savannah River Site (SRS) in 1989 after DuPont left. That consortium has been replaced two or three times over. I currently am managed by a consortium called “Savannah River Nuclear Solutions”, which can easily change each time DOE rebids the management contract. The SRS is one of two sites that used to make plutonium, enriched uranium, and tritium for the US nuclear weapons program. I actually work in the Savannah River National Laboratory in a group that supports the tritium process. I am a PhD physical chemist, currently the senior chemist that deals with metal hydride materials (like Pd). I’ve been doing that since 1995, which is when I also started looking into CF. I also had 3 years experience at Sandia National Laboratory in the groups that dealt with explosives, so I know a little about that too, which is relevant to the CR-39 issue.

O:”And in his critisism, - Shanahan chooses to ignore the preponderance of reliable scientific evidence for nuclear effects in LENR that has accumulated since 1989.”

You might want to try to prove that instead of just shooting off what others in the field have told you. If fact I seriously doubt anyone on this blog has read more than I have. And I folded all of that into my analyses and critiques…

O:”- Shanahan applies highly selective criteria to cherry-pick certain experimental data with potential deficiencies which are vulnerable to attack. He uses these as distractions to cast doubt on the entire large body of credible LENR data that lies outside the very limited subset on which he focuses his narrow lens.”

No, I fold _*all*_ of the available data into my analyses. Of course it’s difficult to write comments to every single cold fusion paper ever written, so I settled for responding to some select ones, that’s true. Particularly ones that (a) had actual real world data available (likes Storms’ ICCF9 (or was it ICCF8 ) paper, (b) papers that claim to present an overview of the field (like Marwan and Krivit’s), or (c) denigrate my work in the literature (like the Szpak, Fleischmann, et al 2004 paper or the Storms 2006 one.

O: “Anyhow, scientists in LENR community has answerred his critique, proven his mistakes and his misunderstandings. This paper was issued in 2010. “

Really? You think so? Did you actually read my papers and their response? I think the answer to that is “No” or you would realize what a fiasco Hagelstein, McKubre, Storms, et al made.

O:”Part of conclusion:"Indeed, peer-reviewed published papers and conference presentations have long disproved Shanahan’s chemical/mechanical suppositions regarding LENR observations. Furthermore, contrary to Shanahan’s assertions, the observed effects are often several orders of magnitude larger than the measurement errors. For example, in a variety of2experiments, the solid-state nuclear track detector background was less than1track/mm whereas the signal exceeded 10,000 tracks/mm2!”

Oh, so many errors, all in one place….

No one has disproved my thesis on why apparent excess heat signals are artifacts of the data analysis process. Cite one you think does and I’ll either point you to where I addressed that before or do a quick analysis of it now. CFers do however refuse to understand my simple thesis and thus continue to this day to repeat the mistake that can be tracked all the way back to F&P. (This is explicitly for F&P electrolysis cells folks, but the ideas brought out in the study can lead to directed questions in the other types of CF experiments that also go unanswered.)

CFers also routinely claim their measurement error is equivalent to the baseline noise level of their calorimeters (c. 40 mW). This is just one component of the measurement error and it is probably the least important one. The real error is delineated by the Calibration Constant Shift (CCS) idea, and is normally equivalent to the size of the supposed excess heat signal.

Of course CR-39 tracks are not milliwatts, so we’ve switched gears here, another typical CFer tactic. The plates that show those levels of tracks were placed in the electrolyte during runs. Plates placed outside the cell show much lower counts. When you look at those plates, you also have to start looking into the way the experiments are run and the literature comments (from CFers) about how easy it is to get lots of tracks from nothing…well, not nothing, but not charged particles like Szpak, et al claim.

At the 10k+ counts level, there is a side effect of the chemical mechanism I proposed in 2002 that can produce all of those tracks without nuclear particles being there at all…you ought to read and understand my papers.

O:"Excess heat production in Szpak and Mosier-Boss’ electrolytic Pd/D co-deposition system was first measured by Miles and then replicated by Letts.”

As I said in my earlier post, there is a real effect at work in F&P cells, but it is not nuclear. But it *does* produce artefactual excess heat signals. So anyone doing F&P-type experiments has a good chance to see this real phenomenon. The problem they have is they keep trying to control this putative nuclear reaction that isn’t there instead of the chemical/physical conditions that would theoretically give the effect. So many times, their control does nothing, but sometimes it appears to do something by coincidence.

O:“Kitimura and Ahern have both replicated excess heat from Arata and Zhang’s gas-loaded Pd/ZrO2 nanostructures."

Again, there is real chemistry going on here. I actually wrote a comment on Kitimura’s work showing why it was unlikely that he got what he claimed, and instead got ‘standard’ hydride chemistry, and submitted it to Phys. Letters (PL). It went through the review process, and I got the comments back plus the Kitimura response. However, the reviewer recommended not publishing it because it wasn’t a fit subject for PL and I didn’t have any real data anyway. *But* the subject had already been opened by the first publication *and* while I didn’t need new data to comment on a paper, I actually *did* show a Pd-H isotherm from nanoparticulate Pd on alumina that illustrated spillover.

But, I said OK, and redid the comment, deleting the data, and resubmitted. I never got an official response from PL, just some words from the editor that he didn’t want to continue the debate in his journal. I protested that too, to no avail. (SRNL-SRI-2009-00616, Comments on “Anomalous effects in charging of Pd Powders with high density hydrogen isotopes”, Kirk L. Shanahan, October, 2009 – check OSTI)

After that and the experience with the 2010 publication, I gave up on trying to publish in the scientific literature. Just takes too much time for too little return.

Oh yes…the fiasco. If you had read my 4 journal publications, you would have noted that I clearly label the artifact-causing effect I have mentioned as “non-random” and “systematic”. Yet the 10 authors of the 2010 paper you reference go to great lengths to disprove the “random” Shanahan CCS(H). Look it up on Wikipedia, that’s known as a ‘strawman’ argumentative tactic, and is a known fallacious logic technique. You can’t prove a point with a fallacious technique, but they certainly try to pass it off as if they did (which is also part of the ‘strawman’ approach). Now, these authors are: J. Marwan, M. C. H. McKubre F. L. Tanzella P. L. Hagelstein, M. H. Miles, M. R. Swartz, Edmund Storms, Y. Iwamura, P. A. Mosier-Boss, and L. P. G. Forsley. And they had to resort to wrong logic to attempt to rebut my comments! Sad state of affairs isn’t it.

Once I saw this, I asked the editor of J. Env. Monitoring if I could write a reply, but he said no. I then asked him if not, wasn’t he going to make these authors correct their clear mistake, but he again said no. So I was again left with no recourse but to get the word out myself. Meanwhile, they all have crowed extensively about how they have ‘answered’ all my criticisms. I think not…

So no, oystia, no one has ever adequately addressed my comments. That’s primarily because my comments are right and the CFers can't imagine anything but a nuclear reaction.

(So Eric, do you think I am the same guy?)

Quote from kirkshanahan

(So Eric, do you think I am the same guy?)

Thank you for the clarification.

Some indication of the "Scientific" level of CF critique;

"To explain the excess heat in these experiments, Shanahan invokes what he calls a Calibration Constant Shift (CCS). This CCS is nothing more than a hypothesis and should be stated as such (CCSH). There is no experimental evidence that it occurs, especially at the level of ±780 mW stated by Shanahan. Furthermore, Shanahan does not specify mechanisms by which a calorimeter thermal

calibration can change in such a way that, just during the periods of putative excess thermal power production, the calibration constant is different from its initial and final calibrated value. He employs the calibration constant shift hypothesis (CCSH), unquantified, with the logic that if this can happen in one experiment or calorimeter type, then it must be presumed to happen in all. To dispel this notion, the excess heat results obtained using two completely different types of calorimeters will be discussed.

The excess power measurements done at China Lake used an isoperibolic-type calorimeter. Periodic calibrations over a five-year period showed no significant changes in the heat transfer coefficients for the China Lake calorimeters.5 In addition, the isoperibolic calorimeters used by Miles at the New Hydrogen Energy Laboratory (NHE) in Japan incorporated an automated Joule heat pulse. The calorimeter was calibrated at least once every second day. From this, the coefficients of thermal calibration are deduced by backwards integration fitting of the calorimeter response to this known input thermal power pulse. Calibrations were performed before, after and during the production of excess thermal power. The excess power measurements5 were summarized by the following six conclusions:

The excess power effect was typically 5 to 10% larger than the input power. The largest excess power effect was 30%

The excess power in terms of the palladium volume was typically 1 to 5 W/cm3

Long electrolysis times ranging from 6 to 14 days were required before the onset of the excess power for Pd rod cathodes

Excess power production required a threshold current density of 100 mA/cm2 or higher

Overall, only 30% of the experiments produced excess power

The success ratio in obtaining excess power varied greatly with the source of the Palladium

It would be nearly impossible to obtain these conclusions if the excess power was due to Shanahan’s random CCSH. Furthermore, SRI obtained very similar conclusions using a totally different type of calorimeter over this same time period ..."

I do not see why such individuals are not banned from lenr-forum. It should be obvious how unpleasant people can be toxic to any community. Does not matter whether the forum aspires to some egalitarian idea of avoiding an echo chamber, because their blatant attempts at FUD are beside the point.

I pretty much never visit this site because every time I do I constantly run across these same couple people's negative commentary. Just not worth it when I can read the news on sites where the moderation team actually moderates such behavior.

I fully agree. Thomas and some others are obviously trolls. I am perfectly sure that they are wrong in some areas. But they are trying to convince about opposite. For me presence of such individuals is very unpleasant. My visitation here is very limited because of this. Community here was much better some time ago.

@ilia,

Where is the end? Do we ban individuals who post threads about impossible scientific clarifications too? Because nearly every scientist don't visit website's that have so much “speculative physics”. And what about “bad” chemistry and childish technical solutions?

I don't mind the posts of Mary Yugo, Thomas Clarke and Tyy. Mostly I don't read their posts and when I read one, I cannot help to smile (I like Tyy the most because he posts mostly not more than 1 or 2 sentences). The cause of your aversion against those posts are the individuals who don't stop to post replies to the posts of Mary Yugo, Thomas Clarke and Tyy. So it goes on and on… Do you want to ban them too?

Thomas and some others are obviously pooping this site with the ambition to have the last answer on every subject. I am perfectly sure that they are wrong in some areas. But they are trying to convince about opposite. For me presence of such individuals is very unpleasant. My visitation here is decreasing because of this. Community here was much better some time ago.