Test of Abnormal Heat in Hydrogen Loaded Metal - Zhang Hang

Hi all

Yet another replication of the Lugano reactor.

Kind Regards walke

Isnt that big news? How come nobody seems to care?

Maybe no one cares because the COP is only 1.14 and Rossi has already moved on to the E-Cat Quark X which produces electricity and light directly. Who cares about heat when you got electricity.

Or no-one cares (much) because they are looking for stronger evidence than we have so far. This result is another interesting one, but basically a one-off (at least for now). I will get excited when we have a solidly replicable (and actually replicated) way of demonstrating that there are nuclear reactions going on here.

IMO, the behavior of the innermost thermocouple compared to the outer thermocouple is consistent with a normal concentric tube-like insulated device at thermal equilibrium. The outer area is radiating heat faster than the inside, and a larger amount of material must heated on the outside, which slows the time required to reach thermal equilibrium. The inside has heat admitted radially from a larger circumference, which concentrates the peak temperature gradient towards the inside. The outer section has a much larger surface area than the inside from which to lose heat to the environment. (The thermal mass of the insulation might possibly be equivalent of that of the metal inside, due to it's much greater volume).
The inside T was just beginning to overtake the outer T at the top of the first heating ramp, and would have been more obvious if the T at both thermocouples had been allowed to come to equilibrium (flat line). The strongest "excess" only shows up at the flat portion at the tail of the heating curve, and additionally at temperatures where radiant heat transfer overtakes conduction as the primary mover of heat. The temperature where radiant heat transfer overtakes the conductive transfer is raised considerably (compared to open air heater wires) due to direct cementing of the heater coils to the ceramic vessel. Mulite also has decreasing thermal conductivity with increasing temperature, which can actually lead to thermal runaway in extreme cases, as heat accumulates inside, but cannot escape as quickly as it accumulates.

A hotter inside compared to outside occurs in every MFMP test, and all other similar tests I have seen, and is not at all unusual.
I don't think anything out of the ordinary is happening in this test.
I believe that the same mass of steel or iron shavings from a lathe could be substituted for the LAH-Ni fuel, and identical results obtained if the same heating profile is used.

The author did manage to stay within the destructive limits of the thermocouples, so I hope Jiang teams up with him and re-does his version with the experience gained here, so that the Jiang experiment problems can be mitigated and we can see what was actually going on with his experiments more clearly.

Quote from AlainCo

I don't see reference to the Thermocouple model (K? S?)

I have not yet read the report, but an important detail is whether a K-type thermocouple was exposed to hydrogen, as you have pointed out in the past. Hydrogen in combination with elevated temperatures can lead to subtle degradation of K-type thermocouples.

Once again an awesome setup but a very poor experimental protocol and the conclusion is a pure guess work.
They simply assume that the reaction vessel temperature should remain lower than the heater's, there is no actual calibration test to verify it.
This time the maximum temperatures are within K-type TC's range, so that's an improvement from previous ones.

Some ECAT replication efforts yield COPs >1 but most do not. For example: Parkhomov is having difficulty replicating his results because he is using a different Ni powder. I have run several ECAT-like experiments, all yielding null results, and suspect other replicators have had similar experiences. All these experiments use similar active ingredients: Ni, LiAlH4, H2 gas, and yet there is a troubling lack of repeatability. So some key parameter is missing. I suspect the lack of reproducability can be traced to pre-treatment of the Ni and a lack of understanding regarding exactly what the pre-treatment process is doing. Zhang-Hang states the Ni in his experiment was pre-treated. Is any way to find out details of his pre-treatment protocol?

To make real progress in LENR and convert it to a physics and engineering discipline it will be necessary to develop a workable theory that bridges the gap between QM interactions among a few particles and scale those QM methods to comprehend structures consisting of hundreds to thousands of atoms. Software tools of this type exist, although they may not have the proper QM approximations for non-stationary potentials or a treatment of the uncertainty relationship that takes into account correlation between operators.

Quote

All these experiments use similar active ingredients: Ni, LiAlH4, H2 gas, and yet there is a troubling lack of repeatability. So some key parameter is missing. I suspect the lack of reproducability can be traced to pre-treatment of the Ni and a lack of understanding regarding exactly what the pre-treatment process is doing.

While of course, should some LENR reaction actually exist, lack of repeatability could in principle be caused by many things, there is a more obvious reason.

Form the experiments which have been done (carefully) we know how easy it is to obtain apparent positive results from some artifact. That is why science requires a result to be repeatable (however good it is) before declaring new Physics. The few positives could just be artifacts.

Before anyone mentions Higgs bosons yet again let me point out:
(1) that was the most boring result of the century: widely expected. In fact no Higgs boson would have been more interesting! So this is not an extraordinary result.
(2) The particle was detected in two completely different experiments using different decay modes. The two different groups were not allowed to compare notes (even informally) as to what was the energy they found. The energies matched.

That (energies matching on different decay modes) is the type of internal validation that really helps make new results plausible. "Excess energy" has no such validation: any positive artifact will be a sighting. Radiation is much better simply because it is easily detected, can be detected by multiple instruments, and artifacts are less common, even though it is similarly non-predictive.

Quote from jeff

All these experiments use similar active ingredients: Ni, LiAlH4, H2 gas, and yet there is a troubling lack of repeatability.

I'm guessing the missing ingredient is a radioisotope, e.g., an alpha or beta emitter. Tungsten, potassium, or even thorium, seem worthwhile to test. I would start out with the assumption that electricity must be run through them, and that they should be exposed to the hydrogen (i.e., not be on the outside of the device, simply heating it).

The missing element is experience. I have yet to see anyone replicate themselves successfully, even with the null protocol.

@AlainCo
I was mostly referring to the more recent hot tube type of experiments.
There are certainly some some good examples of work in the field as well.

At risk of wandering off topic, I understand the desire by experimenters to get to the successful end result as quickly as possible.
But until even a null version of the experiment can be successfully replicated a few times, the system may not be very well understood in basic terms.
The variability in non-LENR situations in a particular device design might not be well characterized, and things that may appear to be excess heat or other successful result parameters can be hastily ascribed to a particular experiment, and then is later found to be something else. Many of these false positives can be prevented by simply doing a null system enough times to get a good handle on the experiment. Most people skip this step. Then the results are spread around, and are soon "debunked", which does not help the field at all, and worse, gives the field a bad reputation for sloppy work. Which in many cases is not undeserved, especially if easily preventable.