MFMP: GS 5.3 - getting excess heat?

@me356
What you are describing doesn't sound like RFI. It sounds more like conducted interference on the AC power line. Switching the AC power line is a very nasty source of interference if power line filters are not present. Without filters, this chopped AC interference can get into everything. That is why I have recommended use of a variac or DC power supply (which I use) to drive the heater. Since Alan's AC chopping was on the secondary side of an isolation transformer, the transformer itself filtered out a lot of that potential interference.

@axil
The RFI that Defkalion found was clearly due to their high power capacitive discharge sparking provided to their reactor. Those repetitive impulses going to the reactor created huge broadband RF noise. It is not the same case here, and I suspect what ME356 is describing is not radiated, but conducted noise. The Defkalion impulses were fast enough that the lead wires could become effective radiators for broadband emission out to 100 MHz. With ME356's AC chopping, I suspect the harmonics are less than 1 MHz and the connecting wires carrying that current are short enough compared to a wavelength that little RFI power is radiated. Since he is still seeing ubiquitous interference, I suspect conducted interference through the power lines.

BobHiggins: No, my measurement equipment is also battery powered - no difference when it is powered from mains. Also control circuit for the heater is running always on a different phase then everything else. I have made many, many tests to exclude something like this.

Quote from BobHiggins

@me356
What you are describing doesn't sound like RFI. It sounds more like conducted interference on the AC power line. Switching the AC power line is a very nasty source of interference if power line filters are not present. Without filters, this chopped AC interference can get into everything. That is why I have recommended use of a variac or DC power supply (which I use) to drive the heater. Since Alan's AC chopping was on the secondary side of an isolation transformer, the transformer itself filtered out a lot of that potential interference.

@axil
The RFI that Defkalion found was clearly due to their high power capacitive discharge sparking provided to their reactor. Those repetitive impulses going to the reactor created huge broadband RF noise. It is not the same case here, and I suspect what ME356 is describing is not radiated, but conducted noise. The Defkalion impulses were fast enough that the lead wires could become effective radiators for broadband emission out to 100 MHz. With ME356's AC chopping, I suspect the harmonics are less than 1 MHz and the connecting wires carrying that current are short enough compared to a wavelength that little RFI power is radiated. Since he is still seeing ubiquitous interference, I suspect conducted interference through the power lines.

From the ICCF-18 document from defkalion.

Quote

After each triggering duty cycle (the triggering sequences producing excess heat), the magnetic fields at ~18 cm from the reactor at all three locations rose from ~0.6 Tesla to ~1.6 Tesla (DC peak) during each reaction period. Such anomalous peak signals were maintained for approximately 3-4 sec after the HV currents were cut off. This indicates that interactions/reactions within the reactor are producing very strong electric fields E (and currents I plus nanoplasma) between the Ni grain nano-antennas, as suggested by Ostrikov et al. [26], and very strong magnetic fields B, possibly enhanced by gallery whisper effects due to reactor’s internal structure and geometry. Such strong magnetic fields are used within Hyperion reactor’s architecture to stabilize the plasma generated by the HV discharges in nonvacuum conditions. A new series of protocols and tests is expected to investigate the possible role of metal surface plasmons on the active Ni crystals lattice, as described by Durach et al. [27], for such “anomalous” magnetic field emissions and their role in the reactions, as predicted in section 7.

What data did you use to conclude that the spark produced the RF or does it just go to figure being a conclusion that serves as an educated guess.

The spark discharge stimulus was applied intermittently. The magnetic field was constant though it varied from .6 tesla to 1.6 tesla. If the RF field was produced by this magnetic field, it should have also would be relatively constant. If the RF was produced by the spark, the RF would terminate when the spark was shut-off.

@axil
The nature of RFI is that every exposed semiconductor junction in an instrument has the potential to produce a rectified quasi-DC offset related to the RFI envelope (like a crystal radio). The noted manifestations of RFI include circuits having DC offsets that will generally mirror a slow envelope of the RFI, but the when the RFI is off, the time constants in the circuits apply. So an RFI could cause a DC offset reading in a magnetometer, and the reading could take seconds or minutes to reach the original quiescent point after the RFI ceases depending on the time constants in the affected areas of the instrument's circuit.

They should have used a simple needle compass to confirm, which is not subject to RFI. It would be wonderful to discover high magnetic fields caused by LENR, but there is too little evidence of sound measure from Defkalion to get excited about it.

@me356
Well, it sounds then like it is an affect worth documenting. Let's open it to scrutiny.

Quote from BobHiggins

@axil
The nature of RFI is that every exposed semiconductor junction in an instrument has the potential to produce a rectified quasi-DC offset related to the RFI envelope (like a crystal radio). The noted manifestations of RFI include circuits having DC offsets that will generally mirror a slow envelope of the RFI, but the when the RFI is off, the time constants in the circuits apply. So an RFI could cause a DC offset reading in a magnetometer, and the reading could take seconds or minutes to reach the original quiescent point after the RFI ceases depending on the time constants in the affected areas of the instrument's circuit.

They should have used a simple needle compass to confirm, which is not subject to RFI. It would be wonderful to discover high magnetic fields caused by LENR, but there is too little evidence of sound measure from Defkalion to get excited about it.

What does not make sense to me, the magnetic power goes up after the spark power is terminated. This is not a latent effect, there is a magnetic source of RF power that remains long after the source of EMF is removed.

On the same old school LENR experimental level as Storms, Pons, and Fleischmann, any data that is gathered by Dr. Kim we can take to the bank and is golden.

What is MFMP doing experimentally to check for magnetic activity when the input power is removed. If not, why not.

While looking at longer term data I think I found an interesting correlation. Can you see it too?

The Blue line shows total counts/s from the X-ray spectra saved every 20 minutes by the Tracor Northern 7200 Multi-channel analyzer (hopefully I got the name correct). Red line is absolute H2 pressure.

It looks as if there is a very slight increase (30% at most) in counts when pressure is bled off/decreased and generally when it's on the low side. Upon closer inspection it appears that generally speaking this occurs to a larger extent when pressure is decreased when temperatures are elevated. See this graph (click to enlarge):

The TN7200 MCA and the Amptek CdTe probe seem to somewhat agree each other on longer term pressure changes but don't quite see the same signal. The UCS-30 spectrometer on the other hand doesn't seem to be showing anything related to pressure or power changes.

There is a general issue with all the claims for unusual experimental results correlated to "high-frequency RF stimulus".

As Bob has eloquently pointed out high power RFI will affect almost every signal processing component and sensor. Even metallic junctions can have some rectifying behaviour (though much less than semiconductors). Sense amplifiers of any description will rectify - if not directly from signal paths, then indirectly due to bias changes from rectified noise on supplies. The list of possible affects is endless.

Anyone working with this stuff (and I for one have) knows what to do and how to ensure that anything electronic you actually want to work correctly is sealed in a grounded metal box with careful filtered feed-throughs for all signal and supply connections into the box. This works. But it is difficult to achieve and attention must be given to stopping leaks. Just one unfiltered or incorrectly earthed connector can be an issue.

So when I see these claims from Brillouin or others, without an explicit description of the very careful testing and control they would need to ensure they had eliminated all the RFI issues I cannot draw any conclusions from the data.

What is the cause of the high-pressure events? Are they manually triggered?

All the ones above 8 psi(A) have been manually triggered with externally supplied hydrogen, as far as I recall.

@axil
Certainly including measure of the magnetic field (a quasi-DC effect) is worth acquiring in an experiment. I also want to measure the RF spectrum and have a spectrum analyzer being prepared for measuring that data. We should put some compasses in the view of the webcam monitoring the experiment. But, these would only be a little useful because a small amount of DC in the chopped AC waveform would stimulate a magnetic field from the heater coil as a solenoid.

RF measurements will be hard to justify as emissions from the reaction if the stimulus includes broadband excitation like is used by many experimenters in the triac/SCR/IGBT switching of their heater power. If any sense is to be made of the RF emissions, the heater power source is going to have to be "quieter". That is why I have been recommending use of DC drive for the heater or AC drive with a variac controlling the heater power so as to limit the bandwidth of the heater drive. Further, I wind my heater coils as a double helix with the wires coming out of only one end to cancel most of the magnetic field produced in the heater coil.

Yes they are manually triggered, both loading and unloading.

Are the loading and unloading events part of a protocol, or are they carried out between protocol, when there's time to fiddle with things?

@Eric Walker: they haven't been part of a protocol and have been more or or less been carried out as random tests (for example upon user request) to verify the behavior of the cell under different conditions.

Quote from BobHiggins

If any sense is to be made of the RF emissions, the heater power source is going to have to be "quieter". That is why I have been recommending use of DC drive for the heater or AC drive with a variac controlling the heater power so as to limit the bandwidth of the heater drive.

During the magnetic detection part of the test run, is it possible to run a periodic power application cycle where the power is turned on to get the reactor up to the desired operational temperature/pressure and then turned off to provide a quiet state where only the inside of the reactor core could possibly be producing radiation? This power application method is similar to the way power application was used in the first Rossi third party test and the periodic spark based power application method that Defkalion used in their tests.

@Eric The pressure events were scripted following Ecco and Webbie's requests, and manually executed. We alternately bled/pumped out the cell and added H2 from a bottle. In all cases, the power was supplied by a Variac, so RF EMI was not an issue.

Quote from magicsound

@Eric The pressure events were scripted following Ecco and Webbie's requests, and manually executed. We alternately bled/pumped out the cell and added H2 from a bottle. In all cases, the power was supplied by a Variac, so RF EMI was not an issue.

If you still have the reactor intact can you do a test with a series of pressure changes to see if the counts behavior can be reproduced?
If not, a dummy reactor should be used as a cross check.

We're currently running a test to evaluate the sensitivity of the UCS30 NaI detector to EMF. We have a spark plug set in front of the detector, with continuous spark drive from a Ford Model T ignition box. You can see the test live at http://magicsound.us/MFMP/video/. It will run until around midnight 2 May (UTC).

We measured the RF field with the Narda detector at 0.2 mW/Cm2, about an order of magnitude higher than background. So far, there's no indication of sensitivity to this stimulus in the gamma spectrometer.

We're following a hint from me356 here, using 100 year old technology!

I trust you are accounting for the phase angle between the voltage and current, but to address the potential critics (I assume the load is somewhat inductive), you may want to add a rectifier bridge and large capacitors to turn the variac output into DC. With this other 19th century technology, there would be no question of an AC-DC converter adding high frequency hash.

In another vein.... GO TEAM GO!, and thanks for your perseverance.