Clays - possible environments for COLD FUSION.

    Thanks very much for that, Alan.


    I particularly liked this piece on the opening page. :)


    Quote

    I chose Science in the Green as a title to emphasise that these ideas are considered new, alternative, and largely unproven. They are therefore in the realm of fools. I will write of hardworking, conscientious, intellegent, trained academics, but they are considered to be fools. Personally, though sceptical by nature, I am entirely of an open mind as to the validity of many of their claims. Perhaps I am the greatest fool. Though I have a general science background, I am no specialist in anything of which I write. This web-site is merely an opportunity to share my efforts to understand some of the issues involved. As such it is, and always will be, a work in progress. It is very much about science in and of the green.


    In the above graph I've indicated in red the barometric pressure scale equivalent to Skempton's pF scale. Thus pF 7, the maximum pressure reached in clays represents a pressure of 10,000 atmospheres, or roughly 150,000 pounds per square inch.


    It can be seen therefore that the maximum strength of clays is of the same order as the maximum strength of metals.


    This goes to explain why the rheological properties of clays and metals are so alike - as Skempton recognised.


    However, because the theory of the Casimir Effect was not sufficiently developed in his time he wasn't in a position to make the Gestalt switch of viewing the clay as being held together by external Casimir particle pressure rather than by internal fluid phase tension.


    My Damascene conversion came about from my research on the stress-strain properties of concretes. I will explain this in more detail in a future post. It was only much later after the discovery of the equations of state for water vapour that I was able to reach a more detailed understanding of the external compression mechanism.

    Quote

    My Damascene conversion came about from my research on the stress-strain properties of concretes. I will explain this in more detail in a future post. It was only much later after the discovery of the equations of state for water vapour that I was able to reach a more detailed understanding of the external compression mechanism.





    Research results for the properties of concrete as shown above convinced me that it was more useful to see materials as held together from external field compressions than from internal tensions.

    An amusing incident early in my research career illustrates the kind of cognitive dissonance resulting from inverting one's view of things such as material strength.


    =============================================================
    To find the density of a piece of material one needs to measure two quantities. Its weight and its volume.


    Finding the volume of a material is easy enough when the material is a simple shape; you just measure and use the appropriate maths formula.


    When the material is irregular, like a roughly hacked piece of soil cement or a king’s crown, then there’s a problem as Archimedes realised. It is his method, or rather the inverse, which we used to find the volume of our soil-cement samples.


    Archimedes’ discovery is often expressed as,


    “The loss of weight in water is equal to the volume of water displaced.”


    Strictly speaking, the loss of weight in water is equal to the weight of water displaced but since 1 cc of water weighs one gram we can jump directly from loss of weight to volume.


    Using this principle the volume of a lump of stuff can be measured by
    hanging it by a thin thread from one arm of a lever balance to measure its weight and then letting out the thread until it is immersed in a beaker of water when its weight is again measured.


    The original weight is its weight. The loss in weight is its volume. So the original weight divided by the loss in weight is its density.


    The Concrete Division were using just such a system for measuring the density gradients of core slices cut from concrete roads. Because Soils didn’t have a suitable lever balance we thought we'd be smart and do it differently. Using a pan balance we measured, not the loss in the weight of the specimen, but the gain in the weight of the water.


    ............


    One day our Division Head, Dr.Maclean, was walking through the lab and he happened to see me holding one end of the thread and calling out the scale readings to my colleague.


    He stood and watched for a while looking puzzled.


    ..........“What are you doing Grimer?”

    ..........“I’m measuring the volume of these soil-cement samples, sir.”

    ..........“But the volume is equal to the loss in weight of the specimen. You are
    ...........holding the end of the thread. How can you measure the loss in weight like that?”

    ..........“I’m not measuring the loss in weight of the specimen, sir. I’m
    ...........measuring the gain in weight of the water.”

    ...........“Are you sure you can do that, Grimer?”


    His incredulity was so palpable that I almost started having doubts myself. It was like when your wife asks you for the third time if you turned the gas off when you left.

    ..........."Pretty sure. After all, the weight has to go somewhere, doesn’t it! It
    ............can’t just disappear.”

    He walked slowly away looking very unconvinced.


    In retrospect I can’t really blame him. When all your life you have been used to seeing a thing done one way, its very difficult to accept that it can also be done in the completely opposite way. Standing there holding one end of the thread with the specimen dangling in a beaker of water at the other it must have seemed as though I was engaged in some mystic rite of pendulum divination. :)
    =============================================================

    I was thinking about Dr Maclean's difficulty with our Archimedes procedure and realised that his problem arose from his training as a physicist. Physicists don't really "do" environments for they have a history of a non-existence aether. Lip service is sometimes paid in the form of virtual particles but generally space is reduced to a maths devoid of substance.


    Consider this account by D.L.Hotson talking
    about himself in the third person.


    ==================================================
    Unfortunately, he could not resist asking
    awkward questions. His professors taught that
    conservation of mass-energy is the never-violated,
    rock-solid foundation of all physics. In
    'pair-production', a photon of at least 1.022 MeV
    'creates' an electron-positron pair, each with
    0.511 MeV of rest energy, with any excess being
    the momentum of the 'created' pair. So supposedly
    the conservation books balance.
    But the 'created' electron and positron both have
    spin (angular momentum) energy of h/4p. By any
    assumption as to the size of electron or positron,
    this is far more energy than that supplied by the
    photon at 'creation'.


    "Isn't angular momentum energy?"
    he asked a professor.


    "Of course it is. This half-integer spin angular
    momentum is the energy needed by the electron to
    set up a stable standing wave around the proton.
    Thus it is responsible for the Pauli exclusion
    principle, hence for the extension and stability
    of all matter. You could say it is the sole cause
    of the periodic table of elements."


    "Then where does all this energy come from? How
    can the 'created' electron have something like
    sixteen times more energy than the photon that
    supposedly 'created' it? Isn't this a huge
    violation of your never-violated rock-solid
    foundation of physics?"


    "We regard spin angular momentum as an 'inherent
    property' of electron and positron, not as a
    violation of conservation."

    "But if it's real energy, where does it come from?"

    "Inherent property' means we don't talk about
    it, and you won't either if you want to pass
    this course."


    Later, Mr. Hotson was taken aside and told that
    his 'attitude' was disrupting the class, and
    that further, with his 'attitude', there was no
    chance in hell of his completing a graduate
    program in physics, so 'save your money'. He
    ended up at the Sorbonne studying French
    literature and later became a professional
    land surveyor.
    ================================================


    For me the shock of seeing that things were held together by external compressions and not internal tensions was akin the the cognitive dissonance of seeing a negative photo as a positive - a complete inversion as in our Archimedes procedure.


    I'm reminded of Secondo Pia's experience who said that he almost dropped and broke the photographic plate in the darkroom from the shock of what appeared on it: the reverse plate showed the image of a man and a face that could not be seen with the naked eye.


    For me the positron and electron don't anihilate each other but form a neutral electric, neutral mangnetic and neutral inertial particle. I was so pleased with the notion that I even wrote a letter to the New Scentist. Of course, I didn't expect them to publish it but I did get a polite letter back thanking me.


    On reflection I think a better name for the Materon would be a Whole.


    I think that's enough scientific heresy for this post. :)

    I suppose my Hotson moment of disillusion with physics came when my director, Sir William Glanville, wrote in his own hand across the top of my Laboratory Note - Not for Publication. Obviously, engineers are not supposed to discover things that physicists like P.W.Bridgman
    had missed.


    Years later I had my revenge, my Building Research Establishment, BRExit. The organiser of the Southampton University 1968 International Conference on Engineering Materials knew about our work on concrete and asked us to submit a paper. Now members of government labs don't have the same freedom of publication as academics and I knew that if I submitted a paper to my superiors which claimed that materials were held together from without and not from within I didn't stand an earthly of it being approved - so I made the first few pages quite anodyne and kept the heresy and equation of state for water to the end. I knew my immediate boss was a lazy sod and wouldn't read it all. :)




    By the time they found out what I had done it was too late. The conference was over and because there'd been no ructions I got away with it.


    Interestingly enough the conference was a year later than the year Fleischmann became Professor of Electrochemistry at the University occupying the Faraday Chair of Chemistry.

    The interesting thing about that Southampton conference I mentioned in the previous post was the complete lack of any contradiction. Frankly I'd expected the paper to be excoriated and I was not looking forward to it. Nevertheless, since I believed my hypothesis to be correct however outlandish it might appear I knew I had to put it forward.


    To my surprise we only got a single comment. That was from a delegate who come up to us afterwards and said,
    "That paper of yours. It was a hoax, wasn't it?"
    We both fell about laughing and assured him we were completely serious. He went away looking very puzzzled.


    I suppose the lack of reaction was simply a reflection of that well known saying about conferences, "We're only here for the beer" :)


    My division head found we'd presented the paper under the auspices of Building Reasearch and was annoyed with my Section Head for passing it but didn't take any other action. I knew that from then on I could publish anything I liked without comeback - and I did. It seemed to me the Official Secrets Act was a paper tiger.


    When I first lectured on the scale invariant sixth power law for water I expected great interest from the many other scientists at my government research lab. After all, water is probably the most important material there is and an equation of state calls for an explantion.
    Why was it a power law? Was the 6 a reflection of the molecule structure? Why had this relation been missed since published by Bridgman in the International Critical Tables all those years ago.


    On reflection Simone Weil, had the situation bang to rights when in her essay,
    "La Science et nous" she wrote,


    ============
    What is disastrous is not the rejection of classical science but the way it has been rejected. It is wrongly believed it could progress indefinitely and it ran into a dead end about the year 1900; but scientists failed to stop at the same time in order to contemplate and reflect upon the barrier, they did not try to describe it and define it and, having taken it into account, to draw some general conclusion from it; instead they rushed violently past it, leaving classical science behind them.


    And why should we be surprised at this? For are they not paid to forge continually ahead? Nobody advances in his career, or reputation, or gets a Nobel prize, by standing still. To cease voluntarily from forging ahead, any brilliantly gifted scientist would need to be a saint or a hero, and why should he be a saint or a hero? With rare exceptions there are none to be found among the members of other professions.


    So the scientists forged ahead without revising anything, because any revision would have seemed a retrogression; they merely made an addition.
    ============

    I've been thinking a lot about those four power laws for water and water vapour.


    I believe that they will open the way to using water as a fuel.


    Of course, water can be used as a fuel at the moment. The problem is that more energy is needed to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen than is returned by their combination back into water.


    I believe that if the process is carried out in the vapour phase rather than the liquid phase less energy will be needed.


    Moreover, I believe this is what Joseph Papp discovered and demonstrated with his Papp engine - and kept quiet about.


    What about the noble gasses? Where do they come into the equation?


    I believe they are acting as catalysts.


    There's a lot of stuff on Papp and his engine. I'll have to start delving into it.


    I suppose it's not exactly LENR, more LEAR.
    Still, it's in the same iconoclastic spirit. :)

    I have missed this topic although I did some experiments with clay (clinoptiloliet) in February 2016. The last experiment was some weeks ago (https://xzplo.blogspot.nl/2016/11/experiment.html).


    I didn’t know about the internal high pressures in clay. However, the tight enclosure of water molecules is not the only problem that must be solved. To get cold fusion it is necessary to apply a dense electromagnetic wave pattern to the hydrogen atoms of the water molecules. So the clay must be a good electric conductor. Unfortunately, the high frequency electric current through the clay lattice have to generate Eddy currents otherwise there is no concentration of free electrons (like the electrolyse with a palladium cathode).


    My solution was a mixture of nickel powder and zeolite powder, but it failed because of the insufficient conductivity. Is there someone who knows about clays that partly consist of metals?

    Quote from Alan Smith

    The most obvious would be red Heamatite clay Fe2O3. Also known as 'red ochre'. Since the natural material contains many impurities I suggest (if you think this worth pursuing) that you buy a purified form of Fe2O3. Micron sized it is available relatively cheaply micron-sized as 'jewellers rouge' Add your own water.


    Holmlid uses Shell 105 catalyst (Fe2O3-K based with >8% K content) on an iridium substrate. He uses a weak green laser light driver to activate deuterium into a reaction.



    @Allan Smith,


    Thanks for the tip about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematite. I don’t know if Hematite can adsorb hydrogen, but I am sure it cannot envelope water molecules (see the image of the crystal structure). Moreover, I cannot find anything about the conductivity.


    It is necessary that the hydrogen atoms (or water atoms) are tight enclosed by a conductive lattice. The more mass the atoms of the lattice have, the better. Because when we supply energy to the lattice – an electric current - only the hydrogen atoms must be affected. Otherwise there is no cold fusion because all the atoms – lattice and hydrogen atoms – start to accelerate their movements when the atoms of the lattice have not enough mass.


    The only way to decrease the Coulomb force of hydrogen atoms is to withhold the hydrogen atoms to accelerate (with the help of the mass of the atoms of the lattice) so the supply of energy will force the hydrogen nuclei to increase their boundary. The result is a decrease of the Coulomb force.


    Of course this is not the only trick to decrease the Coulomb force, Holmlid use a laser to affect hydrogen atoms in a precise way.


    Anyway, the Palladium lattice is not a catalyst to establish cold fusion. It is not chemistry. Now I will read the post of axil. ;-))

    • Official Post

    Hi H.G.


    This is a good background paper on Hydrogen ab/adsorption by metals - page 77 et seq. looks at Iron Oxides in particular. I suspect that Protium is preferentially ad/absorbed, since the presence of small amounts of Pt-Black is said to promote hydrogenation.


    https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1602/1602.06774.pdf


    As for conductivity, I am not sure what temperature zone you are working in, but the addition of finely divided carbon (as Carbon Black) would enhance conductivity and I suspect also operate as a 'spill-over' catalyst to further enhance hydrogenation. Get too hot of course, and the carbon would simply reduce the iron oxides to metallic iron. That's the blast furnace route. :(


    I must confess a personal interest here, since www.lookingforheat.com has stocks of micron-sized iron powder, Fe2O3, and pure carbon black. We also have a larger particle size crushed magnetite - Fe3O4. In similar vein we currently stock magnesium, calcium and zinc oxides as well as palladium black. If your needs are modest we might be able to donate at least some of these in the interest of the science.

    Alan Smith,


    Thanks for the link! The first page mentions already the conductivity: that’s shows to be o.k. ;-))


    I don’t want to “prove” cold fusion. I am searching for an easy way to establish the save LENR electromagnetic radiation. In such a way that small equipments are possible (hot water boilers, etc.). So I have no interest in a high temperature “Rossi’s reactor”. I cannot understand how this type of reactor can decrease the Coulomb force in a controlled way. Besides that, I have read Rossi’s patent too and that’s not reliably physics.


    In fact, I am searching for a replacement of palladium and – if it is possible – for hydrogen gas. Because it is difficult to get 2 hydrogen atoms together within a lattice. The disadvantage is the oxygen atom that probably will prevent the hydrogen nuclei to expand (too much rotational and linear freedom of the whole configuration). That’s why I have tried to use water and zeolite, although I didn’t believe that it would work (the size of the zeolite caves are to big). Nickel is only to concentrate the free electrons to get a dense electromagnetic wave pattern.


    Of course there are chemical bonds that hold hydrogen atoms. However, when a hydrogen atom is bonded tightly to another element, their mutual configuration will prevent the hydrogen atom to act like it is a solitaire atom. That is the advantage of the palladium lattice (the stable electron configuration in the outer shells).

    Quote from Frank Grimer

    Since pore water in clays can reach pressures below ambient of up to pF 7 it seems possible that using <b>D<sub>2</sub>O</b> in clay could be a candidate for cold fusion.


    Has any research been done on this?


    I looked the chain through quickly, and want to point out these Forest rings. They are really interesting observations;


    http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/01/rings/

    Quote

    Hamilton was testing an analytical technique over a Matheson gold deposit to determine if there was any kind of geochemical surface signal. To his surprise, there were signals coming through 30 to 40 metres of glacial clay.“We’re thinking there’s no way metals can move through clay 10,000 years after glaciation.”After ruling out transport by ground water, diffusion and gas, he theorized it had to have been lifted to surface on electrical fields.He applied the same theory to forest rings and discovered that they were also giant negatively charged cells.Any source of negative charge will create a forest ring.


    https://www.researchgate.net/p…f_forest_rings_in_Ontario


    https://www.researchgate.net/p…sence_of_mineral_deposits


    etc.

    Alan Smith,


    I have read your link (a really good paper) and it showed that Hematite, Maghemite and Wustite do not adsorb hydrogen and water within the lattice. It is more a dissociation of the bonds at the surface area of the iron oxides, forming hydroxyl groups, etc.


    When I compare Hematite in relation to zeolite (there are about 250 different types of zeolite), zeolite is not affected by dissociations of the bonds at low temperatures. There are even zeolites that can withstand 1250 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately, these kind of zeolites are not natural zeolites. These are made in a laboratory and a small bottle with 100 gram powder costs about $1500,--.


    Maybe I will do a "zeolite experiment" with another type of reactor to get far more conductivity (without Nickel powder).

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