A question regarding your spark generator.
Are you using a capacitor-discharge type system where you charge up a cap then let it discharge through an HT transformer or are you using a FET/IGBT (or something similar) to hard drive an HT transformer? I ask because once you have an arc formed, the arc is highly conductive and acts like a dead short. A hard driven system could then see large current spikes which could damage it.
A question regarding your spark generator.
Are you using a capacitor-discharge type system where you charge up a cap then let it discharge through an HT transformer or are you using a FET/IGBT (or something similar) to hard drive an HT transformer? I ask because once you have an arc formed, the arc is highly conductive and acts like a dead short. A hard driven system could then see large current spikes which could damage it.
Good question. Diode protection seems appropriate in such a system.
Ecco. I have run tests with a different system using magnesium as an oxygen getter, but no EHT involved. I have bottled Argon of course. Nothing too exciting seen there. The anomaly was the background count increasing briefly by 15X. From 20 to 300cpm. I say it was an anomaly since - with only a trace of Ni and air inside the reactor what else could it be?
GlowFish. No- the EHT system is best described as an 'extreme flyback transformer' - this produces an AC spark by rapidly creating and collapsing an electro magnetic field generated in a ferrite core surrounded by hundreds of turns of cooper wire by means of a brief primary excitation. And yes- once established such an arc can pull a lot of amperes. The transition from arc to plasma discharge causes the current to drop again, strangely enough.
One last question regarding the Geiger counter. You reported an anomaly regarding the CPM. Could the the arc generate huge amounts of EMI? Would that EMI actually affect the measurement electronics of the counter (especially if it were held close)? The arc could also be generating X-Rays depending on the energy you put into it which might also fall within the detection/sensitivity range of the counter.
@ Glowfish. All these are possibilities I will investigate. Many more experiments to come! Thank you for your interest.
@Alan Smith: I'm actually saying that it could be thanks to the high voltage triggering system that you're possibly seeing anomalies, even if you're only using air in the cell and nothing else.
An atom in a Rydberg state is simply one with a valence electron occupying a higher orbital than ground state; you could consider it in an "almost ionized" state. Short spark discharges or an electric field gradient should be able form such atoms.
Rydberg Matter is a state of matter composed by the condensation - usually on non-metallic surfaces (the geometry of your reactor might be helping here) - of atoms in a certain Rydberg state. This potentially includes nitrogen, for example.
If you're actually creating an exotic state of matter inside your reactor tube it shouldn't be too surprising to witness strange anomalies.
I would try to make sure if the radiation count spike wasn't actually due to electromagnetic interference coming from the tube.
However, it's also been theorized that the formation of large enough amounts of RM can produce electromagnetic anomalies. If other macroscopic evidence for the creation of this state of matter in the tube could be found (as I previously mentioned), it would be even better.
It looks like you recreated the MFMP "signal", only that its just EM interference, which supports the observation that a sudden and big voltage change was seen exactly at the time of the "signal" #7. Such rapid change means a spark or break/make event in power supply system causing intense EM interference in electronics around it.
The last MFMP experiment (done very carefully, I must say) did not show any signal, which also rules it out.
The take home message is, a one time anomaly does not mean that there is a signal. It has to be repeatable and one must be able to trace its source to the powder inside the reactor (like no powder == no signal). If there is some strange phenomena, then you have discovered another thing, unrelated to LENR, good, but not useful for this purpose.
So what is the perfect sign or a signal? It has to be multiple things, like radiation (preferably particles, not photonic), excess heat and transmutations or isotopic shifts. And all this must be well above error margins, and must be reproducible by different people and in different labs....
Did I just set an impossible criteria? I guess, its a bit too strong, but this is how Science works.
/* once you have an arc formed, the arc is highly conductive and acts like a dead short */
Note that Me356 used very low/HF discharge at his last pictures: no sparks, no arcs... If you want to replicate something, you should look at it first.
Tarun...I agree. I claim nothing more than an anomaly which is best explained by EMI. I promise not to make a long video about it though.
@Tarun: it's been reported that the formation of Rydberg state atoms and Rydberg Matter of one element/molecules can catalyze the formation of the same of other elements (e.g. Hydrogen), so - if this is what is really happening in Alan Smith's cell - exploring what is going on with other gases might not necessarily be unhelpful. Read for example section 2.2 in this paper (free access).
Hopefully I am not starting to sound like a broken record now.
* * *
As for the MFMP GS5.3 experiment, no big signal like last time, but actually there have been interesting indications of a repeatable slight increase in radiation counts from a NaI X-ray probe when the following conditions were met:
- Elevated temperature (> 600°C internal as far as I recall);
- Desorption of hydrogen from internal materials (primarily due to an external decrease in H2 pressure and/or to a controlled decrease in temperature) or more generally speaking, shortly after large pressure changes.
Additionally, attempting to make a vacuum at elevated temperature could in some instances make pressure drop to an anomalously low level - significantly lower than what the vacuum pump could normally achieve.
Assuming that no strange artifact was in reality causing these anomalies, given that Hydrogen is ab/adsorbed on materials in atomic form, my take is that something unusual can under certain circumstances take place before recombination occurs, as others have also suggested.
Alan, I understand about the hydrogen cylinder difficulties. Fortunately I have a century old pair of tiny bunkers dug into a hill where they will bother no one, and, anyway the authorities don't care in our jurisdiction, but they do get nervous at the cylinder rental place. I turned in my hyd. cyl. last fall, and need to get another one.
Alan, look up pulse forming networks (PFN). They need to be designed for the low impedance of an intense arc discharge. That impedance is pretty hard to define since it varies during the pulse. I have heard of discharges all the way from 300 ohms on down to a tenth that value. Magnetrons are much higher impedance I believe.
Thank you for sparing us poor peanut gallery creatures.
I do enjoy your short and sweet videos about practical stuff and I prefer them to longish videos full of speculations and inconclusive reports.
Tarun: it's been reported that the formation of Rydberg state atoms and Rydberg Matter of one element/molecules can catalyze the formation of the same of other elements (e.g. Hydrogen), so - if this is what is really happening in Alan Smith's cell......
That's surely a million $ question, is it actually happening in that reactor? How to know for sure? Is there a litmus test for RM?
And even before that, is RM certainly, without any doubts, proven, indicator of LENR? If there are no rock solid answers, then I say, move on, don't care about someone else's theoretical stuff. Write your own little theory and test it on your own little reactor. If an experiment stands on firm ground, there is some hope for it. (I'm not preaching, just an opinion ;))
That's surely a million $ question, is it actually happening in that reactor? How to know for sure? Is there a litmus test for RM?
Yes, sort of. There are some macroscopic parameters which could be looked for:
- RM clusters do not move in space like a gas, so pressure may anomalously decrease as they form. Additionally, they can absorb to some extent ions and small molecules and act as a sort of getter themselves, further causing a decrease in pressure ;
- RM is reported to be somewhat conductive (10^−2 – 10^−3 Ω·m). And its formation could thus be detected by an anomalous electrical conduction between cell components that don't normally conduct electricity to each other;
- RM has been measured to have a work function of ~0.5-0.7 eV, but I don't think this would be easy to measure in a DIY reactor by the average experimenter;
- RM clusters have a large magnetic moment; it's been theorized that at a large enough density they can to give rise to detectable magnetic fields (this is somewhat speculative).
QuoteAnd even before that, is RM certainly, without any doubts, proven, indicator of LENR?
I think you're asking for some kind of proof that never existed in the LENR field in the first place. This being said, there are several points in common between the conditions for the formation of RM and those for obtaining anomalies in several LENR experiments, especially by focusing on the so-called "ultra-dense" form of RM which involves hydrogen+catalytic surfaces and about which several papers have been published in the past few years.
QuoteIf there are no rock solid answers, then I say, move on, don't care about someone else's theoretical stuff. Write your own little theory and test it on your own little reactor. If an experiment stands on firm ground, there is some hope for it. (I'm not preaching, just an opinion ;))
It's more than theoretical stuff. Most of the papers written on the subject are experimental, but there's admittedly a scarcity of independent verification as they are for the most part from Holmlid and colleagues, with some exceptions.
Anyway, I wasn't going to ask Alan Smith to perform involved, time costly tests, if this is what you were concerned with. Perhaps checking out if the anomaly changes significantly with pressure, and that's all. Besides, even if it's just an artifact it's important to find out how to debug it in order to avoid false positives in future experiments with this kind of reactor.
Ecco. I have run tests with a different system using magnesium as an oxygen getter, but no EHT involved. I have bottled Argon of course. Nothing too exciting seen there. The anomaly was the background count increasing briefly by 15X. From 20 to 300cpm. I say it was an anomaly since - with only a trace of Ni and air inside the reactor what else could it be?
I find this interesting. Unless it's a phenomenon that is regularly encountered with GM counters and well-known through one's own use of them, I would not make any assumptions about the counts, one way or another, even if there was no nickel.
Do you have other types of detector set up to measure radiation in coincidence with the GM counters? A measurement from the GM counters in coincidence with other types of detector would be interesting.
Hi Eric. I have listed this under A for Anomaly, never fear. And that is where it will stay until I have a chance to investigate further. The GC10 Geigers are normally steady as rock, and though I have less than a year's experience of using them in a variety of circumstances this would be the first time one has 'thrown a dummy'.
Hi Ecco.
Sorry for a slow reply. I actually have a stock of Nano-carbon black. I think that this should be somewhere on my list of fuel experiments - I have not forgotten about 'Carbon Stars'.
@Alan Smith: don't worry, I deleted that simply because in retrospect I didn't want to dilute the message of the last few pages with additional information and requests, and because I won't have too much time to participate to the discussion until this weekend.
In theory any element capable of being ionized can potentially form condensed excited states of matter (e.g. Rydberg Matter. I believe there are similar theories under other names). If one assumes this to be the model behind which LENR anomalies hide, it shouldn't be too implausible that a low grade/non-ideal carbon plasma could show related anomalies.
