Xian Zhang Hang : nickel-hydrogen cold fusion experiment now quite reproducible

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    On LENR China website there is a post about Zhang hang experiments, under supervision of Songsheng Jiang.
    They report some reproducibility.
    http://www.lenr.com.cn/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=show&catid=7&id=763

    Quote from LENR.com.cn translated by Google


    This morning received a netizen Zhang Hang messages sent cold fusion world, he said at the teacher and Xing Jiang Songsheng teacher's guidance, his experiments made initial progress, and the results can be repeated with a certain regularity in the message. The experiment COP over one or more of his next experiment will focus mainly on improving COP, the following is a report of this experiment.


    If Someone can translate the Chinese report :D
    Or find a Chinese OCR .

    • Official Post

    I tried a transcription by http://www.i2ocr.com/free-online-chinese-simplified-ocr
    with google translation...


    awful but some things can be understood. few I concede.


    I think we need a human translator ;(









    It could be looked at and reviewed if there were a complete English write-up.


    One comment about the comment from them:


    "Focussing on increasing COP" in a (sort of) reproducible experiment like this is exactly wrong. Better to focus on understanding and reducing errors.
    (1) If LENR here is real you get better signal to noise ratio and better validation.
    (2) If LENR here is not real you find out.


    Whereas: focussing on increased COP in case (2) will just be optimising some (not fully understood) error mechanism.


    Whether LENR in this case is real or not, you don't get better validation by focussing on increase in COP.



    Fascinating.


    So it's pointless to try and enhance a reaction for which there is no theory, better try to create the theory first, even if it's been elusive for, what, nearly a century?


    Empirical trials and errors are useless! don't go this way, you might understand how it works!


    <Insert random derogative ad hominem here>

    The real beauty in this is the open universal sharing of the work and science moving hopefully towards 'critical mass' and a Moore's Law like development curve......this will put the pressure on Rossi et al to get their collective acts in gear if they want to stay in the game.
    Are we truly heading for a technological Tsunami?

    Quote from Keieueue

    Fascinating.


    So it's pointless to try and enhance a reaction for which there is no theory, better try to create the theory first, even if it's been elusive for, what, nearly a century?


    Empirical trials and errors are useless! don't go this way, you might understand how it works!


    Good isotope analysis of fuel and ash will be the definite answer yes or no. If yes, the result would indicate exactly what goes on. It is difficult to see a working process without detectable radiation, but isotope shift is 100% sure if we want to keep the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy).


    The two Rossi attempts at isotope analysis do not count since independent control was lacking.


    Added: Notice that elemental analysis is not enough. An element can possibly move or disappear. It is harder to imagine accidental isotope separation. This means of course that the ash composition in the Lugano test (99% 62Ni) is absolutely conclusive that the E-Cat works! :)

    Quote from jpav

    The real beauty in this is the open universal sharing of the work and science moving hopefully towards 'critical mass' and a Moore's Law like development curve......this will put the pressure on Rossi et al to get their collective acts in gear if they want to stay in the game.
    Are we truly heading for a technological Tsunami?


    There is also the small matter of laws of physics. Some seem to think that talking is enough.


    You have completely missed (reversed?) my point:


    (1) I never mentioned any theory. Nor is one needed. This is standard experimental methodology for flakey stuff.
    (2) The issue is that until you understand your experimental methodology, including all its error artifacts, very well, you cannot know whether some change you make is optimising COP or optimising error. And no-one else can know whether your claims of COP are real or simply experimental error.

    I hope they are not reproducing the same old k-type thermocouple breakdown effect at high temperatures (and other oddities).
    All the reports coming from there are very strange and ambiguous -- I find
    -no data,
    -no calibration,
    -no explanation of how the COP was calculated,
    -no maths / error estimations /margins
    -no elemental analysis,
    -no radiation measurements
    -no calorimetry.....
    -no peer reviews
    -no answers to important questions raised by us here.


    ....NOTHING, just claims!


    Anyhow, I'm very impressed by the quality of engineering and equipment, and of course their willingness to do the experiments on LENR, when the usual western researchers are terrified of even touching it. They have the means and the will, they lack the method.

    Edited once, last by Tarun ().

    Like 3

    As we know there are elements of physics that remain essentially unexplained. Where we are still only looking through the big picture window.
    Take any of the intrinsic forces of the universe and all we have are observations and distillations of phenomenon into ad hoc rules. Albeit highly dependable distillations.... however, physics as it exists today is a long way from explaining all the phenomenon of the universe.
    In the end, phenomena rules.....


    Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk

    Perhaps there is a translating system that is not so biased toward the language of class warfare and political intrigue. There is a lot of scientific cooperation these days, perhaps someone has contrived a translator that is biased towards science and technology.

    I see that the thermocouple did not go into the melting range, or off scale, which is good.
    I now await a good translation, and hope that the temperatures are not just Inside and Outside temperatures.

    Quote from Thomas Clarke

    [...]


    One comment about the comment from them:


    "Focussing on increasing COP" in a (sort of) reproducible experiment like this is exactly wrong. Better to focus on understanding and reducing errors.

    I'm responding here to underscore the point. The entire field of LENR, reactive to extreme skepticism, went down a dysfunctional path. It was thought that the problem with early results was that they were not "good enough." In fact, Pons and Fleischmann had results that were clearly above noise, as to heat -- though they were completely wrong about the neutron radiation they reported, and they speculated about "nuclear" when it was premature, i.e., the only evidence they had was heat apparently beyond chemistry. In the rush to confirm, replication failure was routine. However, the essential problem was poor control of conditions, not "COP too low."


    "Understanding" here does not mean "theory." My opinion, we are not close to "understanding" LENR in that way. No, it means understanding the experiment. This generally requires running controlled experiments, generally limited to one variable, which is studied over a range of values or conditions. Songsheng Jiang was plagued with apparent thermocouple failure. So ... run the same experiment, with better thermocouples or taking precaution against thermocouple damage from hot hydrogen. Keep the conditions as close to the same as possible, and then these are actually replications and confirmations, not "sort-of the same."


    Parkhomov completely failed to do this, he kept changing his experimental conditions so that results could not be compared. Further, by focusing on COP, it was hidden that his actual results were getting smaller and smaller as to absolute power. COP is not a measure of high interest scientifically. What is of high interest is XP, anomalous power, and even more, XE, anomalous energy.


    COP is only marginally relevant in that if COP is high enough, one may think that possible artifacts must be of little or no importance. That's an error, that has been demonstrated over and over.


    The goal of scientific experiment is not to "improve" results, but to be able to predict them. Quantitatively!


    Quote

    (1) If LENR here is real you get better signal to noise ratio and better validation.
    (2) If LENR here is not real you find out.

    Notice the key word, "here." There are records of thousands of experiments, with many reports of findings that were initially thought to be LENR. Many were not.


    However, far too often, the work was never done to identify and confirm -- or disconfirm -- possible artifacts. Generally, COP was not "enough" to be spectacular, why bother? And then there is the file-drawer effect, which pseudoskeptics think is all the field has. In a way, I don't blame them, because the needles of solid and confirmed work have been buried in a haystack of anecdotes.

    Quote

    Whereas: focussing on increased COP in case (2) will just be optimising some (not fully understood) error mechanism.

    Yes, it could be.
    This could be useful if the work is done to identify possible error mechanisms and rule them out. How does one do that?


    With controlled experiment. Ideally, reproducible behavior is found. If behavior is reproducible, then the testing can be done to discover possible artifact. If it is not reproducible, there is very little to work with.


    Thomas -- and I -- have reacted to the idea that the goal is to increase COP, and this would set up exactly the risk that Thomas lays out.


    Quote

    Whether LENR in this case is real or not, you don't get better validation by focussing on increase in COP.

    He is correct. You get better confirmation or disconfirmation by tightening control.


    I've noticed some here that classify me as a "skeptic." Thanks. Skepticism is essential to science. There is a twofold risk, "belief" on one side, and "pseudoskepticism" on the other. Genuine scientists welcome skepticism and run from belief, which is poisonous to scientific work. "Belief" that there is something worth looking at, fine. That creates motivation to investigate. But beyond that, it is extremely dangerous.


    Pons and Fleischmann apparently believed that they had found a bulk effect in palladium deuteride. This then led them down numerous blind alleys and into major political errors. The full story has never been told, but they actively opposed measuring helium from their experiments. They suppressed actual helium results, they violated the agreed protocol in the Morrey collaboration, and threatened to sue if those results were released, all of which intensified the widespread pseudoskeptical belief that they were deluded or worse.


    I came across, the other day, a little snippet that shows my credentials in this field, along with those of Jed Rothwell. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind…ev&diff=613737385</a><br>
    If that were followed up, the history shows how Wikipedia became corrupted on the topic of cold fusion. By policy, the Storms review in Naturwissenchaften would be golden as a source, as a peer-reviewed review in a mainstream peer-reviewed publication.


    Wikipedia relies on independent publishers, not on authors. That an author in a field "believes" in the field, this is a surprise?


    The issue is the reviewers, who were experts, and the publishers, whose reputation is on the line. That paper was invited, and Springer-Verlag journals often publish papers on cold fusion and they are one of the largest scientific publishers in the world. The other, the largest, Elsevier, also publishes such papers. It is only a couple of journals, particularly Nature, that blacklisted the topic back in 1990 or so.)


    The claims made there about the peer review process at NW were invented from appearances and were highly misleading. I had previously taken the Storms review, shortly before being "community banned" on the topic, to the Reliable Sources Noticeboard and, in spite of attempts to make those same claims, the source was community-validated as meeting RS criteria. (Someone who knew how to follow Wikipedia procedures? They had to get rid of me as quickly as possible. This was not about cold fusion and originally I had only the same general skepticism as everyone else on cold fusion. It was about administrative abuse, which I successfully confronted, and a faction of allied administrators. What do Wikipedia admins think about ordinary users who confront admin abuse? Is it any surprise?)


    It's not true that Storms was involved in the review of his own paper. It was not true that NW was a "biology journal" at the time. It was a venerable multidisciplinary journal, Einstein published in NW, whose content had gone, over the years, toward the life sciences. (Later it made that official). This was all irrelevant. The status of cold fusion in the scientific journals was suppressed from the article, for completely bogus reasons, and often without reasons, and it still is. This was all from a handful of highly opinionated users, including some administrators, who openly violated policies to maintain the impressions that the article still maintains.


    That editor, TenOfAllTrades, is an administrator, heavily involved. As a result of a case that I filed, Cold fusion was put on "discretionary sanctions," and then enforcement was in the hands of administrators. Who were the problem in the first place.

    Having now read the tentative translation by Bog Higgins, the report looks much better than I expected.
    There was calibration - reported and looks reasonable.
    I will have to look at it further, but a possible COP of 1.23 is interesting and not outlandish.


    Edit: The temperature was determined by IR (or seems to have been). There was PID temperature control, which I haven't noticed yet if it was controlled somehow by the IR probe, or by thermocouple. This adds a new dimension of uncertainty. Hopefully we can get some clarification on this aspect.

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