Experimental evidence to date for He / excess heat correlation in LENR experiments to have nuclear mechanism

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Quote from Hermes: “So my advice would be to replicate experiments which produce radio-activity but instrument them properly so the products and reactions can be identified.”


    I posted the paper which explains everything.., which is actual (ongoing…


    Perhaps you posted the wrong paper?


    The only part of this about He measurements is:


    Quote

    Helium measurements for early kHz cavitation systems were carried out in three laboratories: in 1991, by Dave Thomas at Stanford Research Institute (SRI); in 1992–1993 by Dr. Davidson of the US Bureau of Mines in Amarillo, TX; and in 1994-5, samples taken at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) were analyzed by Brian Oliver at the Department of Energy, DOE, facility at Rocketdyne, CA. Brian Oliver also used MS measurements to track a sample of Ti target foil gases that change over time, showing decay of T to 3He at the rate of the disintegration constants confirming the origin of the growing 3He [3]. The Appendix at the end of this paper provides details on these measurements . Reproducibility in He measurements suggested inefficient cavitation due to small variations in temperature, pressure, and acoustic input parameters. Thus, subsequent versions of resonators introduced the MPPC, new technology from Hamamatsu, which measures PE and couples it with significant changes to the MHz acoustic input, Qa, suppressing small effects in resonator’s T and P. This innovation in the MHz system produced better photon cavitation tracking. The MHz calorimetry, with no costly He measurements, was the basis for the Qx determination.


    This is referencing other work, and not providing any insight into the referenced methodology

    Quote from THHuxley

    Perhaps you posted the wrong paper?


    As I told: Already in 1995 LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory - (I said NRL) confirmed the ratio heat/bubble=He produced. (JED told us, many time, about this fact too...) Stringham counted the cavitation/fusion bubbles, which are in line with the heat produced. As the maximum COP is close to 4, we also must not discuss about marginal significance... Read conclusion point 5.


    The other measurement is the photon count of the Bremsstrahlung (fig.5) which clearly indicates the nature/intensity of the process.


    Sono-fusion is LENR, albeit the underlaying process is hot-fusion!!! Thus it is politically very risky to discuss these facts ...


    More experimental details are given in the older paper: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StringhamRlowmassmhz.pdf
    and more actual with COP: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StringhamRwhenbubble.pdf

    Quote from Hermes

    So my advice would be to replicate experiments which produce radio-activity but instrument them properly so the products and reactions can be identified.


    The problem is, cold fusion does not produce radioactivity. So you are demanding the impossible. You cannot dictate to nature how a phenomenon must work. You can only observe how it actually does work.


    What you are demanding is analogous to someone saying to Mme. Curie in 1898: "It is all well and good that you have detected a source of heat from radium that does not produce chemical ash, but that is impossible, so you must show us the chemical ash or we will not believe you." Science does not work that way.

    Quote from THHuxley

    GH - I'd like to stick to one experiment. There are multiple mechanisms here as I indicated on the other thread so the fact that one experiment excludes leakage does not help another. Do you consider Miles's results more significant than Apicelli's?


    Miles made, overall, 33 measurements, including 12 controls. Violante (Apicella et al, 2005) made 3, though they were higher precision and avoided the leakage issue. No controls. Miles work is more "significant" as to correlation, but Apicella et al is more significant as to the ratio.


    The correlation, as confirmed by many, is quite adequate to establish that the FP Heat Effect is nuclear in nature, by a preponderance of the evidence and even, I suggest, beyond a reasonable doubt. However, there are issues -- such as the age of the reports -- that indicate the wisdom of repeating the work with increased precision. And the political effect. As well as addressing certain theoretical problems where a more precise measure could resolve controversies.


    As well as creating something on which real skeptics and cold fusion researchers may be able to agree: Let's do some real science, okay?


    I'm in communication with the people doing this work, so if anyone has serious suggestions, let me know. You could also contact them, there are email addresses in the announcement, as I recall. Google "McKubre Duncan helium."


    Each experiment should properly be examined on its own, as to how it was done and possible artifacts there. But where it appears that experiments are examining the same process, determining a characteristic of the process, then the experiments may become commensurable. I found this somewhat difficult in writing that paper, because of so many different approaches. Storms does present a histogram with selected results. I'd prefer to have a large data set designed to be commensurable, not cherry-picked, and including controls.


    It is obvious that, for example, the amount of excess heat from experiments may not and likely will not be comparable across different protocols. However, if we assume a single process is behind the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect, then we can look for what is common, and in experiments where heat and helium are measured, we can look for commonality, and that's what has been confirmed to exist. Do read my paper carefully, and check the sources.

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    t is nice of You ( in sight that You were a hard core denier of LENR ) to open an new thread about a theme, which for LENR knowledgables is since years no longer a discussion.

    Wyttenbach is apparently not privy to what cold fusion researchers discuss. This is still a discussion on the CMNS list. There are, let's call them, holdouts, among people who must be acknowledged as knowledgeable. I can't name names, because that is a private list, but some of these are well-known. What can be said is that there is a strong majority which does accept heat/helium as established.


    Most cold fusion researchers do not post on blogs or participate in public discussions. This is largely the case with academics in most fields. I'm a writer and I have personal reasons for participating, basically, it is training in public discussion on the topic, because I am ultimately an advocate for real science, and consciously a "skeptic" within the field. As suggested and supported by one of the top names.


    To come into the mainstream, CMNS must develop much better communication with genuine skeptics, not to be confused with the anonymous trolls who are clear pseudoskeptics. Hence I have engaged with some surprising people, where I don't yet have permission to reveal names. When we are ready for the breakthrough, I will use all available means. This is going to be fun.


    For part of this, as previously explained by Darden, we need to clear the decks of fraudulent claims and pretense, and establish weak reports as weak, not central.


    I think if I see one more slide presentation on cold fusion showing industrial smokestacks and then a confident vision of the "LENR future," I might throw up. Yeah. We get it. If this can be made practical, there are possibilities of very high interest. But we are not there yet, and those who show these slides have often been part of the confusion, overstating claims, and ignoring evidence, while blaming the rejection of cold fusion on everyone else, not admitting our responsibility. Overstated claims are part of what caused the rejection cascade in the first place.

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Sono-fusion is LENR, albeit the underlaying process is hot-fusion!!! Thus it is politically very risky to discuss these facts ...

    This is a complete misunderstanding. Sonofusion refers to bubble collapse fusion, which generates extremely high temperatures, alleged to generate neutron radiation from fusion. This would be hot fusion, period. "Cold fusion" does not refer to the overall experimental temperature, but to the energies of the reactants.


    Stringham uses ultrasonic stimulation, but if the "underlying mechanism" is "hot-fusion," this is hot fusion. I'm not going into Stringham, his work is unconfirmed. However, according to Storms, he showed 2.4 x 10^11 atoms per watt-sec, with no precision given. The theoretical value for deuterium conversion to helium is about 2.6 x 10^11 4He/watt-sec, so this is a "confirming value." But the environment isn't necessarily a solid with trapping like in the FPHE. That could explain the higher yield of helium compared to solid PdD work, just as a higher value was found in the Case work with a thin palladium coating on coconut carbon charcoal catalyst.


    Storms describes the "sonic method" as using bubble collapse to inject deuterium into palladium. If Stringham counted bubble collapses and found them correlated with helium, this would not be terribly surprising. This would be correlating stimulus and effect.

    Wyttenbach:


    Quote

    As I told: Already in 1995 LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory - (I said NRL) confirmed the ratio heat/bubble=He produced. (JED told us, many time, about this fact too...) Stringham counted the cavitation/fusion bubbles, which are in line with the heat produced. As the maximum COP is close to 4, we also must not discuss about marginal significance... Read conclusion point 5.


    The issue here is helium, not bubbles or COP.


    And, as a side point, calculated COP=4 can be blindingly conclusive, or completely inconclusive, depending on other parameters which you do not state. It is erroneous logic to equate COP with whether results are marginal. COP = 1.5 will normally be conclusive, if at high enough power and decent flow calorimetry is used without the need for potentially variable calibration (reduce heat losses and measure absolute thermal power in/out). COP=10 will be inconclusive in a bomb-like system with many assumptions about transients, or in a low power system where other marginal effects come into play.


    You have now given me 3 papers to look at. I'm out of patience looking at point 5 in conclusions of the first since it appeared more a summary paper anyway, and has no useful data to point - He production - which was what you said it showed.


    However the links to the 2 new paper are better and also they are closer to the action with real results. So I'll comment on the first one. that exhausts my concentration on such a topic for today but I'll address the second if given good reason to do so. The first certainly is fascinating.


    WRT http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StringhamRlowmassmhz.pdf


    This is a fascinating paper and how you can simplify it is beyond me.


    The potential artifacts (from cursory reading) are:
    (1) RFI to thermocouples
    (2) Wrong estimation of electrical system power loss
    (3) density change in mass flow due to bubbles
    (4) deltaT due to phase change in circulant between input and output of cavitation chamber.


    There are probably others.


    Discussion
    General. There are so many artifacts here because this is a very complex system. It suffers complex errors not controlled and also major calibration with methodology and data not fully specified, so while it could well be good, I can't rule out issues in the calibration.
    (1) two different TCs are monitored for RFI with a 6X difference between that observed in the two. A third TC is used for the main Tout measurement. It is assumed RFI error here is no more than the highest of the two observed. But RFI is highly dependent on leads and siting and exact Tc coupling to surroundings and it could easily be much larger (say another 4X) than that assumed. So without more care this possible artifact might explain the results.


    (2) I personally doubt this is an issue but the complexity of the experiment, and the fact that the total input power is much higher than that delivered to the system, makes this a weak link. The more calculations you need to get the basic power in and power out the more possibility for unexpected effects to hit you with unexpected errors.


    (3) and (4). Both of these are not considered by the authors and personally I have no idea whether they apply. But the cavitation phenomena introduces violent stress to the circulant. As a results there could be transient chemical or physical changes that have enthalpy and raise the measured out temperature. While circulating the change would equilibrate back to its initial state and so the cycle would repeat.


    The difference between the H2O and D2O systems shows that these effects must vary. Unfortunately all could vary either with exact setup (TC RFI which is known from these results highly variable) or with the chemicals used - D2O and H2O will react to cavitation very differently and Pd and CuBe will similarly haev different characteristics. Since the possible artifacts here are difficult to quantify or understand the fact that they vary does not help us.


    If you think I am nit picking then let me point out that the uncertainty in evaluating this experiment comes from its extraordinarily complex design.


    Meta-discussion

    Quote

    We are now developing the idea of ganging the unit LM SF reactors together to form large heating devices. A practical size to build is a 4 unit device that is being tested with higher temperatures and pressures to produce at least 160 watts of Qx with a much more efficient Qa/Qi of 50% or better. We are developing the calorimetry for this 4 unit system which should have an ME of 2.3. A Qa of 15, a Qi of 30 and a Qo of 50 and for a 4 unit system 120 watts for Qi, 200 watts for Qo, and 60watts for Qa  ME of 2.2. If we gang 32 of these 4 unit systems together a 10K watt device results.


    I agree. If these results are not one of the possible alternate explanations above then this system could pretty easily be engineered to generate commercial levels of power. That would be very highly interesting. Even if not commercial, such further engineering would produce similar mass flow evidence with instrumentation tightened to control possible artifacts.


    That this has not happened (or we would have heard of it in dramatic terms) makes me think it is likely an artifact. After all, had I generated these tantalising results and reckoned artifact were unlikely I would move hell and high water to make progress with similar but tighter experiments.


    Regards, THH

    Re Sonofusion background. I'd need to read other stuff to evaluate the claimed interesting he/heat correlation, leave that as question mark. It would help if W could be precise about the other stuff (raw experimental descriptions please, not summaries). As Abd says it would be hot fusion, and would have normal branching ratio, and so absence of radioactivity puts a big negative against a nuclear He producing hypothesis for this anomaly. But, if hot fusion could be induced in this way it would be fascinating anbd potentially valuable. Last I heard it appeared this was not the case. These dynamic collapse events have very high theoretical transient power densities but practically second order effects and asymmetry tend to limit what happens. But that is my initial position and I'd be happy to be corrected by good evidence.

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    But the environment isn't necessarily a solid with trapping like in the FPHE. That could explain the higher yield of helium compared to solid PdD work, just as a higher value was found in the Case work with a thin palladium coating on coconut carbon charcoal catalyst.





    Sorry THC I can't take You anymore serious. Your answer is below any acceptable level. It's just cheap gossip.

    Quote from THHuxley

    The potential artifacts (from cursory reading) are:


    Tom, when skeptics start to seriously examine cold fusion research, I have seen over the years, they often come up with preposterous possible artifacts. It's normal. I'm completely willing to be patient with it. Maybe one at a time.


    Why preposterous? Well, if these are experienced researchers, the really dumb mistakes they probably did not make. What I congratulate you on is starting to think about this. I remember one skeptic who, after a series of preposterous proposals actually came up with some interesting ones, and then I followed up with the researchers.


    This is not a claim that your proposed artifacts are specifically preposterous, I would need to look at them carefully and I have not.


    One of them was that bubble noise had confused the constant current power supply used by McKubre, creating high-frequency noise that resulted in increased input power over that assumed from constant current. I took this to Dieter Britz, the skeptical electrochemist. He did an analysis of some actual data and showed that the influence was insignificant. Other researchers also wrote about examination of the input power with oscilloscopes as being routinely done even though not mentioned in the publications. Bubble noise is actually low-frequency, and the power suppy response was better than 1 MHz. The result was increased understanding. The researchers did not mind the questions. They are actually scientists!


    (That bubble noise theory got more complicated, i.e,. hydrogen bubbles were more buoyant than deuterium, thus explaining the difference between McKubre's hydrogen control and the deuerium experiment. None of this was actually worked out in detail, and it was based on an incorrect assumptions about what researchers actually do. The process demonstrated how a proposed artifact can become more and more complex to explain away contrary evidence. I have seen it get really twisted. Read some of Shanahan's work. The SPAWAR back-side triple tracks? Well, the little recombination explosions on the surface of the cathode that Shanahan posits -- even though nobody has actually seen then or heard them -- cause a shock wave that then travels through the CR-39 plastic and blows plastic off of the back side, creating a pattern which just happens to resemble the triple-tracks created by high-energy neutrons hitting a carbon nucleus. Powerful enough to blow plastic off? He cites the shock waves reported, and those do exist. Barely detectable with a piezoelectric cathode "microphone." Not powerful at all. Shanahan has constructed an array of arguments, in the end his central argument is "nobody is listening to me.")

    Quote from THHuxley

    As Abd says it [sonofusion] would be hot fusion, and would have normal branching ratio, and so absence of radioactivity puts a big negative against a nuclear He producing hypothesis for this anomaly.


    "Sonofusion" is a controversial claim that fusion can occur in rapidly collapsing bubbles. (1) It is unclear that such a thing exists in the world. (2) Even so, the experiments very well could be pointing to something that does exist, very possibly not sonofusion. We would be hasty, and some certainly are hasty, to push aside experiments carried out by researchers whose pet theories are some variant of sonofusion as being unrelated to LENR.


    In this field, I trust no experimentalists to have a good intuition about theory, nor do I trust any theorists to have a good intuition about theory.

    Quote

    Why preposterous? Well, if these are experienced researchers, the really dumb mistakes they probably did not make. What I congratulate you on is starting to think about this. I remember one skeptic who, after a series of preposterous proposals actually came up with some interesting ones, and then I followed up with the researchers.This is not a claim that your proposed artifacts are specifically preposterous, I would need to look at them carefully and I have not.


    People often assume that others are perfect. That is not the way it goes. Scientists make obvious mistakes, especially when investigating phenomena which have no theoretically quantifiable "expected behaviour" and therefore almost any results you get may be real. Such "unknown" phenomena give you les striucture, and therefore less internal validation, than most science.


    In any case these potential artifacts are not particularly obvious, but are holes. Now, I'm not criticising Stringham for not plugging these holes. He actually did quite a lot of investigation. I'm saying that until they are plugged this data is unsafe. Given the positive and - as he points out - pretty obviously near commercial results - I'd expect the additional effort to be made to do this.


    It is work looking at this stuff, so I don't blame you for not engaging with the details of this, even though they are interesting. But, without doing that, your skepticism of these ideas amounts to "pseudo-skepticism". It is such dismissal reasonable questions without checking that would mark LENR as a pseudo-science. I'm sure though that you'd agree with me about that and not do it.


    Eric:


    I agree, in principle sonofusion might be some variant of LENR. I was addressing the "sonofusion is hot fusion" hypothesis. Anyway, I would view this experiment as encouraging and needing rapid checking to see whether the results are one of the obvious possible artifacts or whether they cross-validate given further work on the same setup with better instrumentation and/or more control runs.

    Quote from THHuxley

    It is work looking at this stuff, so I don't blame you for not engaging with the details of this, even though they are interesting. But, without doing that, your skepticism of these ideas amounts to "pseudo-skepticism". It is such dismissal reasonable questions without checking that would mark LENR as a pseudo-science. I'm sure though that you'd agree with me about that and not do it.

    I have not dismissed any questions. I have stated that we may take them up one at a time. I then made a general remark about "new skeptics." That is a report based on experience. If a "new skeptics" persists, he or she will begin to discover the real questions, what still requires answers, and may begin to make actual contributions. Even the "dumb questions" create learning, at least for the skeptic, if they are studied instead of considered one of a pile of unanswered questions that provide a kind of negative proof.


    Real discussions of this tend to become long. What it takes to fully address these questions is a high level of communication. If response is succinct, it will convince people who already believe the conclusions that will necessarily be incorporated in succinct responses, but not a genuine skeptic.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    The problem is, cold fusion does not produce radioactivity. So you are demanding the impossible.


    But your own library denies this assertion!! What about Gozzi or Bush & Eagleton?


    In conventional set-ups little or no radio-activity is detected. And usually attempts are not even made to detect it. Of course any viable theory must explain both the failure to detect radio-activity and the success when it is detected. I am not demanding the impossible but rather, suggesting the investigation of what others have already found. If that conflicts with LENR dogma, does it matter?

    Quote from Hermes

    JedRothwell wrote:
    The problem is, cold fusion does not produce radioactivity. So you are demanding the impossible.


    But your own library denies this assertion!! What about Gozzi or Bush & Eagleton?


    In conventional set-ups little or no radio-activity is detected. And usually attempts are not even made to detect it. Of course any viable theory must explain both the failure to detect radio-activity and the success when it is detected. I am not demanding the impossible but rather, suggesting the investigation of what others have already found. If that conflicts with LENR dogma, does it matter?


    The lack of radiation at significant levels is a well-established characteristic of LENR. This has been confused by reports of radiation at very low levels. For example, SPAWAR has reported evidence for fast neutrons. The levels would be something like ten times background, which is very low. I usually say that this is a million million times down from helium. The SPAWAR reports show that this effect is very sensitive to the substrate material *below* the palladium plating.


    They themselves suggest that the neutrons may be from very rare DT reactions, hot fusion, as secondary reactions.


    What these radiation findings show is reason to suspect that nuclear reactions are taking place. However, the FPHE is a "heat effect." This effect has not been correlated with radiation, radiation results are erratic and there are suspicions of cosmic ray bursts, etc. This is why heat/helium is so important. Helium is a nuclear product. If it is being produced correlated with heat, and even more if the ratio is consistent with deuterium conversion to helium, as it is, apparently, this, confirmed widely, demonstrates that there is indeed a nuclear reaction.


    And then we may expect rare side and secondary reactions, rare branches, etc. But these other effects are rare. Do not lose sight of what is not rare, being distracted by mysterious rarity.

    Quote

    I have not dismissed any questions. I have stated that we may take them up one at a time. I then made a general remark about "new skeptics." That is a report based on experience. If a "new skeptics" persists, he or she will begin to discover the real questions, what still requires answers, and may begin to make actual contributions. Even the "dumb questions" create learning, at least for the skeptic, if they are studied instead of considered one of a pile of unanswered questions that provide a kind of negative proof.


    I'm all for taking issues one at a time. The "new skeptic" homilies sound patronising - which is probably unhelpful for communication. personally, I am difficult to patronise and don't mind.



    Quote

    Real discussions of this tend to become long. What it takes to fully address these questions is a high level of communication. If response is succinct, it will convince people who already believe the conclusions that will necessarily be incorporated in succinct responses, but not a genuine skeptic.


    Well, I'm all for that, and also agree that complex issues require careful case by case consideration. It is however also important, given complex problems, to focus on small sub-questions, rather than try for holistic "gut feeling" summaries.

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    The lack of radiation at significant levels is a well-established characteristic of LENR. This has been confused by reports of radiation at very low levels.


    Do you have any evidence for this or is it just wishful thinking? Oh! Forgive me! Is citing "wishful" thinking an appalling ad hominem attack? Or is it as Eric Walker said, just "calling a spade a spade".


    Your pretence that there is a "lack of radiation at significant levels is a well-established characteristic of LENR" is contradicted by experimental evidence such as:-
    Bush R., Eagleton R. Evidence for Electrolytically Induced Transmutation and Radioactivity Correlated with Excess Heat in Electrolytic Cells With Light Water Rubidium Salt Electrolytes, Proc. ICCF4 3, (1993), p 27 www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRIproceedingb.pdf
    Let's be quite clear, this was not at any "low level" as you imagine. On the contrary these workers demonstrated over 3 million counts per day (obviously many more actual events).


    I appreciate Lomax that you don't like clear cut nuclear evidence from light hydrogen experiments. Perhaps you have or can find criticism of the experiment?

    Quote from Hermes

    If the underlying process is hot-fusion why wasn't Roger Stringham killed by the neutrons? Maybe it's a quite different process.


    You ask a simplified question, without knowing the details.


    ITER for example is man made hot-fusion, very uncommon in the rest of the univers and producing tons if neutrons. But T-D has a high Gamov-factor.


    The main idea behind LENR is: Only very low energy levels (Some 10-100 eV) are needed to induce/produce the nuclear reaction.


    In hot fusion You need higher energy levels (1000-30000eV) to start the reaction.


    Hot fusion is kinetic (at least one reaction partner) - LENR is "static" as there is no real free path of movment for the reaction partners.


    Now sonofusion: One reaction partner is kinetic. The cristaline needlike center of the colapsing bubble, which bangs into the lattice. (About mach 10) Thus sonofusion is similar to accelerator experiments shooting elements into to other target elements.
    But to start a sono-fusion experiment You need only about 4 Watt input, the path of the bubbles is very short and after they entered the lattice the NAE is LENR.


    But contary to most LENR reactions You get radiation. Most He4 is freed (==>Alpha radiation) and induces Bremsstrahlung (mostly "soft" X-rays).


    Thus to my understanding classical LENR is fully contained in a close NAE which confines products and radiation.


    It would be better we define a set of rules for nuclear reactions which allow to classify them exactly.

    Quote from Wyttenbach

    Thus to my understanding classical LENR is fully contained in a close NAE which confines products and radiation.


    LENR is not magic. It has to be consistent with the laws of physics. You can't just wave your hands and say we only get helium when deuterons get sufficiently close to each other. Hot or cold, they will produce standard hot fusion products. This is what we observe with muon catalysed fusion too. If we get helium and we don't get neutrons and tritium then there must be another mechanism woirking which explains why. Please don't call it hot fusion.

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