[SPLIT]Older LENR Experiments were bad, good... in general

Quote from kirkshanahan

One of the characteristics of this whole debate is that people can't seem to believe a 1-2% heat loss can produce the "FPHE". Failing to accept the idea is an example of forcing experimental results to fit preconceived notions. While we certainly have theory to guide us, we should never assume we have it "all". Error bar magnitude must be determined based on the impact of all components of variation, not just the ones we want to be important.

The facts remain that a small calibration constant variation on data obtained in a highly efficient calorimeter can produce a (non-random in this case) variation many times the baseline fluctuation. That is not speculation, that is published fact. General principles present in defining how that happens (such as needing to use a minimum of 2 zones to describe cell/calorimeter function) can be extrapolated appropriately to other scenarios.

In your first paragraph you appear to be replying to me but you're not, which is fine. In your second paragraph you explain that the general idea of a non-random fluctuation is not speculation, which is also fine, and which is not what I was addressing. I'm saying the part about 2 or more zones still being subject to possible CCS, possibly because of the positioning of feedthroughs, is hand-wavy. Do you disagree? Can you suggest a concrete experiment using just resistance heaters, or possibly forced on-cathode recombination (using bubblers perhaps), that will show or falsify a CSS "signal" in a setup specifically with several thermal barriers?

Quote from THHuxley

The specific system considered here is a closed cell with electrolyte at bottom, and air space at top, and a recombiner (which will obviously be a significant source of heat) at the top in the air space. The cell has liquid coolant flowing adjacent to the electrolyte but not at the top and has a 78% (or so) efficiency. That means that 20% (or so) of the cell's heat is not captured by the coolant, or is captured by the coolant and lost before the coolant temperature measurement . . .

That's wrong. The flowing coolant captures the heat from recombination in a closed cell. The quoted recovery rate for a calorimeter includes heat from recombination, and a resistance heater, electrolysis heat, and any anomalous heat. There is no way to distinguish between them.

Suppose the recovery rate is 95%. This means that when you perform ordinary electrolysis with a platinum cathode and light water, the system recovers 95% of the input power. The fact that some of the power goes to recombination in the headspace of the cell makes no difference. In a properly designed calorimeter, just as much of this heat is captured as any other heat. It is not as if the top of the cell protrudes out of the calorimeter into the air. The flowing water surrounds the entire cell including the top of it. There is no path for the recombination heat to escape. Granted, there are usually some wires coming in through the top of the cell. These do conduct a tiny amount of heat. But this is measured and accounted for. They do not conduct measurably more heat when there is electrolysis and recombination compared to a calibration with a resistance heater in the electrolyte. If they did, this would be detected and accounted for.

". . . or is captured by the coolant and lost before the coolant temperature measurement . . ." That never happens, unless you are talking about a fraction of a milliwatt. The cooling water does not lose a significant amount of heat between the inlet and the outlet. The whole system is insulated to prevent that. In any case, it is not going to lose recombination heat any faster than heat from some other location in the cell. It takes only a fraction of a minute for the cooling water to traverse the entire cell wall. It is heated by all parts of the cell wall, including parts that are heated by the recombiner. The cooling water is well stirred before it passes the inlet thermometer and again before it passes the outlet thermometer.

In an open cell, there is no recombination. The researchers confirm this. Shanahan's hypotheses are a complete fantasy with these systems. It describes events that never happen. (Not events that cannot happen in principle, but events that we know never do happen in fact.)

Quote from Eric Walker

One of Kirk's replies: if the feedthroughs for the instrumentation pass through the top of the enclosing apparatus, there might continue to be a problem. Theoretically possible? Hard to say. Speculative? Couldn't be more so.

This is not speculative. It is flat out wrong. People always measure the recovery rate of a calorimeter. The recovery rate is never 100%, of course, and no doubt some of the heat escapes from the instrumentation and electrolysis leads, but this is measured and accounted for. It does not change when you calibrate with resistance heating or electrolysis. Recombination in the headspace does not affect the recovery rate measurably.

Quote

THHuxley wrote:

(2) The more recombination at the electrode, the less recombination at the recombiner.

In a properly designed cold fusion experiment there is never any significant recombination at the electrode. If there were, the test probably would not produce anomalous cold fusion heat.

Granted, this would be difficult to confirm in a closed cell but there have been many open cell experiments and they never produce recombination at the electrode (except for co-deposition experiments). If they did, this would be simple to confirm.

Quote from THHuxley

So now I'm uncertain. I'd expect this effect to scale with the inefficiency of the calorimetry. That means the 20% loss system should show 10X FPHE that the 2% system does.

I have never heard of a laboratory flow calorimeter that recovers only 80% of the heat. I would toss that instrument into the trash. That would be useless for a laboratory study.

90% is okay. 95% is more like it. Anyway, the recovery rate is the same whether you use resistance heating or electrolysis, so recombination does not affect peformance. If the recovery rate fluctuates significantly for any reason during any kind of calibration, you need to toss the instrument into the trash.

You people treat recombination as if it were some sort of mysterious force from a parallel universe. It is just heat! Like any other heat. It can be measured and accounted for. The cooling water flows around the entire wall of the cell so it captures heat no matter where the heat originates in the cell. There have been some isoperibolic calorimeters with a single temperature measurement in one part of the electrolyte. Something like that might produce different answers with recombination in the headspace. However, most isoperibolic calorimeters measure heat at multiple locations (with an array of sensors) or on the outside of the cell, and most tests of this nature are with open cells where the researcher confirms there is no recombination. So in real life, this is not a problem.

If there were a problem, the researcher would detect it during calibration. That's why they calibrate. Calibration data proves that Shanahan is wrong. That is why no one listens to him.

Quote from THHuxley

You will see above that I'm not endorsing Kirk's ideas when I don't understand them. But, given what I do understand, your argument in here does not hold up. Kirk proposes an unusual mechanism in which calibration for cells performing electrolysis with mixed gasses and specific catalytic electrodes fails . . .

Heat is heat, whether it comes from mixed gases or not. Recombination in an electrolysis cell always happens at a fixed rate, as quickly as the gas evolves. If it stops happening for 5 or 10 minutes, either the cell explodes or the pressure relief valve blows open. There is quite a bang when this happens. You can't miss it. The experiment is at an end.

Recombination does not occur at the cathodes, as I said. Even if it did, it would be indistinguishable from heat in the head space. Recombination in a closed cell happens at a catalyst which is above the water line. If the catalyst get wet because recombined water covers it, or because you shake the cell and splash the electrolyte, the catalyst stops working, and the cell explodes.

You can see momentary pauses in recombination with a malfunctioning closed cell, with a dirty or wet recombiner. They show up clearly in the calorimetric data. The problem is not invisible.

Recombiners are a pain in the butt, and the source of many problems.

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

What information? There is minimal review process for conference papers. "By conference arttendees"? There seems to be no process for that. No voting, for example. Yes, it is a "more lenient" crowd.

What information??? The information I have in my hands and head. If you require specifics, I have two posts from the old Usenet newsgroup sci.physics.fusion (spf) in which separately Jed Rothwell and another gentleman (Svein Utne, who posted summaries from the ICCF8 conference) state that the Proceedings will be peer-reviewed and published. That corresponds to standard practice for most scientific conferences. I have the Amazon listing of two copies of said Proceedings being up for sale. And I have the generic knowledge that all ICCF and similar conference proceedings from the CF community claim peer-review (including the Current Science publication you published in).

You correctly note that papers in Conference Proceedinggs have less status than regular journal articles, but they also have more status than company/organization technical reports such as my whitepaper on F&P calorimetry or McKubre's EPRI reports.

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

Blatant nonsense gets "published" this way, sometimes.

As well as in top line journals such as Nature and Science. No medium is immune to the occasional bogus paper. But that is a conscious choice for the most part. Peer review is not to be used to suppress, supposedly it only does two thing: 1) tries to find easily recognizable errors and points needing clarification, and 2) decides if the paper is appropriate for the journal it was submitted to.

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

Shanahan is not competent to assess my teachability, and his quote doesn't show what he thinks. There is a mirror question, is Kirk teachable? If he repeats the same objections over and over, after being answered by experts, has he learned anything?

What I am competent to do is assess your apparent understanding of my writings. So far, as an example, you have apparently failed to grasp the idea that heat moving from the gas space to the liquid space in a cell results in an overcounting, an 'excess'. As well, you fail to grasp my point about heat/He correlations when the 'heat' signal is an artifact and/or when the He measurements are ultra-trace and trace level. I have expressed these points multiple times, but you a) fail to display any understanding of the points and b) continue to push the opposite ideas. Jed does the same thing.

You are correct in that it might be my 'teaching' skills, but us sciency-types are supposed to be able to learn from the worst teachers (at least that's what my university experience taught me...). But apparently I need the authority that was granted to Sun Tzu to be successful with you (and Jed).

At least Ed Storms had the courtesy to repeat back my concepts correctly when asked, even if he chose not to believe them.

As far as my teachability, there are one or two examples back from the Usenet days where I was mistaken, was corrected, and accepted that immediately. I also accepted your comment regarding my writing on Storms' Fig. 47. The important difference there was the person correcting me made sense. I observe that you don't when arguing against my points.

Likewise, when "the experts" clearly fail to understand my objections/proposals/etc., their repetition of their misunderstandings only stimulates me to try again. However, given what Marwan, McKubre, Tanzella, Hagelstein, Miles, Swartz, Storms, Iwamura, Mosier-Boss, and Forsley published (the "CCSH" paper), I have actually given up on them too. These days the only thing that I try to do is clarify that my objections remain unanswered for the benefit of people doing 'due dilligence'. That's why I don't bother to try to publish anything anymore on this, too much work to get it through review for the benefit (which is actually almost non-existant for me).

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

Say where? Not here, previously.

Yes here previously. Abd, everything I have ever posted on the CCS issue in F&P-type cells has said the same thing. Here, on Wikipedia, and back into spf on Usenet. You just proved my point (again).

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

"If I have it correctly ...." and "So it appears ..." ... i.e, if I have it correctly, it appears to me. Those are "facts." If we had a believe that whatever appears to me is truth, then, yes, we'd have an issue. however, I don't have that belief and neither does Kirk, so what is going on here is that he is assuming my position as a "CF'er" or something.

When using those phrases I am describing the CHEMICAL MECHANISM of at-the-electrode recombination. All chemists view mechanisms with a critical eye becasue chemistry's history has repeatedly shown suggested mechanisms are often wrong. On top of that, no one has experimentally investigated my proposed mechanism, therfore it *IS* entirely speculative and in need of verification. That being said, it *ALSO* has strong predictive power withing the available results (CR39 results and the impact of laser ilumination during electrolysis for ex), a property that usually leads to an acceptance of the likely legitimacy of at least *part* of the proposal. But not in the CF field...it isn't nuclear so it can't be right...

Quote from JedRothwell

Heat is heat, whether it comes from mixed gases or not. Recombination in an electrolysis cell always happens at a fixed rate, as quickly as the gas evolves.

No Jed, recombination does NOT happen always. Why do you think Miles, et al, used an external "recombiner". It wasn't an external "condenser".

Quote from JedRothwell

If it stops happening for 5 or 10 minutes, either the cell explodes or the pressure relief valve blows open. There is quite a bang when this happens. You can't miss it. The experiment is at an end.

Yup. But there are at least two ways that happens. First, the now trapped, non-recombining gases build up pressure and rupture the cell, releasing a flammable mix of H2 and O2, which then explodes. Or second, the trapped gases explode inside the cell due to some initiaor being present. Hard to tell them apart from a distance.

Quote from JedRothwell

Recombination does not occur at the cathodes, as I said.

So those hot spots Szpak, et al, videoed *just Have to be* mini-nuclear explosions, right?

Quote from JedRothwell

Even if it did, it would be indistinguishable from heat in the head space.

Only in the primitive model that treats the calorimeter/cell as a featureless, homogeneous black box.

Quote from JedRothwell

Recombination in a closed cell happens at a catalyst which is above the water line. If the catalyst get wet because recombined water covers it, or because you shake the cell and splash the electrolyte, the catalyst stops working, and the cell explodes.

Yes. But you should say the cell 'may' explode, because the condition can clear up without that in some cases.

Quote from JedRothwell

You can see momentary pauses in recombination with a malfunctioning closed cell, with a dirty or wet recombiner. They show up clearly in the calorimetric data. The problem is not invisible.

But what if the heat lost at the recombiner reappears and is overcounted elsewhere??? Get my point?

Quote from JedRothwell

Recombiners are a pain in the butt, and the source of many problems.

May well be true.

Quote from JedRothwell

THHuxley wrote:
So now I'm uncertain. I'd expect this effect to scale with the inefficiency of the calorimetry. That means the 20% loss system should show 10X FPHE that the 2% system does.

@THH: Yes but... you also have to account for the differences in cell designs, possibly down to run-to-run electrode spacing, and for the uncontrolled % recombination ATE (at-the-electrode)...that leads to a lot of apparent variation in the experimental data. You are correct that there should be some limits on this problem however. The extant data doesn't seem to contain the need information to adequately address this today.

Quote from JedRothwell

I have never heard of a laboratory flow calorimeter that recovers only 80% of the heat. I would toss that instrument into the trash. That would be useless for a laboratory study.

...which is why Ed redesigned his cell to move from 78% to 98%... As I recall today, several of the 'calorimetry beginners' in the CF field use less efficient calorimeters.

Quote from JedRothwell

90% is okay. 95% is more like it. Anyway, the recovery rate is the same whether you use resistance heating or electrolysis, so recombination does not affect peformance. If the recovery rate fluctuates significantly for any reason during any kind of calibration, you need to toss the instrument into the trash.

I see you missed my last big explanatory message to Abd. You really should try to comprehend what I write. Go back and look at where I discuss his Figure 2 annotations from the paper that Abd referenced. You'll see you are wrong here. But you're metaphorically right, an unsteady system can't be calibrated, so generally it's of no use, so it should be redesigned, if not trashed.

Quote from JedRothwell

You people treat recombination as if it were some sort of mysterious force from a parallel universe.

No, that's your strawman that you use to ignore critics. My treatment of heat is more sophisticated that Storms or McKubre, or Hagelstein, or ... That's why I say that a 2-zone model is the minimum acceptable model.

Quote from JedRothwell

If there were a problem, the researcher would detect it during calibration. That's why they calibrate. Calibration data proves that Shanahan is wrong. That is why no one listens to him.

No they wouldn't detect it if they are using inadequate methods (which they do when they use a lumped parameter-type of approach). They don't calibrate to detect problems, they calibrate to correct computed output to know output, the calibration correction being developed from control cases. The available calibration data for F&P-type cells proves that there is an apparent excess heat signal. I suggest a mundane explanation that is mathematically correct, and chemically likely. "No one" being primary CF reseachers, "no one" listens to me because if they did it is likely the whole CF field would evaporate. If I am correct, one can potentially say today that *all* 'excess heat' CF signals are artifacts. That leaves a substantially smaller body of data to deal with, that is composed of many subdivisions, each of which is suceptible to criticism. There is no definitive CF data for anything except for the existence of something giving apparent excess heat signals.

The thing people need to remember is that instead of going back to their data and checking to see if a CCS might explain their excess heat signals, the CFers have chosen to use strawman arguments and other incorrect logics to attack the *proposed* mechanism, which was always presented as speculative. A real case where an excess heat signal is outside the bounds of a CCS, and does not have other obvious problems, would go a long way towards dismissing the relevance of the CCS/ATE issue. Where is it?

Quote from kirkshanahan

Your presumption is incorrect. One of the earliest criticisms of CF calorimetry, in particluar F&P's, was that it ws a single point measurement, i.e. one thermocouple (or thermistor, or whatever they used) for the high temp reading. The question was: How does one know the measured temp is the 'correct' temperature? The TC may have been placed in a hot spot (or cold spot).

I looked at some older reactor design, which were in fact crude if one would just conduct electrolysis. There recombination O(₂) + H2 at the Pd surface "might happen" under circumstance like wrong PH or high voltage!

The "might happen" must be discussed, because the surface of Pd is not accessible for H2 and O2 at the same time .. -further on D2 is very light and very fast bubbeling upwards. O2 cannot compete against H2O to get an electron. O₂ needs 4 e- and a deep PH to get 4H+ to recombine to water! Splitting O2 needs a very high potential that I don't see anywhere, thus a recombination (without catalysis) is only possible at very high T or high voltage or deep PH.

May be Kirki can present us his prefered recombination reaction !

But, as already Fleischman/miles did (described in their paper ICCF10) , if you run proper control experiments with H2O instead of D2O everything is fine. You can double check with measuring the gas voluminas etc...
A control run with H2O instead of D2O gives you the expected response of the calorimetry system with no LENR reaction!

I once more point to a much higher COP experiment I proposed, where such a discussion is no more than nail filing.

Quote from JedRothwell

THHuxley wrote:
The specific system considered here is a closed cell with electrolyte at bottom, and air space at top, and a recombiner (which will obviously be a significant source of heat) at the top in the air space. The cell has liquid coolant flowing adjacent to the electrolyte but not at the top and has a 78% (or so) efficiency. That means that 20% (or so) of the cell's heat is not captured by the coolant, or is captured by the coolant and lost before the coolant temperature measurement . . .

That's wrong.

No. That's right. (As long as we ignore the minor problem I have already pointed out, that the published case is with the 98% efficient calorimeter.)

Quote from JedRothwell

There is no way to distinguish between them.

In the sense that heat from one point would trigger a different thermometry device, you are correcet. But we can *model* the calorimeter and then compare the model results to real ones, thereby identifying where heat sources are and how the heat flows within the system. That's the difference between the 1-zone and 2-zone model for example.

Quote from JedRothwell

In a properly designed calorimeter,

There's those nasty preconceptions again. A 'properly' designed calorimeter. What is that exactly? Are McKubre's calorimeters 'properly' designed, how about Storms', or Miles'?

What you seek to do is design a calorimeter with the 'best' precision and accuracy. Then you test it, and see where you ended up. The design is influenced by the extent of knowledge of heat flow in such devices. A 'properly' designed calorimeter has no significant problems with precision and accuracy. Problems afffecting those things are usually worse in a less efficient device. If a calorimeter is overall 78% efficient, but produces better than 1% accuracy and 1% precision, that's a top-notch calorimeter. Do we have such a beast? I don't know, no one has reported using one that good AFAIK.

What you're really doing with that phrase Jed, is 'smuggling in' the idea that a 'properly designed' calorimeter has 100% accuracy and no variation (0% precision). Ain't no such beast. To understand real world results you have to deal in real world facts, not idealized preconceptions.

Quote from JedRothwell

It is not as if the top of the cell protrudes out of the calorimeter into the air.

No, but the power supply lines and the sensor signal lines do. And yes, that's where a good portion of the final heat loss goes. It doesn't just disappear. It's called 'conservation of energy (and matter of course)'. And it uses the standard physical concepts of thermal conductivity and movement to thermal equilibrium.

Quote from JedRothwell

The flowing water surrounds the entire cell including the top of it.

In a fully-integrating calorimeter. The 78% beastie was not 'fully' integrating.

Quote from JedRothwell

Granted, there are usually some wires coming in through the top of the cell. These do conduct a tiny amount of heat. But this is measured and accounted for.

No, they are not. Routinely the only thing reported is the calorimeter output, which does NOT include those lines.

I can believe people have measured heat loss through calorimeter boundary penetrations like this, and obviously they are 'small' relative to the bulk of the thermal signal. But they are not small enough to ignore. They (and any other 'small' heat loss pathway) are implicit in the physical basis of the CCS/ATE explanation of apparent excess heat.

Quote from JedRothwell

If they did, this would be detected and accounted for.

Nope.

Quote from JedRothwell

". . . or is captured by the coolant and lost before the coolant temperature measurement . . ." That never happens, unless you are talking about a fraction of a milliwatt.

The pathway described is another completely legitimate example of these 'small' pathways. There most certainly will be loss to the environment from the calorimeter coil. You can't stop it. All materials conduct heat to differing degrees and never fully stop that. The loss however is compensated for by calibration.

Quote from JedRothwell

The cooling water does not lose a significant amount of heat between the inlet and the outlet.

How do you know this? It's a wonderful idealization, but reality says it will lose some. Whether it is significant or not depends on what other noise sources are present and their magnitude.

Quote from JedRothwell

The whole system is insulated to prevent that.

You realize of course that the insulation is needed becasue the losses are significant enough that they need to be reduced right? All those losses you just said were insignificant...

Quote from JedRothwell

In any case, it is not going to lose recombination heat any faster than heat from some other location in the cell. It takes only a fraction of a minute for the cooling water to traverse the entire cell wall.

Incorrect. It depends totally on the thermal loss profile of the cell. In the sense that we can distinguish recombination heat from ohmic heating via a model of the cell, if recombination heat is produced close to a loss pathway, it should be lost more quickly. Of course in measurements we can't distinguish that directly. Again recording time profiles, modeling the cell, and comparing the two is how one would do it.

Quote from JedRothwell

The cooling water is well stirred before it passes the inlet thermometer and again before it passes the outlet thermometer.

Really, stirred at the outlet? How? (I know generically how one might do it, but I'd like to know what 'specific' measures Storms, McKubre, and Miles take to do that.)

Quote from JedRothwell

The researchers confirm this.

How?

Quote from JedRothwell

Shanahan's hypotheses are a complete fantasy with these systems. It describes events that never happen. (Not events that cannot happen in principle, but events that we know never do happen in fact.)

Well, so far, after three separate attempts at disproving my physical/chemical model by primary CFers, that hasn't happened. Ergo what you write is incorrect or at least unsubstantiated assertion.

Quote from kirkshanahan

Of course in measurements we can't distinguish that directly. Again recording time profiles, modeling the cell, and comparing the two is how one would do it.

In the context of a table-top experiment, the way one would distinguish error from not-error is by doing two otherwise identical experiments, controlling only for CCS, with one run intended to exhibit it, and the other intended not to exhibit it, and then looking at the difference and spread in the measured heat. This is the empirical method. You cannot explain away empirical results using only models and a speculative source of error.

Quote from kirkshanahan

No Jed, recombination does NOT happen always. Why do you think Miles, et al, used an external "recombiner". It wasn't an external "condenser".

I think you have me mixed up with someone else. I did not mention an external condensor or recombiner. Miles did not use either one, as far as I know. He measured the gas and vented it. He also measured the electrolyte water level.

I did not say combination happens always. It happens never, with an open cell that is vented.

Quote from kirkshanahan

There's those nasty preconceptions again. A 'properly' designed calorimeter. What is that exactly? Are McKubre's calorimeters 'properly' designed, how about Storms', or Miles'?

Yes, they are.

Quote from kirkshanahan

If a calorimeter is overall 78% efficient, but produces better than 1% accuracy and 1% precision, that's a top-notch calorimeter.

No, that would be a nightmare. It would prove nothing about anything. Even if you got 15% excess heat, it would still be recovering less heat than you put in, which is not convincing. You want to recover more than 100% of total input power, disregarding electrolysis losses, which means that even if recombination is somehow magically not measured at all you still have indisputable anomalous heat.

The balance during calibration should be as close to 1 as you can make it.