Ultrasonic Fuel Treatment

Quote from Alan Smith

The very extensive literature on hydrigenation shows that both ultrasonics and acid cleaning of nickel (and other metals) increase the absorption and adsorption of hydrogen. The reason being that completely oxide free surfaces reduce H2 to H+H more readily than 'dirty' ones. One of the steps in the hydrogen uptake process may be the formation of 'transient' hydrides, which actually penetrate the metal, propagating crack defects as they do so. This process of defect creation is thought to be due to both physical swelling caused by the hydrides, and charge differences between materials.The hydrogen makes its own defect sites.

In the just published JCMNS20 compendium Storms publishes his newest findings about Pd surface cleaning with HNO₃ (the classical way to do it!).

JCMNS20 http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BiberianJPjcondenseds.pdf

Now, after cleaning, Pd shows new effects, one beeing the fact that the D/Pd load ratio is "not at all" important for excess heat. The mfp finding that the release of D produces the effect is more ore less confirmed now for Pd too. But for Pd it could well be, that the LENR fusion runs on internla surfaces where as in Ni we claim it's happening close to the surface.
Initial high load is still important, because it completely changes the internal structure of Pd!!

Quote from MrSelfSustain

The number one requirement for nickel powder to absorb hydrogen is that it is free from oxides.

Nickel does not absorb significant quantities of hydrogen under normal conditions, no matter how clean the surface is. Surface cleanliness should only affect the rate of absorption, not the amount of hydrogen absorbed.

If large differences in absorption are observed they have to be treated as an anomaly to be further investigated, not dismissed as ordinary behavior. It is not the ordinary behavior of bulk nickel to absorb large quantities of hydrogen.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02882416

On the other hand, adsorption inside newly formed pores and cavities, segregated pores, or inside cavities that are not large enough to trap other gases may be mistaken for absorption. But if it is porous materials that one is looking for then there are more efficient ways to do that, and other materials may be used too.

Quote

you can perform baking under vacuum to produce the micro-cavities (which Rossi describes) and other surface and interior defects

No such thing will be produced just by baking under vacuum.

On the other hand, by suddenly introducing hydrogen at very high temperatures the nickel oxides will be completely and quickly reduced, leaving a porous structure at the nanometric scale even inside the bulk of the material. So an idea could be directly starting from NiO instead of clean Ni. This paper has already been posted a few times in the past, but it looks like people are not interested in simple and effective ideas: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpcc.5b04313

Currently only two working approaches improve the saturation of nickel surface with hydrogen: the implantation of protons with corona discharge and the mixing of nickel with palladium (which is IMO inert with respect to cold fusion, but it exhibits high solubility for hydrogen). The making the nickel surface porous (with redox cycling or similar way) may also work, but the character of resulting nickel surface (like the whisker density) may be important after then. Note also that small particles exhibit much larger pressure due to their surface tension, which may positively affect the speed of hydrogen uptake but adversely affect the saturation (level of hydrogen within metal lattice).

Well, in general the cold fusion runs the better, the higher surface the nickel has, which is why the finely divided nickel dust is usually used in cold fusion reactors. So it has no big meaning to clean the rough surface of nickel, until it's not covered with compact oxide layer. Such an oxide layer couldn't be removed with ultrasound anyway, so I consider your recommendations as somewhat armchair advice anyway. If you'll clean the surface of nickel with acid, then no further treatment in ultrasound will be actually necessary - it may contaminate the surface again instead.

In general, the people who really advanced in cold fusion recommended to oxidize and reduce nickel repeatedly, as such treatment increased its specific surface. So you may be right or not, but you shouldn't push the ideas, until they're not supported with experiments - as they could become misleading easily.

/* 'Only two working approaches' seems to exclude much of this work */

You shouldn't transfer the ideas from organic chemistry catalysis to cold fusion catalysis carelessly. Now we aren't talking about hundred years old experience with hydrogenation on nickel, but about cold fusion, where the consistent experience is way narrower. Maybe some other approaches work well too, but I have no information about it. Do you?

In general, I don't think, that the cold fusion can run reliably without some electricity. If it could run so, then just by accident and such a system hasn't been developed already. So I don't recommend to waste time with some laborious preparation of nickel surface, until corona discharge isn't used. This is much more powerful way, how the streamline things, in particularly because the corona has a strong cleaning effect by itself.

The only sucessfull replicators were these ones who introduced electricity into cold fusion system: electrolysis, plasma electrolysis, corona discharge. Even Defkalion, Brillouin Energy and Rossi did use some kind of EM activation in their reactors from its very beginning. But the amateur community still ignores it from some reason.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

In general, I don't think, that the cold fusion can run reliably without some electricity.

There are various reports of excess heat in gas loading systems that do not make use of electric current. An example is Iraj Parchamazad's work with zeolites, discussed here. I don't think it's safe to generalize about needing electric current.

@Eric Walker: Yes, I already talked about cracks and pits as about second main factor of cold fusion systems, which also includes the zeolites with their narrow channels.

The roles of pores for LENR may be vicarious in the way, they do increase the saturation of palladium with hydrogen by negative curvature of their surface. Inside the pores the pressure of hydrogen not only would be increased by its adsorption, but the effect of surface tension to small particles of palladium would be balanced. The surface tension would otherwise exert large pressure to fine palladium particles, which would decrease the load of hydrogen by itself. Note also that palladium is usually used in connection with titanium or nickel, as its role is also secondary: the main purpose of which is to increase the load of hydrogen at the clusters of transition metals, where the nuclear reaction is actually working. As the main fusion factor of palladium are ruthenium & similar impurities, not the palladium itself. One of the reasons of cold fusion fiasco in 1986 could be, the replicators did use very pure palladium in an effort to make Pons experiments reproducible as much as possible. Whereas in fact they got rid of the important component of cold fusion reaction.

The third main factor enhancing the LENR may be magnetic field, but the systematical experimental data are still missing here.

The goal of fuel preparation is the generation of metalized hydrides. That goal is not to produce nickel particles. The purpose of nickel particles is to generate metalized hydrides in nanoscale sized holes, cavities, and pits. Once these hydrides are created, the nickel particles only act as containers in which the metalized hydrides can be transported.

As a object lessen, the operating temperature of the QuarkX shows that the nickel particle can melt, the holes, cavities, and pits in these nickel particles can vanish, but the LENR reaction is still supported by the metalized hydrides that those particles carry.

With the sucessful results reported by WisKid who uses lithium fluoride in his sucessful reactor experiments, we now know that fluorine is compatible with the LENR reaction, and that is fluorine is not a LENR poison. This new LENR compatible material opens up the use of molten salts and enormous pressures that cavitation can provide to LENR fuel preparation activity. Cavitation can produce pressures in this thin zone between the bubble shock wave and the solid metal substrate is in the range of a few hundred up to just over a thousand gigapascals depending on the strength of the material. Metalized hydrogen is thought to be formed at pressures of about 400 gigapascals. This is well within the range of cavitation pressure production.

The cavitation that occurs in molten salts are many times more powerful than the pressures produced by water based cavitation so the production of sufficient pressure should be no issue.

A molten salt closed circuit and be filtered by a nanoscale metal foam, possibly comprised of nickel to trap and contain the metalized hydride particles after their production.

OK, "metalized hydrides" are the hype for this week. BTW How the metalized hydrides differ from metal hydrides?

Quote from Zephir_AWT

One of the reasons of cold fusion fiasco in 1986 could be, the replicators did use very pure palladium in an effort to make Pons experiments reproducible as much as possible.

Indeed. I am always very skeptical when experimental discussions here and elsewhere start to explore ways to produce ultra-pure this or that, as I don't think it's been established that ultra-pure material is in any way better than material with impurities for producing the anomalous heat effect, and there is anecdotal evidence that impurities are a good thing. It is all too common for various assumptions to creep into experiment design which have not been properly vetted.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

OK, "metalized hydrides" are the hype for this week. BTW How the metalized hydrides differ from metal hydrides?

Metalized hydrifes act like a metal but are not a metal and you know what metal hydrides are, don't you?

This is typical Axil: he pushes an idea without having an idea (what it actually is and what it does).

Quote from gameover

Axil, I think that I already wrote this in the past but you seem to be the only person on the internet who calls metallic hydrogen "metalized hydride". Unless you have specific reasons to call it in that way (for example I thought that since technically H- ions are called hydrides this could be a reference to Piantelli's theory) I would suggest that you stick with the other name.

A superconducting form of lithium hydride which as achieved the formation of a Bose condinsate should not rightfully be called hydrogen because it is a hydride compound of hydrogen. In other words, it is a chemical compound and not an element.

Notice in this article that the word hydride appears

http://www.nature.com/nature/j…567/full/nature14964.html

Conventional superconductivity at 203 kelvin at high pressures in the sulfur hydride system

Also note that in this article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…emperature_superconductor

the term hydride is used to refer to hydrogen loaded palladium.