Nevalinna on Cobraf : Yeong E Kim funded by Industrial Heat and Cumberland & Western Resources

If he follows the bread crumb trail left on this forum by Me356, which is absolutely amazing if you following it from start to finish, he could perform some outstanding tests in a very short time period with all that cash. Heck, for $400,000, he could leap frog beyond Rossi in short order if he was willing to openly disclose his work, discuss findings, and rapidly improve upon it via continual non-stop testing. The E-Cat tech could be verified in short order.

I just hope IH hasn't advised him to muck around with deuterium-palldium electrolytic systems.

Quote from MrSelfSustain

If he follows the bread crumb trail left on this forum by Me356, which is absolutely amazing if you following it from start to finish, he could perform some outstanding tests in a very short time period with all that cash. Heck, for $400,000, he could leap frog beyond Rossi in short order if he was willing to openly disclose his work, discuss findings, and rapidly improve upon it via continual non-stop testing. The E-Cat tech could be verified in short order.

I just hope IH hasn't advised him to muck around with deuterium-palldium electrolytic systems.

Kim is a theoretical physicist, not an experimentalist. There are two physicists with cold fusion theories involving Bose-Einstein Condensates. Kim has been writing about this for years, so what this is showing is that IH and others are supporting theorists. I'm not sure that's where I'd go first, the big problem with cold fusion theory is that there are too many with not enough data to clearly discriminate between them.

(Akito Takahashi has also long studied Bose-Einstein Condensates and LENR, and is also an experimentalist, finding a standard 3-body fusion rate elevated 10^26 over naive expectation in palladium deuteride bombarded by deuterons. That was not LENR, perhaps, but showed that classical, over-simplified, predictions were far off.)

Any cold fusion theory that focuses on what is not well-established (i.e., NiH reactions) and ignores what is far better known (PdD) and, within PdD, electrolytic systems, would be unlikely to find the mechanism.

With PdD the ash is known, so at least we know what the reaction actually does (based on the preponderance of the evidence, for sure, with work under way to confirm this with increased precision), i.e., it converts deuterium to helium. Kim knows that. With NiH, there has been no correlation between heat and any specific product or class of products. The state of the NiH field is primitive.

Peter Gluck is treating the reporting of fact about this as if it were an attempt to "kill LENR+." No, it's just being honest and practical. Nobody is trying to stop NiH research, and it is included in that major Texas Tech/ENEA project well funded by Gates. If the Rossi Effect were real and verifiable, the high-power output would make exploration of ash relatively easy, and thus there could be far more focus on NiH.

Unfortunately, the Rossi results, if they exist at all, have likely been greatly exaggerated. And that work has never been accessible to confirmation; what is sometimes presented as confirmation is very weak, and the equivalent of Miles, who found the heat/helium correlation in 1991, confirmed many times over the years -- with true confirmation, not merely something "similar," -- does not yet exist for NiH.

Overall, the funding of Kim shows dedication on the part of those who funded, to pure research. Kim is not likely to be generating anything like a product. This is science.

I'm going to attempt to articulate a very complicated topic into simple terms. For the record, I'm not saying I understand all the precise metallurgical details.

In my opinion, the fundamental basis of most LENR is the production of extremely high pressures in isolated voids, defects, or cavities inside of the nickel lattice. These high pressures, for some reason or another, produce LENR effects. Microcavities and other features on the surface may be important, but the hydrogen pressure does NOT increase dramatically there upon thermal shocking or "triggering." Instead, these surface cavities are areas of higher hydrogen loading. The hydrogen permeates through the nickel and fills INTERIOR voids in which desorption is NOT a rapid process. In these interior sites, triggering produces very high pressures because the hydrogen literally cannot migrate out of the lattice fast enough.

In a nutshell, the fact hydrogen does not absorb into nickel as rapidly as palladium makes it the better choice. This is because if it is very easy for hydrogen to migrate through the lattice into interior defects, it will be easy for the hydrogen to migrate out. This means the pressures induced will usually be lower in palladium. Basically, if it takes you very little effort to load hydrogen into a metal lattice, you're going to get relatively little heat out upon triggering. Nickel is in a sweet spot for LENR: it absorbs/desorbs hydrogen (not talking about adsorption here) at a rate that isn't too slow or too fast. Also, due to the tensile strength of nickel (compared to lets say aluminum) the cavities can survive higher pressures at higher temperatures.

My guess is that in most metals, LENR works by this same concept. In Rossi's first patents he mentions copper can be interchanged with nickel. My guess is that this same mechanism would work inside of copper cavities, but that getting the hydrogen into the copper is very difficult (making loading almost impractical all together) and the lower melting temperature of copper compared to nickel reduces the working temperatures capable of being achieved.

Nickel is the superior LENR element, IMO.

Zephir,

Faster absorption of hydrogen doesn't specifically mean a combination of elements is better for LENR. Actually, faster absorption could mean easier desorption which could reduce the maximum pressures capable of being produced inside internal voids, defects, and cavities. Palladium does absorb and desorb hydrogen *very* easily and at room temperature and to huge amounts. However, you don't need massive amounts of hydrogen absorption for LENR. You only need to reach a certain level of loading. If you can achieve that certain level very quickly, your final result may be poor because as soon as you attempt to thermal shock the loaded material all of the hydrogen may migrate out too rapidly. Basically, nickel is a great material because even though it takes MORE effort to get hydrogen loaded into the lattice, the hydrogen does not desorb extremely rapidly. This allows a higher level of nuclear reactions being produced.

Again, this is a trade off. Some lower level of excess heat may be easily achieved with shorter loading times when using palladium. But the final excess heat may be less due to the rapid migration of hydrogen out of the critical cavities/dislocations/voids during thermal shocking.

What I do find interesting (although I do not like the idea of using Pd at all due to its high cost) is peppering an oxide free, cleaned nickel particle with dozens or hundreds of much smaller palladium particles that can act as reverse spillover catalysts. The palladium adsorbs the hydrogen, breaks it down into atomic hydrogen, and then allows it to "spill over" onto the nickel substrate. Rossi utilized this in his earliest of systems. But again, I don't think the use of palladium is required to achieve sufficient loading in nickel. Primarily, what's required is PRACTICE and EXPERIENCE. Me356 learned how to load hydrogen into his nickel wire and powder with no problem. Other replicators can learn to do the same.

In palladium you are correct. But nickel high loading across the entire nickel powder particle is probably low. The high loading that needs to take place is near the surface of the nickel particle. It's very tough to get hydrogen to fully diffuse into bulk nickel even at the temperatures and pressures produced by Parkhomov and Songsheng. Most likely, overall their loading was low, but at the surface it was higher.

And your statement about Me356 is totally false. He was able to produce a COP of around 1.5 to 3 with just nickel and hydrogen supplied from a tank -- no exotic coronal discharge whatsoever. I've read through every single post he's ever made on this forum, twice. He was able to produce high levels of excess heat with nickel and hydrogen, nickel and LiAlH4 (although he warned that this could be tricky without gaining the proper experience from repeated testing), and then later he began work on his more exotic glow discharge systems.

I'd like to say that I admit I should try to be even more precise in my language. When we talk about high or low loading of hydrogen, we need to specify if we are talking about throughout the entire particle or in certain regions. So, for the record, my opinion is that with NiH LENR you need high loading near the surface of the nickel powder, but utilizing hundreds of bars of pressure to push hydrogen throughout the ENTIRE particle is probably not required. Songsheng utilized a maximum of around five for six bars of hydrogen pressure, and Parkhomov probably only achieved a similar level of pressure due to the leakiness of his sealing method. These levels of pressures and temperatures are not going to produce 90% to 100% loading throughout the entire nickel particle.

EDIT: Look at his posts again. He had success with LiAlH4 and nickel! He specified that it can produce excess heat. However, it's just tricky because of a number of different issues such as waiting for pressures to drop. He suggested using a hydrogen generator or hydrogen tank instead. However, most replicators probably would rather work with LiAlH4 due to convenience.

The problem is that he never revealed data for probably 98% of the tests he conducted. According to Bob Greenyer, he's the kind of person who will work all day, come home, and then test all evening. He is similar to Rossi in that he will perform many series of tests over a short period of time. The difference is, I think, Me356 has a slightly more "modern" understanding of data collection.

I wish Me356 would reveal more data from his later tests.

---

Nickel is not inert. Just nickel and hydrogen is sufficient to produce excess heat. Now, I'll totally admit that the the mechanism for this excess heat is not fully understood. Piantelli found all sorts of transmutation products on his nickel rods that had been, "active." Also, he saw particle emissions that he thinks were ejected protons. I think these emissions from whatever nuclear process is taking place with only nickel and hydrogen (either H-H fusion or Ni-H fusion or some other reaction) then interacts with the lithium to produce a secondary nuclear process that produces far more energy than the first. This is why Me356 claimed that the addition of lithium was a shortcut to even higher levels of excess heat. He claimed to be able to place a small bit of lithium into an active reactor (probably he could see it because of using a sapphire tube) centimeters away from the nickel and seeing it glow brilliantly. When the same lithium chunk was surrounded by powder, he claimed it looked like it was almost floating, suspended in the powder. He said even trace amounts of vaporized lithium could boost the output of his cells enormously.

Basically, I think there is a reaction that only requires nickel and hydrogen which can then produce emissions that somehow stimulate further reactions with lithium that is supported on the surface of the nickel particle.

Kim was roundly and thoroughly bamboozled by Defkalion and Hadjichristos. He has no business asking for grants in LENR as he clearly has no judgement in this field. And none should have been given. A sad waste of money. Actually, it's shocking. I wonder if the grantors know the history. If they do, they're morons. If they don't, they should have researched Kim better.

http://www.e-catworld.com/2013…efkalion-nickel-hydrogen/

Quote from kirkshanahan

Zephir_AWT wrote:

Zephir's comment is not based on any solid experimental evidence, and "uncontrolled runaway" and "overheating" would be highly visible. It's probably made up from speculations about Rossi, which has nothing to do with the reaction in palladium.

Remarkably, Shanahan is assuming that a report of possible heat from platinum is then applicable to all the palladium work, where loading is clearly a "key parameter" as to what was known. That is, a huge body of experimental work correlated heat with loading. What has now come up is the possibility that high loading results in a condition (NAE formation, Ed would say) that then does allow reaction, if the condition is maintained, at lower loading, and Ed has shown this experimentally, in recent work that is, as yet, unconfirmed but which is quite plausible.

[quote]and from Shanahan, Thermochimica Acta, 428 (2005) 207–212
"Obviously, since Pt does not form hydrides, bulk loading is not the relevant number."

This is "obvious" from the original report of Storms' work on Pt from ICCF8 (2000), which I reanalyzed in my 2002 publication, which I wrote in 2000. I guess it takes Ed (and others) awhile to catch on...

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Shanahan became obsessed about that paper, which is about platinum, not palladium. I have written about this elsewhere here. As an isolated report, the Storms' work on platinum is largely irrelevant. Storms does claim that palladium is not necessary, that NAE can form in other materials, but that remains to be established clearly. There is anecdotal evidence, only.

Shanahan was correct in that "bulk loading" would not be relevant to platinum results. However, he is here making it appear that this was more general, that he anticipated what is not being mentioned in his paper. He did not, unless his paper confused the platinum results with the palladium results. From his CCS theory, it is all artifact, and if that is correct, he would still, then, have the correlation with loading in palladium to explain.

Storms does explain the correlation, or it can easily be supplied. Storms' theory has the effect take place in cracks at the surface of the palladium, and the particular kind of cracking that is effective is caused by stress to the material from loading. His theory would predict then that other methods of forming the required cracks or similar structures of the required dimensions (they are "nanocracks," very small) could produce heat without the high loading.

His actual experimental result was that he set up a reaction with high loading, generating the heat, and he maintained the electrolyte temperature with a heater, then shutting off the electrolytic current. His measurements continued to show anomalous heat, with no decline, even though with the current shut off, loading declined. This continued for hours, I forget how long. This, if confirmed, would indicate that the actual reaction does not depend on loading, but on palladium structure and the availability of enough deuterium as fuel, and apparently much lower loading is enough.

(Maintaining the environmental temperature of a reaction is not clearly "input power." We don't think of the room temperature as a power input. He was maintaining with thermostatic control an elevated temperature in the electrolyte, that's the difference. This is environmental temperature for the cathode. I have suggested similar approaches for working with nickel hydride. XP would up as a decline in input power necessary to maintain the constant elevated temperature, and this works as long as the XP is not great enough to take the temperature out of control range. In theory, one could then cool the cell.)