Ordinary activated carbon can be produced from many different carbon sources as well. I guess the question would have been better posed as: "does the activation here roughly cause the same transformations occurring during standard activated carbon manufacturing?"
No- ordinary activated charcoal - as used for filtration.odour trapping etc. - doesn't do the hydrogen trick as supplied. But it will do it if electrolysed. So there is something distinctly different about CC.
I get that there is something different about CC and/or the process used to prepare it! 
I'd like to know if after preparing CC I can dry it in an oven and efficiently use it for filtration, odor trapping or as a catalyst support as with ordinary activated charcoal.
From another thread, I'll continue here which seems more in-topic.
QuoteSurely the most convincing demonstration of the reality of his LENR reaction would be to let a unit run away even to destruction. It should produce lots of heat. More than can be accounted for by any chemical reaction.
Quote from Alan SmithI thought so once, but soon discovered that it is very annoying when happening in a 'wet' system. Such an annoying phenomenon that I went looking for more controllable systems. A runaway reaction teaches you very little and often involves a lot of wasted time rebuilding (sometimes expensive) equipment. Bangs are for babies.
Quote from canNevertheless it would be very useful if people could have indications on how to replicate such a runaway effect.
Quote from Alan SmithHere is the paper i wrote about this at the time. If you need any more information, I would be glad to help.
It appears this is the same paper introduced in this thread.
I think I might have observed a similar reaction in conditions very loosely similar to yours, but I'm not convinced it can be considered a runaway or due to LENR. At the present time I think it's some sort of flash combustion of the small particles produced. In short, I had a small jar with mostly carbon particles and copper suspended in water, and a significant current getting passed through electrodes with the water near/at boiling conditions. I haven't made a dedicated thread because it's an embarrassingly silly experiment and I was literally mostly playing around.
I did (as usual) take notes however. Maybe you'll be able to recognize something in common in the testing procedure?
Am I just seeing the combustion of small metal particles?
The indication that the LENR reaction is active is the development of transmutation of elements. One inexpensive way to check for this is to make sure that the elements that you are using are pure of contaminants, then test the ash for substances like iron that appear in the ash, There are chemical tests that show iron in the ash that can be had inexpensively. Other elements can also be detected in this way.
The next check is to see if strange radiation can be produced. This is done through the use of x-ray photo emulsions that can be used to show radiation produced by the ash. MFMP is doing this for both fuel and ash now. The ash is placed on a paper that is in contact with the photoemission(X-ray film) for a two week exposure timeframe. Many LENR researchers use this method.
Another test is the CP39 plastic detection method. This requires chemical etching using lye.
To save money, I beleive that the plastic (polycarbonate) used for CDs might be used to detect particle tracks. To test the method first use the Tracks of 3.2 MeV alpha particles from a collimated beam of an 241Am source degraded in air. Get your etching method down as well as your inspection method using an alpha source. Using this method, a high quality of science can be produced for little cost save the time to become expert at it.
No matter the inspection method used. always use a before and after baselining process to establish an origin point to check for changes in the inspection material that your experiment has produced.
Thanks for the suggestions, but the experiment summarily described in the notes above (originally intended for personal use only) was never intended to be rigorous. I was only looking for big and/or strange effects. I'll definitely allocate more effort and budget (currently proudly zero) if I'll ever get serious about these.
The strange "runaway effect" (which might have not) was one of those, which I got when coincidentally there were carbon and metal particles suspended in the water where discharges (occasionally also electrolysis for brief amounts of time) were occurring with a relatively large current at 12V, thus under conditions very loosely similar to Alan Smith's. I'm aware he only did electrolysis with lead sheet electrodes in his case, however.
The graph in the paper attached in the opening post in this thread is rather blurry, but I just noticed something there: is the indicated spike here a current spike?
It is possible that for some reason conditions might arise in your case that would result in the lead sheet electrodes briefly shorting through the suspended particles, rupturing the cell in the process?
Today I did more "improvised" short-circuits tests along what I described a few posts earlier, and for what it's worth, I have observed several times that when carbon/metal particles are in suspension in large amounts near the strike point (short-circuit) the plasma formed would occasionally grow larger and "ignite" a larger volume of water, supposedly igniting/combusting the particles nearby, although I am not ruling out other effects. This would cause a brief burst of heat. From the small photos you provided I see that in your case the water is completely black, filled with fine carbon particles in suspension.
Sorry if I'm being picky, but in the legend on the top left I read from top to bottom: Radiated, Temp1, Temp3, Current, RadCnt (possibly).
The spike I'm referring to at the end of the red arrow looks orange, is thick and appears to rise from the the line which has average value of 2.5-3.0 consistently with the current that is reported in the paper. RadCnt should be the thin jaggy blue line and looks like the typical output from a Geiger counter reading a background signal.
To me it seemed that this thick orange line went above 10 (A) briefly.
And I thought that the sudden heat burst caused a sudden drop in water level (as reported in the paper), associated with a drop in measured temperature (= no water temperature to be measured), from this short downward spike of the violet line (Temp3) and possibly also the cyan one (Temp1):
My suggestion was not that the PSU itself ruptured the cell, but that the reaction following what I assumed was a sudden and brief current spike did.
Of course, if you're saying that it wasn't the case and that the PSU couldn't deliver more than a few amperes of current, then there's nothing I could possibly add other than suggesting that next time it might be an idea to include sharper/higher resolution graphs to avoid potential misunderstandings.
Replying to this thread at this time will probably be confusing for those following the ongoing LION replication efforts, but I'm wondering if any of the anomalous effects described in the opening post have been observed with other electrode materials too, in particular those directly or indirectly used as the LION "fuel" (like Ni from the 3M Diapad disks or Cu).
Is it plausible that both the electroactivation and occasional polarity reversal process can eventually "dope" the carbon grains in a manner similar to the industrial diamonds suggested to be responsible for anomalous effects in the LION cell?
Also, are the anomalous effects observed here correlated to any extent to the degree of the electroactivation of these carbon grains?
(With reference to US 9102529 B2 - Methods and systems for producing hydrogen)
Also, are the anomalous effects observed here correlated to any extent to the degree of the electroactivation of these carbon grains?
This patent - to which I have an R&D license to develop - describes the creation of a basic 'spillover' catalyst system which a colleague and I have refined and developed to improve its performance by several orders of magnitude. The degree of activation is indeed important, but it can be overdone very easily, resulting in very poor catalyst performance. Occasional bursts of XSH and short half-life beta-radiation from some experiments with carbon using 'overcooking' led us to speculating that the systems we use tend to preferentially sequester DHO and D2O in the carbon matrix. However, doping the system with extra D2O has not produced any supporting evidence for this hypothesis. It is - even by LENR standards an outlier effect, and of interest only in that it has been thought to pose a risk to those producing bulk catalysts by this method.
Actually, I was trying the electroactivation procedure above with powdered graphite in light water (at 12V DC) but other electrode materials like copper and steel since I didn't have lead sheet electrodes at disposal.
I recalled that the industrial diamonds of the ongoing LION experiment might have had some sort of electroplating treatment at some point during production (or so has been suggested a few times), but lead likely was not used there. So, I was wondering if those anomalous effects reported in the opening post here have been observed with other electrode materials.
I didn't think that heavy water should be necessary. So far LION hasn't reported soaking the diamonds in H2O.
Further, I tried reversing electrode polarity several times as per instructions (since it's been associated with the excess heat events in the document) while roughly monitoring the load of the power supply (through the 12V voltage sag under load) and I noticed that load would remain increased for a while after doing that, as if water conductivity temporarily increased. However I don't know enough about electrochemistry to determine whether that should be considered normal - that could be just due to increased heating due to H2-O2 recombination or also the power supply's characteristics.
