New USPTO Patent Applications

Another 'blanket/try to cover everything' patent by the look of it - I suppose quasicrystal material covers any superconductors, transition metal oxides, and any related perovskite structures? Wonder what experimental evidence/examples this patent is based upon.

Klee Irwin runs an LA company QGR Quantum Gravity Research - physicist, and possibly well-funded entrepreneur? Coming at it from purely hypothetical perspective but looks like a good addition to the LENR world. Maybe fund some experimental work/collaboration on quasicrystal experiments? Put out the invitation, at least.

Seems awfully familiar~

Alan Smith - Small LENR world I guess - nice that Klee supported your project. QGR seems to have a lot of negative press on Reddit maybe the mistake is to be over-ambitious in trying to formulate a 'theory of everything' including consciousness. It becomes theory divorced from any practical reality or experiment. Still, maybe he might be persuaded to do more practical studies, use some of his vast resources to buy a range of superconducting quasicrystals and do some LENR experiments with either hydrogen or deuterium. I believe one of the ways forward is to expand the range of material substrates to find the optimal crystal lattice structure for practical use in a LENR reactor. Pd/Ni have received a lot of attention, Brillouin Energy are gradually increasing their COP presumably modifying their core mixture/metallurgy - but there is still a lot more to be done at the experimental level using your atom ecology approach. Maybe see if he's interested now that he has a patent to support/provide practical evidence for.

I know, its a matter of scouring the literature to identify possible candidates for such hydrogen isotope substrates - since we're not chemists we're restricted to commercially-available or naturally occurring compounds. I guess Brillouin Energy are approaching it in the opposite way - start with a core you know is effective (Al2O3/Ni substrate) then add in extra transition metals or oxides to make cores with higher COP's so from an engineering view they'll be successful in the end by sheer trial and error. Since none of us really has a firm theoretical basis for LENR the atom-ecology approach seems the best but when it comes down to expenses one would have to eliminate the most expensive options from such trials. So the reductionist approach is simply dictated by economics, unfortunately. If it turned out that the only reliable way to make a LENR reactor was to use 2 Kg Pd and unlimited deuterium just the Pd core would cost $100,000 at today's prices. A 2 Kg Ni core would only cost $26 in raw materials. Do you know if anybody has actually replicated the Thermacore runaway experiment reported back in the 90's (could use 2Kg Ni powder with say 200g LiAlH4 or just H2 gas)? Jed Rothwell might know.....maybe there is a critical mass effect involved with internal neutron/gammas generation then conversion to heat. I know the emphasis is on nano-particles/gram quantities of Ni powder etc - be nice to see a scaled up reaction in the Kg range (a bucket experiment!).

So the Thermacore runaway has never been completely replicated (apart from blowing up Brian Ahern's garage, which would be a positive result!)? That's intriguing - but maybe other people have tried, produced nothing and did not bother reporting it. Still, might be worth filling a 3 L pressure vessel with Ni powder and some hydride and see if we get anything...................a controlled thermonuclear explosion?

I found this by Brian Ahern.................

3, 2016

To the Editor:

I was associated with NiH experiments conducted by Thermacore Corp working with Randall Mills in 1993-1996. They measured long term excess power outputs as high as 97 watts.

Chuck Haldeman from MIT Lincoln Laboratory replicated the Thermacore work in 1995 and got significant excess heat production. Unfortunately, Chuck was unable to scale the exceed power beyond 10 watts.

Chuck retired from Lincoln and I too left government service and had no further contact with Thermacore. Only recently, we learned that Thermacore made one final experiment in late 1996 to assess the role of Nickel surface area and reaction temperature.

They loaded 5 pounds of nickel powder together with 1/2 pound of K2CO3 mixed together. They used K2CO3 powder as a means of introducing the potassium catalytic activity. They introduced hydrogen gas at 30 psi instead of generating hydrogen with electrolysis This allowed them to increase the temperature of the reaction vessel.

This experiment experienced a massive runaway reaction that melted the 50 pound, stainless steel reaction vessel. This heat release exceeded any potential chemical energy by more than a factor of ten.

We are currently setting up to replicate this runaway reaction with the guidance of Thermacore personnel associated with the 1996 runaway experiment.

A repeat of the heat release has the potential to open up the LENR field and allow for experiments that will elucidate the underlying reasons for the energy.

Brian Ahern, Acton, MA

Worth trying again?

Randall Mills might be able to tell us more about it since he was working with Thermacore then. If they were interested in surface area effects, maybe some of the Ni powder was Raney Ni which is preloaded with hydrogen & has a massive surface area and is pyrophoric. So maybe add in some Raney Ni and also some Fe2O3 (to react with the K2CO3 to form FeO2 which catalyses UDH formation) just to get the party started. If this doesn't just explode but releases long term excess power of say 100 W for zero energy input long term we will be in business with a critical mass chain - reaction driven LENR reactor using either H or D or a 50-50 mixture. Set up and measure radiation release etc to convince finally the sceptics that LENR/cold fusion is real!

Quote from Alan Smith

Well, it's a very strange kind of a patent application. Basically an attempt to hijack a physical state and arrangement of atoms. As here:-

1. An apparatus for generating power via low energy nuclear reactions (LENR), comprising:a quasicrystal or quasicrystalline approximant material designed to have an arrangement of atoms, associated with a structure of the quasicrystal or quasicrystalline approximant material, forming active sites for LENR to occur when the material is loaded with a hydrogen isotope.

2. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the quasicrystal or quasicrystalline approximant material has an arrangement of metal atoms forming active sites for LENR, wherein the metal atoms are organized as atomic clusters of metal atoms.

3. The apparatus of claim 2, wherein a hydrogen isotope gas is loaded into the quasicrystal or quasicryalline approximant material with the hydrogen isotope being a reactant species for LENR at the nuclear active sites via at least one of: 1) hydrogen isotope fusion and 2) metal atom-hydrogen atom fusion.

4. The apparatus of claim 3, wherein the metal atoms comprises palladium and the gas comprises deuterium.

5. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the material comprises a clathrate guest-host system in which the guest comprises atomic nano-clusters of metal atoms having a different symmetry than a host cage.

6. The apparatus of claim 5, wherein the guest comprises atomic nano-clusters of a metal with the atomic nano-clusters having a different symmetry than the host cage selected such that the atomic nano-clusters have a restriction on at least one degree of freedom for tunneling that increases an atomic tunneling probability, relative to no restriction.

7. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the material has an energy landscape with a network of double well potentials, with each double well potential having a first well site and a second well site selected for tunneling to occur from an occupied well site to an unoccupied well site of the double well potential.

8. The apparatus of claim 7, wherein each double well potential imposes a restriction on at least one degree of freedom for tunneling of a heavy atom.

9. The apparatus of claim 8, wherein the material has a restriction on a degree of freedom for atomic tunneling including at least one of a spatial restraint, a temporal restraint, and an orientation restraint on degrees of freedom.

10. The apparatus of claim 9, wherein the restriction on the degree of freedom is selected to maximize a negentropy.

11. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the quasicrystal or quasicrystalline approximant material comprises a guest-host clathrate material having a negentropy at a maximum possible level.

12. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the material is designed with a guest-host structure create tautomeric tunneling.

13. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the material is designed for tunneling phason flips to occur of at least metal atoms as at least a part of the mechanism for LENR.

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Haha, and how is Klee Irwin going to prove that potential commercial CF / LENR products is violating his patent

Probably have more chance of patenting something based on the Thermacore runaway - don't know whether K was used or not but synthesising a: UDH catalyst like FeO2 is probably not a bad idea to raise the temperature::

Recently, Brian Ahern has been in contact with Nelson Gernert, the chief researcher in the new Thermacore (having gone through two changes of ownership) who was also in charge of the runaway. None of this has appeared in print before. Gernert added 2.5 pounds of nickel powder (200 mesh of Ni-200) into a 3 liter stainless steel Dewar. The Dewar weighed 300 pounds. It was a strong pressure vessel with a hemispherical volume. Thermacore evacuated the nickel under vacuum for several days before adding H2 gas at 2 atmospheres (apparently there was no potassium but this detail needs to be verified). The most amazing thing happened next. The powder immediately and spontaneously heated before external power could be added. The Dewar glowed orange (800C) and the engineers ran for cover. No external heat had been used and no radiation monitors were running. The nickel had sintered into a glob alloyed into the vessel and could not be removed. The (then) owner of Thermacore, Yale Eastman was frightened that an explosion was imminent and that someone could be killed. He forbade any further work on LENR. The incident was not published.

Lets not forget to run for cover

A supercritical mass is one in which, once fission has started, it will proceed at an increasing rate. The material may settle into equilibrium (i.e. become critical again) at an elevated temperature/power level or destroy itself. In the case of supercriticality, k > 1.

Due to spontaneous fission a supercritical mass will undergo a chain reaction. For example, a spherical critical mass of pure uranium-235 will have a mass of 52 kg and will experience around 15 spontaneous fission events per second^{[citation needed]}. The probability that one such event will cause a chain reaction depends on how much the mass exceeds the critical mass. If there is uranium-238 present, the rate of spontaneous fission will be much higher. Fission can also be initiated by neutrons produced by cosmic rays.

So if we apply the same principles to fusion, and that neutrons (for arguments sake) are released by around 15 spontaneous fusion events per second we would require at least 52 kg of NiH or NiD for a self-sustaining chain reaction, or somewhat less if the fusion rate was higher. So to have any chance of self-sustaining energy production with Ni or Pd powder systems we do actually require Kg quantities to initiate energy production - and funnily enough this has only been tried ONCE in the Thermacore runaway experiment. All other dry gas experiments have been done at gram quantities of reactants - way BELOW CRITICAL MASS LEVELS! Could such a simple problem of scale have simply been overlooked in the last 30 yrs?