“In Shanahan's case, there are no experiments backing up his theory. There is no evidence for it.”
“No one else agrees with his analysis.“
“There are many experiments showing it is wrong.”
Yup. Including the theory of LENR.
I've no idea whether these are good reasons.”
The word ‘nuclear’ should be ‘special’ or ‘special surface’. My theory is non-nuclear.
If Shanahan could point to real evidence for his theory, then he would actually overthrow Faraday's law.
Or describe a decent experiment to prove it in sufficient detail for it to be replicable.
Or describe a decent experiment to prove it in sufficient detail for it to be replicable.
Your bias is showing...
Rossi vs. Darden aftermath discussions
Rossi vs. Darden aftermath discussions
Or describe a decent experiment to prove it in sufficient detail for it to be replicable.
To reiterate, replace the Pd and Pt cathode and anode in a standard F&P-type cell with a Joule heater, i.e., a resistor. Make the leads long enough so that you can bend it up out of the electrolyte and into the gas space of the cell. Assume 20W total input power derived from 2A at 10V. Use maximally 2A at 1.54 V in the gas space heater, and 2A at (10-1.54) V in the liquid heater. Calibrate by varying current.
Now change the voltage distribution to less heat in the gas space. Be bold, take it to 0. So 2A max at 10V in the liquid. Calibrate by varying current.
Now, wait 3 days and repeat.
Wait 3 more days and repeat.
Report results.
Note that Ed Storms proved Jed wrong in his 'it don't matter where or how' comment. In the experiments that I reanalyzed he reported 3 different calibration results. (The only researcher I have seen do this BTW. Kudos to him for honesty and thoroughness.) He reported that a Joule heater gave a calibration equation of Pout = 0.072107 * DeltaT -0.23893. Electrolytic calibration (what I describe above) however gave Pout = .071221 * DeltaT -.177146 *initially* and Pout = 0.070892 * DeltaT - 0.14405 *finally*. (So it makes a difference how, where, and when.)
Compare to my extracted separate calibration equations for runs 3 and 6, which both displayed zero or nearly so 'excess heat' (which means they used 'inactive' electrodes and thus are equivalent to calibration conditions). I obtained Pout = 0.070672 * DeltaT - 0.177146 for run 3 and Pout = 0.071320 * DeltaT - 0.0.131471 for run 6. Pretty solid evidence that my zero excess heat assumption gives calibrations well within the normal variation of the experimental setup, isn't it?
Correction: The electrode used in Runs 3 and 6 was an 'active' electrode that had become inactive and was immediately revitalized by an anodic strip for Runs 4 and 7, which showed maximum excess heat signals.
So that's it. No electrodes, no electrolysis, simply a heater either in the air-space or in the water? I missed this before, sincere apologies.
So that's it. No electrodes, no electrolysis, simply a heater either in the air-space or in the water? I missed this before, sincere apologies.
As far as I know, that should be all that is required. Alternatively, someone who has done F&P experiments before can attempt to assess whether my 'trick' would work on their data too. That way only 'armchair' work needs to be done. Something way out of the possible for a CCS should disprove it is important in that case. Doesn't eliminate other errors though of course.
It occurs to me that lack of bubble stirring might cause a problem. Have to see if it does or not by trying it.
I suspect that if using 'total immersion calorimetry' -where the whole system is put into an insulated water-filled tank with means of accurate measurement of the tank-water temperature - that the 'joule heater in air' would initially give a faster temperature rise than the 'joule heater in water' because the air will heat up more easily than the reactor water and thus transfer heat to the surrounding calorimeter contents faster. But over a period of time (unknown) the calorimeter temperature curves for both methods would coincide.
What do you think?
Since Shanahan's theory and LENR are both hypotheses that explain a number of LENR results, I don't see how you can separate them in this manner.
That's easy! Shanahan's hypotheses "explain" a small subset of the results. He does not even try to explain most of the results. Even where he does try to explain things, his explanations violate laws of physics and common sense, and in many cases the test results show that he is wrong.
The competing hypothesis is not LENR. It is that the calorimetry is working normally and the cells are producing heat. It happens to be excess heat beyond the limits of chemistry, but heat is heat, and calorimetry cannot distinguish between chemical, nuclear, or electrical resistance heat. We know that the competing hypothesis is correct because the calibrations work. These calibrations also show that Shanahan is wrong; the calibration constant does not change when you move the source of heat in the cell. We know he is wrong for several other reasons, as well.
The one distinction is that Shanahan (alone) advocates his theory, whereas there are quite a number of LENR advocates who advocate (different, for the most part) LENR theories.
LENR theories that attempt to explain the physics have nothing to do with this discussion. Shanahan's theory has nothing to do with LENR per se. He is attempting to show that the calorimetry in these experiments does not work. That includes calorimetry that was put on a firm basis in 1780, 1840 and 1900 (ice calorimetry, isoperibolic, and flow and Seebeck calorimetry, respectively). He only tried to show that isoperibolic calorimetry does not work. The experimental results show he is wrong. He never even addressed the other three types. A schematic of these calorimeters, or the isoperibolic types that Miles and others use, show at a glance that Shanahan's hypotheses are impossible nonsense.
So that's it. No electrodes, no electrolysis, simply a heater either in the air-space or in the water? I missed this before, sincere apologies.
You missed it because it is wrong. Test results from Miles and others show no difference between heating in different parts of the cell. How could there be, when the heat is measured centimeters away from the cell, or with a copper sheath? With a Seebeck calorimeter, you could put the heater outside the cell and the calorimeter would not detect the difference.
Yes, it is possible to engineer a cell which gets the wrong answer when you move the heat source. You put a single temperature sensor in the electrolyte and then heat in the head space. No one would do this, because it would produce the wrong answer during calibration. You can look at that design and see the problem. Any electrochemist or person experienced in calorimetry would warn you not to do that. Everyone calibrates with a resistance heater in the electrolyte.
Even putting the heater in the head space would be only slightly wrong unless there was a lot of heat conducted out of the head space by metal contacts for the anode, cathode and sensors in the cap. That would be a bad design for other reasons. It would give the wrong answer even if you calibrated correctly with a resistance heater in the electrolyte. The major heat loss path has to be from the cell walls.
This reminds me of a claim by Jones that recombination might be a problem. He "proved" that by making a cell of the wrong shape (short and wide instead of tall and narrow) and then running electrolysis at a power level about a thousand times lower than any cold fusion experiment. Yes, that did produce significant recombination. Yes, any electrochemist would know that, and would warn you not to do that. Miles said, "why not throw some palladium power into the electrolyte while you are a it?" That, too, would ensure recombination.
You can always find a way to do something deliberately wrong.
https://fusionefredda.wordpress.com/2017/05/26/df/
Snaps via Google Translate from a minor CF's related blog
I suspect that if using 'total immersion calorimetry' -where the whole system is put into an insulated water-filled tank with means of accurate measurement of the tank-water temperature
Do you mean like the calorimeter Bockris used in the first photo here?
http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=187
That's a common configuration. The water in the tank is kept at a constant temperature with a lab cooler. That is a gadget that circulates, heats or cools as needed with a precision thermostat.
The heat loss path is from the cell walls to the cooling water. Air cooled cells should be placed in constant temperature air with precision HVAC, or in an "incubator" (a large box with precision air temperature control).
In a Seebeck envelope calorimeter, the cell is in air, obviously, inside the envelope. You should put a fan in there to stir the air. The entire Seebeck calorimeter itself should be placed inside another envelope with constant temperature air or water. With a water envelope, the water from a cooler does not touch the Seebeck calorimeter, but it ensures that the surroundings are at a constant temperature. Here is a Seebeck calorimeter placed inside a larger envelope, with the lids removed from both so you can see inside. The fan in the top left of the photo stirs the air in the outer envelope.
Even putting the heater in the head space would be only slightly wrong unless there was a lot of heat conducted out of the head space by metal contacts for the anode, cathode and sensors in the cap. That would be a bad design for other reasons. It would give the wrong answer even if you calibrated correctly with a resistance heater in the electrolyte. The major heat loss path has to be from the cell walls.
That I believe is all that Kirk is claiming: that moving heating from the head space to the electrode (or vice versa) makes a small change in the calibration. That, he has shown quantitatively in at least one case, is enough to account for the apparent excess heat measurements.
How many other experiments it applies to is an interesting question: one not answered by dismissing this mechanism.
Hi Jed.
Thanks for your comments. I was thinking of the Bockris type, known in my world as a 'TIC' -for Total Immersion Calorimeter. Personally I am not a big fan (pun intended) of air calorimetry but that is probably because I have no experience with it. Most other kinds I have at least a scraping acquaintance with.
https://fusionefredda.wordpress.com/2017/05/26/df/
Snaps via Google Translate from a minor CF's related blog
Thanks for posting that Ahlfors. Looks like GSVIT will shortly put out their analysis of Mizuno's latest. Those guys are pretty good. They were the first to discredit the Lugano report I believe. From Massa's tone, it does not sound positive for Mizuno...although English is not his (Massa) native tongue so I could be wrong.
BG mentioned last week on ECW, that MFMP may also have a chance to replicate Mizuno.
That's easy! Shanahan's hypotheses "explain" a small subset of the results. He does not even try to explain most of the results.
At the time I wrote the manuscript of my first paper (http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ShanahanKapossiblec.pdf) (note that while Jed's library lists this as the 2002 Thermochimica Acta publication, it actually isn't, and Jed was told this but refuses to correct his mistake) (the technical contents of the 2000 manuscript are the same as the 2002 TA publication) the largest single block of related experimental data was for calorimetry in F&P-type cells. This was still true when Ed Storms put out his first book in 2007. My CCS/ATER proposal directly addresses all that work. I have also addressed He measurements, heavy metal transmutation, and CR-39 pits in various Internet comments and briefly in my 2010 paper. I didn't address tritium results directly, but there are substantially less of those, and I preliminarily attribute them to the causes listed in Will's second paper on tritium analysis. I am not an expert on radiation detection instruments so I don't comment on those results. And, experiments other than F&P electrolysis cells are a different ball of wax. I have made some comments on some of these in various places. So, 'most of the results'? Depends how you define that. I definitely commented on the single largest block from a mish-mash of reports.
He only tried to show that isoperibolic calorimetry does not work.
Jed lies here. He knows fully that my original publication was on a mass flow calorimeter. And he knows I have been saying what I say in the following clip from a 2002 spf post also.
----------------------------------
Post by Kirk Shanahan 12/12/2002 (3rd from the bottom in the list from the above link)
{snip}
Since ALL calorimeters are imperfect, and ALL have a few higher loss
pathways, a calibration constant shift is possible in all calorimeters.
{rest of post snipped}
---
Kirk Shanahan {My opinions...noone else's}
------------------------------------
A schematic of these calorimeters, or the isoperibolic types that Miles and others use, show at a glance that Shanahan's hypotheses are impossible nonsense.
Actually, the schematics prove the opposite. All show similar design, with all the cell penetrations for electrical leads going through the top. Those penetrations are the primary pathways for the lost heat, and their concentration in one geometrical area is what makes it necessary to use a better calorimeter model than was used in the 17 and 1800's.
In light of Jed’s derogatory comments about where the CCS is applicable, I want to discuss the photo Jed posted with Bockris’ experimental calorimetric setup in it.
First we note the cell design is typical. A tall cylinder capped with a top through which electrical leads penetrate. These leads leave the cell, pass through a short distance of the surrounding water bath, and then go out into the air and off to a measuring device or power control or whatever. I can’t really tell if the cells are open or closed (i.e. with a recombination catalyst inside) but I would guess they are open, i.e. having a vent pipe for electrolysis gases to exit the cell, probably through a tube to a hood.
Since there are many cells in one bath, we should probably assume it is an isoperibolic type calorimeter, i.e. the internal cell temperature has the presumably constant bath temperature subtracted from it to form a temperature difference term (i.e. dT = Tcell – Tbath), which is then used in a calibration equation to compute power out from each cell. It is unknown at this point whether one equation is used for all the cells, or whether each is calibrated separately.
There will be heat lost from each cell via the electrical penetration leads. The amount should be comparable to that from Storms’ or McKubre’s mass flow calorimeters, i.e. 2-3% of the input power. It is reasonable to assume when the leads exit the bath they are at the bath temperature, which means the lost heat is being deposited in the bath. The bath is usually being held at a reasonably constant temperature by a control unit. The heating and cooling done by that unit is unknown, but the level of control is usually quite good. The controller will compensate for the added heat from the electrical leads, and thus the Tin will include any heating effect from them. IOW, you can’t really see this effect unless you do a detailed, accurate, and precise heat balance on the bath.
So now, let’s assume ATER starts up in one of the open cells. In an open cell, this means the heat exiting the cell through the leads may increase slightly as per normal operation, but the change will be so small as to be unnoticeable (unless one is looking _very_ carefully). But the Tcell _will_ show an increase, thus dT will increase, and thus Pout will increase. That increase will be registered as ‘excess heat’ unless a detailed mass balance on the exit gases is kept. That mass balance must be kept accurately enough to use to mathematically balance out the observed Tcell increase.
If the cells are closed (with recombination catalyst) and ATER starts, the heat formerly found near the leads in the gas phase decreases, thus the heat loss decreases, but again because of the size of the bath, that presents almost no effect in Tbath. But the Tcell will increase here too. So, same result, apparent excess heat.
The use of a water bath like this might up the heat capture efficiency slightly, but it is hard to beat the currently obtained values of 97-98% or more. The use of multiple cells in the bath makes it nearly impossible to detect what is going on and target it to a particular cell.
So I conclude there is minimal value in trying to use a water bath like this even with a single cell. Storms’ mass flow calorimeter would seem to me to be about as good as you can get. This is why I concluded that the field is about at its limit of accuracy and precision (which Hagelstein failed to understand as pointed out by his use of my comment in his 2015 ‘MIT’ course). But I could be wrong of course, always a possibility.
Jed Rothwell wrote:
"Even putting the heater in the head space would be only slightly wrong unless there was a lot of heat conducted out of the head space by metal contacts for the anode, cathode and sensors in the cap. That would be a bad design for other reasons. It would give the wrong answer even if you calibrated correctly with a resistance heater in the electrolyte. The major heat loss path has to be from the cell walls."
That I believe is all that Kirk is claiming: that moving heating from the head space to the electrode (or vice versa) makes a small change in the calibration. That, he has shown quantitatively in at least one case, is enough to account for the apparent excess heat measurements.
As I mentioned previously, Ed Storms once supplied me with calibration data from a cell that used mass flow calorimetry, but only contacted the bottom and sides of the cell. The top was left out. That cell showed an ~75% heat capture efficiency (similar to Mizuno's air flow calorimeter in the paper that started this thread). When he added tubing to the mass flow pathway in contact with the top of the cell, the efficiency went up to the 97+% I have noted before. So about 1/4 of the heat goes out the top of these cells. (And this does _not_ require any 'metal contacts'.)
Placing a heater close to the top in a lower thermal conductivity gas phase should give significantly different results from placing it near the bottom in a high thermal conductivity liquid phase.
What is so funny is that Jed then says "That would be a bad design for other reasons. It would give the wrong answer even if you calibrated correctly with a resistance heater in the electrolyte." IOW, if you have a heater near the top in a cell calibrated with a heater near the bottom, you are likely to get a wrong answer. Gee...sounds like a 'CCS' arising from something like 'ATER'....
Jed also said "The major heat loss path has to be from the cell walls.". Absolutely correct (for once). About 75% goes out that way. About 25% goes out the top. And the 'abouts' add up to a 2-3% loss along the leads.
Hey Jed, Can you point (link) to the one best, most persuasive paper (most powerful, best COP, longest duration, clearest calibration, etc. etc.) describing a result from a cell used in a Seebeck Effect calorimeter?
That I believe is all that Kirk is claiming: that moving heating from the head space to the electrode (or vice versa) makes a small change in the calibration. That, he has shown quantitatively in at least one case, is enough to account for the apparent excess heat measurements.
Not really.
1. No one would do this. The only similar configuration is a closed cell with a recombiner in the head space, which produces heat above the electrolyte. When you compare calibration with a resistance heater in the electrolyte to electrolysis which produces heat in the electrolyte and headspace, you find no measurable difference. If you did find a difference, you would know the reason and you would redesign the cell.
2. If anyone did do this, and there was a measurable difference, it would show up during calibration, assuming they have enough sense to calibrate with electrolysis. So they would stop doing this. I have never heard of anyone doing electrolysis cold fusion who did not calibrate with electrolysis.
3. With any calorimeter types where the heat is measured outside the cell you would see nothing.
How many other experiments it applies to is an interesting question: one not answered by dismissing this mechanism.
It is answered by the data from calibration, which shows no measurable changes when moving the heat source from one location to another.
Hey Jed, Can you point (link) to the one best, most persuasive paper (most powerful, best COP, longest duration, clearest calibration, etc. etc.)
I can, but I won't. You never read anything, so why would I bother?
