Mizuno's bucket of water

Quote from bocijn

Paradigmnoia "Of course, it could happen that the reaction did make some convenient round numbers"

Here's a clue " I filled a large bucket with water and partially submerged the cell in it:"

Here's another clue... Anders Celsius would have measured the temperature as another round number..

What equilibrium temperature would you expect 5 litres of water with a 70 w lightbulb partially submerged in it to reach?

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I would expect a high chance of electrocution finding out since the bulb glass is a high risk of breakage with a high thermal gradient in such a scenario...

Anyways, since the TC voltage was measured using a voltmeter, it should look something like this (image below), if it makes you feel any better....

Or maybe he held each DVM probe to the TC wire ends with his fingers, and it becomes like this:

Paradigmnoia "

"would expect a high chance of electrocution finding out since the bulb glass is a high risk of breakage with a high thermal gradient in such a scenario...

No breakage here and no electrocution from the battery

What temperature do you expect for the globe of the bulb?

RobertBryant ,

You did not specify the conditions, so I had to guess at voltage, whether the bulb was hot or not before it went in the water, what type of bulb, etc.....

Nor was there a solid description of how the voltmeter was hooked up to the thermocouple...

Was the minimum resolution of the voltmeter in mV? Was there a TC reference junction kept at O C? Conditions make a difference.

Which is why we are discussing this as an anecdote.

Paradigmnoia wrote " which is why we are discussing this anecdote"

Why do you use 16 or 30 degrees as the reference?

Why not an icebath....... as recommended by Omega?

Which temperature 0, 16 or 30 is easier to achieve in Sapporo?

Notice the lack of swimming pools on the rooves.

RobertBryant ,

That is what I am saying.

16 C I think was suggested as the room temperature at some point. Seems like a likely temperature for wire ends of a thermocouple in a cool but not cold room.

30 C was a guess at someone's finger temperature. Maybe it is more like 25 C....

A voltmeter doesn't use a reference temperature. A proper thermocouple reader does. I saw no mention of an ice bath reference or room temperature compensation method used in conjunction with the voltmeter. Probably there was some reference or software equivalent compensation with the main set up.

Paradigmnoia

So why do you think the cathode on the reactor cell is being maintained at ~100C

Do you think that 113 or 126 C are equally likely....

or do you think the BP of water( ~100C) might have some relevance??

lenr-forum.com/attachment/3578/

I think the tail of the plot posted by Jed looks really cool. The boiling point of water makes little difference. It is in a bucket at some point, not in a sealed container. Was there superheated steam flashing out of the bucket? I think that might have been a bit scarier than mildly boiling water, and probably not something to be left alone.

So which number seems more reasonable to you? 4 mV by voltmeter, or 100 C from boiling water (assuming that superheated steam was not exiting the bucket)? Or maybe we have some level of post-facto interpretations added to the anecdote to make the story a seem a little more solid? (Even if it is for the most part true in general terms, if not exact specifics).

What seems more reasonable to me is that Mizuno would have calibrated at 0C.

The post facto interpretation that strikes me is

When the hot reactor hit the water at ~110 C some water evaporated as superheated steam and the reactor cooled to 100c

the water rose to 100C and kept evaporating at a rate corresponding to the slowly decreasing power output from the palladium

Mizuno's book is not called Nuclear Anomalous Heat: the reality of cold fusion.

It is called Nuclear Transmutation:....................................

The evidence for the reality is more in the numerous transmutations he documents such as Pt-197, Xe-136

Quote from bocijn

Kirkshanahan

" It is hopeless trying to change his mind"

"unless someone besides Zeus, bocijn, and"

Question .

So you don't like questions??

Apart from your new aspersion of Mizuno siphoning water like petrol

which is an underhand way of saying that Mizuno lied

What are your explanations of the calculation of 114Megajoules of xs heat from100 g of Palladium?

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A surprising number of LENR experiments noting continuous stable power generation are instrumented in such a way that:

• TC drift is not checked
• (Known in at least one case, the Craven's balls demo, the TC is a type not sealed well enough to withstand reducing atmospheres)
• The TC is exposed to a reducing atmosphere at elevated temperature: in the balls case this was noted as a necessary preconditioning step.
• The TC is known to be sensitive to reducing atmospheres
• Power generation is inferred from TC temperature.

As a result of noting this phenomena, I now don't trust stable higher than expected temperatures from TCs. Rather than suppose these due to power generation that magically adjusts to keep temperature stable when the object is immersed in water, I'd need first to exclude the possibility that the TC has drifted.

in this case I don't say all the circumstances are the same as for CB, but the phenomenon of a high stable temperature from a TC would lead anyone to wonder about whether this TC has drifted. Easy to check, but no such check done here. And the 4mv is the sort of inconvenient voltage that can be mismeasured for all sorts of reasons, if the measuring setup is not careful enough.

This is not an explanation in the sense that I know this is the reason for the observations. However, based on what Bocjin posted, it is a possible explanation. When anomalous results happen it is often something unconsidered, or some assumption made implicitly that breaks. That is why very detailed write-ups with redundant instrumentation are helpful. They can be used afterwards to confirm or deny possible mechanisms. The larger problem for me with this write-up is the lack of such careful cross-checking.

Jed said: What "unknown circumstances" can make an object appear to be hot when it is actually at room temperature?

Sensation of heat is a very problematic indicator:

(1) metal objects will appear hot at slightly elevated temperatures when insulators at the same temperature do not

(2) cold objects and hot objects cannot be distinguished

Which is why experiments tend to use instruments rather than anecdotal comments. Even then, as above, instruments can lie too.

Bocjin said: The evidence for the reality is more in the numerous transmutations he documents such as Pt-197, Xe-136

I agree with you, nuclear transmutation evidence would be very strong. However, the results from mass spectrographs or other systems that can perform isotopic and elemental analysis are tricky to interpret and especially at low levels can be deceptive. My understanding is that such evidence as exists at the moment is at very low levels where either contamination of samples, or conflating peaks from clusters, etc, cannot be ruled out. In order to make this evidence strong you need a lot of effort to rule such things out. That makes a method that looks as though it ought to be pretty easy actually quite difficult.

THH "That makes a method that looks as though it ought to be pretty easy actually quite difficult."

Its hard to rule out the evidence for the production of Pt-197 and Xenon. e.g. Pt197. 1995.

Two different types of thermocouple measuring the same area might be a good backstop against problems with reference junctions. The temperatures should diverge if the reference starts getting warm. The TC types should be selected to make the divergence obvious in the operating range of an experiment. Maybe comparing against ambient T might be OK, as well as being easier and cheaper.

The idea that thermocouple reference junction drift could be a culprit in Shanahan's CCS is disturbing. (Just putting that idea out there).

Quote from Alan Smith

How often have you known a TC to drift upwards on it's way to failure?

I cannot remember a single instance where I have seen this happen, and in the interests of bad science I have killed scores of TC's. They always start under-recording temperatures when this happens. TC's generally fail because of containment loss, insulation breakdown or junction weld fracture. In every case this leads loss of TC output. The only exception I can conceive of might be where failure of a metallic containment which incorporates EM protection resulted in the TC picking up stray currents from its surroundings, However since we are only talking mV of temperature-related TC output normally, such an event generally leads to such whacky and inconsistent behaviour that a failure is readily apparent or even in the simplest modern data-logging systems the generation of an 'error' code.

'Tis a fine and logical suggestion you make, but one that I have never seen happen in the world outside my head..

As shown above, the thermocouple is very sensitive to the reference junction temperature or compensation. The error is easily and often upward. Worse is that the thermocouple will test out perfectly fine, because there is nothing actually wrong with it.

My thermocouples usually fail from green rot.

Quote from Alan Smith

And modern thermocouple interfaces have a built in reference junction., which includes temperature compensation. For around the last 20 years at least.

And how does one monitor that little bit of electronic magic?

Nearly impossible.

Not that I think they are often unreliable.

Quote from bocijn

THH "That makes a method that looks as though it ought to be pretty easy actually quite difficult."

Its hard to rule out the evidence for the production of Pt-197 and Xenon. e.g. Pt197. 1995.

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The text you quote here is strong evidence only if the control evidence is that. But, without precise information about all of the handling, and information about whether D vs H could alter results, this is not strong.

Thus all of

• handling differences between D and H samples
• differential diffusion between D and H changing things
• D vs H molecules generating different mass spectra anomalies at low levels
• Detection evidence is not (for somone who knows mass spectroscopy etc, whatever method was used) strong due to known artifacts

Must be ruled out.

All these have to be carefully ruled out, and would be so in a high quality experiment. I can't tell from your quotes how well this has been done but I'm pretty sure I would have been alerted to the matter had it been done, because this would then be much more interesting evidence.