Uploaded Letters from Martin Fleischmann to Melvin Miles

Quote from THHuxleynew

In any case, as I've pointed out above, salt measurements do not limit the amount of liquid phase electrolyte leaving a cell because it can be either direct (carrying salt) or recondensed (with no salt).

That's wrong. Recondensed liquid does not leave the cell. It falls back into it. This is a reflux cell. Only vapor leaves the cell, and only vapor is accounted for in the boil-off calorimetry.

The shape of the cell ensures this. It is a distillation retort. These were developed in medieval times.

APPEND

As I noted on the previous page, you are wrong about this: "You will note that I am considering vapour that condenses before it [exits] the cell as entrained liquid-phase D2O." You miss the point. Entrained liquid-phase D2O cannot leave the cell. It falls back in. That is what calibrations with Pd-H and joule heaters show.

Quote from THHuxleynew

This would be a strong argument except that the conditions you need are not often stated to exist. A good isothermal barrier with no leakage would solve the problem, however CF cells always have some leakage from the electrode connections and (if open) the vent. They also (if closed) have a recombiner in the headspace above the electrolyte. If open they have other issues, notably the one I address above, which is why quite correctly McKubre used closed cells for greater accuracy. Researchers sometimes make multiple temperature measurements in the liquid. This however does not catch the mechanism here, a change in temperature differential between the recombiner and the liquid. I'd agree that it is possible (for example in high efficiency calorimeters) to bound any such effect. The question is which experiments cannot be so bounded. You would need to look at each experiment series to check.

I discussed recombiners. They move the heat from one location in the cell to another. However, this does not measurably affect the calorimetry. Therefore the Shanahan effect would not change the calorimetry either, even if the Shanahan effect existed, which it does not.

Even when you measure multiple temperature measurements in the water, a recombiner in the head space has no measureable effect. It produces the same cell constant as a joule heater in the water at the same power level. Because the heat from the recombiner has no place to go but into the water. No doubt, compared to a heat source entirely under water, a recombiner will radiate a tiny amount more more heat from the top of the cell. Yes, this tiny amount will not be caught by multiple temperature measurements in the water. However it is so tiny it cannot be detected with ordinary instruments. It will be swamped by other sources of noise, such as bubbles, changes in the stirring rate, and gas that remains unrecombined momentarily.

You don't need to check for this specifically. You just compare the cell constant in various configurations, with different kinds of calibration. There will be variations, of course, although I doubt you can detect one caused by a recombiner. As long as the variations are consistent, and they are smaller than the effect you hope to measure, they do not matter.

With all other types of calorimeter such as a Seebeck, where heat is measured outside the cell, there is not even a hypothetical way to detect the effect of the headspace recombiner.

Quote from THHuxleynew

This cell is operated under unprecedented fast boil-off conditions. The possibility of recondensed vapour pushed out by the speed of exiting vapour cannot possibly be discounted. just think about it.

It is not a bit unprecedented. You can operate any cell with these conditions. Just input ~100 W of heating with electrolysis or joule heating. When you do that, no significant amount of recondensed vapor or bubbles of boiling water are pushed out the top. The energy balance is zero.

Obviously, F&P, Biberian and the others who did these tests did "just think about that." They are not fools. They know you have to calibrate and characterize the cell. Anyone knows it has to act as a reflux cell (a retort) or you will get the wrong answer. That is the first thing that would occur to any chemist or any person operating a distillery in the last 4000 years. (Distilled alcohol was invented in Greece circa 2000 BC.)

Quote from THHuxleynew

And, as I noted, there is no fast boil-off calibarion of this. How could there be, because under such conditions the amount of recondensed vapour is unknown, and variable?

Of course there is a calibration! Why wouldn't there be? F&F and Biberian both calibrated. They used ordinary electrolysis at high power with Pt-H. In other words, with ~100 W of power. It boiled away the water in same time duration as the excess heat run. The videos look the same. The boiling water reaches the same level in the cell headspace. There is a difference: the power cuts off as soon as the water falls below the cathode, and boiling stops immediately. Because there is no anomalous power. Otherwise it is the same. During the time the water is boiling, vapor leaves the cell at the same speed, and the waterline falls at the same speed, as shown in the time-lapse videos. The heat balance is zero during this time, of course.

Fleischmann never did an experiment without extensive calibrations. He told me an experiment is meaningless without them. I think he expressed that thought in the letters.

The amount of recondensed vapor is easily computed. During a calibration, you measure the power going in and the speed of the vapor going out. Any condensation will slow down the boil-off. It will lower efficiency, increasing heat losses by radiation from the walls of the cell, which you measure by the same method they do before the boil-off. Since the heat balance is zero, you know that no unboiled water left the cell, so you know the recondensed vapor all fell back into the cell.

If you do not measure heat losses by radiation from the walls, the balance is negative during a calibration. There is heat lost unaccounted for. It is never positive. Whereas with anomalous heat, the balance is always positive, even when you ignore heat lost from the walls. There is a tremendous difference! With anomalous heat you input 22,500 J from electrolysis, and you get out 102,500 J in vapor, and 6,700 J in radiation. See p. 16:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

In a calibration, you have to input all 102,500 J to produce the vapor, plus 22,500 to make up for other losses. You have to do it in the same time period, about 10 minutes. In other words, you have to input 182 W of electrolysis for 10 minutes, which is easily done.

Quote from kirkshanahan

As mentioned several times already (and being soundly ignored by certain parties), Fleischmann, et al found an excess of water exiting the cell (as reported in their 2004 Thermochimica Acta paper). The excess is based on what was expected from reacted and condensed D2+O2. This is a reported fact.

I assume this refers to Szpak et al.:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakSthermalbeh.pdf

Where does it describe the excess water?

That is not boil-off calorimetry, and even if it were, a 7% error would not affect the conclusion.

(The D2+O2 is recombined, not condensed.)

This paper has some bad news for the Shanahan hypothesis:

Except for Joule heating, the exothermic absorption of deuterium and the F–P effect, no other heat sources are activated during the co-deposition process. The frequently cited D2 + O2 recombination reaction, as being responsible for excess enthalpy generation, is not supported by experiment (recombination of evolving gases yielded volumes that were better than 1.0% of those calculated assuming 100.0% Faradaic efficiency [9], or theoretical considerations [10]). And yet the notion that recombination is responsible for the excess enthalpy generation persists. For example, Shanahan [11] observed that the short-lived hot spots [12,13] support the recombination theory. In his view, to quote: “The infrared photography of Szpak et al. is supportive evidence of this, if one considers the oxidation in subsurface bubbles to be rapid, which should be true of D2 +O2 flames”. Such interpretation is, indeed, difficult to understand and therefore accept. As pointed out by Fleischmann and Pons [14], such “hot spots” would have an intensity of ca. 6 nW—hence, impossible to detect by IR camera.

Mel Miles found some more letters from his correspondence with Martin Fleischmann. He sent them to me. I scanned them and added around 200 pages to this document:

Fleischmann, M. and M. Miles, Letters from Martin Fleischmann to Melvin Miles, R. Carter, M.C.H. McKubre, and J. Rothwell, Editors. 2018, LENR-CANR.org.

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanlettersfroa.pdf

(If you click on this link and you do not see "Revised May 2018" on the first page, press Refresh.)

The content is mostly the same as it was before. You may find that puzzling gaps in the correspondence have been closed. Some letters said things like: "My response to your numbered questions follow . . ." where the numbered questions were missing. (1998-07-03, p. 218)

One revelation is the abominable behavior by the management at China Lake, described in 1997-05-12, starting on p. 152. See especially the memo on p. 158. It is depressing.

I added a funny comment by Fleischmann to the introduction: "P.P.P.P.P.P.S. You may think that I am a very suspicious person. Of course, this is absolutely correct." (1999-11-19)