SRI Report Independently Verifies Brillouin LENR Reactions (report included)

Quote from THHuxleynew

Shane, if an exothermic nuclear reaction that can often and reliably generate 20-100% overunity exists, as claimed here, it is always going to be possible to generate an unambiguous experimental result, especially because nothing about nuclear mechanisms makes the output power directly depend on the input power. So there is no inherent limit on COP.

Currently known nuclear reactions don't depend on molecular diffusion. Proposed LENRs are likely to. IMO.

Quote from Eric Walker

Side note: an output of 160 percent of input (if true) would only be within the noise range if there was a large standard deviation in the figure of merit.

The report says the error is 5%. That sounds plausible, and conservative. But I do not know the details.

I think the analysis of what a material heated by LENR would look like is understandable but overly focused on specific possibilities. Although individual nuclear events are violent in comparison to chemical reactions, this does not necessarily translate to the macroscopic picture, even in the form of reduced stability for the overall process. We see a different situation with radioactive decay: individual fission reactions are violent and unpredictable. By contrast, the temperature of a pellet of fission fuel in steady state does not change over short periods, and fission as a macroscopic process in conditions of steady state is consistent to the point of being boring.

Can you achieve something similar with LENR, where the process is induced rather than naturally occurring? That amounts to asking what LENR is and how it can be induced. If the process of inducing it relies on a relatively stable macroscopic change in the environment that does something to incrementally increase the rate of an already occurring natural process such as radioactive decay, I do not see unstable excursions in the macroscopic system as a necessary consequence, just as moving two pellets of fission fuel closer together to increase their activity does not (in the normal case) result in unstable behavior.

But note also that transients in temperature are sometimes reported in LENR writeups, so it's also something that appears to be in the realm of possibility at least.

Eric Walker ,

The control systems for experiments typically work at semi-second to maybe microsecond (measurement/calculation) response times, tangled with generally much slower responding thermal mass properties of reactor and thermocouple materials, while nuclear events typically work in picosecond magnitude time periods. So once some sort of tipping point for inducing a nuclear reaction occurs, there can be an enormous delay (from the viewpoint of atoms) before the control systems can possibly react. Nuclear events releasing enough energy to sensibly heat objects in the human scale neccesarily must be very numerous and diffuse, otherwise the heat would be miniscule or too concentrated in one location.

In some sort of essence, we are looking for the trigger to millions upon millions of low energy nuclear events, triggered casually (if not complicatedly) and yet that such the reactor materials and temperature measurement materials can easily absorb and report the heat so that these millions upon millions of events can be slowed down or un-triggered in a time frame that is relevant to the atomic reaction time scale, the data monitoring and control apparatus time scale, and the heat transfer rate time scale. Without even knowing the reason the millions upon millions of reactions occurs in the first place.

I would expect for these reasons that temperature excursions should be the norm in a successful event, not an exception. And almost certainly that nice smooth input-plus-a-little-more "COP" plots should be anomalous, if not incredibly suspicious.

Consider a hypothetical process that speeds up radioactive decay a little, e.g., alpha decay. For the sake of argument, suppose a strong magnetic field, not hooked up to a control system, could do this. Radioactive decay is a statistical phenomenon, and (in our hypothetical scenario) you've just turned the dial a little. I don't think this would result in the instabilities. That suggests to me that if the feedback loop is slow enough to respond (e.g., due to thermal inertia), there wouldn't necessarily be instability when the inducing process (a magnetic field in our case) is hooked up to a control system. In a short period of time after the field strength has been increased, the decay rate would go up a little, resulting in more decays per second, and more thermalized heat, and then the ensemble of atoms would re-establish equilibrium. The control system would see the new state of the world in the form of an increase in temperature within a period of time that is a function of the thermal inertia of the system, resulting in a dampened response.

I agree with you 100 percent that input-plus-a-little-more "COP" plots are suspicious.

Quote from Eric Walker

Consider a hypothetical process that speeds up radioactive decay a little, e.g., alpha decay. For the sake of argument, suppose a strong magnetic field, not hooked up to a control system, could do this. Radioactive decay is a statistical phenomenon, and (in our hypothetical scenario) you've just turned the dial a little.

Here is a non-hypothetical example in the other direction: "Some Experiments on the Decrease of Tritium Radioactivity:"

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

Along the lines you described, if increasing or decreasing radioactivity could only be accomplished with a feedback loop, then I suppose Reifenschweiler would have seen the reaction stop dead. Assuming his results are valid, that is not what happened.

Moderating a fission reaction by slowing down neutrons with graphite or water (moderator) or quenching it with boron are not feedback mechanisms. In operation they act more like a rheostat. On the other hand, neutrons from one reaction triggering another reaction is a feedback loop. It can go out of control, as everyone knows.

Quote from Eric Walker

I don't think this would result in the instabilities you describe. That suggests to me that if the feedback loop is slow enough to respond, there wouldn't necessarily be instability when the inducing process (a magnetic field in our case) is hooked up to a control system.

Getting back to cold fusion, there is a feedback loop from heat. However this is very different from direct feedback in a chain reaction. In my book, p. 103, I wrote:

Most researchers think that a runaway reaction or explosion [from cold fusion] is impossible for three reasons:

1. Cold fusion only works with an intact metal lattice.
2. It ramps up relatively slowly, so it would destroy the lattice before it could increase to high levels.
3. It is not a chain reaction. In a uranium fission chain reaction, one event directly triggers two or more others, and the reaction can increase exponentially over a very short time (80 generations in 1 microsecond).

Cold fusion can raise the temperature of the metal, and this higher temperature often causes more cold fusion activity. This is called positive feedback. A wood fire works the same way: the heat from an open flame rapidly vaporizes and ignites more fuel, accelerating the fire. But neither a fire nor cold fusion is a chain reaction in the same sense fission is.

"http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Reifenschwsomeexperia.pdf"

"http://akademiai.com/doi/abs/10.1007/s10967-011-1403-5"

Ahlfors, interesting leads. Note that the second paper appears to be arguing that the diffusion of volatile components in the decay chain is responsible for the apparent variation in decay rate of 226Ra and not temperature proper. I.e., it is an argument that there's nothing weird going on in that particular case.

... "i.e., it is an argument that there's nothing weird going on in that particular case"

or in others, e.g. WO2016026720A1 fig.14 - an AR strong selling argument in 2012 [AREVA et al].

Quote from Eric Walker

Consider a hypothetical process that speeds up radioactive decay a little, e.g., alpha decay. For the sake of argument, suppose a strong magnetic field, not hooked up to a control system, could do this. Radioactive decay is a statistical phenomenon, and (in our hypothetical scenario) you've just turned the dial a little. I don't think this would result in the instabilities. That suggests to me that if the feedback loop is slow enough to respond (e.g., due to thermal inertia), there wouldn't necessarily be instability when the inducing process (a magnetic field in our case) is hooked up to a control system. In a short period of time after the field strength has been increased, the decay rate would go up a little, resulting in more decays per second, and more thermalized heat, and then the ensemble of atoms would re-establish equilibrium. The control system would see the new state of the world in the form of an increase in temperature within a period of time that is a function of the thermal inertia of the system, resulting in a dampened response.

I agree with you 100 percent that input-plus-a-little-more "COP" plots are suspicious.

Using the example of increasing the decay rate, the decay rate of a material in a typical reactor size would have to be increased phenomenally, not just a little, to produce sensible heat for any significant time period.

We have calculated the required number of alphas, gammas, IR photons, etc., numerous times over the years. Even for 10 W for 30 seconds, for example, the numbers are huge.

Yes. The number will be in the neighborhood of 1e11 - 1e13 decays per second per joule excess heat (just recalling from memory, assuming ~ 2-5 MeV per alpha decay). No doubt that would be a big increase. To assume that LENR might exist is to assume that such numbers might be feasible.

This is a large number, but it's a vanishingly small fraction of a mole.

Quote from H-G Branzell

You are hypothetically controlling an alpha decay with a magnetic field. There will be no positive feedback unless the decay generates more magnetic field, and it will not do so without human help.

You have made half of a point. Although later in the description I mentioned a control system that would adjust the magnetic field on the basis of the state of the system, it's also true that the magnetic field is not (in the hypothetical scenario) part of a natural feedback loop.

But the point at issue is whether a system must be unstable and hard to control when there are fast, highly energetic reactions, in contrast to a system driven by a chemical process, in which the low-level reactions individually have much less energy. I don't think the existence or lack thereof of a natural feedback loop changes the conclusion I was trying to get to, which is that the former system doesn't necessarily have to be unstable and hard to control, although it might be in certain cases.

Quote from Shane D.

Success, it made it to Next Big Future! That is a start:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/…t-so-far-a-few-watts.html

Just for clarity: those COP figures ignore heater power. COP normally indicates the error in calorimetry needed to generate the results without any real excess heat. In this case, including the heater power, you get COP=1.2 or 20% error, not as stated by NBF 1.5 or 50% error.

To their credit this is the headline COP that SRI are now quoting, NBF just chose to go with the older less helpful version!

This SRI report is a very important announcement.

I must confess that I was not convinced by the claims of Rossi and his "E-Cat", but that I began to change my mind when I saw the results of my friend Alexander Parkhomov.

But Parkhomov works in his living room, and although he is both an excellent experimenter and theoricist , he may have made a mistake.

The results of Tanzella are obtained in a professional laboratory and they are extremely credible.

An excess of 5 watts energy opens the way for irrefutable experiments in which the reactor would be sealed in a glass container full of hydrogen, and perfectly insulated with mineral fiber. After a temperature rise in an oven, it may be possible to cut off the power supply to the oven and allow it to cool, keeping the core of the reactor at 350 ° C thanks to the careful insulation of it. (The reactor temperature being maintained only by the 5 watts produced by the nuclear reaction)