ICCF21 Thread

Quote from JedRothwell

This was marvelous:

E. Beiting, “Investigation of the nickel-hydrogen anomalous heat effect,” Aerospace Report No. ATR-2017-01760, The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo CA, USA, May 15, 2017.

The problem with thermal-to-thermal claims of COP > 1 is that if they were real, it would be easy to make them self-sustain, because the nasty Carnot efficiency limit is not there. (The Carnot limit provides the excuse for not closing the loop in electrolysis experiments.)

Beiting uses the old small-amount-of-fuel trick so popular in cold fusion research, so that a small artifact can be plausibly mistaken for heat from nuclear reactions -- that is, plausible to those who have consumed the kool-aid.

If his fuel were producing a watt of power from nuclear reactions, then 20 times that amount of fuel at the same temperature would produce 20 watts. Now, the fuel could be sufficiently insulated so that 20 W maintained the required temperature, and so once started, the input could be turned off.

When he's done that, the world will beat a path to his door. As always, I'm not holding my breath.

Shane, it's an error, not a trick in the traditional sense of trying to deceive. Nobody is accusing Beiting of that. Note that Celani can also greatly increase the fuel and thereby the signal without increasing the input power and noise. Basically, all reactors that start with Joule heating and fuel to produce more heat than they require are thermal to thermal and should eventually be made to self run, as Louis Reed pointed out. Rossi claimed an output to input ratio of heat ("COP") of more than six even for his earliest ecats. They should have easily self run given a bit of insulation but of course, they never did. Several people pointed this out at the time, and since. It did not seem to impress Jed Rothwell, Tom Darden, the Swedish professors nor anyone who believed Rossi.

Quote

The problem with thermal-to-thermal claims of COP > 1 is that if they were real, it would be easy to make them self-sustain, because the nasty Carnot efficiency limit is not there. (The Carnot limit provides the excuse for not closing the loop in electrolysis experiments.)

Of course. Yet no LENR reaction has self sustained for any length of time, or has one?

Quote from Shane D.

Pretty low of you to suggest someone of his stature, is resorting to "tricks", to make something small appear big.

*That* you call low. You have suggested scientists of far greater stature (and far more of them) have resorted to corruptly suppressing a phenomenon that could save the planet to protect their own selfish interests. That is far lower. But my suggestion is not low at all. He's not deliberately (or successfully) tricking the world. He's tricking himself and the CF community. It's how pathological sciences roll.

Quote

Really, do you think he would risk his reputation established over a long and industrious career, over this?

There is no significant risk, because cold fusion will never be proven to be bogus. He may try larger amounts of fuel, and when the power fails to scale, there will be excuses -- that is, if he reports the failure. And he can certainly admit he was mistaken without admitting he was deliberately deceptive. His career will be fine.

You want risk? Consider scientists like Lewis, Koonin, and the MIT team (and many others) who denounced cold fusion with great fervor. That would have represented real risk to their reputations if there was even a small chance cold fusion would be vindicated. Why would they have taken such a risk unless they in fact considered the possibility of vindication to be remote indeed, in which case, they acted honestly, and not corruptly. Why do you use this kind of argument only to convince yourself that cold fusion scientists are honest, but not that skeptics are honest? Double standard?

Quote from Shane D.

Louis claimed Beiting was tricking, or making stuff up, "to deceive", not me.

You put "to deceive" in quotes, but I did not use those words. I called it a trick because many people are tricked by it, including the scientists themselves. Many CF experiments use small amounts of the active material, and then claim high energy or power density, but those words (energy per unit volume (or mass)) suggest more energy with more volume or mass. But as McKubre laments in his abstract for ICCF, nothing scales in this field. So, I submit the entire cold fusion cast has been tricked by this kind of bumbling in the lab. McKubre is right. Until someone can show the sort of scaling that made Marie Curie and Lavoisier famous, the world will continue to ignore cold fusion.

Quote from kirkshanahan

Good. I'd like to see how he does it.

Briefly, he uses 6 calibration curves for each cell. Three for the internal TC and 3 for the external TC. The three are: calibration for hydrogen, nitrogen and a vacuum. He monitors pressure. He does not add hydrogen to the active cell during the test, so after a short while it absorbs most of the hydrogen and the performance curve is close to the vacuum. Any heat detected by the nitrogen cell is assumed to be an error, and it is subtracted from the total energy from both cells.

He says this is described in much more detail in the paper. I hope to upload it next week.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Of course. Yet no LENR reaction has self sustained for any length of time, or has one?

The longest self sustained one I know of was about a week. Most last a few hours to a day or so. Other cells would be self sustaining if you insulated them and kept them hot. Ones in that category have run for three to six months continuously, at power levels ranging from 10 to about 100 W.

Would that be any length of time? Some length of time? Not sure.

The whole discussion is ridiculous because it is easy to measure input power; we can be sure it is not causing an error; and it has no impact on the prospects for a practical device.

It is necessary to change approaches to cold synthesis, it is necessary to study the nature, has these processes but as a thermonuclear reaction, and as receiving electricity there. An example is the planet model Earth!

Quote from seven_of_twenty

The first thing that strikes me is that they calibrate with nitrogen in both cells and then compare a nitrogen filled cell with a hydrogen filled cell during their active run.

No, that did not "strike you." You assumed that. You made it up. That is not what the author said. I described the method above. I suggest you wait to read the paper before letting it strike you with imaginary blows.

Quote from Louis Reed

Until someone can show the sort of scaling that made Marie Curie and Lavoisier famous

Curie showed the heat from 0.1 g of radium. She wrote that it produced "one hundred calories per hour." (https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/article_text.htm) That's 0.116 W. Beiting reported 9 times more than that, and many other cold fusion experiments have produced hundreds of times more than that. Yet you don't believe them. I suppose you would not believe Curie either.

Lavoisier made the first modern calorimeter circa 1780. The people at Shell Oil in Paris made a calorimeter very similar to it, only somewhat more precise and accurate, and they measured the heat from a cold fusion reaction with it. Lavoisier's instrument could measure about a half watt as I recall, so it could have easily confirmed Beiting and many others, but you would not believe it.

Quote from Louis Reed

If his fuel were producing a watt of power from nuclear reactions, then 20 times that amount of fuel at the same temperature would produce 20 watts.

That is certainly not a foregone conclusion! If only it were that simple. Some of the Japanese researchers are using 100 times more of this ZrO2NiPd fuel, made as closely as possible to the Beiting's fuel, yet they are getting zero output. Or less output than he is getting, for various reasons that are becoming clear.

Quote from JedRothwell

Curie showed the heat from 0.1 g of radium. She wrote that it produced "one hundred calories per hour." (https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/article_text.htm) That's 0.116 W. Beiting reported 9 times more than that, and many other cold fusion experiments have produced hundreds of times more than that. Yet you don't believe them. I suppose you would not believe Curie either.

You missed two key points.

1) There was no input heat in Curie's experiment. 0.1 W from cold fusion would be eminently believable if it went on long enough *without* input.

2) The output *scaled* with the relevant fuel. Of course, she measured radiation, and found it scaled in some experiments uranium, and in some radium. It was the scaling that allowed her to identify the source.

Quote

Lavoisier's instrument could measure about a half watt as I recall, so it could have easily confirmed Beiting and many others, but you would not believe it.

If there were no input, half a watt would be convincing. Much less would be too. But when you have to separate sources of the heat, and the claimed source is less than 10%, things are more dicey, especially when it would be possible to dispense with the input, but he does not. As you said in 2001, "calorimetry errors and artifacts are more common than researchers realize".

Anyway, it was the scaling of the heat with oxygen that made Lavoisier's contribution so compelling. Let's see if Beiting can show the heat scales with his fuel.

Quote from JedRothwell

The longest self sustained one I know of was about a week. Most last a few hours to a day or so.

But presumably not sufficiently reproducible to demonstrate to the DOE, for example. A demonstration of a self-sustained nuclear reaction could hardly be denied. A claim of it on the other hand...

And since Beiting is the new best evidence ever, those claims are inferior to his.

Quote

Other cells would be self sustaining if you insulated them and kept them hot.

Exactly. If the claim were valid, and they insulated, they would self-sustain. I don't believe they would not do this if they could.

Quote

Ones in that category have run for three to six months continuously, at power levels ranging from 10 to about 100 W.

Anything in the range of 100W for six months that's passed the minor hurdle of peer review?

Quote

The whole discussion is ridiculous because it is easy to measure input power; we can be sure it is not causing an error; and it has no impact on the prospects for a practical device.

And yet, for 5 years Rossi fooled you into thinking he had proved LENR by making errors in power measurement. If his claims were valid, he could have easily self-sustained, and removed doubt. He didn't because he couldn't.

Quote from Shane D.

Louis Reed wrote:

"You put "to deceive" in quotes, but I did not use those words."

You are correct. SOT said that.

7 of 20 said it's "*not* a trick in the traditional sense of trying to deceive." The word "not" negates what you say.

Anyway, I was just pointing out your incorrect use of quotation marks.

Quote

Really though, is there any difference in meaning between "trick", and "deceive"?

I would say, yes. Especially in the context I used it with reference to an old TV comedy. I was attempting a little levity with "the old small-amount-of-fuel trick". For the record, I do not think Beiting is deliberately trying to deceive anyone. But his methods serve to trick a lot of people anyway.

Quote from Louis Reed

You missed two key points.

1) There was no input heat in Curie's experiment. 0.1 W from cold fusion would be eminently believable if it went on long enough *without* input.

Input makes no difference. It is direct current, and therefore easily accounted for, and subtracted. Beiting could reduce it or eliminate it with better insulation.

You have come up with a meaningless reason to reject the measurement. This is not an electrolysis experiment, but you probably reject them too because they have input power, even though people have have successfully measured the power balance of electrolysis since Faraday's day. (Faraday diddit.)

Quote from Louis Reed

2) The output *scaled* with the relevant fuel.

The output (power, that is) from burning wood or coal does not scale with the fuel. The energy of a modern variable yield nuclear bomb does not scale with the fuel. It varies from 0.3 to 80 kilotons (Wikipedia) with the same amount of fuel.

Quote from Louis Reed

But presumably not sufficiently reproducible to demonstrate to the DOE, for example.

It was reproduced hundreds of times! If the DoE had sent someone to France I am sure they could have seen one.

Quote from Louis Reed

And since Beiting is the new best evidence ever, those claims are inferior to his.

I wouldn't say the best evidence ever, but I think it is pretty good. It is a replication of Takahashi, and he thinks it is excellent. The calibration curves are the best I have seen, and the signal to noise ratio must be very high. You have not read the paper, so you wouldn't know about any of that. All you can do is come up with bogus reasons to reject it, like Garwin's.