Where is the LENR goal line, and how best do we get there?

Quote from Alan Smith

I am not as cynical as you imagine - however, the usual routes of replication and peer-review have done little to help move LENR from the fringe to the center, so they are little useit seems. I am looking for other paths. The observation of XSH during electrolysis was not even an experiment to find it, but seen during fuel preparation. It just so happened that the same metal mix (devised by Russ) was being electrolysed with both heavy and light water, using a very similar cell structure, The LW cell was pulling twice the current of the HW cell, even so the HW cell was stubbornly a few degrees warmer over many hours.

The merit in writing these things up is that this (anecdotal) information can be examined and a judgement made about whether the quantified observations indicate something new (e.g. LENR) or behaviour expected from chemical reactions. There is a sort of intermediate possibility where unexpected chemical reactions deliver unusually high (but still within possible chemical limits) energy.

Without that process, initially from the experimenter and then checked by others, no-one will leap on LENR as the most likely reason. Nor should they.

Quote from THHuxleynew

(1) Water vapour comes off the electrolyte (first boiled)

(2) At some point in the air it then condenses

(3) the condensate is evacuated from the vessel with the outgoing vapours.

If the vapor condenses, it falls back into the electrolyte. The outgoing vapor cannot push a liquid up a long, narrow tube.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Long narrow tubes do not prevent the passage of liquid.

Yes, they do prevent that. That is how a retort works, and a teapot. This has been known since ancient times. This is how you distill alcohol and other liquids.

Furthermore, if what you describe were the case, then:

1. Control tests with ordinary water and platinum would also produce apparent excess heat.

2. There would be no apparent excess heat before the boil-off or after it.

3. Drops of water would be seen at the top of the cell walls, being driven up and out.

These three do not happen.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Scientists however pay attention to replicable experiments with clear results, which you hinted (but did not state) you have. You still have not stated you have this...

Some scientists do, others do not. For example, many top scientists rejected the maser and laser even after they were replicated, because they violated the theories these scientists embraced. Nearly all scientists rejected continental drift and the proof that H. pylori is the cause of ulcers even after abundant proof was available. Whether scientists accept or reject a claim is more related to politics and money than the validity of the claim. As Stan Szpak put it, scientists believe whatever you pay them to believe.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The F&P results are anything but clear! Replications of them achieving much lower results which equally are not (replicably) clear.

You say they are not clear, but several hundred of the world's electrochemists, experts in calorimetry, tritium detection, the people who ran BARC, the chairman of the Indian AEC and others who replicated these results say they were very clear. Also, you are wrong that these results where much lower. Many of them were higher, using better equipment.

These people actually replicated, and they described their findings in detail, in peer reviewed journal papers. You, on the other hand, have not attempted to replicate, and the reasons you give to reject experiments are invalid. For example you claim that drops of condensed water will be driven up narrow, long tubes by vapor which is only slightly above atmospheric pressure. If that were true, retorts would not work. They have been known to work for thousands of years, since alcohol was first distilled. As far as I know, all of your critiques, of all major cold fusion claims, have been mistaken. In any case, you would have to disprove all claims to show that cold fusion does not exist. If you cannot challenge McKubre or Miles, then even if you were right about Fleischmann's boil off results, cold fusion would still be real.

So, these are your mistaken claims, inaccurate claims about low results and so on, technically impossible claims of droplets driven up by ~1 atm steam, and your unfounded opinion versus hundreds of peer-reviewed experiments done by leading scientists. I think they are correct, and you are mistaken.

Quote from Wyttenbach

You just jumped over the troll barrier. In one thread you fight JED and here JED serves as your shield to avoid a loosing discussion.

I'm not fighting anyone. I've already explained to you why I'm here (1) and I just explained to Shane why it's not possible to talk about LENR without considering the JR position, with all its contradictions.

You are forgetting that you are posting in a thread in which 7 out of 30 comments in its first page are from JR. He strongly influences the agenda of the public LENR debate, and he proposes all the most widespread narratives. He did it with the Ecat, first vehemently supporting its reality, and later harshly accusing Rossi of fraud. A socio-psychological phenomenon essentially coincides with its narratives. We could say that JR is the father of the LENR phenomenon, the real one.

Quote

It is too late to find errors in old experiments ...

It's too late to check the old experiments, but it's not too late to evaluate the correctness of the old documents which reports their presumed results. In the case we are talking about, the disproving of the old F&P energy claims is already contained in the old Lonchampt papers.

Quote

... as it is to late to stop LENR.

Don't worry. The CF/LENR phenomenon has run for nearly 3 decades, the last due mainly to Rossi, and will go further.

Quote

Your attitude is very close to ABD's. Just trying to produce noise to distract people by referencing "low value" old experiments.

You don't read carefully the posts of this thread. Please, read them better from the first page. You will find that the prominence of old experiments was affirmed by JR, and confirmed by McKubre, who wrote: "Most of the progress I made at SRI and most of my residual knowledge (and an awful lot lost) came in the first 2-3 years of the "Fleischmann Pons era" when I had a group of 8-10 highly talented folk focussed coherently, energetically and full time and on FP experiments."

Quote

All well informed people (reading this forum) doing experiments know about the Lipinski findings, thus it's up to you be informed too.

You are continuing to modify your request. First, you praised Ruer and invited me to disprove ALL the LENR findings (2), now you stick on Lipinski alone. What's next?

Btw, I've already read the paper that Ruer dedicated to the October 6, 2011 experiment on the Ecat. Very interesting. Have you read it?

(1) Where is the LENR goal line, and how best do we get there?

(2) Where is the LENR goal line, and how best do we get there?

Quote from JedRothwell

Some scientists do, others do not. For example, many top scientists rejected the maser and laser even after they were replicated, because they violated the theories these scientists embraced. Nearly all scientists rejected continental drift and the proof that H. pylori is the cause of ulcers even after abundant proof was available. Whether scientists accept or reject a claim is more related to politics and money than the validity of the claim. As Stan Szpak put it, scientists believe whatever you pay them to believe.

You say they are not clear, but several hundred of the world's electrochemists, experts in calorimetry, tritium detection, the people who ran BARC, the chairman of the Indian AEC and others who replicated these results say they were very clear. Also, you are wrong that these results where much lower. Many of them were higher, using better equipment.

These people actually replicated, and they described their findings in detail, in peer reviewed journal papers. You, on the other hand, have not attempted to replicate, and the reasons you give to reject experiments are invalid. For example you claim that drops of condensed water will be driven up narrow, long tubes by vapor which is only slightly above atmospheric pressure. If that were true, retorts would not work. They have been known to work for thousands of years, since alcohol was first distilled. As far as I know, all of your critiques, of all major cold fusion claims, have been mistaken. In any case, you would have to disprove all claims to show that cold fusion does not exist. If you cannot challenge McKubre or Miles, then even if you were right about Fleischmann's boil off results, cold fusion would still be real.

So, these are your mistaken claims, inaccurate claims about low results and so on, technically impossible claims of droplets driven up by ~1 atm steam, and your unfounded opinion versus hundreds of peer-reviewed experiments done by leading scientists. I think they are correct, and you are mistaken.

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where we disagree, as always, is:

(1) Level of certainty. I'm less certain that you that what you say usually is the case need be the case in this experiment under these conditions. For example, retorts, as used for distillation, will work in this case (with recondensation), because the liquid going up the tube is all recondensed. And I'm quite sure that liquid does sometimes recondense in retorts. The pressure required to expel such recondensed liquid up a tube is (you can easily calculate) minimal. 1/1000th atmosphere per vertical cm of liquid - and we expect maybe a few cm. Such obvious errors of physical intuition in your arguments mean that I'm not inclined to take them as necessarily true.

(2) We are also less certain in judgement of people. You put faith in specific people (F&P) which I after having read their papers which are less definitive than I'd expect, had they cast iron results, will do. In fact I would not put faith in one one group even then. The F&P paper you have many times directed me to is no way definitive and not what I'd expect for a truly anomalous result record. It was written when F&P were certain they had achieved anomalous results, and does not bother properly to establish that this is the case because it summarises many experiments and typical practices, leaving wiggle room, rather than carefully documenting a single definitive experiment. I think had thy such a carefully documented single result it would be much discussed here.

(3) We are also less certain about the replications. I've seen and heard of none more carefully done than McKubre. those look interesting but not definitive, and certainly do NOT replicate the extraordinarily high claims of excess heat made by F&P. The very many other claimed replications (historically) were not compelling enough to make a good lab rat experiment now, nor to keep those doing the work interested. More recently the various replications look much less convincing (and many have been shown so) than those earlier experiments.

(4) Most scientists are not venal as you suggest. Sure, they have limitations and cannot do work that is not funded. But the funding system allows blue sky research and freedom to do it (even now) people can indulge hobbies (even now) and academics are driven by curiosity much more than by financial rewards. Quite apart from the fact that if anyone did discover strong replicable proof for LENR it would be a very big deal and lead eventually to great fame etc. That is a strong inducement for high risk options.

As a skeptic I'm slow to make categorical statements, so I certainly cannot say that LENR does not exist. In fact no-one can make that statement even if much readier to make definite statements about science. But thus far while there remains enough anomaly for me to go on looking at results, none of these stack up nor make me think LENR is likely - rather than (e.g to take one possibility) some higher than expected chemical enthalpies in some hydrogen-metal systems combined with (to take another possibility) some systematic errors in certain classes of experiments. I take these two examples because both are pretty well proven to exist in some cases, though it is not clear how many of the "interesting results" they intersect. I note that with these two possibilities there are likely to be other such, not mentioned, which are significant, and it only needs one such possibility to pan out per apparently positive experiment.

You obviously take a different view, which is fine. Where I disagree is that your view is more informed by scientific understanding, or detailed assimilation of experimental results, than me. I don't doubt that you have spent more time studying this stuff than me or indeed pretty well anyone else on the planet. That does not necessarily make your judgement more sound, because of the (to my view) erroneous assumptions that you make about the stuff that I have studied. Such errors have a consistent pattern and would naturally lead to your conclusions. I realise that you will have a symmetric view about me, and see my caution here is being an error.

Jed said:

1. Control tests with ordinary water and platinum would also produce apparent excess heat.

2. There would be no apparent excess heat before the boil-off or after it.

3. Drops of water would be seen at the top of the cell walls, being driven up and out.

I am happy also to answer Jed's other substantive points.

1. These were never tested under similar boil-off conditions (we are talking here about the boil-off apparent high XSH phenomenon).

2. That assumes that this boil-off problem is the only issue in F&Ps experiments. I do not make that assumption. Actually I also don't rule out the same phenomena happening without boil off when some recondensation is still possible. It can be significant at any time where missing H2O or D2O is computed in the energy budget using enthalpy of vaporisation. It could still be influenced by electrode conditions which might alter turbulence, vapour, etc, and might significantly change with D vs H.

3. Many assumptions here - you cannot know this.

THH, be ready for Jed’s reply that how dare you argue with the 256 foremost electrochemists, directors of prestigious institutes, dead Nobel laureates, 6 lords-a-leaping, and, most of all, him? Until you disprove the existence of LENR (which as you note is impossible), you have no right to say anything.

Quote from THHuxleynew

(1) Level of certainty. I'm less certain that you . . .

You mean you are less certain than Fleischmann and the people who peer-reviewed him. Not me. These are not my claims, and the evidence I gave you for them is not from me.

Quote from THHuxleynew

(1) Level of certainty. I'm less certain that you that what you say usually is the case need be the case in this experiment under these conditions. For example, retorts, as used for distillation, will work in this case (with recondensation), because the liquid going up the tube is all recondensed. And I'm quite sure that liquid does sometimes recondense in retorts. The pressure required to expel such recondensed liquid up a tube is (you can easily calculate) minimal. 1/1000th atmosphere per vertical cm of liquid - and we expect maybe a few cm.

Of course the liquid recondenses in a retort. But it then falls back in. It does not go out the top, because if it did, the retort would not work. It would not distill. Of course there is some small fraction that does go out. Ancient retorts did not work as well as modern ones. Fleischmann's cell is a modern one. It would have to fail drastically to produce this much apparent excess heat. And you have not told us why it only fails with Pd and deuterium, and not with Pt or ordinary water. How would the choice of Pd or deuterium affect the distillation?

There is not "a few cm of liquid." There will be a few drops of condensed liquid on the walls in the lower part of the tube, but that is not a vertical centimeter. The steam does not push against a drop of water on the wall. It goes right past it, up the tube, and out. There is no mechanism by which steam at this pressure can push any measurable amount of liquid up the tube. If it were high pressure steam rushing up the tube, it might carry along droplets, but you can see from the photos and videos of the cell that it is low pressure, like steam coming out of a tea kettle.

Quote from THHuxleynew

(2) We are also less certain in judgement of people. You put faith in specific people (F&P) which I after having read their papers which are less definitive than I'd expect, had they cast iron results, will do. In fact I would not put faith in one one group even then.

I put my faith in them and several hundred others who replicated them and confirmed their results. If hundreds of scientists could be wrong, the experimental method would not work, and science would not exist. You put your faith in your own ideas, which are demonstrably wrong. I listed three reasons why you are wrong. You refuse to comment on them. For you to continue to claim you are right in the face of such irrefutable evidence is pathological skepticism.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The F&P paper you have many times directed me to is no way definitive and not what I'd expect for a truly anomalous result record.

Yes, it is definitive, for the reasons I gave, which you refuse to acknowledge or address.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The F&P paper you have many times directed me to is no way definitive and not what I'd expect for a truly anomalous result record.

It is exactly what anyone else would expect, especially given the excess heat before and after the boil-off, measured with other calorimetric techniques. Excess heat is confirmed by three methods in one test, yet you refuse to believe it. What more can you ask for?

If you will not believe this, or McKubre, or Miles, there is no experiment that you would believe. You cannot describe any better experimental techniques than these. You refuse to believe conventional techniques and levels of heat that any scientist could have measured after 1780, and that have been measured millions of times. Even when these tests are repeated thousands of times in hundreds of labs. You have never disproved a single one of them, except with imaginary scenarios in which steam at ~1 atm magically pushes invisible drops of water up and out of a test tube. You cannot be convinced by any experiment; you will always invent absurd reasons to reject them. I suppose you would come round and believe a commercial product.

Quote from interested observer

THH, be ready for Jed’s reply that how dare you argue with the 256 foremost electrochemists, directors of prestigious institutes, dead Nobel laureates, 6 lords-a-leaping, and, most of all, him?

I did not appeal to scientists. I gave three reasons why he is wrong. Would you care to address them?

Ah, I see that THH did address these:

Quote from THHuxleynew

1. Control tests with ordinary water and platinum would also produce apparent excess heat.

2. There would be no apparent excess heat before the boil-off or after it.

3. Drops of water would be seen at the top of the cell walls, being driven up and out.

I am happy also to answer Jed's other substantive points.

1. These were never tested under similar boil-off conditions (we are talking here about the boil-off apparent high XSH phenomenon).

2. That assumes that this boil-off problem is the only issue in F&Ps experiments. I do not make that assumption. Actually I also don't rule out the same phenomena happening without boil off when some recondensation is still possible. It can be significant at any time where missing H2O or D2O is computed in the energy budget using enthalpy of vaporisation. It could still be influenced by electrode conditions which might alter turbulence, vapour, etc, and might significantly change with D vs H.

3. Many assumptions here - you cannot know this.

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1. "These were never tested under similar boil-off conditions (we are talking here about the boil-off apparent high XSH phenomenon)."

Yes they were tested in similar boil-off conditions, using Pt and and Pd with ordinary water. Obviously, the "high XSH" (excess heat) in the calibrations must have been same ~100 W, or the cells would not have boiled off the same way, in the same amount of time. Which they did. Fleischmann said that many times, and I told you that many times.

Electrolysis at the same power levels as the excess heat (~100 W) produced exactly the same boil off conditions, leaving all of the salts in the cell. Distilling all of the water, in other words. It looked the same. The heat balance was zero. There was no excess heat. Tests with resistance heaters also produced the same boiling and distillation, over the same time period, with no excess heat.

Furthermore, there is no mechanism by which the choice of Pd (or a resistance heater) can change the way the water is condensed, or make the steam push drops of water up the tube. Why would Pd do that, yet Pt does not? You cannot suggest such a mechanism.

2. "That assumes that this boil-off problem is the only issue in F&Ps experiments. I do not make that assumption."

You have not come up with any other issues, except imaginary and impossible ones such as 1 atm steam pushing drops of water up tube. More to the point, no one else has come up with any issues. You cannot point to any paper showing errors in this experiment.

3. "Actually I also don't rule out the same phenomena happening without boil off when some recondensation is still possible." Please explain:

This goes on for a week or two before the boil off, at power ranging from several watts to ~80 W. Why doesn't the volume of liquid in the cell decline? How could droplets leaving the cell produce this apparent excess heat the whole time? The water would all be gone in a few hours.

Why does it not happen with Pt and ordinary water blanks?

Do you also not rule it out condensation after the cell has boiled dry? How can there be condensation when there is no more water or steam, and nothing is coming out of the cell, and nothing is condensing? The method of calorimetry is completely different, as I said.

"It can be significant at any time where missing H2O or D2O is computed in the energy budget using enthalpy of vaporisation. It could still be influenced by electrode conditions which might alter turbulence, vapour, etc, and might significantly change with D vs H."

How could vapor explain excess heat continuing before boil off for a week, producing many orders of magnitude more energy than any chemical reaction, without any unexpected measurable change in the volume of water in the cell? The water level changes according to Faraday's law from electrolysis, plus a tiny amount from vaporization. The latter is exactly the expected amount from the temperature of the electrolyte. There is no unexpected or unaccounted-for loss of water. This is described in many papers in enormous detail.

You pay no attention to the facts. You are making up impossible scenarios. This is pathological skepticism.

I forgot point #3.

Quote from THHuxleynew

[Drops of water would be seen at the top of the cell walls, being driven up and out.]

3. Many assumptions here - you cannot know this.

No assumptions here. I do know this, because I have seen close-up videos and photos of the experiments being performed, and I have seen the actual cells. Also because Fleischmann, Pons and the people they worked with would have seen the droplets in the upper part of the cell being pushed up by steam. They did not.

You can easily verify this yourself. Boil some water in a long, tall test tube with a narrow exit at the top, with ~100 W of power. Look at it and see if any condensed droplets are driven up the walls after they condense. You will see they sometimes roll or fall down, but none are driven up and out.

Quote from Shane D.

Now though, that mission accomplished, and with your sights set on taking down LENR, you have gotten lazy.

I also got tired, Shane. It's time for me to go back on vacation. One more time.

But before leaving, I have to answer your funny proposal.

Quote

Go onto LENR-CANR yourself and dig in. Read everything in no particular order. Dedicate at least as much time there, as you did with the Rossi early years. […] So go on, do your homework and when done, come back and tell us what you found.

This mission is impossible.

It has been possible to confute with certainty the claimed Ecat performances, thanks to the many side information that have been incautiously released on the web, in particular for the tests carried out in 2011. If the only information available had been limited to the reports and declarations from the experts of so-called third parties, it would have been only possible to raise suspicious about their results, but the authoritativeness of the academic testers would have eventually prevailed on any criticisms, as the last Ecat supporters are still trying to do (1-2).

For the older CF/LENR tests, the only documents available are the test reports, accompained by all the myths that have grown around them and their authors. So, it is a unique circumstance that the calorimetric claims of the two fathers of CF are still considered the best on record by the organizer of the most complete LENR library, and that these findings were "de facto" disproved by the results of replications made by another protagonist of CF, widely praised by the same librarian. You can't get more from this old stuff.

Each of us can draw his conclusions. IMO, the stories of the CFathers and of the LENRenassaince man can be connected in a whole CF/LENR history which would make even more sense.

(1) Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

(2) Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

Quote from Shane D.

Yep, it is a vendetta.

Please, do not joke on this. It's not.

Jed: I'll answer this part of your comments, since it is most factually based:

Of course the liquid recondenses in a retort. But it then falls back in. It does not go out the top, because if it did, the retort would not work. It would not distill. Of course there is some small fraction that does go out. Ancient retorts did not work as well as modern ones. Fleischmann's cell is a modern one. It would have to fail drastically to produce this much apparent excess heat.

This argument is wrong. Recondensation in a retort is expected and because the recondensed liquid is distilled this does not prevent the retort from working.

And you have not told us why it only fails with Pd and deuterium, and not with Pt or ordinary water. How would the choice of Pd or deuterium affect the distillation?

That is true. You have not shown me the evidence from F&P that under boil-off conditions (the case we consider) these different cases give different boil-off XSH results. Therefore I don't need to. F&P may claim that only one case results in boil-off conditions, but that can be explained by the profound physical differences between H & D, and Pd an Pt, which alter near-electrode environment and therefore various effects. That is a separate issue to the one at hand. When considering complex problems, as this, I like to analyse different aspects separately, then put all the results together. A style of thinking in which you layer together many different reasons all pointing the same direction does not help this when they apply in different cases. They are all relevant, but must be considered, on their merits, separately.

There is not "a few cm of liquid." There will be a few drops of condensed liquid on the walls in the lower part of the tube, but that is not a vertical centimeter. The steam does not push against a drop of water on the wall. It goes right past it, up the tube, and out.

The vertical length of liquid (and hence pressure required to push, ignoring surface effects) is at most the height of the retort and can be much less than this if the liquid is in tiny droplets or if there are gas bubbles in the liquid. How much does not matter because the available pressure here is obviously and easily high enough to do the job. let us suppose 10cm, we need just 1/100 atmosphere (10mBar is you prefer). In the case of a wide exit tube you are correct this is not the issue, see below.

There is no mechanism by which steam at this pressure can push any measurable amount of liquid up the tube. If it were high pressure steam rushing up the tube, it might carry along droplets, but you can see from the photos and videos of the cell that it is low pressure, like steam coming out of a tea kettle.

I have not ruled out droplets: all I've said is recondensed water. But I don't understand this. If the only exit from the vessel is up a tube then whatever pressure is needed will happen. and the needed pressure is very low (10mBar). What does 10mbar look like? I defy you to determine that simply from photos and videos. Perhaps if you disagree you could post the videos you have - note that those are of the most extreme boil-off conditions available - and state what pressure you think exists in the vessel. You may be right, but if so my point remains because recondensed droplets in the exiting vapour are an issue if the recondensation happens inside the calorimetric boundary.

You can easily verify this yourself. Boil some water in a long, tall test tube with a narrow exit at the top, with ~100 W of power. Look at it and see if any condensed droplets are driven up the walls after they condense. You will see they sometimes roll or fall down, but none are driven up and out.

I agree. If the opening is wide then we have droplets in vapour, not droplets clinging to sides, emerging. But droplets clinging to sides can possibly result in heat exchange so making air droplets recondense inside the calorimetic boundary... (I was addressing your point above when you said the opening was narrow).

Quote from THHuxleynew

This argument is wrong. Recondensation in a retort is expected and because the recondensed liquid is distilled this does not prevent the retort from working.

The recondensed liquid does not leave the retort. It falls back in. If it left the retort, the distillate would have a lot of contamination, so the retort would not work. In this case, even recondensed water would have some salts from the walls, if it left the cell. Therefore this mechanism cannot produce apparent excess heat.

Even if a tiny amount of recondensed water leaves the cell, it would not be enough to change the apparent heat balance to produce 100 W of spurious (artifact) heat. Given the input power to the cell, nearly all of water leaving the cell would have to be in liquid state for that to happen. It would be readily apparent to the naked eye. Contrary to what you say, steam at ~1 atm cannot push liquid water up an open tube, but even if we accept that it can -- for the sake of argument -- it cannot push up most of the liquid water in cell up. Nor is there any way that much water could recondense without nearly all of it falling back down.

Quote from THHuxleynew

[And you have not told us why it only fails with Pd and deuterium, and not with Pt or ordinary water. How would the choice of Pd or deuterium affect the distillation?]

That is true. You have not shown me the evidence from F&P that under boil-off conditions (the case we consider) these different cases give different boil-off XSH results. Therefore I don't need to.

They showed this evidence many times, and they said in their papers that this test was done repeatedly. I pointed out examples to you. Therefore, you do need to address it. Perhaps you are saying you don't believe Fleischmann. That would be one way of addressing the claims.

Quote from THHuxleynew

F&P may claim that only one case results in boil-off conditions, but that can be explained by the profound physical differences between H & D, and Pd an Pt, which alter near-electrode environment and therefore various effects.

No such macroscopic effects exist. If they did, heavy water would be dead easy to extract from ordinary water, and it would not cost $1000/kg. Such effects are tiny, and could not possibly produce a 100 W artifact. If you say such large effects exist, I suggest you point to a textbook or paper describing them.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I agree. If the opening is wide then we have droplets in vapour, not droplets clinging to sides, emerging. But droplets clinging to sides can possibly result in heat exchange so making air droplets recondense inside the calorimetic boundary... (I was addressing your point above when you said the opening was narrow).

No significant macroscopic amount of droplets emerge. They fall back in. If that were not the case, they would also emerge during the calibrations, producing apparent excess heat. You claim that there are significant differences between Pd and Pt, and heavy water and light water, but such differences cannot affect the way droplets of condensed water on the walls or in the vapor behave. They can only affect the way electrochemical reactions occur in the water at the cathode and anode.

You are hand-waving.

Heat exchange would reduce the apparent excess heat, not increase it. It would cause more heat to leave the walls of the cell, and less as vapor. That does not happen. There is no change in the ratio of heat losses from the walls or vapor in the calibrations compared to the excess heat runs.

You could repeat the test I recommend with heavy water, if you would like to confirm this. I am 100% confident you will see no change in the heat balance with heavy water versus light water. I am sure that if you read the literature on heavy water, you will find no sign of this.

Quote from Shane D.

Just a heads up. A little later I will transfer most of the latest posts over to the Mizuno Bucket thread.

It doesn't seem relevant. Mizuno is not Fleischmann and their experiments were quite different. How about a new thread for Fleischmann?