F&P's experiments – 30 years after CF announcement

Quote from kirkshanahan

Given the HAD region claims are silly too, F&P were totally working in the noise

Hi Kirk

Did Dieter Britz give you any advice on the HAD region and the Szpak T effect? in 2002

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/g…hi-FOIA-00929-00952-W.pdf

"

07/18/2002 08: 14 AM

Hi Dieter ,(Britz) DOE

I have been totalling up my time recently , and I find I am spending too much time for too little return.

I do seem to have the penchant for teaching , even though I ' m not in academics.

And , in my current job assignment , I am the only chemist in a group of 15 metallographers .

I used to have a ~chemist as a supervisor , but even that left me starved for conversation (re . chemistry).

I do like chemistry, and 1 feel somewhat isolated where 1 am now .

The Internet was one way of maintaining professional level contacts . Also, I realize that I have ' the addiction ',

I seem to have withdrawal symptoms if I don’ t get my ' CF fix ' routinely.

But intellect shall prevail ! I think 1 've learned just about as much as I can or want from the ' field', such as it is.

I am getting less and less out of it , and in turn , I seem to be 'helping ' no one .

The ones who need the help the most ignore me because they are emotionally committed to their suppositions .

For them , it has become a matter of faith . I know about faith , as you know , but in my dealings in the CF area

I have always tried to use standard science and logic .

But , I need to quit . I have a couple of items to wrap up though .

For example , and this is where I need your professional advice.

In my most recent post in the ' F&P HAD ' thread , I talk about Szpak 's T claims ,

and attack it from the computational side .

However , it has occurred to me that I may be being too harsh , in that the concentration of the reactive species (water ) will not actually be changing that much

, even though the electrolyte concs change by 100- 200%. I 'd need to look up the detailed model Szpak references ,

or I can ask you I bet .

Was I too quick to reject the steady state condition? Or will the electrolyte concentration changes grossly affect things?

There are other things I don 't like about the study as well , that I didn ' t get into yet , so I probably could put out a couple more long posts.

I guess in the end I have to ask what good it does to comment on spf .

No one who matters (actual researchers , funding orgs.) is watching. (Just the historian !)

I ‘ve begun a 1^st draft of a paper that responds to Ed Storms ' claim that my TA paper is 'only' applicable to his Pt work.

Dieter , in fact I can go back through all the CF calorimetry literature and see evidences of the same problem,

including F&P ' s work . There is the wrinkle in their work about ' bursts ', but if you postulate a messed up calibration and

just look at delta- T, you find the same delta- Ts there as in Storms ' (and probably McKubre ' s) work, so I can make a case

that they just don ' t measure recombination properly.

However ,that paper keeps getting bigger and bigger, and again I don ' t know what value it has in the end.

What I was contemplating doing was just do a so-so job on it, and then putting it out as a

government report , and not actually getting it published , just publically released .

I am going to try to stop responding to the ' groupies ' like Salsman and the like. The one guy that bugs me right now is Staker .

He 's made some claims that I would like to evaluate , but his behavior seems a clear flag that I should expect zip from him,

so I guess I just drop that too.

In the end, the thing that keeps me coming back is that the likes of McKubre keep getting funding to do sloppy science .

I really wanted to impact the funding orgs by pointing out minimum acceptable quality levels , but again ,

I don ' t know who ' s listening . In any case , we need to stay in touch , even if it ' s not about CF, and I will definitely try to do so .

Kirk

Quote from Ascoli65

I let oystla the pleasure of explaining you why his curve goes to infinity

haha, You mean the P/(P'-P) has the wrong form

But you still don't get the physics and chemistry here

Mv / (Mv+Md+Mo) = P / P*

You cannot choose what kind of Vapor you would like to include or not.

Learn a little of partial pressures, mixture of gases, mole fractions etc. lazy you

Quote from Ascoli65

At boiling temperature, Lonchampt (3) switched from his Equation [1], equivalent to the Equation [1] of the F&P paper (1), to his Equation [6], which no longer contains the nor-treatable term P/(P'-P). Lonchampt has changed equation because,

Lonchampt chose to evaluate the total enthalpy necessary to evaporate the contents of the cell, therefore he correctly changed the formula.

F&P chose another path, but as I said many times, potential errors in this paper does not matter, it was not their main discovery or their main paper

And Lonchampt confirmed excess heat, so what's the issue ?

Quote from oystla

haha, you have discovered something that neither Wilson, Hansen or any of the other critics found, or F&P themselves in all the discussions they had on the issue 😉

Yes, apparently I did. It is probably because the others are 'old school' when it comes to error evaluation and don't actually evaluate it, they just wave their hands a lot, and then others accept it. Glad you appreciate it!

Quote from Wyttenbach

P is a partial pressure and thus very small the value in P'-P will (P' ambient pressure) will never even be close to 0. It's your understanding of Chemistry that is close to 0!

"The boiling point of a liquid varies according to the applied pressure; the normal boiling point is the temperature at which the vapour pressure is equal to the standard sea-level atmospheric pressure (760 mm [29.92 inches] of mercury). At sea level, water boils at 100° C (212° F)."

Boiling point | chemistry | Britannica.com

https://www.britannica.com/science/boiling-point

-------------------

From: http://www.wiredchemist.com/chemistry/data/vapor-pressure (Note that the last point is 758, not 658.)

It seems it's you W who needs remedial chemistry.

Quote from kirkshanahan

It seems it's you W who needs remedial chemistry.

You are completely right. If you do as Ascoli does - P&F didn't do it - then you end up in an undefined point. But for the regular calorimetry below 80C - where P&F did measure most of the time and did prove LENR this plays absolutely no role at all.

It gets even worse if you assume that the cathode is hotter than 100C what will give additional heat ( > 100C) to the bubbles what will reverse the equation.

That's why P&F only tried to give an estimate for the boil off timing ( at T > 80C) with a slight variation of the ambient pressure.

The crucial point in P&F's paper is the 4h HAD what happened without any water present.

Final conclusion: Only in Ascolis dreams the division by 0 explains something he would like to explain. May be you should explain him why, at the boiling point we need no (complex) equation at all, but simply the time it takes to empty the reactor...

@W

Perhaps you should reread this: F&P's experiments – 30 years after CF announcement

There, I show that F&P's method begins to be highly inaccurate by approx. 50C. That's why F&P said it can't be used 'near' boiling. Any discussion of using the F&P model near boiling is incorrect, because of what I outline above. Originally I missed that they admit this, but they actually do, they simply don't explain why. I do so above. In fact, all of their claims in the papers that have been discussed here so far are within the noise band, a clear sign of psuedoscience.

Likewise, in the HAD region I long ago pointed out the temperature profile of the one claimed to show HAD was no different from the one claimed to be the 'control' . Ascoli did this also way back at the start of the prior thread on this. If one is a HAD why not the other? The whole video-basedmethod is worthless, as Pons admitted in a later paper by claiming they still needed to develop better calorimetry.

F&P's results are all noise. Anyone who points to them as 'support' for their results being CF or LENR or LANR or CANR or... is hurting their credibility.

Dear all,

On bubblegate - as propagated here for many posts. I finally (needing some diversion from other things) decided to work this out. NB - bubblegate is not the same as foamgate though it has some tangential relationship, see below.

1. As is often the case on this forum, there is interesting empirical science at the heart of this, which is however not easy for people reading these posts to decode. (Well - it took me some time and effort - and if others find it easier they have not explained it here).

2. In the above equation bubblegate refers to accuracy of the 3rd line (the 1/F { } bracket). I realise everyone knows this, but context, and hence the whole equation, is helpful.

3. This is meant to represent the total heat power lost to the cell due to the evolved gasses. It contains terms from the specific heat content of the gases (which are supposed heated up by temperature DeltaTheta) , and the vaporisation enthalpy L of the D2).

4. Here the D2 and O2 rate of gas evolution is known (accurately predicted) from the electrolysis current. The D2O in the evolved gas stream is predicted assuming that all the emitted D2O is in thermal equilibrium with the D2 and O2 in the bubbles. In this case we can work out the D2O volume from the D2 and O2 volumes and the known equilibrium partial pressures.

For example: suppose the D2O partial pressure (in the bubbles) was 0.5 P where P is the total pressure. Then the D2 and O2 partial pressures would be P/3 and P/6 respectively (because the D2 volume is double the O2 volume for the same pressure). The coefficients of 0.5, 0.25 and 0.5 come from this. The factor P/(P*-P) represents the ratio between D2O and D2/O2 given thermal equilibrium. Thus as boiling point approaches there is more D2O and the ratio goes to infinity.

Note that P must be the D2O partial pressure and P* the total pressure (1 atmosphere approx given this open cell). At low temperatures P is low and so this factor is also low, however it is not insignificant: you would be foolish to ignore it without quantitative evaluation.

5. This is the key issue. The equation is exactly correct if you assume all the thermally-evolved D2O vapour is in thermal equilibrium with the electrolysis-evolved D2 and H2 in the bubbles. This assumption is true enough when the bubbles are created very slowly and there are no boiling bubbles (because there will be enough time for this equilibrium to establish). It will not true when bubbles are created quickly unless you suppose the D2O in the gasses have time to equilibrate with the surface of the cell. Nor when boiling bubbles (all D2O) exist. The system is not steady-state - the evolved gasses depart - so there is no reason to suppose thermal equilibrium happens and obviously it will increasingly be wrong as temperature approaches boiling.

So:

Ascolfi Term 5. Oystla et al are right that there is no Term 5. If F&P's assumption of thermal equilibrium with the surface is correct then Terms 1-4 are all that is needed. If the system is boiling then pretty clearly there is no thermal equilibrium and this way to calculate the D2O in the exhaust stream does not work. There is then no term 5 because the equation does not work, but you could see the additional (non-equilibrium) D2O vapour from boiling as notionally a Term 5 - just you could not from this method work out its magnitude. So, as is usually the case, there is some merit in both sides of the argument here, though the argument misses the key and important point. Interestingly, it is not clear whether this assumption (thermal equilibrium) overestimates or underestimates the enthalpy. At low temperatures and high currents D2 and O2 not in thermal equilibrium will be emitted at a fast rate and contain less D2O than expected here. At high temperatures the larger D2O emmission will mean there is more D2O than expected here.

What does this tells us? This equation cannot be used at higher temperatures, and indeed using it at lower temperatures is dubious because there is no proof of when thermal equilibrium is met and when it is not met. That factor depends both on electrolysis rate and temperature and maybe on other things like foam on surface (which can change the rate at which equilibrium is attained) and the physics of bubble formation (again it can do that, and also change the time D2 and O2 has to equilibrate in bubbles).

So any results resting on these equations are theoretically unsound. It is Ok to use them empirically if you can prove that either the D2O terms are insignificant, or the system is close to thermal equilibrium. However lots of things can change the system dynamics, and, and hence the contribution of these terms, including:

• D2 vs O2 (different physical characteristics, maybe not a big deal but cannot be ruled out)
• foam
• temperature
• rate of electrolysis

So to validate this equation empirically you have to control each of these variables. It will break down at temperatures much lower than boiling (but quantifying this would be difficult). Longchampt seems to have realised the problem at boiling, but assumed the equation remains correct at high non-boiling temperatures.

Kirk: I have not read your comment on F&P - I guess this problem (problematic assumption of thermal equilibrium in exhaust gasses) was what you identified?

I've said before that F&P's work is very poorly documented in their papers. This is another example where a key assumption is not properly explained, nor properly validated.

THH

Quote from oystla

haha, You mean the P/(P'-P) has the wrong form

But you still don't get the physics and chemistry here

Mv / (Mv+Md+Mo) = P / P*

You cannot choose what kind of Vapor you would like to include or not.

Learn a little of partial pressures, mixture of gases, mole fractions etc. lazy you

Display More

So: Oystla.

While I agree with the equation, you certainly can choose what the actual (rather than theoretically predicted) partial pressures are. The equation only applies in thermodynamic equilibrium and given that the gasses are flowing from the cell there is no guarantee or even likelihood that equilibrium vapour pressures have been achieved.

The actual D2O volume emitted could therefore be either lower or (in principle, though probably not in practice, and would lead to condensation in the exhaust stream) higher than what is predicted here.

The matter could be resolved by measuring the total volume of exhaust gasses (keeping them above 100C) and calculating the D2O from that rather than the unproven and (bound to be, in some cases) wrong P/(P*-P) assumption.

Quote from Ascoli65

As I've already told you, the kind of vapor represented by the term Mv in your equation was explained by F&P themselves in their seminal paper (1):

As you can see, the term Mv in your equation applies only to the vapor which saturates the D2 and O2 streams produced by electrolysis.

oh dear 🤓

Ascoli, read the sentence again and answer this: are you saying D2O vapor is NOT a gas ?

I mean Really 😂

Quote from Ascoli65

The crucial point of your crucial point is that F&P misrepresented the timing of the boil-off time (3). Consequently, there was no HAD, neither the 4 hours that you keep on dreaming about, nor the 3 hours actually claimed by F&P.

No they did not! the point of "dry cell" has been reached when the voltage hit the max voltage and no current did flow anymore... There have been 3 hours with no energy input but high heat... Nothing you can see/detect in a video with different timing.

Do you really think that they did not log the current in a separate stream? How else could they ever even think about trying to calculate something? Just by look at a video as you do ??

Quote from kirkshanahan

F&P's results are all noise. Anyone who points to them as 'support' for their results being CF or LENR or LANR or CANR or... is hurting their credibility

Quote from kirkshanahan

I do seem to have the penchant for teaching , even though I ' m not in academics.

Lordy.. Kirkshanahan's efforts at 'teaching' have fallen on deaf ears for two decades

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/g…hi-FOIA-00929-00952-W.pdf

"

07/18/2002 08: 14 AM

Hi Dieter ,(Britz) DOE

I have been totalling up my time recently , and I find I am spending too much time for too little return.

I do seem to have the penchant for teaching , even though I ' m not in academics.

And , in my current job assignment , I am the only chemist in a group of 15 metallographers .

I used to have a ~chemist as a supervisor , but even that left me starved for conversation (re . chemistry).

I do like chemistry, and 1 feel somewhat isolated where 1 am now .

The Internet was one way of maintaining professional level contacts . Also, I realize that I have ' the addiction ',

I seem to have withdrawal symptoms if I don’ t get my ' CF fix ' routinely.

But intellect shall prevail ! I think 1 've learned just about as much as I can or want from the ' field', such as it is.

I am getting less and less out of it , and in turn , I seem to be 'helping ' no one .

The ones who need the help the most ignore me because they are emotionally committed to their suppositions .

For them , it has become a matter of faith . I know about faith , as you know , but in my dealings in the CF area

I have always tried to use standard science and logic .

But , I need to quit . I have a couple of items to wrap up though .

For example , and this is where I need your professional advice.

In my most recent post in the ' F&P HAD ' thread , I talk about Szpak 's T claims ,

and attack it from the computational side .

However , it has occurred to me that I may be being too harsh , in that the concentration of the reactive species (water ) will not actually be changing that much

, even though the electrolyte concs change by 100- 200%. I 'd need to look up the detailed model Szpak references ,

or I can ask you I bet .

Was I too quick to reject the steady state condition? Or will the electrolyte concentration changes grossly affect things?

There are other things I don 't like about the study as well , that I didn ' t get into yet , so I probably could put out a couple more long posts.

I guess in the end I have to ask what good it does to comment on spf .

No one who matters (actual researchers , funding orgs.) is watching. (Just the historian !)

I ‘ve begun a 1^st draft of a paper that responds to Ed Storms ' claim that my TA paper is 'only' applicable to his Pt work.

Dieter , in fact I can go back through all the CF calorimetry literature and see evidences of the same problem,

including F&P ' s work . There is the wrinkle in their work about ' bursts ', but if you postulate a messed up calibration and

just look at delta- T, you find the same delta- Ts there as in Storms ' (and probably McKubre ' s) work, so I can make a case

that they just don ' t measure recombination properly.

However ,that paper keeps getting bigger and bigger, and again I don ' t know what value it has in the end.

What I was contemplating doing was just do a so-so job on it, and then putting it out as a

government report , and not actually getting it published , just publically released .

I am going to try to stop responding to the ' groupies ' like Salsman and the like. The one guy that bugs me right now is Staker .

He 's made some claims that I would like to evaluate , but his behavior seems a clear flag that I should expect zip from him,

so I guess I just drop that too.

In the end, the thing that keeps me coming back is that the likes of McKubre keep getting funding to do sloppy science .

I really wanted to impact the funding orgs by pointing out minimum acceptable quality levels , but again ,

I don ' t know who ' s listening . In any case , we need to stay in touch , even if it ' s not about CF, and I will definitely try to do so .

Kirk

Quote from Ascoli65

Their video shows a different timing. And the voltage continued to stay above zero even after the apparent peak (1). It means that the current was still flowing.

This is basic electronics. The voltage must reach maximum if the resistance goes to infinite. There is only virtually a current flowing...

Quote from kirkshanahan

a clear sign of psuedoscience

Perhaps Kirkshanahan means pseudoscience

Like his fake CCS/ CCF paper which uses arbitrary constants /assumptions

to change decent Storms data into Kirkshanahan BS

How did he get this hit piece past the peer review?

opaque, ungeneralizable, zero sensitivity analysis

zero verification, zero backup references

Clue.. the impact factor at that time was 0.8

Imagine...

Uncle Sam paid for this junk

https://sti.srs.gov/fulltext/ms2000788/ms2000788.html

Quote from THHuxleynew

Kirk: I have not read your comment on F&P - I guess this problem (problematic assumption of thermal equilibrium in exhaust gasses) was what you identified?

No, but you are correct that thermal equilibrium may not be obtained and that the equations' bases assume equilibrium. However, calibration doesn't require equilibrium it just requires steady state, and steady state doesn't imply equilibrium is attained either. What I have been discussing in this thread is the mathematical impact of a) the Pfactor term [ P/(P*-P) ] combined with b) the dropping of the gamma term. Those combine to make all of F&P's claims in this series of papers lie in the noise. Once that is established the rest of the arguments being made are somewhat unimportant to the final decision on the overall validity of whether F&P found 'excess heat' or not. (And just for the record, this is a separate issue from CCS/ATER (or maybe ATEC), although CCS/ATER can still apply if warranted.)