Google redux 1: plasma replication

Some individuals of LENR forum made already attempts (at least theoretically) to summarize plasma related LENR effects; i.e. please refer to following post.

And there is also willingness for cooperation i.e. in 3D CAD modelling of a respective device and manufacturing of mechanical components.

Macro-Scale “Exotic Vacuum Object” Self-Oscillating within a High Q Factor Circuit Producing Nuclear Reactions with an Optimized Fuel Mixture

main document to be downloaded here:

https://e-catworld.com/wp-cont…2019/01/macroEVOfinal.pdf

Quote from THHuxleynew

Their best effort may be good or bad: that is a matter for discussion.

From what I have learned so far, I am not impressed. I do not want to rush to judgement but there are some disquieting indications. Apparently they did not confer with some of the leading experts. Their paper does not describe their methods or results with Pd-D but apparently it did not load high enough. They should have said that. Apparently, they tried to replicate Rossi without knowing what his powder is made of. No one knows what it is made of, but people have speculated it is nickel powder plus LiAlH4. The only other researcher who tried that material reported that it did not work. See:

Berlinguette cited wrong paper, and apparently tried to do Rossi experiment

Quote from THHuxleynew

They are what LENR has asked for: a well funded group looking at LENR work trying to get enough evidence to drag it into the scientific mainstream.

There have been many well-funded groups. In most cases, their work has been a fiasco and setback, because they had no idea what they are doing and they did not consult with experts. In some cases, they did not even include an electrochemist in their group. I described an example on p. 10 and 11 here:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf

McKubre described this experiment as "a profligate squandering of resource and opportunity." Based on my discussions with many electrochemists, I described it as trying to tune a piano with a sledgehammer. The NEDO project in the 1990s was another prominent fiasco. We do not need any more well-funded groups like this.

Fortunately, the lead author in the Google group is an electrochemist. There are not enough technical details in the paper so I cannot tell whether he did what is recommended, but at least he knows how to do it. This project may have been a well-funded fiasco. I cannot judge from the paper.

Quote from THHuxleynew

This thread is for discussion of one of these areas: high fusion rate induced by (relatively low energy) plasma. Specifically, google looked at d-d fusion induced by bombarding a metallic target with d+ ions at low low voltages (1keV).

Berlinguette et al. cite Ref 41:

Claytor, T. N., Jackson, D. D. & Tuggle, D. G. Tritium Production from a Low Voltage Deuterium Discharge on Palladium and Other Metals. https://doi.org/10.2172/102234 (LANL, 1995). I think this is the same as:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ClaytorTNtritiumpro.pdf

There are many other papers by Claytor at LENR-CANR.org. Do a search here:

https://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=1081

You can see if Berlinguette did a good job replicating the paper they cite. I haven't done that yet. (They may not have intended to replicate Claytor, but anyway, they cited him.)

Quote from THHuxleynew

high fusion rate induced by (relatively low energy) plasma

Quote from THHuxleynew

Kasagi 2002

"The excitation functions of the yield of protons emitted in the D(d,p)T reaction in Ti, Fe, Pd, PdO and Au were measured for bombarding energies .2.5 -10 keV

The most strongly enhanced DD reaction occurs in PdO. At E _d =2.5 keV,

it is enhanced by factor of fifty from the bare deuteron rate and the screening energy deduced from the excitation function amounts to 600 eV.
An enhancement of this size can't be explained by electron screening .. suggests the existence of an additional /important mechanism of the screening in solids.

Kasagi 's 600eV 'screening' forPdO is in the same ballpark as Schenkel's 1000eV result for PdH2.

and so is the bombarding energy 2.5 -10 keV .(2500 -10000eV)

Perhaps Schenkel can get down to 0.5 keV or 500 eV bombarding this year.

The bombarding energies for most screening experiments have been far above low energy.. as compared to current LENR reactors.

For example Brillouin uses 150V, not sure about the Takahashi group reactors but I

suspect the voltage input for thermalheating is much less than 50V.

16 years later, Kasagi seems to be no longer pursing this line of high energy bombarding work.

Kasagi advises looking at the gamma output in the <50 kev range,, this is part of the current focus in the Essex laboratory .

which reportedly uses only thermal heat at 620 ~1000K,

which is really low in particle energy terms( 0.06 -0.08 eV equivalent)

Quote from THHuxleynew

A starting point would be whether they cite the correct material...

...I'm expecting that "correct practice to get D-Pd working" is now well enough understood and written down. In which case I'd expect such to be referenced by the google guys.

Two references found in 5 minutes by googling “reproducible LENR experiment”:

1. Highly reproducible LENR experiments using dual laser stimulation (559) | February 2015, 108 (04) DjVu | PDF. Letts, Dennis

2. DTRA: INVESTIGATION OF NANO-NUCLEAR REACTIONS IN CONDENSED MATTER FINAL REPORT. June 2016

...“The Pd/D co-deposition process has been shown to provide a reproducible means of manufacturing Pd-D nano-alloys that induce low energy nuclear reactions (LENRs)”

Quote from THHuxleynew

A starting point would be whether they cite the correct material: after all this time, and so many attempted replications, it should surely be the case that what knowledge there is of what works, what does not, can be written. Indeed I thought that Storms had more or less done that.

Yes, he did, and so did Cravens. They described how to identify what material works, not how to make it. Violante described how to make it, and he made samples that worked well. Imam at the NRL made Pd-B samples that worked well. Johnson-Matthey made the best ones. See p. 6:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf

I do not know whether Berlinguette et al. used the procedures described by Storms and Cravens, or whether they asked Violante for material. The paper says nothing about Pd-D experiments except that the material did not load high enough to produce heat. (It doesn't say that. It lists some loading levels which are not high enough. I suppose they are the highest achieved.)

Quote from THHuxleynew

I'm expecting that "correct practice to get D-Pd working" is now well enough understood and written down. In which case I'd expect such to be referenced by the google guys.

It is well understood and written down, but the Google guys did not reference the papers or mention any of the procedures. They talked to some of the experts who wrote these papers, but not others. As I said, I have no idea whether they asked for samples of the best known materials, or whether they did the procedures to test, identify and prepare the best materials.

The methods of loading palladium were understood by electrochemists long before Fleischmann and Pons announced cold fusion. That is why many electrochemists were able to replicate, while others were not. Mizuno, for example, was in the Nuclear Engineering Department doing studies of hydrogen embrittlement in nuclear fission reactor walls, which called for electrochemically loading metal with hydrogen faster than it normally loads, to speed up the clock. He just happened to have the right skills to do this experiment. Berlinguette is an electrochemist so I suppose he knows these methods.