Mizuno reports increased excess heat

In the upcoming ICCF22 conference, Tadahiko Mizuno will report increased excess heat with nickel mesh coated with palladium. The results are dramatic, so we decided to upload a preprint of his paper. To understand the calorimetry, you have to read his ICCF21 paper. Unfortunately, the ICCF21 Proceedings have not yet been published. So I decided to upload preprints of both papers:

ICCF21: Mizuno, T. and J. Rothwell, Excess Heat from Palladium Deposited on Nickel (preprint). J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci., 2019. 29

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

ICCF22: Mizuno, T. and J. Rothwell. Increased Excess Heat from Palladium Deposited on Nickel (Preprint). in The 22nd International Conference for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science ICCF-22. 2019. Assisi, Italy

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

Here is the abstract for the latest paper:

Abstract

We have developed an improved method of producing excess heat with nickel mesh coated with palladium. The new method produces higher power, a larger output to input ratio, and it can be controlled effectively. With 50 W of input, it produces ~250 W of excess heat, and with 300 W it produces ~2 to 3 kW. This paper is a comprehensive description of the apparatus, the reactant, and the method. We hope this paper will allow others to replicate the experiment.

Update 2019.09.22

MizunoTincreasedea.pdf

Update 2019.09.23 video from ICCF22

Quote from clarifier

... wow. I hope, this will be able to keep Rossi silent once and for all.

I have more ambitious hopes. I am hoping this is replicated by thousands of researchers worldwide. As we said in the conclusion, this is a remarkably simple experiment. The paper describes the materials and methods in as much detail as Mizuno himself knows. I spent weeks grilling him to think of every detail. As you see, we even listed the detergent he uses, and the ingredients listed on their website. We do not know if the choice of detergent has any impact on the results, but just in case it does, we tell the reader the ingredients.

Quote from gdaigle

Jed, are you going to try getting it published in Nature, just to test to see if Google broken down their acceptance barrier a bit?

That's hilarious! Oh, me, I laughed so hard I had to catch my breath. No, I don't think we will try that.

Nature! What a hoot!

Quote from stefan

This indicates that my investment by giving Mizuno some small fund after the earthquake, is the best investment of my life

(yes I value open science high ).

Yeah, without that he would have been forced to quit, as he wrote in the Acknowledgements. Unfortunately, that was not enough money to fix all of the equipment. He couldn't fix the SEM. This research, and this report, would have been better with some SEM examinations of the Ni surface before and after Pd application. We are thinking of sending out some samples to have SEM photos taken elsewhere.

Fortunately, the Ni meshes are cheap. I have a copy of the invoice from Inada Kanaami, Inc. A 5-pack of meshes costs $72.

Quote from Max Nozin

What is the source of palladium?

Ah, ha. I had that on my list of questions but we never got around to it. I will find out and update the paper. I intend to add some details before the conference from the work now underway. I mentioned this: "We hope we can test the reactor in a larger calorimeter before the ICCF22 conference, and include these results in the final version of this paper." I think that's the biggest priority. It may be very difficult because of practical concerns.

We're gonna need a bigger calorimeter.

-- say that as a cross between Jaws and Scotty in Star Trek. "She's gonna blow, Captain!" She -- the R20 -- did exceed the capacity of the calorimeter to keep the cell cool. Since heat controls the reaction, you want a way to reliably cool the cell. Mizuno said he does not want to do high powered tests in his lab, which is a firetrap falling to pieces.

Quote from Cydonia

Also, it should be nice to know temperature gradient between mesh central part to external layers, because probable phonons involvement.

The temperature gradient would be interesting to know. That has occurred to us. I don't know about phonons, but I suspect the improved performance has to do with temperature gradients. Putting the heat source in the center of the reactor did wonders improving things. Also, as I said in the paper, one thing to avoid is a calorimeter that reduces the temperature of the reactor wall too much. I think an air-flow or possibly a Seebeck calorimeter is called for. You have to let the cell heat up. Martin Fleischmann emphasized that in the Pd-D experiments. People did not listen to him, which upset him.

Quote from Cydonia

To create a temperature gap, you need a SS wall colder than heater area.

You suggested i understood to keep SS wall not too cold as said Martin Fleischmann.

Yes, colder, but not too cold. Too cold will clobber the reaction.

Moving the heater to the center of the cell made a much larger temperature gradient, and it also lowered the amount of input power needed, which improves the "COP" (the output/input ratio).

Note that the meshes are right up against the inside of the reactor vessel steel wall.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The R20 results headlined are not presented properly in the paper. There is a reference to 250W excess heat output in the calorimeter but no other data.

See pages 5 - 7 and Figs. 5, 6 and 7. It is something of a mystery to me why you would accept results in a table from one reactor, but reject graphs from another reactor, when they were both tested in the same calorimeter. How could it be the calorimeter can measure a 45% excess heat reaction but not a 500% reaction? The latter is easier to measure with confidence, not harder. Do you seriously think at 10 deg C temperature difference might be an instrument artifact?

My guess is that you are grasping at straws trying to come up with reasons to reject the results. That's what you always do.

Quote from THHuxleynew

For this calorimeter:

Raw data from which the results are derived: temp in, out, air speed, air cross-section, air speed profile, exact geometry over which these are measured . . .

See the ICCF21 paper:

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

Quote from THHuxleynew

PS - it would be really helpful for everyone involved with LENR to understand the level of care in write-up required for any Journal paper - let alone an experimental paper describing results that are extraordinary.

The ICCF21 paper went through months of peer-review which was better than Nature provides. I have seen comments by Nature reviewers and editors. They are . . . unimpressive.

Note also that I had corporate training at a major U.S. company and decades of experience writing technical manuals, which is as demanding as writing journal papers. So I know a thing or two about presenting information. This paper reads more like an instruction manual than a scientific journal paper. That was deliberate.

Not to blow my own horn, but I think this paper was more informative and it has more scientific information than the recent Google research paper in Nature. I think I know how to do this better than Nature's editors. Granted, that isn't saying much.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The previous results were too low to be clear, given the various experimental uncertainties.

Yes, that is what I said here:

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

For once we agree.

However, if Mizuno had not relentlessly pursued these unclear, low power results, he would never have learned how to make them larger. Small signals are often clues to large discoveries. They should not be ignored or dismissed. It is a good thing he reported the previous results. For one thing, it led to months of exchanges with the reviewer, which helped tighten up the presentation, and helped fill in many questions. It did not actually improve the calorimetry, but it improved the way we explained it.

Now that our first resident pathological skeptic (PS) has chimed in, let me post this set of responses I prepared for them. I want to save Seven_of_twenty and other skeptics the time and effort of responding. Here are their objections and my responses. For once I take their side in the debate.

Pathological Skeptic: I have not read the paper but I am sure it is wrong.

Me: Please don't read it.

PS: The results are not real because they have not been replicated.

Me: Actually, they have been replicated. However, anyone who replicates a cold fusion experiment is incompetent by definition, and the results are always wrong. When 180 labs replicated Fleischmann and Pons that only proved they were all wrong. 18,000 could replicate but it would mean nothing. Replications simply don't matter. They don't count! This is the Ballinger rule:

"It would not matter to me if a thousand other investigations were to subsequently perform experiments that see excess heat. These results may all be correct, but it would be an insult to these investigators to connect them with Pons and Fleischmann.

"Putting the 'Cold Fusion' issue on the same page with Wien, Rayleigh-Jeans, Davison-Germer, Einstein, and Planck is analogous to comparing a Dick Tracy comic book story with the Bible."

- Professor Ronald G. Ballinger, MIT Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering, [In The Gordon Institute News, March/April 1991]

PS: The power is too low.

Me: Yes, 3 kW is not enough. The goal-posts has now been automatically moved to 10 kW, and if that is achieved, they will move to 50 kW.

PS: The COP is not high enough.

Me: Indeed, 10 times input does not count. Again, the automatic goalpost moving mechanism tells us the COP must now be at least 100.

PS: I have a crackpot theory that large drops of water become invisible and move against gravity and that proves the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. So, you are wrong.

Me: Well okay then!

Moving right along --

PS: The calorimeter is not reliable.

Me: Right. The calibration shows that over 24 hours when average input was 50.6 W, the calorimeter only captured 46.6 W, or 50.5 W after taking into account heat losses from the calorimeter walls. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

PS: The reactor has to be used as a room heater before I will believe it.

Me: Ah, I see you haven't read the paper. Good. It was used as a room heater. But that doesn't count because it was not purchased at Walmart.

PS: You will have to pay a world-class laboratory $1 million to test this before I will believe it.

Me: Alas, we do not have $1 million and no laboratory would touch the machine even if we had the money. Because we live on planet Earth. This is difficult for you to understand because you live in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and you have unlimited supplies of leprechaun gold, and any laboratory in your world will do whatever you ask.