Mizuno reports increased excess heat

Quote from seven_of_twenty

300W in, 3kW out and no rush to verify. That has to be the single weirdest pronouncement I have read on this forum ever.

Well, it takes months. No one should "rush" to do an experiment. That does not end well. If you happen to have an appropriate calorimeter (large; air flow or Seebeck), that would save time, but you still should not rush. A couple of people have done preliminary tests with no positive results. One of them is redesigning the reactor based on these initial tests. I expect anyone who succeeds will first go through several redesigns and a lot of hands-on learning. That takes time. As in: years. I hope it does not take as many years as it took Mizuno, and 20 redesigned versions of the reactor. But that's the kind of thing you have to expect when doing fundamental research.

If people are already doing other experiments, I would not urge them to drop everything and do this instead. There are already several people trying to replicate this. We have our hands full with them. Mizuno is making some screens and sending them out, but it is taking him weeks or months, and all 30 of them are committed. We will not be able to send out any more. Plus I am not willing to fork out another $4,000, and I don't see you or anyone else lining up to pay for this.

The other thing is, I do not want unenthusiastic or lukewarm people trying to do this. They will fail. So I would not urge anyone to do it. If you have doubts about the results, or you think it may not be worth the effort, please don't do it. Also, if you are unskilled or you do not have the proper instruments, or you think you should substitute a single point measurement of the reactor temperature for a calorimeter, please don't do it. A half-baked experiment is worse than none.

If the prepared screens do not work, we are exploring the possibility of sending a used mesh to someone who has a world-class collection of equipment to analyze the materials. Used meshes are a precious, limited resource. We cannot supply more than one or two people with them, so they have to be people proven skilled in the art with tons of equipment. We are not going to rush to do anything like that.

It would be easier to supply used meshes for analysis to many people if we could identify the active locations in a set of three meshes. But we cannot. So I guess we have send all three to one person. Suppose we could snip out a 1 cm square chunk, knowing it was active. That would be great! We could supply a bunch more. Maybe after the first set of analyses, someone will be able to tell us what part of the mesh was active.

Quote from Alan Smith

If somebody has the time it would be very useful (to me) to work out how much D2 Mizuno's 3kW reactor would transmute - I have done this calculation 'back of the envelope' style and cannot see how there's room for enough D2 at the known reactor volume and stated final gas pressure.

In Table 1 showing the 111 day test, you will see that he kept pumping out the D2 and adding new D2. It is a little unclear but that's what it shows.

Quote from Alan Smith

50 mg of Pd cannot hold a lot of gas - maybe a few mg, as as far as 'free' gas goes at a few pascals there isn't much in the reactor.

There is no way the Pd held enough gas. Most of the absorbed gas went into the Ni, or it went into cracks and open spaces between the two metals. In the upcoming presentation I discuss this:

The excess heat does not appear to correlate with loading. At higher loading is actually anti-correlated. This is the opposite of all previous cold fusion experiments. I was astounded by this. Mizuno was sanguine. He thinks he can explain it. He thinks that high loading reduces the effect because it impedes adsorption in the interface between the two metals. It reduces flux. He said that when you are loading a palladium or nickel lattice, you want high loading, but not in this case, “presumably because the adsorption at the internal interface or the Pd-Ni mixed layer is the simplest Langmuir type. . . . If the deuterium concentration in the interior is high, the reaction at the interface or in the two-mixed metal layer will drop due to a slight inhibition of the adsorptive power.”

He measures loading by keeping an inventory of the gas added to the reactor, and measuring the gas pressure. I do not think this measures loading in the normal sense of the word used in this field. That usually means gas going into solution with the metal; deuterons occupying the lattice. I think Mizuno’s techniques also measures gas fitting into spaces between the palladium and nickel, and gas filling the cracks and crannies in the nickel.

If I am right, this fits in well with Ed Storms’ theory that the effect occurs in nano cracks. Ed agrees. He was also not surprised this works at low loading. He pointed out that when Pd is bonded to Ni, and they both absorb hydrogen, the Pd expands more. Since they are bonded, this opens cracks in the Ni. he wrote a paper describing how his theory may explain this experiment, and some tests he himself recently that might apply to these results. And he has a paper:

"Relationship between the burnishing process used by Mizuno and the Storms theory of NAE formation" . . .

I don't know if I will have time to say all that blather, but anyway, that's what I wrote. For that matter, I don't know if I will be given a presentation slot. But the blather will end up as captions to PowerPoint slides, which I will upload eventually.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

I keep seeing contradictory claims. Supposedly, Mizuno handed out 12 reactors, some of which had been tested by him.

I only know about 3 of them. One worked, the other two are still sitting there, untested. Regarding the other 8, I have no idea who they went to, or when, or what happened.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Those shouldn't need redesign and all the learning that goes with that.

The most qualified person I know doing a replication is now redesigning it, and he is learning a lot. Whether it works or not, he will publish, but I am sure that will be months or years from now.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

I would expect some people to have various types of suitable calorimeters at hand.

I wouldn't! In 1989, the only person who had a suitable calorimeter for this particular experiment would have been Richard Oriani. His calorimeter was designed to measure metabolic heat from a baby.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Yikes man! Copying an admittedly difficult but perfectly detailed protocol from Mizuno isn't research!

It is far from perfect. If it were perfect, the two preliminary attempts by people skilled in the art that I know of would have worked. They did not work, and I did not expect they would. Neither did Mizuno or the people doing them. That's not how fundamental research goes.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

What a way to look at it!

That is how any experimental scientist looks at it. You should grant that I know lots and lots of experimental scientists, and I know what they say, and think. This is not an engineering project.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Nor should it take 6 months to know if this bullsh*t or Shinola.

It is likely to take 6 months to never. If you do not understand why, you have no clue what this involves, and no idea what experimental research entails. Why do you think it took Mizuno years to get it to work, and about 3 years to get back to the high power levels he first measured in 2016, after years of seeing nothing? This is what he had before, and what he is now seeing again:

That was with glow discharge, and it took anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to make the gadgets say "boo." Which they usually did not do. That's a difficult experiment! That's right up there with the bulk Pd-D Fleischmann Pons experiment, which F&P themselves did for years without results back in the 1980s. If you think this experiment is difficult, look at the older ones. This is more promising. We hope.

If anything that Mizuno or I said makes you think this is easy, we take it back. We never meant to give that impression. It is relatively easy compared to most other cold fusion experiments, but on an absolute scale it is difficult. It is difficult because no one understands cold fusion. There is no theory to guide the work. It is, as you put it, an enigma. Also, it is being done by elderly, superannuated professors using broken equipment dating back to the 1980s, or 1950s analog equipment in some cases. (Mizuno describes himself as an analog person in a digital world.) With no climate control. And with $4,000 in funding from me, which is a lot of money by our standards. It is a miracle they manage to get anything done. Research is a young person's game, like programming. When you are in your 70s, you cannot do as much work as a 20-year-old hotshot.

Your notion of easy and difficult reminds me of what Martin Fleischmann said in 1989. He called this a "relatively simple" method. Or "relatively easy." (I don't recall exactly what he said.) I wish he had not said that, but anyway, he meant compared to building a Tokamak plasma fusion reactor.

People often complain to me that little progress has been made in cold fusion. My stock answer: If you knew how difficult it is, you would be amazed at how much progress has been made.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

. . . the anemometer traverse technique used by Mizuno can be improved, perhaps with a significant increase in calorimeter resolution.

The recommended technique is known as the Log-T or equal area technique. This means that the anemometer test locations collected across the diameter of a cylinder are taken not at equal intervals (ie: 1 cm apart,) but at distances representative of equal volumes of air described by different radii.

That's an interesting paper. I love the Pitot static tube in Fig. 4! A first principle instrument, of the kind dear to my heart.

The points chosen in the round duct in Fig. 7 are not equidistant apart (as you say), but they are close to equidistant. It seems the equal area technique is not much different from Mizuno's in actual practice. Also I doubt you will get the points to overlap and line up much better than Mizuno's Fig. 4. I don't see much room for improvement in that.

Figure 11 shows a square duct with an array of sensors equidistant apart. That is a much larger duct than Mizuno's but anyway, it does not seem to be the Log-T or equal area technique.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Are you guys serious about making LENR happen?

We are. Some of the people who purchased reactors may not be.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Do you need some sort of administrator type person to help you out? This is completely unacceptable. You have working reactors and they sit on a shelf?

We don't! The people who purchased them do. Two of them that I know of, anyway. I have no idea what happened to the others.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

This is competence and diligence?

Nothing to do with us. Anyway, one of those people is incapacitated. Unable to do anything. That happens to people, with things like strokes and death, for example. I have no idea what has delayed the other fellow. I have not heard from him in months. I have no authority to tell him what to do. It does irk me that we went to all this trouble to supply him with equipment, but I can't do anything about it. (He might finally be at work for all I know.)

Quote from seven_of_twenty

[The most qualified person I know doing a replication is now redesigning it, and he is learning a lot. Whether it works or not, he will publish, but I am sure that will be months or years from now.]

Completely, totally and without a doubt idiotic and moronic. Also it's a hallmark of fraud science and junk science.

If you think that redesigning reactors and starting over is a sign of fraud and junk science, you know nothing about experimental science.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

I am starting to believe the whole story less and less.

Good! I hope you ignore it, and I hope you stop making ignorant comments.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

Here are some error estimates for various techniques and number of measurement points.

https://www.epj-conferences.or…epjconf_icm2014_00010.pdf

I see your point here, but you gotta admit, the ASHRAE diagram measuring points are pretty close to equidistant apart. Very similar to Mizuno's measuring points. Given the precision of his anemometer, I doubt the results would be significantly different. Also, as you noted, it is a little difficult to position the anemometer probe exactly to the nearest millimeter. I do not know how Mizuno does it. He is careful.