Have you thought about using a quartz-glass sheathed element like one of these? They are cheap enough, and available everywhere., although this would require a triac and a diode network to give you around 100V DC to produce 200W..
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3pc…1e9df8:g:0uMAAOSwvGZcWjUQ
Apologies btw for all the EBay links, it's just that they often provide the info and a picture in one convenient package.
I haven't thought of using a halogen lamp but besides the electrical complications you listed I believe it could pose significant explosion risks in addition to the limited ones of the steel tube setup.
What if for example water droplets reached the hot quartz tube, or if the tube got stained in some unchecked spot with dirt, grease, alkaline compounds, etc? I would need to be extra careful and the setup in general is already kind of "dirty" in many ways.
EDIT: anyway, if they require about 100V DC, in a pinch wouldn't a typical SCR dimmer be sufficient?
EDIT: anyway, if they require about 100V DC, in a pinch wouldn't a typical SCR dimmer be sufficient?
A dimmer normally outputs AC of course, if you don't mind AC power then that's fine, I just thought you wanted a DC heater. But you can put a bridge rectifier onto the output of a dimmer switch AFAIK. of you want DC. And if you are concerned about explosion risk then buy a slightly larger metal tube and put it inside that - If your metal tube is sealed in then you can make the heater removable very easily.
Since silicon controlled rectifiers (SCR, or thyristors) output only half the input AC wave, I assumed that cheap dimmers basically produced a sort of dirty, pulsed DC at 50/60 Hz. However I haven't personally checked in practice.
As for whether the power type and voltage of the heater matters, that depends on the setup. If it's going to use the same power source of that used to pass a current directly through the catalyst, then it should be DC at low voltage (5–24V, but probably better if on the lower end of this range). If the heater uses a separate power source, it could be full-wave AC as far as I am concerned, although it will be more dangerous to handle. (EDIT: also see note on the bottom)
I haven't yet thought in detail of how a setup employing a halogen lamp as a heater could be made in practice. The terminals would need to be kept away from the hot area, dirt, moisture, etc.
As I finished writing this comment I thought of a possible arrangement based on the previously discussed ideas using more or less plausible measurements. Although the outer surface can typically get quite hot, I don't know at all whether halogen lamps intended for space heating would be able to hold and maintain the surface temperatures required by the catalyst (600 °C operating, 800–900 °C peak). It's also possible that the terminals could get too hot and fail.
As in the previous case, this would be a sort of "finished" design that would likely not be suitable for ease of disassembly, quick tests and so on. Probably one of the caps would have to be omitted to allow inspecting the catalyst, installing/compressing it, etc., and a vertical orientation be more convenient in some ways. I feel this is getting more complex than originally planned, anyhow.
EDIT: as an additional note regarding:
I just thought you wanted a DC heater
If you're referring to the suggestion I made (relayed from others) in different thread(s) that the magnetic field produced by an AC heater could be somehow harmful to any anomalous reaction, the basic idea is that in this setup the "off" periods of the low-frequency intermittent heating from PID temperature control would not make this a significant issue. This could be different with constant/continuous heating.
Hi Can.
The quartz envelope of the tubes is good up to around 1650C, and looking at the colour they normally run at around half that when operated at full voltage on free air. In your set-up they could easily achieve that (I suspect) running on half power. The contacts at each end are ceramic-sealed metal pins - they can take a bit of heat too, but I would be tempted to leave them exposed for cooling purposes.
I knew that quartz glass can withstand pretty high temperatures but I wasn't aware that ordinary halogen tube lamps are also able to. What about the maximum allowed temperature gradient along their length and temperature changes per unit of time? If they have exceptional qualities also with these properties they would be excellent heaters for many LENR experiments and make me wonder why they haven't been used more often.
Besides these unknowns, although potentially these halogen lamps could simplify the setup compared to other solutions, the one as shown above would still require precisely machining insulating spacers and modifying them if required, plus possibly welding for the caps. This would be ordinary stuff for a small workshop, but it can be an issue if only hand tools are locally available.
For the first attempts to test the concept and verifying how the catalyst precursor materials respond to temperature changes (for example, from past tests with very small amounts of material it appears that the K-Fe oxide compound might expand in volume considerably upon formation even over hematite, which could be a problem), a rougher and more compact setup would be desired. That would be the "quick-and-dirty" setup with a heating wire (with insulating spacers that I was about to get) that I mentioned earlier, which would not have at this stage the full capabilities/characteristics of the arrangements discussed in the past few comments.
See if you can fins 'size 1 beads' - they are a little smaller, and take wire up to 1mm in diameter - they will save you some room in the tube for sure.
can I guess you know the reports on hho gas dry cell combined with sand heaters. The sand grains are alegdly coated with a metal catalyst (platinum). Unusal heat production is reported from such a System. This sounds somehow similar what you propose. Except of course the current thru the catalyst and initial heat.
Would a AC electrolysis or hho dry cell be a good idea to produce the gas needed on demand? What's about safety in such a Setup?
can I guess you know the reports on hho gas dry cell combined with sand heaters. The sand grains are alegdly coated with a metal catalyst (platinum). Unusal heat production is reported from such a System. This sounds somehow similar what you propose. Except of course the current thru the catalyst and initial heat.
Would a AC electrolysis or hho dry cell be a good idea to produce the gas needed on demand? What's about safety in such a Setup?
There are ceramic “sponges” coated with catalyst metals too, for the same purpose, but to my best knowledge excess heat on this kind of systems has never been proved with a methodologically exhaustive approach. It is however often hinted that the process is “very efficient” which is a way of putting an excess heat claim in a non instantly dismissible languaje.
See if you can fins 'size 1 beads' - they are a little smaller, and take wire up to 1mm in diameter - they will save you some room in the tube for sure.
More than saving room I'm concerned about heat transfer and not having to needlessly spend money when cheaper solutions would work as well. I haven't managed yet to find sources for smaller beads on Ebay and I only found a local non-Ebay vendor which sells barely smaller ones but at a significantly higher price per unit and minimum ordering price.
The plan (which could work or not, but probably will not be so simple) is installing them loosely along the length of the heating wire. This should reduce the amount of beads needed per turn and could increase heat transfer by radiation to the tube. 1 or 2 turns of 1/2" ceramic fiber insulating mat would be installed around the entire assembly.
Here are 4mm beads around a 25mm OD tube:
A similar but open access paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcc.8b11421
The paper from Lalik et al seems more straightforward, though. Although his group only mentions thermal oscillations exceeding the heat of water formation here, his late mentor A.J. Groszek thought he was observing excess heat in similar experiments. Related document which was posted in the forum a few years ago: https://www.lenr-forum.com/att…1-lfh-patent-notes-1-pdf/
can I guess you know the reports on hho gas dry cell combined with sand heaters. The sand grains are alegdly coated with a metal catalyst (platinum). Unusal heat production is reported from such a System. This sounds somehow similar what you propose. Except of course the current thru the catalyst and initial heat.
No, I haven't read reports of HHO systems employing precious metal-coated sand grains before. However in theory the same transitions for hydrogen atoms should expected also from metallic catalysts like Pt, (I would guess preferably supported on carbon or a metal oxide like SiO2 in this case), as Holmlid also acknowledges:
https://iopscience.iop.org/art…02-4896/ab1276#psab1276s4
Quote[...] The catalysts which are best suited for RM and ultra-dense hydrogen formation are so called hydrogen transfer catalysts, which dissociate the H2 molecules to separate H atoms on the surface, as also metals like Pt and Ir do.
As a side note, in the initial tests instead of using pure Fe2O3 (and K2CO3) and possibly another oxide like CeO2, I planned using iron oxide pigment as it generally contains a few % weight of impurities in the form of common oxides like SiO2 (mainly), Al2O3, and alkaline earth oxides like CaO or MgO. The reasoning is the resulting material would be closer to the composition of real-world catalysts and possibly work more like them. On the other hand these impurities will not be very controllable and other characteristics like ionic conductivity might end up being unpredictable. However in the initial "quick and dirty" setup I don't think I will be testing that.
QuoteWould a AC electrolysis or hho dry cell be a good idea to produce the gas needed on demand? What's about safety in such a Setup?
The plan is eventually using a standard (academic, even) low-voltage DC electrolysis setup to produce input hydrogen gas, and admitting oxygen as needed to keep the catalytic material oxidized and active, but not both H2 and O2 at the same time. While slight amounts of gaseous water or oxygen in the feed will also help keeping the material oxidized, I haven't tried yet thinking of the precautions needed against the possible dangers when admitting H2 and O2 / HHO. Small amounts of these gases in stoichiometric amounts are already capable of producing sharply loud explosions.
From what R.Mills generally writes in the opening statements of his patents in any case, such mixture might have to be richer in hydrogen, since apparently the transition to a dense hydrogen form (named Hydrino in his case) can also occur when H2–O2 form water in the presence of free hydrogen atoms (I imagine that atoms adsorbed on a surface should also be ok). However I don't think that in the setups I thought about so far this would be the main operating mechanism.
Spacing out the beads will work fine - if you put them 'nose to nose, tail to tail' you will also require less.
My fiirst tube furnaces (the old 'model T') used around 1M of 0.9mm Kanthal wound around a 25mm quartz tube and ran (from memory) on 36V DC at around 10A. They could hit 1000C with a little coaxing. I have never used anything thinner, it would be fragile for sure.
I didn't think of that. I also didn't fully realize that with a 25 mm OD tube and the wire spacing given by these ceramic beads, the actual length of the heating wire around it will not be that long: roughly about 2.5–3.0 meters considering also some extra length for the ends into the high-temperature connector.
To have an acceptable resistance value (assuming Kanthal A-1 wire) for employing an AC dimmer to achieve about 250-300W, a rather small gauge will have to be used, possibly 28AWG (0.32mm - 17.97 ohm/m) or even 30AWG (0.25mm - 29.3 ohm/m). I'm not sure about the durability of such thin wires at high temperature under the planned conditions; I think significantly thicker gauges have often been used in hot tube LENR experiments previously reported by others.
The thinnest Kanthal wire I have (ab)used is 26 AWG. It does not take much abuse.
My favourite size is 23 AWG, which can be ordered from a vape shop. 23 is a good balance between resistance and strength for 120 V use, IMO.
Steam-Engine.org is useful for working out the coil specifications (coil length is Width, near the bottom of the page). One can jiggle the wire size, wrap spacing, coil length, coil diameter etc, until the best fit for the requirements is worked out.
Morning can
No, I haven't read reports of HHO systems employing precious metal-coated sand grains before.
please refer to:
https://www.minotech.de/forsch…chnologie/heizen-mit-hho/
6. Sandheizung (sand heater)
"....Similar to the catalyst, the oxyhydrogen gas is passed by small platinparts. At this, the hydrogen reacts with the oxygen, giving off heat.
sand in turn is usually filled in a tube that is closed from the bottom to the connection of a HHO burner nozzle. ..."
or watch this video (only in German)
External Content
www.youtube.com
Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.
(ca. 25:00 - 37:00)
My fiirst tube furnaces (the old 'model T') used around 1M of 0.9mm Kanthal wound around a 25mm quartz tube and ran (from memory) on 36V DC at around 10A. They could hit 1000C with a little coaxing. I have never used anything thinner, it would be fragile for sure.
It looks like one issue pops out unexpectedly after the other, but it's good to know in advance what could work and what could not. With short wire lengths and thicker gauges like the one you suggested (18 or 19 AWG) a DC power supply will be required and fine tuning the heating rate for usage again with a PID temperature controller will probably have to be done with an additional PWM controller. Not hard to find but more expensive than with AC heating.
The thinnest Kanthal wire I have (ab)used is 26 AWG. It does not take much abuse.
My favourite size is 23 AWG, which can be ordered from a vape shop. 23 is a good balance between resistance and strength for 120 V use, IMO.
Steam-Engine.org is useful for working out the coil specifications (coil length is Width, near the bottom of the page). One can jiggle the wire size, wrap spacing, coil length, coil diameter etc, until the best fit for the requirements is worked out.
That calculator looks very useful, thanks. It would definitely be annoying having to replace often the heating wire, and possibly it might deteriorate faster with intermittent usage.
please refer to:
https://www.minotech.de/forsch…chnologie/heizen-mit-hho/
6. Sandheizung (sand heater)
"....Similar to the catalyst, the oxyhydrogen gas is passed by small platinparts. At this, the hydrogen reacts with the oxygen, giving off heat.sand in turn is usually filled in a tube that is closed from the bottom to the connection of a HHO burner nozzle. ..."
Interesting, thanks for the source.
Section 6.1 immediately below that seems the most relevant. Apparently they use a platinum chloride solution (made by dissolving Pt in aqua regia) to plate Pt by wet impregnation on the sand grains and subsequent calcination; the plating solution will be probably expensive and somewhat hazardous to handle, and chlorine will be evolved so it has to be done in a well-ventilated space or under a fume hood. Worth considering and probably more active as a catalyst than the K-Fe oxide one I plan synthesizing, but the latter should be much cheaper.
A possible unknown factor here is the source of the sand grains and their purity. Beach sand will notably be relatively rich in salt and carbonates, most of which will likely be decomposed into their base oxides and gases in the calcination process. So the actual catalytic material could be Pt on various Si-based oxides rather than just Pt on pure silica.
In any case, I should restate that it's not catalytic burning that I plan doing, at least not directly (I can't rule out that it could happen to some extent).
