Fusione fredda Renzo Mondaini—trascrizione

Paradigmnoia

I'm determining that the material is melting from the small shiny ball that forms at the tip. This is the 1 mm mild steel wire cathode (paper clip).

It has somewhat become brown from oxidation but so far wear hasn't been too severe and I don't think it's burning (significantly at least). The atmosphere close to the contact zone should be pretty harsh though, containing hydrogen from electrolysis, possibly thermally decomposed water (according to Tadahiko Mizuno here) and superheated steam. However most of the H₂-O₂ should recombine very quickly; actually I think it's what is causing the loud noise which is making me considering getting hearing protection ASAP.

Does tungsten specifically have a problem with burning in an oxidizing atmosphere or is it just the effect of high temperatures in general?

Nichrome, SS316, Ni200 and sometimes Titanium, in addition to the usual Kanthal wire, are readily available as wire for usage in vaping. I was considering getting a "starter kit", but half of it is made Kanthal wire, so it would potentially be wasted. The electrolyte solution I'm using does not have a high alkali concentration however.

I might still end up getting tungsten wire if I manage to find it cheap enough in the amounts I need.

On a different note, I made a quick test earlier. Below are some notes.

• Attempting to use 0.90–0.95 mm thick steel wire of unknown origin, but likely cheap. However, perhaps better than that of a paper clip.

• While preparing the cell for usage I’m noticing that the anode seems to have a more rusty color than previous tests with KOH. Currently the cell is using about 0.13M K2CO3. However this could be just my impression.
• After a short test that worked almost immediately, the same reaction and behavior as previously observed could be reproduced. I made a short video; it doesn't look substantially different than most other ones I posted so far:

• The wire emits a red-orange plasma with a faint purple hue, at least in person. It didn’t seem to fare too badly but it looks like it is still melting. It emits an unpleasant smell in the process so it is probably galvanized steel wire. I will be using something else for the next attempts as this can’t possibly be healthy.

EDIT: earlier I put the wire in a boiling KOH solution to try de-galvanizing it and will test it again later. Before heating the solution, the melted tip from the previous test started emitting a large amount of small bubbles. I don’t know what kind of material will have been present there other than metallic iron.

Curbina

I recall watching it but I should probably do it again and perhaps transcribe it and/or rip closed captions to have the entire narration as a reference. They use voltages in the order of 100V using several 12V batteries in series and quite likely (haven't checked in detail) a significantly higher average power level than what I'm using. They have a downloadable free manual here: https://www.freefromfuel.com/lenr/

The reaction should work better at higher voltages and having it operating impulsively could be better than having a continuous, steady plasma—however this is just my speculation.

I didn't have a small enough container to use to replicate a similar setup (also similar to that in the patent application by Bazhutov et al) so I initially used an large anode similar to what Renzo Mondaini did, tweaking cathode height to obtain the required electrode area ratio. That reminds me I should probably try using copper or stainless steel sheet rolled into a 1/2 or 3/4 cylinder (leaving a small gap for inspection from the side) along the inner surface of the jar as the anode.

Comments on ECW where the video was shown at the time weren't very enthusiastic: https://e-catworld.com/2016/03…naoh-electrolysis-system/

Alan Smith

It indeed had a pungent smell.

Curbina

I haven't [re]watched that video yet, but I think the largest issue is how input power is determined. The plasma reaction is not a resistive load and depending on the electrical characteristics of the setup, operating conditions and in particular the current meter, unusually low (or even inverse) current draw values might be obtained. Although one might argue that this is exactly where an anomalous effect is hidden (e.g. possibly similar to the latest Rossi claims), an advanced power analyzer or fast oscilloscope is needed first to make sure that everything is being measured correctly.

Alternatively, measuring battery consumption could be more reliable than calculating power as V*I. If batteries last unusually long or even get recharged that would certainly be unusual.

• Bathing the wire in a hot and concentrated KOH solution seems to have been effective in removing most of the galvanized Zn layer, by the absence of related smell in a test made later on.
• I made a longer 2 minutes self-operated test with the camera on a tripod while I was away with the ears plugged due to intense noise likely mainly from H2-O2 recombination. Unfortunately the video turned out to be a bit blurry.

• To losslessly rotate the video, which turned out to have a vertical orientation, I used “ffmpeg -i $INPUTVIDEO -metadata:s:v rotate="0" -codec copy $OUTPUTVIDEO” (source).
• Minimum current draw was 0.11A DC from the cheap multimeter but it showed 0.30A AC from the clamp meter. Not clear if the test stopped due to cathode consumption or water evaporating or getting dissociated, but I think the former occurred.
• However, even when considering 0.30A and 264V, naively calculating power as I*V = 79.2W does not seem consistent with the very limited heating of the DC boost converter during operation. The manufacturer even recommends using fan cooling at high power levels. The device is rated for 40W, 70W peak.
• From a spectrogram of the the audio, the intermittent operation of the electrodes, ramping up and eventually down, is visible:

• Upon inspection after testing, the upper portion of the tip of the steel cathode has acquired all shades of ferric oxide, while the point of contact with the water surface still looks melted and shiny (not clear from the photo below).

The sharp noise is indeed related with the plasma sphere or globe around the cathode, but I assumed that was due to the combustion of gases around it. I thought that if it was a spark or an arc it would have been limited to a straight, thin channel between the cathode and the water surface.

I made another test earlier and thought of tracking current draw from the multimeter and the clamp meter; unfortunately I started this when the test was already underway. The measured peak temperature (with a food thermometer) of the DC boost converter heat sink was 40.6 °C at the end of the test.

As the test progressed the reaction became increasingly more intermittent (as in the previous video) and eventually shut itself down.

A few notes on another short test series.

• I attempted another self-operated test. Before the tests, the cathode measured 2.1–2.2 cm (or roughly more than 2 cm) from the tip to the middle of a kink. After several minutes of operation this length decreased to 1.9–2.0 cm or roughly less than 2 cm.
• A goal of this test was measuring the temperature of the heat sink of the DC boost converter in order to evaluate whether it actually needs active cooling.
• It took more tries than expected to make it perform on its own, and eventually DC boost converter heat sink temperature (close to the transistor it is intended to cool) reached 53.3 °C from a starting temperature of 39.6 °C in the last, almost 5-minute test. The capacitors were not warm, however the coil was and so I think that’s the main component which might need active cooling.
• The main problem I noticed is that the converter isn’t powerful enough to make the plasma reaction start with the cathode already immersed, at least under present conditions. It needs to be progressively immersed. Also, even if the reaction manages to start, if the cathode is too immersed it will slowly cool down and eventually revert to regular high-voltage electrolysis. This is again a problem of this setup in particular.
• I’ve made a video showing the last of the above tests and the rather crude setup. I started the video recording only a few seconds after the reaction seemed stable. From this, I sampled measurements manually into a spreadsheet using a video editor and looking at the values every 500 frames or less in some portions.

• The gap in temperature readings is where I had to turn on again the food thermometer and possibly I might have displaced it a bit in the process from its original position.

BruceInKonstanz

Usually these experiments require a limited amount of laboratory and/or economic commitment due to power involved, amount of gases combusted or freely evolved, etc. I don't recall ever seeing them at these low input power levels. So this is one main difference that could make more or different experimentation possible than it previously was.

Typical plasma electrolysis experiments, to my recollection, run with the electrodes already immersed and almost never (putting aside Mondaini or the German experimenter previously linked, or also Bazhutov's—but these approaches were never very popular) with the cathode barely touching the surface of the electrolyte and immersed from there. So this is one more variable that was not previously deeply explored.

At the power levels I'm using, varying the depth of the cathode can easily achieve different plasma operational modes and it does not wear up very quickly either. So if there's any of them in particular that could be conducive to anomalous results, this could allow more focused study with more ease than in typical plasma electrolysis experiments.

I noticed that with the copper cathode, which wore up relatively quickly compared to the steel wire, producing a high-rate bursting noise, or with the cathode just barely touching the surface, there's a high chance of producing high frequency components in the current draw. So the problems that people have had in the past on this regard could in part be due to cathode wear. During tamer modes of operation both my current meters (clamp meter in DC mode) seem to agree, and no AC component is observed by the clamp meter (5000 counts True RMS meter—not great but better than average).

The end goal on my side would be using some sort of electronically controlled switch at the output (FETs or else) in order to modulate the reaction instead of letting it run unregulated. Ideally this would allow the DC boost converter capacitors to fully charge at the set voltage before discharging, and wasting less power doing electrolysis (although more could be wasted with the switch). If the pulses have all the same width it will also be easier to measure actual input power into the electrodes.

I would be more concerned about possible health issues due to fumes from metal/metal-oxide nanoparticles and atomized electrolyte than EVOs to be honest.

Alan Smith

No; inside the hot, steadily glowing plasma, I don't think either. Tadahiko Mizuno actually argued in the past in his published papers (example here) that water might be thermally dissociated into H2-O2 there (pyrolysis), which could in part explain how it seems to vaporize quickly even at low temperatures in some cases, for example like the German guy noted (eventually I watched the video—not too informative in the end). So these gases would recombine on the way to (or at) the surface, producing the bursting noise and transient, larger-diameter globular plasma observed, which I think is what you're saying too.

In theory, hydrogen-oxygen recombination in the presence of excess hydrogen atoms would be conducive to the formation of Hydrinos. So it might be possible that modes of operation which favor this could produce excess heat, UV radiation, and possibly other effects. Now let's see if this thread gets reported for intellectual property violations.

I just realized that in the patent application by Bazhutov et al in reality the electrode with a small surface area is the anode. This is the opposite of what Mondaini and the German experimenter (and other people, me included) did, and it should cause a visually weaker reaction compared to the opposite situation. At first this might seem a Russian convention, but the description refers to OH- anions being accelerated in the gap and colliding with the anode.

Quote from Google Translation

When voltage is applied to the heat generator, a low-temperature plasma formation 13 is formed in the aqueous electrolyte solution and the current flows in the surrounding electrolyte 3. In this case, the plasma is formed due to the blockage of oxygen near the anode space and subsequent discharge in this gas gap. OH– anions are accelerated in this discharge gap until they collide with the anode metal, while receiving sufficient energy — more than 100 eV. In the framework of the model of erzionic catalysis (IEC) (Bazhutov Yu.N., Vereshkov G.M., Kuzmin R.N., Frolov AM // Collection FPINVOF, TsNIIMash, 1990, 67-70; Bazhutov Yu.N., Vereshkov G .M. “New stable hadrons in cosmic rays, their theoretical interpretation and possible role in catalysis of cold nuclear fusion” Preprint 1, TsNIIMash, 1990, p. -56) hydrogen and oxygen nuclei are carriers of anions. An energy of 100 eV becomes enough to release them and get into the metal of the anode, where they turn into neutral erzions, which, in turn, fly out into the near-anode water space. Once in water, the erzions on the deuterium nuclei (H ² ) and on the nuclei of the oxygen isotope O ¹⁷ provide nuclear reactions of erzionic catalysis in accordance with the IEC model. In this case, a large thermal energy is released (about 10 kW at a current in the electrolyte of order A) from the products of a nuclear reaction (H ¹ , H ³ , O ¹⁶ and O ¹⁸ ), which leads to intensive evaporation of water (> 600% compared to standard heating elements)