Successful attempts in university of Bengaluru / India

    • Official Post
    Quote from DMBoss1021

    Back in 2012 I did a replication of Celani, albeit without the specialized materials work they used. We used Monel metal as substrate, media blasted with silicon carbide to etch the monel strip, and then flame sprayed Raney Nickel onto this substrate, and subsequently etched out the Al from the Raney nickel.


    Not really a replication TBH. More of a pastiche.

    ... "We used Monel metal as substrate, media blasted with silicon carbide to etch the monel strip, and then flame sprayed Raney Nickel onto this substrate, and subsequently etched out the Al from the Raney nickel. [...]

    This combination yielded a COP of 143% (1.43) using very good calorimetry, cross checked and verified several ways. [...]

    It was privately funded, so I doubt I can reveal details."


    Interesting: US3637437A - Raney metal sheet material

    Abstract

    A Raney metal catalytic sheet material is prepared by spraying molten particles of a Raney alloy, such as a silver, nickel, iron, platinum or cobalt alloy with aluminum on a substrate, and leaching aluminum from the alloy. The sheet catalyst is claimed as is the process of manufacture.


    https://patents.google.com/patent/US3637437A/

    Quote from Alan Smith

    Well, for a first post after 6 years of silence that's pretty clear. Thanks for pointing out the error in the Arithmetic, lets hope it's just that. As the experiment leader has been invited to comment here (by Curbina) it may be that he can clarify things to everybody's satisfaction.


    BTW- Welcome! we are always happy to hear from people getting their hands dirty in the lab. Are you still working in the LENR field?

    No, I'm not working on LENR at this time. My main focus was a different avenue showing energy gains on the lab bench, and in literature research over a century. Sorting the wheat from the chaff in that literature research to find viable experimental replications - led to discovering some root principles. LENR was always a possibility in the gains that manifest. However I believe that other work I engaged in is a separate phenomenon from LENR.


    With Celani et al - where it appears a transmutation between Cu and Ni isotopes is at work - anyway that experiment was within reach of our capabilities - at least an attempt, albeit not with precisely Celani' reactant formula, but rather with the apparent root principle(s) he used applied with an extremely limited budget.


    My acerbic tone in the above post is because you must dot all your i's and cross all your t's before making a public statement. All of this work gets lumped into the "tinfoil hat wearer" derision - and giving the other side ammunition to attack and dismiss - because you were sloppy - or in fact delusional hurts the credibility of any legitimate research immensely.


    In fact from my literature research it is apparent that part of the reason these things are not more accepted is precisely because of naive, or delusional, or outright fraudulent actors making stupid claims in the past.

    I was acerbic in tone because of the harm such actions in public releases causes to all of us. There is already so much resistance, animosity and outright derision against anyone being able to generate a COP over 1 that you MUST not make silly mistakes, or be delusional, or fraudulent in public disclosures.


    If on an obscure discussion amongst believers or a working group - and this error was made, I would of course assume it's an error and point it out without derision. But you make a dumbass statement in public and I will call you out on it - because such behavior does and has hurt my/all efforts.


    No the report states clearly " the total energy that has been generated so far is 60MJ" Absolute COP is total energy output divided by total energy input. Period.


    If the COP was 1.347 as you suggest, then the 60 MJ would be called "the excess energy generated". You must have both mathematic and semantic descriptions accurate!


    Furthermore they claim to have 50 watts input and 50 watts excess output. So they explained a case of 2 COP there, but proceeded to destroy their credibility by saying 40 days of 50W in and 100W out is a total energy output of 60 MJ. Either way 60MJ does not jibe with 50 watts input and 50 watts excess output over 40 days of operation!


    Your interpretation of the report appears tainted by wishful thinking as the evidence in the report is either a gross mistake, or delusional, or deliberately misleading to obtain more funding or attention or whatever.


    Celani reported far higher COP - after a lot of trial and error with proper reactant regime. I am not familiar with the "committed group" replication of 1.2 and 1.12 average you speak of. I will say however, in a bit of sarcastic jest - "you know what you get when you design a horse by committee? - a camel" (I've had experiments become unsuccessful because of "consensus" or "groupthink" silliness - or designed by committee syndrome)


    If you dig into what Celani informs appears to make his really good results tick - and attempt to achieve that root principle or principles - you can get far better than 1.12 COP. Even then our work did trial and error for at least 20 iterations before getting as far as we did.


    I will attempt to ask if I can share details on our replication...

    You are correct. They did not specifically state the 60 MJ of total output was at 50 watts input and 50 watts excess output. However they implied it. And what they did was give the mainstream consensus against this being possible, ammunition to dismiss it as erroneous or quackery - by not being clear or precise.


    That is my point. The first thing you must do when you have apparently incredible results is try to poke holes in them. Did I make any mistakes? Did I commit any contradictions in my explanation? Do the numbers I proffered make sense? etc etc. It took me 20 seconds to poke titanic sized holes in this report.... as would any mainstream reviewer.


    I do agree that to find incredible new things you must have an innocent, almost child like sense of wonderment and acceptance. But then when you appear to get results which fly in the face of accepted norms, you must become a hard nosed skeptic to see if you were being delusional or erroneous. My comments were really tame compared to what you can expect from any mainstream science reviewer or referee.


    When you go into a lion's den, you do not stay safe by "loving one another"! (you do so by being a realist and very prepared)


    I have submitted briefs and results to science referees and I can tell you with certainty, a mistake like the inconsistency in this subject's report would not only get derided, it would be dismissed without even considering it viable - such a glaring problem with the description/numbers and the referee would not even read the full report, and telegraph to others that this entity is a fake, or delusional.


    If you are going to attempt to convince mainstream that LENR is real, you had better have some very thick skin, and unassailable evidence.


    So what then, RobertBryant suggests the report means that the 40 days of constant running to obtain 60MJ output - is disconnected from the added claim of 50 watts input and 50 watts excess output? So from these conflicting claims you might conclude they appear to have 2 COP from the 50W in and 50+50W out...


    But 60 MJ for 40 days is only an average of 17.361 Watts (60 MJ/ 3,456,000 seconds) So did they have 2 COP which results in 8.605 W input and 17.361 W output?


    Or did they only have 15.096 W input for 17.361W output for a COP of 1.15? If you leave any part of your press release ambiguous, the reader can insert whatever conclusion they wish into your narrative!


    You cannot know if the report is a mistake, delusion, or fake from the information at hand. As such chiding these folks is called for as it harms the cause of achieving LENR and getting it accepted by mainstream.


    Of course the mainstream will likely simply dismiss hard nosed results as merely "measuring error" even if you did not screw up the description as these folks did. You are already fighting an uphill battle against overwhelming odds. Do not shoot yourselves in the foot with half cocked silliness!


    A referee could simply say, well now - 17 Watts - what are the cumulative measuring errors and resolutions of the instrumentation? Such low power brings these factors into play. If you have 0.9 x 0.85 x 0.9 accuracy margins you could be off by 0.6885 or put another way, if your COP is less than 1.452, it's within the cumulative error margins of your measuring instrumentation when power is this low!

    • Official Post

    DMBoss1021 , I value your input, I myself thought the report being scant on any meaningful detail, and that’s why I have asked the main author directly to come here, without result so far. The report as it is, is of no scientific value, and reads mostly as a PR announcement.


    I am all for accuracy, but I am also aware that cultural differences and even language barrier are factors to be considered. We here favor politeness, and you can always ask politely for more data, and the lack of response normally speaks for itself.


    Now, the highly committed group I talked about working to reproduce Celani’s work, is the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project, and they worked with Celani ‘s direct input. The first problem they found was in the calorimetry data collection system Celani was using, due to a software glitch. This all happened more than 5 years ago so I can’t find the results in a single place, just chunks scattered here and there, but from these you can draw a good picture of how things went, and they were able to produce gamma radiation at will, which was a notable part of their success. Here’s the only paper AFAIK where the MFMP summarizes their Celani attempts and where the 12,5% excess heat is reported.


    https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0614.pdf

    Quote from Alan Smith

    Not really a replication TBH. More of a pastiche.

    A pastiche? It wasn't some art or theater project. It was an attempt to replicate results with an extremely limited budget in a short time frame. To execute a "go/no go" test on whether it's worth sinking a lot of time and money into it. Took some finesse as the original specifications were not possible to replicate regards the core material. And some confusion or subterfuge - or red herrings were observed in the source material. So we took what appeared to be the root principles and found ways to achieve them with the limited time and resources we had.


    We already had several iterations of excellent calorimetry. And we had evidence of anomalous actions of certain catalysts on producing monatomic hydrogen. Actually this is used commonly in industry - it's called "spillover" and spillover catalysts are routinely used in hydrocarbon cracking.


    Monel metal (alloy consisting of 66% Cu and 33% Ni) is cheap and abundant and we had experimental evidence it acted as a spillover catalyst in another setting. So we used it as our base reactor core material. Various etching schemes we had available to us were attempted as per Celani's showing the nano structure was important... (and the high likelihood that Celani achieved some Ni>Cu transmutation)


    The reactor and gas and vacuum systems along with inherent closed loop calorimetry were assembled. instrumentation installed and thorough calibrations done.


    We tried all manner of monel forms and etching methods. But these fell short. We also knew of Raney Nickel, and obtained some in fine powder form. Flame spraying was achieved by using a custom made rig - akin to an air brush or air eraser. (hydrogen torch with a coaxial Raney powder feed tube, with argon as shield gas to prevent oxidation of the Al in the Raney powder)


    The best result was obtained using flat monel strip. Media blasted with 220 grit to cause micro structure of the active surface, then some brief HCL etching. Then Raney alloy flame spraying, and etching in KOH to remove the aluminum from the alloy layer, made deep and excellent micro/nano structure on the monel strip substrate.


    The strip was wound on a borosilicate glass rod, and electrical connections to the ends of the strip using silver brazing. The reactor was a high vacuum flanged system with electrical feedthroughs at the end flanges. Calorimetry was done with a wrap of copper tubing around this tubular 316L reactor, and a water coolant, with pump, radiator, and sensitive flow metering and inlet and outlet temperature probes. (and this whole rig highly insulated outboard of the heat exchange tubing)


    Calibration was with a dummy heater in the reactor and argon gas. True power applied to the dummy or monel cores was via two high end DSO's with math channels and high accuracy voltage and current probes.


    Aside, best results achieved not with smooth DC applied to heat the monel, but with sharply pulsed DC via our existing high power switching systems. (hence the need for sophisticated True Power metering)


    This was all done in under 6 months for a materials cost of under $5,000.


    So no, it was not a "pastiche", it was a serious investigation.

    Excellent. So someone has done the diligence to replicate Celani's work properly. I would concede that perhaps the ill advised descriptive error in the report in question is the result of poorly grasped command of English.


    I just am or was so disheartened by how much damage other's being sloppy or greedy have done to the "cause" has done - I blew off some steam here.


    As I posted above some detail about our work, we did not per se replicate Celani. We attempted to get results with his core or root principle(s) by making choices from our own knowledge base, and what was within the art of the possible in terms of budget.


    I did not fashion the data or reports for external consumption, only to our own internal group. So it is not something to be used publicly for anything other than being instructive on possible alternate routes to LENR, which I believe is achievable by many avenues.


    We did not really develop a slick or convincing report, because we already had far better COP numbers much easier to achieve in different arenas - so it was dropped. And to really get something that might be commercially viable with this LENR venture, would take a lot of time and money to realize.


    And it may be limited in power, or not competitive. I personally believe there are all sorts of ways to achieve COP over 1 - I've seen it on the bench many times, from many different approaches other than LENR. But the world is not ready for it yet, and as such it's never going to amount to any "absolute proof" until enough people believe it's possible. (the inhibiting field if you will is consensus against it being possible) (as free will to choose what to believe cannot be violated - is a universal law I believe is true) (call me a nutbar, I'm used to it)

    • Official Post

    DMBoss1021 , we all need to blow steam from time to time, I am only calling for politeness, as we have to keep harmony even in the face of disagreement / disappointment.


    I thank you for the information about what you worked on. It’s probably more accurate to say that you performed experiments inspired on Celani’s work, and Alan Smith uses the word “pastiche” as a humorous manner to point that out.


    I think you prepared a rather complex material with all those steps, all make sense from what is currently believed to be the way to get LENR in hydrogen loading systems, downy to the observation that complex DC waves seem to enhance the effect. Celani currently argues that the conditions that promote changes on the flux are key to increase the heat output.

    This of course is within lattices. The latest NASA publication of H/D flux through Pd is rather disconcerting in this regard as the conditions in which occur is basically using the palladium as a membrane to let H or D to diffuse through Pd, driven by differential pressure (pressurized H or D inside the Pd tubing, vaccum outside of it). Perhaps the success of this system is that the rate of diffusion changes constantly, don’t know really.

    .... "And we had evidence of anomalous actions of certain catalysts on producing monatomic hydrogen. Actually this is used commonly in industry - it's called "spillover" and spillover catalysts are routinely used in hydrocarbon cracking."


    New Energy caused by "Spillover-Deuterium"

    Yoshiaki Arata, Yue-Chang Zhang

    Sept. 12, 1994


    Abstract: It was verified that a new kind of energy is caused by "Spillover- Deuterium" generated in a double structure DS-cathode with "Pd-black". Using this cathode, the authors confirmed the sustained production of a significantly abnormal amount of energy over a period of several months that could not be ascribed to chemical reaction energy. The chemical reaction energy of 0.1 mol Pd-black used is only 4 kJ, but morethan 200 MJ of excess energy was continuously produced for over 3000 hr at an averagerate of 50-100 kJ/hr using a DS-cathode with a same quantity of Pd-black. Intermittent operation over a period of two years using this structure proved the completere producibility of these results.

    Interesting, from E. Lalik et al. Oscillatory Behavior and Anomalous Heat Evolution in Recombination of H2 and O2 on Pd-based Catalysts,

    June 29, 2015

    https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.iecr.5b00686


    "In designing nuclear reactors, safety must be kept uppermost in one’s mind and prominent among the safety issues is that of hydrogen safety. Due to various adverse processes, the water that is used as a cooling medium within the reactor confinement can also be a source of gaseous hydrogen. The latter’s concentration, if it is accumulated in an uncontrolled manner, may easily reach an explosive limit in a mixture with air. A hydrogen explosion is therefore a threat which, due to the fact that it may take place in a close vicinity to the nuclear core, can have potentially disastrous consequences, including an uncontrollable release of radioactive material. To mitigate the hazard posed by hydrogen, passive autocatalytic recombiners (PARs) are widely applied in nuclear reactors as a remedy. In spite of the name, the recombination reaction of H2 + O2→ H2O, which proceeds within the PAR, is not truly an autocatalytic one. It requires solid catalyst for the recombination to occur at a moderate temperature, and supported noble metals (Pd, Pt) are mostly used for this purpose. The idea behind the PAR design is that it should work reliably without constant human control, and crucially, without an external energy source such as electricity, since in case of an accident, such factors might well be expected to fail. The catalytic recombination of H2 and O2 should be, therefore, ideally left to its own means in the task of prevention of hydrogen gas accumulation. However, complexity of the reaction mechanism and energetics will have a bearing on effectiveness of PAR technology. The formation of water is a highly exothermic reaction (∆H°(298.15 K) = –242 kJ/mol H2 for H2Og formation from elements, and so a potentially high rate of heat evolution must be carefully considered in effective PAR design. Currently, this is addressed by assuming a twofold role played by natural convection. Apart from the removal of the evolving heat, it is also supposed to ensure an efficient gas circulation within the PAR interior. This assumes that the heat evolution in this reaction is “well-behaved”. But there are hints that the system may behave in a less than predictable manner. In fact, the reaction is known to have rather intricate kinetics. It is capable of attaining multiple steady states6,7, a trait it shares with other Pd-catalyzed reactions. The notoriously evasive hysteretic phenomena, in other words multiple steady states in the metallic Pd catalysis, may not be featured often in literature, but are a frequent subject of conversations among scientists working in the field. The metal-catalyzed reaction is also capable of reaching oscillatory regime(s). The oscillatory kinetics in the hydrogen oxidation have been reported on palladium, platinum, and nickel, i.e., on the metals that are also known for dissociative sorption of H2. Although oscillatory oxidation of H2 on Pd is not studied very often, metallic Pd is by no means a stranger in oscillatory catalysis. In fact, oscillatory oxidations of CO on metallic Pd or Pt are classic systems widely studied for their nonlinear dynamics, also leading to the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2007. As for the H/Pd system, a handful of results on oscillatory hydrogenations have been published. Thermokinetic oscillations in the Pd/H system, i.e., the oscillatory rate of heat evolution accompanying the sorption of hydrogen and/or deuterium in metallic palladium have been reported recently. Moreover, an incidence of anomalously high thermal effects has been observed in the H2/O2/Pd system, as well as in the H2/O2/Ni, and also with noble metals catalysts such as Au/TiO2, considerably exceeding the thermodynamically expected heat of water formation. Here we use the gas flow-through microcalorimetric method to detect both the thermokinetic oscillations as well as anomalous heat evolutions in the catalytic recombination of H2 and O2 on the Pd supported catalysts, including Pd/Al2O3, Pd/Al2O3 and PdAu/Al2O3, i.e. of the type usually applied in the PARs. We show that instantaneous thermal effects as high as 700 kJ/mol H2 which is nearly three times as much as the “normal” heat of water formation, may unexpectedly appear in this reaction. We believe that those findings are important for the hydrogen safety of nuclear reactors, and that heat evolutions much larger than the thermodynamic values of 242 kJ/mol H2 should be considered in the PAR design proceedings."

    Yes, well as I said it certainly was not some "art project" as the term "pastiche" infers. Humor is often lost in text communication. What I/we had been doing for over a decade, was to sort through mountains of "prior art" in several fields with claims of gains. And sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Finding common denominators or root principles, and producing good candidates for experimental investigation.


    That process, revealed that many times a person who makes a discovery, is often unaware of what really made it tick. And many times replications failed because of nonsense red herrings, or misunderstanding of what the important root principle was. Sometimes these misadventures were because the original discoverer or publisher of details was ignorant of what made it work, or had a false sense of that, or attempts to hide the true nature with side tracks or subterfuge (paranoia at idea being stolen).


    Sometimes adherents of a particular subject's works acted almost as worshipers of some ritualistic gibberish the subject had put forward.


    I applied that knowledge base and experience to looking at Celani's writings - and combined with our own work with hydrogen, and observing anomalies and achieving serious gains in other ways with hydrogen - it was deemed worth while to try it.


    Yes, it was a rather complex material - arrived at after many early attempts very close to Celani proper - which failed. (well failure here means gains less than COP 1.15) (of note we had already achieved gains with other ways of using hydrogen of 1.35 and 1.65, which when applied these two gains multiply, yielding between 2-3 COP)


    Correction from my previous post - Monel metal is 67% Ni and 33% Cu - I got the two mixed up in that earlier post.


    I wouldn't say it was inspired by Celani - this project took elements from Celani's work, but also took elements from many other parts of our knowledge base, and from other industrial processes and patents or papers. It was more correctly an amalgam of many things with a starting point of Celani's protocol, which appealed to us because it operated at a low enough temperature to do water as coolant calorimetry which we already had nailed down, and it was within our reach at the very low budget we had at the time.


    I've edited a blurb on the flame spraying of Raney Alloy for the final core that worked the best before we dropped the project, attached.


    As I said this is not really for public discourse, but if any of you find usefulness in the details - good. I can edit the reactor and calibration and results detail later and share it.


    Finally, again on the researching of prior art - often an inventor or discoverer did something in a less than "clinical" fashion, and this haphazard method is where the key lies! But they often do not realize this, nor do the blind followers. (so while you pointed to a replication of Celani - I'm sure done very professionally and faithfully - it may have missed the key almost entirely, because something Celani did was less than ideal, and actually caused the conditions to make the material, or process of creating the experiment - unknowingly) (so temper your reaction to the less than ideal, poor man's methods you see in the attached, or indeed any work you seek to understand - it's happened dozens of times with many other kinds of projects)


    FlameSpray-rNi-edited.pdf)

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