Frank Gordon / Harper Whitehouse - the LEC -collected papers

I don't think it has been published in any formal way.

I have been looking at the economics of using Pd for making LECs for general use as a small part of an article I am writing. The outlook is not good IMHO.

Consistently good and durable working electrodes for LECs are made using palladium co-deposition in lithiated light water, but to meet the challenge that the LEC research group has set itself, to bring LED lighting and more to the almost 1Bn people who depend on kerosene to light their homes, we need make LECs from less expensive and more abundant materials than Pd. This is because global production of Pd is around 250 tonnes p.a, at a current price of $35M/tonne and making 250M LECs with 1 gram of Pd in each would use all of it. With this in mind, the following pages look at earlier research onto the use of nickel in sheet and particulate form as a WE material, Current global production of nickel is 2.8M tonnes p.a. at a price of $20,000.tonne. Quite a difference in that Ni is 1,750 times less expensive and 10,000 times more abundant.

In their 1996 technical memorandum “Replication Of The Apparent Excess Heat Effect In A Light Water-Potassium Carbonate-Nickel Electrolytic Cell” the authors, Niedra, Myers, Fralick and Baldwin report:-

“The existence of an excess heat effect in electrolytic cells based on a platinum (coated) anode and a nickel cathode immersed in a light-water solution of K2CO3 was first reported by R.L. Mills and S.P. Kneizys, although the possibility was stated earlier by S. Pons et al. in a patent application. The effect was soon verified by V.C. Noninski and continues as an active topic of research at numerous laboratories. Prevailing experience has it that only rarely do the light-water cells using either K2CO3 or Rb2CO3 fail to produce at least some apparent excess heat immediately upon electrolysis, although full power may take months to develop. In contrast, cells based on Pd and D2O often remain inactive for many days and require very careful selection and loading of the Pd.”

That K2CO3, potassium carbonate, is described as an effective electrolyte in many similar reports is fortunate, it is readily available and of very low toxicity. The global price of K2CO3 is generally below $2/kg. In contrast, PdCl2, the electrolyte of choice for most Pd electrolysis costs around $80,000/kg.

Quote from JedRothwell

The power density may not be as good as palladium, but I think it will work.

So do I and many other scientists since Stanley Pons. But that's not it. If internal combustion engines could only be made from gold and transistors from 5-carat diamonds we would all be using steam cars and listening to 6-valve superhet radios. (remember those?).

Indeed you might be able to get away with that- but currently Frank has been using Pd co-deposited onto Pd mesh. I think nanograms is optimistic btw- but current versions need a lot of electrode area to produce the 3 watts we would like to get.- and Pd is very dense.

Anthropocene Podcast with Harper Whitehouse.

About Harper J. Whitehouse

Harper J. Whitehouse specializes in modern digital signal processing (DSP) using mathematically robust computational algorithms, with interdisciplinary interests in fields such as physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering. As an Adjunct Professor, Harper taught mathematical signal processing at Stanford, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Queensland. After a highly successful career at the Navy Laboratory and developing several patents in acoustics, Harper retired in 2000. In 2009, Harper joined Frank Gordon to pursue the development of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), where his contributions include the development of a special instrumentation approach for the real-time measurement of the Thevevin equivalent circuit of an LENR self-sustaining energy cell. Whitehouse has over 50 issued US patents and authored many technical papers and book chapters in several fields of study.

Harper Whitehouse: The Cold Fusion Challenge - Solid State Fusion Discovery

Email extract (from me.)

I think the important thing is that we both see that LECs are probably way more complex than we (certainly me) imagined a few years ago, and there are a lot of factors to consider. In no particular order these are ones I can think of. Knowing Harper he is probably ahead of me on this as usual.

H- fusion

Fusion-related and unrelated photon emissions including UV.

Electron Emission/positron emission

Diffusion Effects

Space Charge effect (capacitor effect)

Electron work function changes due to hydrogenation ditto positron/positronium work function changes (perhaps)

Electrolytic currents - caused by unknown or unexpected chemical changes.

Anomalous Hall effect

Bulk charge vs surface charge effects.

Ed Storms electron cloud theory.

Quote from Cydonia

I have the feeling that in 30 years we have gone from one extreme side to the other.. P&F explaining phenomena too simply than expected initially and you are now postulating for great complexity in order to explain maybe more simple things ?

You are right. I like simple a lot, but the problem is that when you dig into the LEC the underlying phenomena get ore difficult to understand. Why do they sometimes change polarity? LEC's are simple to make, but hard to understand.

It is a cold fusion reactor, a capacitor, a contact potential device, perhaps a bit of a battery, an ion detector. That's what makes it complicated

Thank you Frogfall. I put this snippet from Mitch's paper in because some of our own members have been wondering about photo-emission from LEC cathodes. Personally I also wonder about 'dark currents' " ...the relatively small electric current that flows through photosensitive devices such as a photomultiplier tube, photodiode, or charge-coupled device even when no photons enter the device; it consists of the charges generated in the detector when no outside radiation is entering the detector. It is referred to as reverse bias leakage current in non-optical devices and is present in all diodes. Physically, dark current is due to the random generation of electrons and holes within the depletion region of the device."

Attached is the abstract of another JCF-24 paper on 'Nuclear Batteries'. Frank tells me that the hypothesis re the soruce of energy is similar to something they have been working on.

See this one...

The Design of a Low-Energy Nuclear Battery

Ryoji Furui

Nano Fusion Design

E-mail: [email protected]

jcf24-abstracts.pdf