The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.

Quote from THHuxleynew

How about McKubre - better quality so more liked by me?

Which experiment, specifically, would you pick is best proof? (Counting a run of experiments using identical methodology as a single experiment - with one-off many sigma outliers excluded).

I suggest you look at all of the experiments he published. Read both the summaries and details. I suggest this because:

1. In experimental science, experiments must be replicated in different labs. In the same lab they must be repeated. One experiment might be wrong. Two, less likely. Ten, or a hundred, even less likely. Note that is is not true in other branches of science, or in technology. One test flight of a new airplane proves it works. (Of course you need many test flights to learn exactly how well it works, and what problems there may be.)

2. McKubre did different experiments to learn different things about the effect. The sum total of knowledge revealed by the entire set of experiments is more convincing and more educational than any single experiment. Showing there is heat in some experiments is good. Showing that it correlates with loading is even better, because loading cannot cause an artifact in calorimetry. You can only correlate heat with loading in many different experiments, preferably from different labs, like this:

From https://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf

In other words, some information is a synthesis of many different experiments. You cannot learn it from looking at just one experiment.

3. You have to look at control experiments and failed experiments as well as positive ones.

4. You will see the basis of the McKubre equation, which is interesting.

Quote from Curbina

With all this we are drifting again To the territory where the only justification that THHuxleynew has to insist is that he doesn’t believe the results to be possible at all, so he starts imagining implausible escenarios where his belief can remain intact. We can keep doing this exercise virtually for ever, because in his frame of mind excess heat is impossible in these systems so he is sure there’s an error to be found. No matter how, the excess heat can’t be true.

Maybe we need to find a new "good" skeptic. Someone who can tell us "if excess heat is measured, something must have been done wrong" in another way.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Jed - you do understand that calibration of a calorimeter means that the measurement is no longer direct?

No, I do not understand what you mean by that. Even if you do not calibrate, the calorimeter still measures heat directly.

Perhaps you mean that the results depend on calibration. That they are predicated on it, or they can only be computed in reference to a calibration. Is that what you mean? That is incorrect. In all recent experiments, the result is also measured by first principles. That is, based on the amount of electrolyte and its thermal mass, the surface area of the cell, the Stefan-Boltzmann coefficient and so on. In the 1980s, some researchers did not do this with isoperibolic calorimeters. They depended on calibration curves. Nowadays everyone models the calorimeter and does a first principle analysis because it is so much easier to do, with modern software.

Flow calorimeters make a first principle analysis dead simple. You do not need a calibration at all, but of course they always do one, just to be sure everything is working.

Quote from THHuxleynew

And to my knowledge nearly all of those positives were from positives after calibration?

Always after one calibration, and before another (post-run recalibration), and often with a calibration on-the-fly during the experiment. But you don't need the calibrations to be sure the heat is real. First principles tell you that. Calibrations back it up. Suspenders and belt, as engineers say.

Quote from THHuxleynew

This introduces potential calibration errors which are then multiplied by power in.

No, it does not.

Quote from Shane D.

Maybe we need to find a new "good" skeptic. Someone who can tell us "if excess heat is measured, something must have been done wrong" in another way.

LOL, I perhaps sounded like a complainer, but in reality I don’t expect anything else from THHuxleynew , he is just doing what we know he will do, and I was just pointing out that the outcome will be the same every time. The paradigm is clear: Be it an exotic calorimetry issue or sloppy confusion between contamination and transmutations, or even the fleeting detection of cosmic ray bursts, any of those things is more probable than the possibility of them being really The result of something new and unexpected, as no such thing as nuclear reactions can happen (unless with extremely low probabilities) in the mild conditions of hydrogen or deuterium trapped in a lattice. We have been making the same mistakes for 33 years.
Lattice Confinement Fusion is an interesting quirk that perhaps can become useful, eventually, at some point in the future.

Quote from JedRothwell

I suggest you look at all of the experiments he published. Read both the summaries and details. I suggest this because:

. . . because blah, blah, blah. But perhaps you do not care about the totality of the evidence. You don't want to know How It All Fits Together, or What It All Means. Maybe you just want to know how the calorimeter works. See:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermala.pdf

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHisothermal.pdf

Albeit there’s no consensus that one can put the SAFIRE reactor results in the same box as LENR, for those or us that have undertaken the task of getting some degree of knowledge about the work of Kenneth Shoulders (we will always have to thank Alan Smith for making the effort Kenneth’s book available to our community) , is impossible to ignore the possibility that is highly likely that this phenomena is behind what is known as LENR. Takaaki Matsumoto (another mostly forgotten figure of the field) acknowledged that Cold Fusion had to do with the phenomena described by Kenneth Shoulders.

I don’t pretend to sway THHuxleynew into even looking at these possibilities, but I wanted to mention them as a mostly virgin territory where “the law of conservation of miracles” of McKubre might well find a thorough explanation, once we get to fully understand what EVOs / coherent matter / String Vortex Solitons / condensed plasmoids / etc. are and how they really behave.

Quote from THHuxleynew

You need to know where heat is distributed in a complex system where (for example) it is not clear where recombination occurs.

You always know where recombination occurs. With an open cell, it is always outside the cell. You can tell because the amount of electrolyte lost every day follows Faraday's law closely. With a closed cell, recombination always happens above the water line in the recombiner (the catalyst). You can be sure because if the recombiner fails, the cell explodes. It never happens underwater in a properly designed cell. You can see the bubbles rising, and they do not impinge on the anode or cathode.

In any case, with a closed cell, it makes no difference where it occurs. It would not show up as excess heat no matter where it happened. With an open cell, you would get a recombination error, but in most cases this is much less than the excess heat.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I agree. A good flow or Seebeck calorimeter has pretty low errors. For Seebeck, you need to be sure that the inner surface is isothermal, otherwise differences in thermoelectric converter efficiency or nonlinearites in same cause errors.

I hope you realize that every scientist who has used a Seebeck calorimeter knows these things as well as you do.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Flow calorimeter - all you need is very low heat losses or good enough inner isothermal surfaces so that heat loss cannot depend on where inside the calorimeter the heat comes from, (You get external temperature dependence as well, with heat losses, but that is more easily checked and errors bounded).

So in both cases, it "reaches out" by changing heat distribution.

Nope, nope, nope. Not possible. You cannot tell where in the cell the heat comes from. The distribution of heat inside the cannot affect an external flow calorimeter, Seebeck, or even a copper sheath. In many cells, there are electrochemical electrodes, and there is also a resistance heater for calibration. When one is turned at 1 W and the other off, or vice versa, there is no detectable difference to the flow calorimeter. It cannot tell which is on. When they are both on at 1 W, that looks exactly the same as one being on at 2 W. If there are any differences they are far smaller than the various sources of noise.

ADD: I described this in more detail below. You will find many examples in the literature.

It is obvious why. Look at a diagram of a flow calorimeter. The temperature sensors are far from the cell. Before the cooling water flow reaches them, it goes through mixers (Venturi in McKubre's calorimeter) so it is well mixed and the temperature uniform. How could the flow of water preserve any aspect of the heat distribution in the cell? Suppose the heat is concentrated at one end of the cell, and the water leaves at that end. It is warmed for a fraction a second longer than it would be, but there is no way you could detect such a small change in water temperature. It is not like a thermal flow meter. You can detect a pulse of heat in a thermal flow meter because the pulse is short, the stream inside the meter is not mixed, and it is only a centimeter from the pulse heater to the exit. The wave of warm water reaches the end very quickly, still intact, not mixed.

If you do not believe me, I suggest you build a flow calorimeter and test it. I have done that, by the way.

Changes made by heat reflecting off the inner surfaces of the cell would be orders of magnitude too small to measure with a water-based calorimeter. Those would be nanowatt variations, not milliwatts.

In any case, without a resistance heater, all of the heat originates at the electrodes, whether it is electrochemical heat or cold fusion excess heat, or both. It does not move around in the cell. It does not come from the water itself, or the cell walls. So the location of the heat never changes, just the intensity. Also, before you say it: calibration with high powered electrolysis, and experiments with Pd-D that fail to produce heat, often produce more heat than positive cold fusion experiments. So the intensity of the heat does not affect the flow calorimeter performance.

Quote from Alan Smith

I asked Shanahan several times (in this forum) to describe to me an experiment which confirmed his speculations so I could perform it. He always evaded the question or claimed he had already done so (which he had not). He's a member here btw, but not present much lately.

Anyone can see how to test Shanahan's hypothesis. It has been tested many times. Take the following steps:

1. Use a cell with a resistance calibration heater at the bottom, a Pt-Pt electrode pair in the middle, and a recombiner at the top. *
2. Turn on the resistance heater at 2 W and measure the power. The heat originates at the bottom of the cell.
3. Turn off the resistance heater, and turn on electrolysis at 2 W. The heat originates in the middle of the cell, and the top at the recombiner. Change the voltage to increase or decrease the heat at the top (Faraday efficiency).
4. Turn on both the resistance heater and electrolysis at 1 W each. The heat originates at all three locations.
5. Compare the heat measured by the calorimeter for all three situations. You will find no measurable difference.
6. Try different power levels. Still no difference.

There are many examples of calibration curves in the literature for this configuration.

I and others told Shanahan this many times, but he did not respond.

* F&P put the resistance heater side by side with the electrodes, with an open cell. Both are close to the bottom, below the half-silvered window. This shifts the origin of the heat from bottom of the cell to a place at the bottom closer to the cell wall. Perhaps that is not as convincing as shifting the heat halfway down the cell, but it is still a much larger shift than anything you could get from Shanahan's hypothetical shift, which would only be from one location in the electrodes to another.

The people calibrating with a resistance heater in the cell did not do this to test Shanahan's hypothesis, but their results are a test of it. Their calibration curve points for resistance heating are smack on top of the ones for Pt-Pt electrolysis, or Pd-H. Look at the actual numbers and you will find no significant variation. Even if the shift were to cause a slight effect, it would be swamped by known sources of noise.

You can test the hypothesis more easily, without electrolysis or a recombiner, by putting two resistance heaters into a dummy cell. One at the top, and one at the bottom. Make them as far apart as you can, to produce the largest shift you can. That would be the most dramatic and easily measured Shanahan effect. Try this with a flow calorimeter or Seebeck and you will see absolutely no difference. Yet Shanahan claims this effect produces all examples of excess heat, including 5 to 20 W, with far more output power than input, and heat after death, with no input.

You can see the Shanahan effect does not exist in an isoperibolic cell, such as F&P used, for two reasons:

1. Calibrations with the resistance heater are smack on top of the electrolysis calibrations, as I said.
2. The water temperature above the electrodes and resistance heater is uniform, as shown by the array of 5 thermistors. The array can be turned vertically or horizontally. It shows no variation. So the water is well mixed. Whether the hot water comes from the resistance heater or the electrode, by the time it reaches the thermistors it is well mixed. I suppose if you put the array vertically and move it down so that one end pokes into the space between the anode and cathode, that would show a higher temperature. That would be ridiculous. You can always find a way to do an experiment wrong!

You can also see that the Shanahan effect does not happen with Miles' isoperibolic cell where the heat is measured outside the wall, with a copper sheath and 3 thermocouples. (I think there are 3.) See the data from Miles. The effect does not happen because heat conduction in copper is faster than any calorimeter can measure, and more uniform.

There are some positional effects with Seebeck calorimeters. Not with the electrodes, but with the entire cell. In a Seebeck calorimeter, it is best to put the cell in the center, away from the walls, and to install a muffin fan to circulate the air. This eliminates any localized heating effects. In principle these effects should make no difference, but apparently they can distort the readings at the milliwatt level. They cannot possibly make 1 W look like 5 W.

Here is a closed cell from Ed Storms with the resistance heater in oil, placed next to the electrodes (a Shanahan shift from left to right):

And we are back at the age old “basic errors of calorimetry made by LENR believers” part of the discussion. We have done this again and again without any recognition of the skeptic side that the work done has been thorough and meticulous to rule out and / or bound the error to a known value. As the excess heat is impossible, we are just stuck with skeptics claiming a yet to be found error.

This is where a more practical approach as using a self regulating temperature oven as a calorimeter that at some point was being proposed by Daniel_G was interesting. I am sure we all would love to have more information about it, as the difference on energy spent to reach a set temperature between an active and a dummy cell would be hard to argue with.

I have no doubts that the calorimetry used in LENR experiments has been thorough and reliable.

On the other hand, the experiments with thermometry instead of calorimetry have always provided calibration curves that are precisely designed to determine the energy required to achieve a given temperature and reveal if the active cells change that. The plot of energy in vs temperature achieved of Dummy cells vs active cells always should produce a straight 45 degrees curve if there were no excess energy, and we have seen plenty of curves that deviate from that, meaning that the active cells achieve the same temperature with lower energy input. But somehow skeptics will never agree with this approach.

Quote from JedRothwell

Anyone can see how to test Shanahan's hypothesis. It has been tested many times.

I knew how I would do it Jed, but the point was I wanted him to set out the parameters and the method. Me devising and performing an experiment according to my ideas just leaves him wriggle room.

Quote from Curbina

On the other hand, the experiments with thermometry instead of calorimetry have always provided calibration curves that are precisely designed to determine the energy required to achieve a given temperature and reveal if the active cells change that.

That was what Russ George and I were doing in my lab. We were using PID thermostats at constant voltage, we could accurately compare the 'heater power on' time for matched reactors, all of which were calibrated in advance with previous (failed so 'dummy') fuel tubes . This would often show a very clear difference between control and a working test. It is a simple and cheap method, which we never made any great claims for, since we were more interested in the Gamma emissions. But it worked pretty well - however, very few people trust thermometry..

Quote from Alan Smith

But it worked pretty well - however, very few people trust tjermometry..

I’d say that skeptics don’t trust thermometry, “because excess heat is impossible”. Once you know what you are doing, it can be very straight forward and useful.

There’s a couple of papers that I have had in mind to bring into the discussion that are funny in the sense that they find abundant excess heat but deny it comes from anything nuclear. Those are funny for me because they throw a wrench in the “LENR believers don’t know how to do proper calorimetry” argument. Normally these papers support the “runaway reactions” or recombination hypothesis to explain the excess heat. This is the “excess heat is real but fusion can’t be the source” camp.

Quote from Curbina

As much as the CERN LHC, the existence of these sophisticated experiments doesn’t prove the data they collect, which is gathered and interpreted under a set of assumptions, really prove the theory they were designed to prove.

This is so wrong in regards to the experiment I linked.
This is so much more real than most of the ideas supported here, based on many lines of proof including empirical tests by multiple methods.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

This is so wrong in regards to the experiment I linked.
This is so much more real than most of the ideas supported here, based on many lines of proof including empirical tests by multiple methods.

May you misunderstood me: These experiments are real, and produce great deal of accurate data.

Wether the data is correctly interpreted or understood, is another completely different matter, as it is always done through the perspective of a set of assumptions and underlying rationale that is assumed to be correct.

If that turns out not to be the case, then we are completely blind even if we have great data that we think fully supports the underlying assumptions.

Quote from Curbina

There’s a couple of papers that I have had in mind to bring into the discussion that are funny in the sense that they find abundant excess heat but deny it comes from anything nuclear.

That is funny. But I do not recall any papers like that. If you think of the titles or author let us know.

Quote from JedRothwell

That is funny. But I do not recall any papers like that. If you think of the titles or author let us know.

This is one that we discussed at large a couple of years ago. https://www.sciencedirect.com/…abs/pii/S1572665720304653

Quote from Curbina

This is one that we discussed at large a couple of years ago. https://www.sciencedirect.com/…abs/pii/S1572665720304653

That's hilarious!

Quote from Alan Smith

I knew how I would do it Jed, but the point was I wanted him to set out the parameters and the method.

No doubt you know, but now you know how I would do it! And how other people already done did it, inadvertently. How would Shanahan do it? One never knows, do one?

Oh, I can't stop laughing at that paper. Get a load of the Highlights. What would be the Lowlights?

Highlights

•Effect of Fleischmann-Pons is not associated with cold fusion of deuterium nuclei.

• Effect of Fleischmann-Pons is associated with exothermic reaction of thermal runaway.

• During of heavy water electrolysis deuterium accumulates in the electrodes.

• Recombination of accumulated atomic deuterium is the reaction of thermal runaway.

• Recommendations are given allowing reproducing this effect without failures.

This other paper reports 1 KJ of excess heat without making much of it, as a mere curiosity that requires further elucidation.

https://www.lenr-forum.com/attachment/13716-gromov2019-pdf/