The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.

Quote from JedRothwell

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.

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The guy basically proposes that Pd can have a huge H storage capacity and release it in burts that explain the "apparent excess heat".

Quote from Curbina

The guy basically proposes that Pd can have a huge H storage capacity and release it in burts that explain the "apparent excess heat".

Yeah, and if it is "apparent" it isn't real. So what is he talking about?

Here is what I find hysterical. It isn't often you see a scientific paper where the answer is 4 and the correct answer is 24 million. Nobody noticed? They have never heard of energy density?

It is just too funny.

Quote from Curbina

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/

1 kJ excess with 241 kJ in, 242 kJ out, that's within error margins.

They should have tried up to 50 wt% KOH concentration just to make sure, although that would have likely required lower voltages.

Quote from can

1 kJ excess with 241 kJ in, 242 kJ out, that's within error margins.

They should have tried up to 50 wt% KOH concentration just to make sure, although that would have likely required lower voltages.

I don't mean it's rather significant, just that they reported it without making much of it. I am puting it as an example of the general context that calorimetry in these experiments is well understood, and they were able to get the expected balance 3 out of 4 times, and got one outlier just with the highest KOH concentration they worked with.

This paper from 2007 is a review of excess heat in Pd H systems, and I think it would be great if Sabine would have read it.

Anomalous effects in hydrogen-charged palladium — A review

There are more than 10 groups world wide that have reported the measurement of excess heat in 1/3 of their experiments in open and/or closed electroch…

www.sciencedirect.com

I just found another reference of excess heat during difussion of H through Pd, this one I was completely unaware of, from Chinese researchers. In these experiments the absence of water and the sudden spikes of temperature make the calorimetry a moot point.

An Excess Heat Phenomenon Triggered by Pressure in a H-Pd Gas-Loading System | Scientific.Net

I think the paper linked above should be of interest to Rob

This is the one of "coolescence" that finds excess heat but claims is only of chemical origin. An outlier that I just bring to attention because I was looking for it as belonging to the camp "is real but is not nuclear".

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1077.9857&rep=rep1&type=pdf

I wrote various responses to THH:

Quote from JedRothwell

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.

Quote from JedRothwell

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.

Quote from JedRothwell

Anyone can see how to test Shanahan's hypothesis. It has been tested many times. Take the following steps:
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. *
Turn on the resistance heater at 2 W and measure the power. The heat originates at the bottom of the cell.
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).
Turn on both the resistance heater and electrolysis at 1 W each. The heat originates at all three locations.
Compare the heat measured by the calorimeter for all three situations. You will find no measurable difference.
Try different power levels. Still no difference.

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He did not respond. He never will respond. His method is to write bogus doubts, hoping that no one will respond. He can then claim that his doubts are unrefuted, so he wins by default. That does not bother me. I wrote the messages for the benefit of other readers. However, this does irk me:

THH will repeat this nonsense in a few weeks. He will once again claim that that all calorimetry depends on calibration so you can never be sure it is right. * He will once again claim that Shanahan's hypothesis is correct, even though it has been disproven many times by calibrating with a joule heater in the same cell as the electrodes. Once again, he will do this hoping that no one responds, so he can fool new readers and readers who did not read my responses.

That is deceptive. He should be censured for that.

* As I said, that is not true. Calorimetry nowadays is always checked against first principles, plus calibrations. It is dead simple to do a first principle check with a flow or Seebeck calorimeter. Everyone always does this. It is a little more complicated with other types, but not difficult nowadays. Furthermore, you can depend only on calibrations. Suppose you calibrate before a test, then on-the-fly during the test, and then recalibrate afterwards. You find the calibration constant has not changed. Suppose that during the experiment, there is excess heat, including during times when you are recalibrating on-the-fly (Fleischmann's method). It makes no sense to claim that the calibration constant changed only during the excess heat events, but then it went right back to what it was, and this amazing behavior only happens when you test Pd-D, you achieve high loading, and the cell produces helium at 24 MeV. There is no possible way the type of cathode and water, or high loading, or helium can change the calibration constant. There is no causal connection.

Quote from JedRothwell

It makes no sense to claim that the calibration constant changed only during the excess heat events, but then it went right back to what it was,

It makes no sense, but people have done this, especially Lewis. See:

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

Thanks for the link above Jed. I liked this quote " N&N have now also proceeded to invent a new hypothetical type of heat that they claim could have been missed in our experiments, and which was not reported by Pons and Fleischmann in their experiments."

Quote from THHuxleynew

LENR field says: every single experiment can be criticised, but put them all together and the result are persuasive.

No, we do not say that. Stop putting words in our mouths. The top tier experiments cannot be criticized. They are irrefutable. That is to say, no one has refuted them. Skeptics such as Morrison and you tried to refute them, but you failed. You have not shown any errors in Fleischmann, McKubre, Miles, Storms, Bockris or any other. I know that you think you have, but you are wrong. I showed how you were wrong in the examples above. Actually, it wasn't me. I described how the papers show you were wrong.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Other people say: we want one reference experiment - even if unreliable on a per cathode sample basis - which can prove excess heat.

The original F&P experiment proves there is excess heat. Hundreds of expert electrochemists replicated it, and they all agree that is what it proves. You do not agree, but they are right and you are wrong. They know much more about this than you do.

THHuxleynew , you have not said anything about the excess heat in D gas flow through PdAg tubing walls like Fralick did in 1989 and was confirmed as presented by Benyo at ICCF24. There are other analog results by Li with a Pd thin film that also produced excess heat with an energy density of the order of a modern nuclear fission plant. A couple of days ago I found a series of paper from a Chinese team that were published between 2011 and 2015 and some later from 2021 that are all in Pd D or Ni H flow through metal systems, none of the is electrolytic, and some of them with electric pulses to stimulate the gas flow (similar to what Celani does to his Constantan wire reactor).

I will paste the papers and or links to those that are only available as abstracts ASAP, but you will find these results are 100% reproducible, and the excess heat is beyond any possible error.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The google guys found it very difficult to get loading higher than 0.875. They also said that measuring loading accurately was not easy - they tried several methods.

It seems possible to me that the LENR variability here (not understood) might be variability in measurement - not in obtaining high loading. it would be important to check this with the (better) experiments to check.

It is not clear what "variability" you are talking about. Your assertion is that LENR does not exist. In other words, the heat is not real.

Please explain how variability in measuring loading could affect the calorimetry. Assume for the sake of argument that the variability is a measurement problem, and not an actual difference in loading. The instruments used to measure loading have nothing to do with the thermistors and flowmeters used to measure heat. No connection at all. So how could they affect the calorimetry?

Please be specific. There are various different way to measure loading, especially the 4-wire and excess oxygen methods. Every method indicates that with low loading, there is no heat. And no helium or tritium either. So, please explain, in detail:

How can two physically different, unrelated methods of measuring loading both be wrong, and in the course of being wrong, how can they corrupt results measured by thermistors, thermocouples, thermoelectric chips in Seebeck calorimeter (three unrelated instruments that cannot have any common systematic error), and also flow meters, tritium detectors used weeks after the experiment ends, and helium detectors used in three or more labs hundreds of miles away and weeks or months later.

Also, describe what "(better) experiments" you have in mind. These experiments were done by the best experts in the world. What makes you think you know how to do them "better"?

Quote from THHuxleynew

a reference experiment with replicable high loading (using a single cathode sample that can be broken into say 10 cathodes, with 50% used and 50% left for replication)

That would not work, for reasons beyond the scope of the discussion. But in any case, finding a single cathode that does work can take a year or two. It has to be done manually, with the methods described by Storms. You have to start with 50 to 100 cathodes. You may find one or two. If you don't find one, spend another year looking through another 100 cathodes. If you find one, it will probably work repeatedly, many times. So the success rate is 2% if you evaluate the whole process, or 100% if you evaluate starting from the time you find a working cathode.

You would know all of that if you read the literature, but of course you have not read it, so you have no idea what you are talking about.

This process could be automated so that it could be done much faster, but that would take a lot of money, which no one has. Also, the researchers I know see no point to replicating the original experiment. I don't see much point to it either. We could demonstrate it repeatedly at 100 W, the way Pons did, but you and the other skeptics would never believe it, so it would not persuade anyone, or serve any purpose.

Quote from THHuxleynew

open cells:

Here what we need is to simulate the (as elusive as LENR) ATER at the cathode. That is difficult.

* Not going to rehash this. here. Many people on this site say ascoli and THH are wrong

You seem to be confused about the definition of an open cell. It does not mean a boil off cell. It has nothing to do with what Ascoli says. It means a cell without a recombiner. The free D2 and O2 gas leave the cell. The electrolyte gradually falls, and the salts become more concentrated. The loss of electrolyte is measured to confirm that there is no recombination in the cell.

An open cell is not necessarily physically open to the atmosphere. The escaping gas can go through a bubbler to exclude air. Or, a cell with a narrow vent at the top will not allow air back into the cell.

I do not know what "ATER" means.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Many of the D experiments show positive against a control of H. Taht is IMHO necessary for plausibility, but not sufficient because of the very different physical properties of H and D.

Please explain how the differences between H and D can affect the calorimetry. Please be specific.

You made this assertion before, but you never explained how it might work. In particular, you never showed how the difference between and H and D might affect calorimetry outside the cell, with a flow calorimeter, Seebeck or copper sheath in an isoperibolic cell. I pointed out this problem to you many times, but you refuse to address it.

Also, please explain why calibrations with a resistance heater, or Pt-Pt electrolysis, never show any difference between heavy and light water.