The perpetual “is LENR even real” argument thread.

Quote from Alan Smith

http://coldfusioncommunity.net…018/08/81_JCMNS-Vol20.pdf

Might work better.

Thank you very much. I have a house-full of family at the minute, but will get to it soon.

Initial comments.

• This is a very nice setup for detecting electrolysis excess power.
• It is very clearly described
• Particularly useful is the parametrisation of apparent excess heat - which helps motivate or rule out mechanisms. The extensive parametrization makes these results much more revelatory than would be the case otherwise
• The excess heat is 1% of the max 35W input power, roughly. The issue here is that it would be important to check that the calorimeter exhibits errors of less than that magnitude when power is moved to different positions inside the box, because even small changes from this could be significant compared with the excess. This is quite easily checked.

Scattered thoughts (it will take me a long time to work them out properly) - forgive me if they are wrong due to thus far only superficial scanning of the paper:

• The Arrhenius plot Fig 17 shows a linear log power / 1/T relationship. However Fig 11 shows a linear power/T relationship - basically - it is not possible to tell whether the Arrhenius plot is coincidental or significant . Although the similarity of the Arrhenius slope to that expected from D diffusion is very interesting, we can also not exclude some linear (with temperature) mechanism for the apparent excess power.
• Fig 11 shows anomalous negative excess power at temperatures around 25C.
• The obvious error mechanism in this Seebeck calorimeter is if the spatial detection of thermal flux is uneven between different sides or (less likely but also possible) different positions emitting heat on one side. Whether this might affect results could be elucidated by having the individual sensor outputs and looking for differences in balance between calibration and apparent excess power. Or, by thorough characterisation of the calorimeter using resistors on different sides and varying the distribution of power between resistors.
• It is worth nothing that (I think) all the characteristion uses power sourced in roughly the electrolytic cell position. During electrolysis the recombiner will emit power on the opposite side of the box. If there is catalytic recombination in the cathode the amount of catalysis will determine how much of that recombiner power is moved from recombiner to the electrolytic cell position.

That's all I've got at the moment. Lots more to do!

THH

(Just for Jed: nail - head - hit - what?)

Quote from JedRothwell

I leave it you to determine why this error is impossible, and not "obvious." Even if I tell you, or Storms tells you, you will ignore us.

Jed - look back the last 10 pages. How many times have I ignored what you say? How many times have you ignored what I say?

(Hint - how many times did I request you read my write-up?)

Since both you and Ed know more about calorimetry than me, it will slow things down if you wish not to tell me things relevant to Ed's paper. Of course - if you tell me things without proper reasons you are right - I will not believe they are always true unless I can work out reasons myself.

I was brought up that way. I recommend it to you. It is also why I treat everyone the same - no matter how illustrious they may or may not be.

Quote from JedRothwell

I acknowledge that you came with a list of objections to the Storms paper. They are all addressed and eliminated in the paper itself. Such as this one: "The obvious error mechanism in this Seebeck calorimeter is if the spatial detection of thermal flux is uneven . . ." I leave it you to determine why this error is impossible, and not "obvious." Even if I tell you, or Storms tells you, you will ignore us.

Well - if it is in the paper - as it should be - this is no problem. I will get to it eventually. I am very slow to understand things. I make no apology for that.

More scattered thoughts:

• The excess heat points should be based on the cell under equilibrium conditions. My cursory reading so far has not found the methodology for ensuring that - it obviously matters. The merit of this closed cell is that with a recombiner equilibrium conditions should exist.
• Complete description of methodology may not normally matter so much, but when extraordinary results are claimed documentation of every detail clearly helps to add credibility (to a skeptical non-LENR-believer audience).
• Fig 11 is a bit surprising, with the -40mW negative excess heat. This is a bit higher than would be expected given:

1. In equilibrium we do not expect any negative excess heat
2. The stated calibration repeatability is +/- 20mW

The calibration uses heat sources in various positions but all are around the electrolytic cell - it is not clear how well they cover the range of possible heat inequalities - especially the one from that recombiner sitting far away from the electrolytic cell. Since I read this first, before making my comment, and it is "obvious" I am sure what Jed wanted to tell me was something else.

The arrangement of the electrolytic cell, GM detector, and fan within the box can be seen in Fig. 2. Energy
generated inside the box produces a voltage generated by the thermoelectric converters proportional to the magnitude
of applied power. The amount of power is based on a calibration using electrical power applied to a resistor inside the
electrolytic cell, as electrolytic current using an inert platinum cathode, or as current applied to a 50 W Quartz–iodine
light bulb in place of the electrolytic cell. As can be seen in Fig. 3, each method for generating heat results in the same
generated voltage when using the same amount of applied power.

Quote from JedRothwell

Read the papers by Storms and McKubre and you will see. There is a good reason you have tried to find an error in McKubre. You know as well as I do that you cannot find one.

Yes. I read the McKubre results in detail and the only potential error I could find would come from variable recombination - where the test for heat in different places in the cell that was made covered electrolyte uneven heating - but not transfer of heat between the far away recombiner in the air, and the electrolyte. Still, the McKubre experiments are the best I have seen.

General point - the nature of closed electrolytic cells is that the recombiner tends to be thermally isolated from the electrolyte. It tends (obviously) to be at the top of the cell in the headspace where typically thermal characteristics are heterogeneous from the rest of the cell - for, again, obvious reasons. So one useful test is accurately to calibrate with a resistor built into (or on the far side of) the recombiner and check that against a heat source cosited with the electrolyte.

I'm sure there are closed cell LENR positive experiments which have done this but I don't think I have read them. Unless I misread ed's paper: quite possible - it will take me time to absorb it all.

Quote from JedRothwell

Whereas recombination cannot be a factor with the closed cells used by Storms, McKubre, Mizuno and others.

Why? (See remarks on TEG asymmetry - which may be very small but I cannot be sure of that from published information in this experiment).

Quote from JedRothwell

That is also why THH and other skeptics never discuss McKubre's work.

Forgive me Jed.

YOU recommended me McKubre's work a long time ago and I remember reading it in detail and discussing it here at some length.

Notice also, that calibration values based
on Joule heating of a resistor located in the cell agree very well with values obtained by
using a platinum cathode. This shows that the location of heat production within the cell
has no effect on measured values.

From a paper of Ed's describing his Seebeck calorimeter Microsoft Word - StormsEdescriptioa.doc (lenr-canr.org)

I don't understand this. Take the most obvious cause of "position error" in the calorimeter: unmatched TEGs. There are a lot of TEGs (11? if two per side). That is 11 parameters to adjust for perfect TEG matching. Each differently positioned heat source in the cell gives a (different) equation to calibrate these "balance" coefficients. But, with 11 coefficients, we needs 11 distinct orthogonal heat vectors from sources with 11 different positions. Also the fan will help to equalise temperatures on the panels. For best calibration - and also best determination of potential errors, we should calibrate with one resistor per TEG - resistors stuck to box panel. This type of calibration is pretty easy. It does two things:

• allows variation of output with spatial distribution of heat to be accurately measured for any distribution
• allows balance of TEGs to be adjusted to minimise any dependence of output on spatial distribution.

Without this we could check the TEG specification for balance ab initio. But we do not have this.

The calibration used in the experiment we are discussing:

• electrolytic heating
• resistor in electrolyte
• quartz lamp instead of electrolytic cell

Is not enough to calibrate the TEGs - and in any case whether it has different enough distribution of heat to do this well where it matters (on the TEGs the other side of the recombiner) is unknown.

I would take the relatively easy step of affixing 12 30W resistors to each of the panels: leading cables out (you need 13 connections or 12 if you use earth) then calibrating looking at the TEG response to power from each resistor in turn as a 12 element vector. It would be illuminating, as would how it changed with fan on and off. Solving this data would provide the coefficients which exactly balance the voltages.

Without this - it is trivial to prove that the balance of the 12 separate TEGs cannot be determined from only two undocumented (we do not know the "TEG vectors" from the 3 sources) tests. If we had info on the TEG type and ab initio matching that would maybe provide assurance of balance? And separate outputs from each TEG for the experimental data would show how much imbalance errors could affect the results. But the stated calibration does not provide any assurance.

I hope the maths here is obvious. If not I can explain.

Re my 12 resistors. That is overkill.

For the purposes of understanding this experiment it would be sufficient to place one resistor between the top of the recombinator and the calorimeter wall - Or, embedded in the recombinator at that position.

Then do another calibration run comparing output when heating this resistor with the electrolytic cell based calibration output. That would show whether there is maybe 1% asymmetry between the cell response to heat in the two locations which are deliberately at opposite ends of the box - which would then perhaps explain the results without LENR - or it would rule that out so strengthening the experimental results.

One of the merits of this experiment (it has many merits) is that input power can be measured (if required) to great accuracy as noted in the writeup. So checking fidelity of the experiment in this way is quite possible.

THH

Quote from Curbina

When you understand that this Figure shows excess heat without energy input for a extended period of time while the electrode is deloading of D, several concepts fall in place, and denying that LENR is real just becomes a personal agenda.

I'd like to understand that figure.

How is the temperature of 60C maintained: and what causes it suddenly to drop? From the paper:

Turning off the electrolytic current while a sample is making energy produces the so-called “heat after death”
behavior, as can be seen in Fig. 14. In the past, Fleischmann and Pons observed energy production to continue for
extended times [22]. The various reported runaway heating events [23,24] are consistent with this behavior. In the
present study, the temperature is held constant at about 60◦C by an internal heater after the electrolytic power is turned
off. Excess power remains constant as the average D/Pd ratio changes from above 0.8 to 0.15 as the sample deloads.
The excess power continues and drops to an undetectable value only after the temperature falls to 10◦C because the
internal heater was turned off.

So: there is power input (resistive heating) throughout this period. The excess power measured is a small percentage of that. Larger than the calibration repeatability. But not necessarily larger than the cell accuracy because imbalance between power coming from different positions in the cell.

To understand this we need to know the position of the resistor keeping temperature at 60C (maybe this is the same one used for calibration in the same position, which would make direct differences small). However indirect differences could come from deloading and corresponding recombination.

I would like to understand more so that these two possibilities can be ruled out.

Quote from Curbina

Is really annoying to see questions about calorimetry being raised that can only stem from the unreasonable idea that “is impossible” that the excess heat be real, and therefore “it must be” an artifact. Excess heat has been acknowledged to be real even by people that propose that it is from a chemical effect, so denying it is real is moot.

I understand that would be very annoying.

Two points:

(1) You can be less annoyed if you see points like I make as the friendly input from somone who is keen to see positive results tightened up, in an easy to replicate experiment, to the level where everyone has to take notice. Care is needed when excess power is a small fraction of applied input power because any effect not modelled accurately by the calibration could give such a small change as an error. However the good news is that it is relatively easy to rule these things out iteratively - just keep on adding instrumentation or testing the experiment in different ways - answering the questions.

(2) "Excess heat" is not a unitary thing - you believe it or you do not. LENR has many different experiments showing excess heat. Just one such, replicable now with whatever additions are needed to silence critics, and therefore capable of putting to rest annoying but useful questions like mine, would be enough to provoke major curiosity and interest from the mainstream scientific community. Ed's experiment is a better candidate than Staker's for that in that it is I think more easily replicated (might be wrong - but it looks that). Also, as a closed experiment, it is simpler to analyse: meaning fewer possible annoying questions. The only minus is that the level of excess heat Ed is seeing is 1% which does require very careful consideration of any potential error. ed has ruled out many errors. I have added just one more, which could also be ruled out.

Just to put up a marker - to further strengthen and make more informative these results, after the asymmetry issue is dealt with, I think it would be helpful to quantify and bound the effect of deloaded H2 or D2 recombining with O2, to understanding what are the dynamic effects happening here. This is not saying you must do this to eliminate an error - just that the more is understood the more valuable the data - and also the clearer the results become.

Quote from JedRothwell

I should point out that even if there was 100% recombination, and even if we ignore evaporation, Staker's experiment still produced far more heat than any chemical reaction can, with no chemical changes. So this entire discussion is silly.

In Staker's experiment 20% or so (ball park) recombination in the cell would account for the results. Recombination heat is counted. Unrecombined exhaust gases leave the cell without delivering heat. Looking at the (complicated) issues there about evaporation etc I think that is possible, but it could easily be ruled out by checking evaporation.

Another possible issue is that H vs D leaks into some of the air-gaps given the positive pressure in the cell. The difference between the thermal conductivity of H & D would make the difference between the controls (no excess) and the active run (excess).

I don't know how to evaluate this because I do not understand exactly how the experiment was calibrated post-runs. That information, in detail, would either rule this out, or, not ruling it out, make it look pretty likely. In fact, it is quite possible the calibrations done do rule this out - but lack of write-up or consideration (explicitly) of the issue mean no-one looking at the work can know that.

I think these issues make my point pretty clearly that if you want LENR results to stand up, for people who do not come into the room believing LENR is already proven to exist, a bit more care (of a type that is very possible) is needed. I would dearly like to see this care taken in modern experiments.