I love fooling around with all kinds of stuff in the lab, the workshop, and with my music- but I don't try to represent any of it as any kind of rigor for demonstrating a concept or supporting a theory without some very careful construction- and I'd try to pay some kind of attention to the normal methodology if I were trying to make any serious point.
TVulgaris
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Posts by TVulgaris
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"Results: The plate connected to the negative terminal heats up much quicker that the other 3 plates."
So far, this is a dead simple experiment. IT DOESN'T TEST FOR LENR IN ITS CURRENT CONFIGURATION, but then you didn't state that as a hypothesis.
You'd have to eliminate, or at least differentiate, reflected from adsorbed and reradiant IR, and account for the transmission rate or gradient with the material first to second surface. A thermocouple pair is even cheaper than the laser thermometer, and enables easy data logging electronically, and you don't even have to calibrate them if you set them up as a differential pair.
Some basic chemical scratch tests and micrography would be immensely interesting and helpful (and inexpensive).
The laser thermometer isn't as apprpriate a tool as even a kitch-n (IT COMES UP AS A CENSORED WORD? REALLY?) thermometer (however much more precise it is) because it can't differentiate the IR at all without filtering, and it STILL can't differentiate incident from reradiant IR of the same wavelength without polarization detection- and then you're talking some substantial money for detection instrumentation.
If you actually have excess heat (which these mods would enable you to at least qualify, if not precisely quantify), you still haven't eliminated a host of possible chemical reactions, some of which might involve H loaded into the metal surface. Do this in a decent vacuum with extremely accurate temperature measurement, and you could isolate adsorbed atoms versus ambient exposure (but you still haven't determined whether the oxide layer has any involvement (at least the O part- that may or may not be significant)). This would probably double or triple your project budget, but that's no more than it would cost to put a decent band setup, or a cheap recording studio, in the same space...
When your experiment doesn't test your hypothesis, one or the other needs to change if you're trying to "science" (and even a good outright replication qualifies as "sciencing"), but your "Discussion" is the sort of thing that's just ammo for the knee-jerk skeptic, and drives the unconvinced analytical thinkers straight into their camp. Wild guessing can make for good hypothesizing (I do it all the time) but tends to greatly increase the effort required to test over a carefully constructed hypothesis.