Quote from Erwin: “On summing up over the pulses, the heat does not exceed the standard value for the water formation.”
Thanks for clearing it. Does this mean that there is no LENR here ?
One needs to be very careful in proclaiming LENR. I believe the anomalous heat evolution in the oxygen titration may eventually be a result of a LENR phenomenon, but perhaps not in direct way. Let me explain.
The heat that we have measured for the highest O2 pulses ranged from 1100 kJ/mol O2 to 1200 kJ/mol O2. This is more than twice as much as the heat of gaseous water formation from molecular reagents, i.e., 1/2O2 + H2 = H2O, which is ca. 500 kJ/mol O2. However, it still does not exceed the heat of (gaseous) water formation from atomic reagents. Let us take the reaction of molecular oxygen with atomic hydrogen, i.e., 1/2O2 + 2H = H2O. Now, the standard heat of this reaction is a massive 1354 kJ/mol O2 (or 678 kJ/mol H2). This is because in case of starting from the molecular O2 and H2, a large part of the energy released on the formation of the H2O molecule is actually being used up for braking the bonds in the O2 and H2 themselves, and so only the 500 kJ/mol O2 is left to be measured as the actual thermal effect of reaction. In contrast, when the H2O molecule is being formed from the atomic H and molecular O2, than much more of the H2O bonding energy is being released as a heat of reaction. How much more? It is precisely by the bonding energy in the H2 molecule, which is 436 kJ/mol H2. So the thermal effects we observe for the highest pulses in oxygen titration, say 1200 kJ/mol O2, could be explained as coming from the water formation from the molecular O2 with atomic H (1354 kJ/mol O2). But then, where does the atomic hydrogen species come from, or more precisely, where does the energy necessary to dissociate the H2 molecule come from? Remember, that we only provide molecular H2 to the system.
For the H-H bond in H2, the bonding energy of 436 kJ/mol makes it be one of the strongest chemical bonds in chemistry. And yet, on several occasions, this strongest bond is being broken effortlessly, as H2 dissociates easily on contact with metals like Pd, Ni or Pt. Not only does this process not require any energy to be absorbed in order to brake the H-H bond, in fact, a heat is actually being released on such reactions; indeed, in the case of Pd/H system the thermal effect of sorption is around 40 kJ/mol H2.
It seems, therefore, possible, that that a clandestine LENR process may occur in our system. It is hidden behind the H2 dissociation. What we measure calorimetrically may be the heat of water formation from atomic hydrogen species, but the very production of the H-species may be taking energy from compact hydrogen species of a kind postulated by various authors, like hydrino (R. Mills), hydrex (X. Dufour) or tresino (F. Mayer and J. Reitz). Needless to say, this is only a hypothesis currently, and much work is still necessary for it to be verified.
