I seem to have a serious case of cynicism this morning. Is it infectious? Let's try it:
1) All news is fake. Don't believe anything you hear or read. It's just entertainment.
2) All pictures are fake, both digital and chemical. Show me the real thing!
3) Equations are just guesses and have little if any connection to reality.
5) Don't show me any data without describing in detail where it came from and how.
Hmm, now it's time for lunch. Bye kids....
In our last validation, at 295C Exh was about 10W. At 590C it goes to >600W, or about 60x with a doubling of temperature.
I had an out-gassing problem with my 304 stainless steel cell when over 350°C. Nitrogen and CO2 both appeared along with water vapor from the reduction of oxides. Post-testing with vacuum showed no leakage issues. For operation at 500°C or higher, a ceramic inside coating would probably help with this. It would have to be thermally matched to the steel COE. Maybe an exhaust header coating would work, something like cerakote or jet-hot.
It should probably be in the Playground area.
And Lo! it was gone there! AlanS 
the ones by magicsound that were positive but not as long lasting.
My results were similar to Ken's. My only positive voltage measurement was due to electrolytic shorting by plating debris, found on disassembly of the cell. I'm not optimistic that co-deposition by Fe plating will reproduce the LEC effect, and I'm moving on to Pd plating as used by Frank Gordon.
And Lattice Assisted Muon Energy...LAME of course.
Not to disparage Holmlid's work, but I just can't resist a stupid acronymic pun.
The calorimeter has to keep the sample hot with Mizuno's experiment. Some calorimeters cool too aggressively.
Doesn't seem correct in this case Jed. The air flow calorimeter as Mizuno previously used would cool the reactor more than my simple thermometry setup, with the reactor in still air. The furnace-type enclosure described by Daniel_G would probably keep the sample hotter than either of those systems.
I ran my system at a wide range of temperatures over many days of testing, looking for the "sweet spot" if one existed. No significant temperature deviation from the calibrated power steps was seen in any of my tests.
The type of calorimeter matters.
Why?
That's isoperibolic operation
Thanks for the correction Jed. As you know, the thermal conductivity of stainless steel is pretty low, so the heat flow out of my reactor is reduced, though not infinitesimal of course. Therefore, in my testing I measure both the external skin temperature and the internal temperature (in a thermowell). The result is somewhere between isothermal and isoperibolic measurement. The high thermal conductivity of hydrogen gas results in the thermowell temperature being closer to that of the Ni mesh than the reactor external temp.
Alan, why would long-duration testing be difficult? Could you please elaborate? What exactly is long-duration and why would adiabatic calorimetry be problematic?
In true adiabatic calorimetry, no heat is transferred to the surrounding environment. Energy is calculated from temperature rise of the enclosed volume of known mass. In laboratory practice, such measurement is usually done in a vacuum dewar chamber or similar vessel, where heat transfer by convection and radiation are reduced to insignificant levels. Therefore, with a constant source of heat the internal temperature will continually increase until changes in material and reactions cause some failure. In other embodiments, the device under test would be immersed in a large well-insulated container of water or other liquid. The heat rise of the enclosing liquid allows easy calculation of the energy added to the system by the device under test. Such a system is sometimes referred to as a "bomb calorimeter" perhaps due to the physical appearance of the enclosure. The long duration limit is determined by phase change of the liquid used.
In the case of your oven-based system, heat is allowed to escape from the oven itself. The energy calculation could be done by measuring the power needed by the oven heater to maintain a set temperature. That is not adiabatic calorimetry, but rather isothermal. However, if I understand correctly, you do not change the power input to the oven, but rather measure the difference between the calibrated oven temperature at a set power and the equilibrium temperature with the reactor operating and the oven power unchanged. If the reactor has an internal heat source, the temperatures inside and outside of it will rise, but at different rates due to the complex thermal mass and heat transport environment. In such a system, time to equilibrium would be long, possibly days rather than hours. If the reaction is temperature-related and also time-limited as has been reported, extraction of accurate data with such a calorimeter seems unlikely.
Finally, I want to point out that my own system of measurement also depends on heat transport through the wall of the reactor. The external environment (still air in the lab) is nearly isothermal, and the ambient temperature is measured and known to vary within ±2°C during the tests. The advantage of this kind of measurement is low thermal inertia, with equilibrium time typically of 1 hour or less.
For context, copied below is the dialog I had with Daniel_G, to which he has not yet replied directly. His text is in red and mine in blue. In particular, I commented on the difficulty of long-duration testing with adiabatic calorimetry, and I stand by that comment. I'm also anxious to see if Mizuno will offer any further information on the mesh (fuel) preparation process described by Rothwell, which I followed in detail. My full report on the work I did is available for review at https://tinyurl.com/vudbmro
That sounds very good Alan and all due respect for what you are doing. We have several sized reactors we could send. What are the maximum dimensions of your equipment?
The test stand as currently configured could take roughly a 0.5 m cube (20 x 20 x 20 inches). My setup is built on two wheeled carts, with the vacuum system flex connection being the limiting link between them. If that were lengthened or the carts re-positioned or supplemented, a larger reactor could fit.
My only request would be that perhaps we cooperate in building an adiabatic calorimeter as life has been much easier after switching to this method and there are very few possible error sources.
For the expected reactor sizes and powers, that would have to be a pretty big lump, several square meters of floor space. I envision a metal box surrounded with lots of foam insulation. And for true adiabatic ("bomb") testing, a double-wall structure is really needed, with either vacuum or good temperature control of the inter-wall cavity. Otherwise the power resolution is little better than the differential thermometry I already use. A further issue is the inability to do long-duration testing, for which flow calorimetry is really the best choice, and the most difficult.
In either case, accuracy depends on careful calibration, which I suspect would be tricky in the kind of calorimeter you propose. The right way to do it is to calibrate with the reactor body locked in place, using an internal joule heater and no fuel. That is how I calibrate my existing system, and with correction for ambient temperature variation I can resolve as little as 3 watts of excess heat at 300°C.
I don’t know how much discretionary budget you have but if necessary we could likely find a corporate sponsor. Are you working as an independent individual researcher or as part of an organization for this?
I'm an independent researcher (d/b/a Magicsound Lab). I'm also associated with a 501C3 non-profit Quantum Heat Inc, for which I serve as corporate secretary. Occasional grants enable purchase of some needed equipment, such as the Agilent turbo vacuum system I use. Most of my gear including my SEM/EDX system is self-funded.
I will ask Mizuno about your mesh preparation.
It seems obvious to me that the real winner of the current conflict will be China. In long-view geopolitical terms, they gain no matter what the outcome.
How do you find excess heat without doing calorimetry?
Daniel, to clarify your description, I used carefully calibrated thermometry in still air at the center of the external reactor surface for my tests. Calibration was repeated eight times, refining the design and protocol with each iteration. The final two calibrations showed a deviation of ±3°C or less over the entire range of input power and reactor temperature up to 390°C. When the Ni mesh (prepared as described by Mizuno and Rothwell) was installed in the reactor, no heat above the calibration bars was seen. A post calibration was also within the error bars.
The "thermal scanning" you mentioned was used to characterize the heat distribution over the surface of the reactor, not for comparison with calibrations. It would also have shown any local hot spots away from the thermocouples used for primary measurements, and none were seen.
Don't neglect to include conduction heat flow from the calorimeter structure into its supports or the surface on which it is mounted. We found in tests at Hunt Utilities Group that such losses could be substantial.
That is the Alpha Ring International guy
Some background: "A longtime professor of physics at UCLA, Wong served as the director of the Plasma Physics Laboratory at UCLA"
That is from a US DOJ press release: https://tinyurl.com/2p98e8se
headlined "Former UCLA Physics Professor Agrees To Plead Guilty In Federal Contract Fraud Case And Pay Nearly $1.7 Million In Damages"
This is where NASA offers technology to market.
NASA Technology Transfer Program
Good find, with some unexpected gems, like this one - Solar Powered Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Conversion
'The meaning of Temperature'- a very readable but profound look at the misconceptions about the nature of something we take for granted
<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access denied</Message>
</Err
Thanks = AS
If you get to the point your back is to the wall "like most" its a free for all.
"People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed"
All those spikey things don't seem to be traditional noise.
The spikeyness of the posted graph is deceptive, in the context of how a gamma-scintillator-based spectrometer works. The raw signal comes from a photomultiplier tube or semiconductor ("PMT"), which has a thermal noise floor of roughly 1/f character. On top of this is imposed a set of discrete events caused by the photon emission of the scintillator crystal. The PMT output signal is then sampled and sorted by intensity into many quantised bins by a software and/or hardware discriminator mechanism, yielding an output table of the accumulated counts in each bin.
Then a curve can be constructed by "connecting the dots". In the posted graph, this can be seen in the relatively consistent periodicity of the peaks. A much more accurate way of graphing such data is a bar chart, which is less prone to visually exaggerating the possible presence of peaks. Or a smoothing function could be used to compensate for the sampling periodicity.
This mechanism has many other potential sources of inaccuracy. To mention just one, if the PMT thermal jitter exceeds the sampling band width, several discrete, adjacent peaks might be recorded from successive events of the same energy level. Curve smoothing would help reveal such peaks, but could possibly conceal the presence of two closely spaced emission lines. Spectrometric analysis is an art, needing careful interpretation of results and mindfulness of its limits.
if investers want to engage they should go on a field trip and see it in action.
Very good point. At this stage they are looking for "Round A" institutional support, so a typical video channel with staged releases of each video would likely not be productive. The kind of big investors they need would exercise Due Diligence personally and in detail.
Website has been updated. Time for a roadshow.
In the early days of software-driven products, we used to joke about competitors "yeah, they're shipping spec sheets in quantity...but where's the hardware?."
In the case of Aureon, we might say "they're posting videos in quantity". They are excellent short-form videos, built by a skilled producer using excerpts from the previous long-form Safire videos. To be fair, nobody is yet shipping any hardware in this field, while video postings are universal.
It seems clear that with the new web site, Aureon is in full fund-raising mode, for which such short, punchy videos can be a powerful tool. My personal take is that the Aureon team has done some very important work, and have a good chance of transforming it into useful and viable products. That said, the web page with half a dozen such videos seems a bit "too much, too soon", and I hope they will revise the format to better capture the interest and engagement of potential investors.
