Lomax wrote:
Quote
Basically, the ash is helium and nothing else, from PdD experiments. The heat generated is consistent with the conversion of deuterium to helium and heat, with no major energy leakage (as with neutrinos). The correlation between heat and helium was established, first, by Miles with a significant experimental series, announced in 1991. That work continued and the correlation has been confirmed by about a dozen independent groups.
This is not accurate. Miles claimed a very weak correlation, in which results changed by an order of magnitude between interpretations, in which 4 control flasks also had helium, in which most of the controls were performed after the fact in a different experiment, when maybe their exclusion of helium had improved, and in which one experiment that produced substantial excess heat but no helium was simply ignored. And if the quantitative correlation with the amount of heat was weak when the glass flasks were used, it was essentially absent when the experiment improved and metal flasks were used.
Miles himself admitted the weakness of the results: "The production of helium-4 in these experiments is a very difficult concept to prove since there is always the possibility of atmospheric helium contamination. More studies reporting helium-4 production will likely be required before our helium results become convincing to most scientists."
Miles' results were challenged in the refereed literature, and after that no quantitative correlation met the modest standard of peer review.
Of the dozen "confirmations" Lomax refers to here,
1) One of the few refereed papers on helium after Miles (Gozzi) admits the helium levels are not definitive.
2) Aoki and Takahashi report results that suggest an anti-correlation of heat and helium
3) Luch has continued experiments until recently, but stopped reporting helium
4) Arata's helium levels seem orders of magnitude too low
5) DeNinno's helium levels are 10 times too high
6)The claimed values provided by Bush and Lagowski were not to Storms' liking, "so the values in Table 3 are based on detailed information communicated to Storms by Bush in 1998 (Storms 1998)." None of this information is communicated to the reader to give confidence to this re-analysis.
7) And even McKubre admits at first that "it has not been possible to address directly the issue of heat-commensurable nuclear product generation"
8.) A large fraction of the results used in Storms' 2010 review come from McKubre's gas-loading experiment, reported sketchily in a conference proceeding in 2000. But using the data from one cell out of 16, and treating the observations as 13 independent measurements is grossly misleading for the following reasons:
(i) What is observed (or claimed) is a steady increase of the helium over a period of 20 days, and a constant excess power of less than 100 mW. Both of these could be caused by artifact -- helium infusion (a leak) to produce the steady increase in helium, and an error in interpreting isolated temperatures to give a small excess power. The result of these two phenomena are that both the total energy and the helium increase together, even if they're caused by two completely independent errors. So the claimed correlation here is meaningless. But more importantly, it's really only one result. The graph (Fig. 3) actually only shows 10 data points, so it's not clear where the 13 came from, but it could have been measured 100 times. That wouldn't make the results more significant, but would have made for a much sharper histogram, which is to say that once the observation of a steady increase is established, the number of measurements is arbitrary.
(ii) In Fig 2, it is shown that the helium measurements for that cell actually continue for another 15 days, and the concentration peaks and then decreases, even while the total energy presumably continues to increase. Why were these additional points not used?
(iii) The fact that the level saturates suggests helium infusion. The level (as measured) does exceed the putative background value by something less than a factor of 2, but the problem is *measurement* of the background value is not reported, nor is any calibration of the concentration measurement presented. So, it's possible the levels are off a little, or that the background is elevated. Miles reported earlier that the helium background in their lab was twice the normal background, which is not surprising given the usual presence of helium cryogenics and helium glove-boxes in physics labs.
(iv) The estimate of excess power was not made using any kind of reliable *calorimetry*, but by the measurement of isolated temperatures, and by methods that are not described in any detail. This kind of determination of excess power was shown to be seriously flawed in CERN's replication of the Piantelli work, where CERN attributed the apparent excess power to changes in the thermal properties of the nickel caused by hydrogen absorption. And they were claiming tens of watts. Here, only about 90 mW is claimed, so that result has little credibility. Furthermore, determinations of excess power were not reported for any of the other cells, and in particular the cells that showed no helium.
(v) A general comment. Only one of the 3 references Storms gives for this work is easily accessible (ICCF8, 2000), but that document is woefully inadequate as a scientific report. Much is left out, and many questions are unanswered. If that's the best McKubre can do, or if he doesn't have good answers to those questions, it's not surprising that the work was never published in a proper journal, and for the same reason, it is completely unjustified to use the data from a single dubious cell to comprise more than half of the data points contributing to Storms helium ratio in the 2010 review.
After Miles disputed paper, none of the data Storms considered good enough to calculate a ratio were published in refereed journals.
That's what passes for conclusive in the field of cold fusion.