Posts by Robert Horst

Quote from magicsound

Here's a video of testing for magnetic attraction between the electrodes. Result: no measurable force.

https://goo.gl/ojxU6

Quote from magicsound

One other issue to think about: if the electrodes are ferromagnetic, the field resulting from current pulses around the loop formed by a short might pull them together. Too much flexibility in the mounting could then cause-latch up.

The difference between a solenoid and this setup is that the ferromagnetic material of the solenoid directs the B field towards the internal slug and completes the magnetic circuit. With parallel wires, if you look at a slice of one of the conductors, the B field goes out in all directions. Making the conductor ferromagntic results in the same B field pattern and does not increase the force. If the ferromagnetic material was in the gap instead, that would concentrate the magnetic field lines in the direction of the other conductor and would be almost equivalent to moving the conductors closer together. The high reluctance of the air gap dominates the magnetic circuit. In an electrical analog, it would be like putting a gold connector in the circuit, but leaving a high resistance air gap instead of touching the low resistance conductors together.

This is also related to CAN's surprise that removing the magnetic material from the core did not change the inductance much.

High L inductors do not just have a ferromagnetic core down the center because the magnetic field lines still need to pass through air from one end to the other. Instead,they either wrap the coils around a ring (toroid), or there is a ferromagnetic core plus a ferromagnetic housing to complete the magnetic circuit. If you think of the inductor as an electromagnet, you need a low reluctance material between the North and South poles to provide a complete low-reluctance path through and around the coil to prevent the magnetic field lines from passing through air. The solid slug in magicsound's inductor has the same problem because the ends are open. If you want high inductance, wind the coil around a stack of big steel washers or a big steel nut.

Quote from magicsound

Looks good Robert. The BA6020 has both terminations at one end (thus outside of the electrolyte). But the "insulating resin coating" would have to tolerate 0.1 molar HCl at up to 100C. Worth an inquiry. The adhesive used to attach the cathode would also need to tolerate immersion, so maybe a clamp to the cathode would be better for that.

One other issue to think about: if the electrodes are ferromagnetic, the field resulting from current pulses around the loop formed by a short might pull them together. Too much flexibility in the mounting could then cause-latch up. Or maybe mechanical oscillation. Perhaps the dynamic stiffness of the piezo would be enhanced by low reverse impedance at the driver circuit. In audio practice this is known as the amplifier damping factor.

Regarding insulation, I do not know what would stand up to the acid. There may be other coatings that could be added if necessary. Another option would be to use shrink-wrap like the type used to insulate wires. It would be easy to drop some into your acid and see what happens.

Regarding the magnetic field from the current, I think that will be negligible.

At 10 A and 1 mm spacing, the attraction between wires is just .02 N/m. See:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g…base/magnetic/wirfor.html

Converting to grams-force, that is about 2g/m or .002g/mm. The parallel portion of the electrode might be about 50 mm, so that comes to just .1 g-force. Even if the undriven actuator is not very stiff, just the weight would be enough to resist this force.

For those unable to open the link to my piezo bender drawing, I edited the post to insert a pasted graphic.

See #282: Unconventional electrolysis

See the attached drawing (or screenshot below): lenr-forum.com/attachment/7264/

This shows my idea for using a piezo bimorph bender to make and break the connections. The drawing assumes this bender and piezo driver that can be ordered from an Austrailan company. Prices are very reasonable, but shipping might take a while. Parts may be available sooner from a local distributor.

BA6020 2.6 mm, 150V or ±37V, 0.5 N 60 mm x 20 mm, $AU 61

https://www.piezodrive.com/actuators/

PDu100b Piezo Driver

https://www.piezodrive.com/mod…b-miniature-piezo-driver/

Another driver that would work is this one from local distributors:

EVAL MOD DRV2700 HV500

https://www.digikey.com/produc…V500/296-42576-ND/5452009

In operation, the gap would be set, then the whole thing inverted into the electrolyte. The signal generator might first be set to something simple like a 20 Hz sine wave. More complex waveforms could later be used. For instance it could be set to make rapid oscillations with a DC offset to keep the electrodes close, followed by a longer negatve pulse to clear shorts. The actuator is probably good for a few hundred Hz depending on the mass of the moving electrode and flexibility of the wire to it.

Quote from magicsound

I appreciate your input on mechanical stimulation to initiate the arc. It's not an easy engineering job and I encourage you to propose a practical design to try.

I will work on a drawing of my thoughts on this.

To make a specific proposal, it would be helpful to know what material would be best to use for supporting and connecting hardware. Do you or CAN have any thoughts on this? What is the material of the electrodes? It looks like steel L-brackets. I assume you want to avoid stainless steel electrodes because electrolysis will produce hexavalent chromium which is extremely toxic and carcinogenic.

https://antique-engines.com/stainless-steel-electrodes.htm

It seems like the experiment is supposed to have these states:

S0: Plating = high resistance, low current.

S1: Shorted = low resistance, high current. Inductor is charging up.

S2: Discharge = high resistance, high current, high voltage, . Indcuctor is discharged by sparking.

Sequence: S0 -> S1 -> S2 -> S0 ...

It seems like you are sometimes stuck in S1 (shorted with 10A current too low to break short), and sometimes in S0 (plating with microshorts cleared by a few amps of plating current).

Getting it to oscillate seems difficult.

The S1 problem may be solved by a higher current supply. The S0 problem might need mechanical or electronic mods to force it through the 3 states at a desired rate. An electrical change could prevent medium currents. It should plate slowly until shorted, then have a big current surge. It should not stay at a medium current where tiny shorts are self-clearing.

It seems like you would need a sustained short in order to dump energy into the inductor during the current pulse. Then when the high current clears the short, the inductor delivers the high voltage to cause the sparking.

If your initial electrode spacing is slightly too large, there would never be enough plating to short out the electrode. There might also be problems if the electrodes are not flat and parallel enough. If a tiny bump shorts out first, a small current would clear that short too quickly and not allow enough energy to be dumped into the inductor.

Also Magicsound's inductor may have much higher L than CANs because the bolt he is using appears to be a much better core. The higher the inductance, the longer it takes for current ti build up, meaning that the short has to stay longer in order to charge up the inductor.

This is why I suggested an actuator to force the electrodes together to start the reaction.

On the video feed, I cannot quite make out the scales on the scope. Can you turn up the brightness of the scope or send us the channel settings and how the probes are connected?

If these experiments look promising, you may want to make it more reliable and reproducible by adding an actuator to allow you to control movement of one of the electrodes relative to the other one. That way you could decide when to start it by using the actuator to move them together. The actuator could also pull them apart to clear shorts. You could also run an AC current to the actuator and experiment with different frequencies of operation.

Many different kinds of actuators could be used, including solenoids, piezo stacks and voicecoil actuators. The type that seems best is a piezo bimorph bender similar to this:

Piezo Ceramic Bimorph 40x10x0.5mm 2 KHz

https://www.steminc.com/PZT/en…-bimorph-40x10x05mm-2-khz

$19.80 /2 Pcs Set

Dimensions: 40 x 10 x 0.5 mm

Resonant frequency fr: 2 KHz±5%

Maximum Deflection δ: 2mm (min)

Maximum Input Voltage: 100 Vpp

You would just attach one of the electrodes to then end of the bender with the neutral (nonactuated) position at a point near the nominal position of your fixed-position tests. A positive voltage to the bender would short out the electrodes and a negative voltage would clear out shorts. Fixed frequency oscillations could be driven by a simple center-tapped transformer. With a little electronics, or a piezo driver like this, you could drive custom waveforms from a signal generator or processor.

http://www.mmech.com/piezodrive-amplifiers/pdu100b

This more recent paper from McKubre addresses some of the questions IO is asking:

LENR – What We must Do to Complete Martin Fleischmann’s Undertaking, Michael C.H. McKubre, Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science 26 (2018)

http://www.iscmns.org/CMNS/JCMNS-Vol26.pdf#page=6

In this paper, McKubre points out the need for a device that can demonstrate the feasibility of LENR as a useful power source. Without such a demo, even if you accept the existence of LENR, you may conclude that it has no more practical importance than something like muon-catalyzed fusion. A demonstration is needed to show the critical difference between a scientific curiosity and something that industry and governments need to pay attention to

Of all of the experiments he cites, he focuses on one with high enough power and figure-of-merit (aka COP) to allow closing the loop by generating the input power from the output power to make it self-sustaining:

"Representing Energetics Technologies (Incorporated and operating in Israel as ETI but headquartered in New Jersey) Arik

El-Boher presented at ICCF10 [15] what was then and remains today one of the most exciting discoveries in Pd–D heat studies. Energetics struck a super-wave modulated glow discharge between thoriated tungsten and a thin palladium coating (on stainless steel) in sub-atmospheric D2. The experiment produced boiling water with a power gain of 3.88 and an energy gain of 6.72 (because of conspicuous “heat after death”) over a periodof 10 h."

This sounds exciting, but the Energetics paper was from 2003 and could not be replicated:

"Because the temperature of the plasma was quite high (although unmeasured) one can easily conceive

of a demonstration prototype but this experiment has not been replicated to my knowledge despite the best

efforts of El-Boher, Energetics and SKINR"

I think this is the crux of the problem that IO is talking about. The field is filled with papers describing promising ideas that then vanish or stall at levels that prevent them from becoming practical or even demonstrable power sources. This is much different than most other technologies that make steady progress and get better over time. Maybe Jed is right that the reality of LENR is proven, but IO is right that the reality of useful LENR is far from proven.

When analyzing a patent portfolio, I put them into three categories:

A. Family jewels. These are patents that another company needs to enter your market. They broadly cover a company's main technology.

B. Implementation specific patents. These would cover any direct copies of a device, but could be designed around with different, non-infringing implementations.

C. Unimplemented ideas. These cover variations or other ideas thought up by the inventors, but are unlikely to be good enough to be used in products or are so narrow as to be of little value.

In LENR, there are no issued A patents yet. The patent office will not issue broad patents of over unity devices until there is an accepted theory or widely replicated results. There could be some B and C patents, but only if they are crafted in such a way that there is patentable content that does not depend on over unity claims. For instance, someone may have a unique way of layering the fuel and extracting the heat. If written carefully, it may apply to non-LENR heat sources but still cover an important, useful technique for building a LENR device.

Even in other technology areas, there are few A patents. The idea of just writing a patent then licensing if for tons of money seldom happens. The A patents that do exist are usually because the inventor perfected something that works and then built a company around the idea while writing patents to cover the proven ideas. It is possible that some of the BLP or Brillouin patent applications will eventually issue as A patents, but they are still not likely to be so broad as to preclude other techniques that will evolve as more is learned.

This IH patent application is about how to test for over unity and does not cover a particular way to attain over unity. It is likely a C patent, but filing it may still be a good strategy for IH. The big problem with LENR is credibility, and patents like this, if issued, will give them some degree of credibility with potential investors and partners. Even though it does not directly cover overunity devices, they can use it to show they have some original ideas and expertise as judged by the USPTO. It is hard for investors to spend the time and money required to fully understand the value of untested ideas. Issued patents show that a company has ideas that are original in the judgment of an impartial patent examiner.

This is not a Dec 27-2018 patent, is just an application. It is the national phase filing of an earlier international (PCT) application.

It will not become a patent unless they can convince the examiner that it is new, useful and non-obvious. "Useful" is the hard part. The examiner needs to be convinced it actually works.

https://www.techexplorist.com/…ost-identical-gold/19740/

"A team of scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has recently turned cheap copper into a material that is almost identical to gold. The material is expected to reduce the use of rare, expensive metals in factories. Scientists developed this material by shooting a copper target with a jet of hot, electrically charged argon gas. The fast-moving ionized particles blasted copper atoms off the target. ...

this new material can’t be used to make fake gold. The reality- its density will remain the same as like as ordinary copper ...

This new method can inject a large amount of energy into copper atoms and made the electrons more dense and stable. Moreover, it can resist high temperatures, oxidization, and erosion.

The study is published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances on Saturday."

(making electrons more dense and stable ???)

Just came across a very low cost data logger/scope you may want to take a look at:

https://www.piccircuit.com/sho…cu3-pic18f2553_12bit_adc_

They have versions packaged as a USB stick or as Arduino form factor, with 10 or 12 bit resolution, with costs ranging from $19 to $40. They have free data logger, scope and PWM software you can download.

Here is a short review of it:

http://embedded-lab.com/blog/p…12-usbstick-and-smartdaq/

Regarding the current probe, you could use a smaller resistor as long as your ADC can can resolve the lowest current you need to measure. Another option would be a hall-effect current sensor. I have used the Allegro current sensors for high current AC line measurements. They have an internal shunt that you pass the current through and then they deliver a nice 0-5V output in proportion to the current. For instance, here is a 50A hall effect current sensor:

https://www.digikey.com/produc…F-T/620-1541-5-ND/4473980

For a scope replacement, the sound card will probably not work for you because sound cards are AC coupled (like the series capacitor in the first link you sent). You need to measure voltages between transitions, not repetitive waveforms.

Bandwidth would also probably be an issue because you need to see transition edges which would require higher frequency measurements.

Quote from oystla

Again, Fleischmann where very well avare of the role of vold fraction and ITS implication on the voltage, as referred to in my prevoius posts.

Also, the void fraction you explain above would we in the path of electricity between the anode and the cathode.

The highest void fraction would be in the shortest distance between the anode and cathode, and Gradually reduced void fraction further away to achieve same resistance over the longer path of electricity.

And If the cathode exhibited film Boiling, your analysis would be wrong, but the consequence the same, increased voltage, as stated by Fleischmann at several occations.

The void fraction may therefore be much lower elsewhere in the cell, i.e higher water content in the cell, than your analysis shows, i.e. 50% filled cell at the start of the last 10 minutes is still possible.

Display More

It is true that the calculation assumes that bubbles between anode and cathode have about the same distribution as elsewhere. But the cell construction has the anode surrounding the cathode, and the bubbles need to rise up to fill most of the area above the cathode to exit. It is clearly just an estimate, but seems unlikely to be wrong by factors of 2 or more which would be needed to make the paper's conclusion correct.

Regarding film boiling, I do not see how that could increase the resistance by that much. Do you have a reference?

Also remember that the high voltage and resistance starts a full day before the final 10 minute period. If it started to boil then, the liquid would boil off long before the final 10 minutes.

And if the cell is boiling furiously, the bubbles are displacing liquid and you can no longer use the liquid levels (even if correctly measured in the videos) to determine the liquid volume. The paper completely ignores this factor.

Quote from Ascoli65

There is probably a typo. It should be .882 W in Figure 6C.

I would suggest to avoid guessing the trend of cell voltage on the basis of the info contained on page 16 of the F&P paper (1). Unless you know the real trend from the original data logging, it's impossible to know what happened in the last 10 minutes. Moreover, we don't even know the cell to which the data of page 16 refer.

This is an interesting approach for a first rough estimation, but we should consider that the Maxwell relationship was derived for a homogeneous distribution of bubbles, which is not the case of the F&P cells, especially during the last minutes of the boil-off. Actually, during this period of time, the videos show a lower thin transparent (i.e. mostly liquid) layer whose thickness progressively reduces to zero. Therefore, the voltage increase may also depend from a strong increase in current density, as shown in Figure 1.3 of the Lumanauw thesis.

You are right that the .862 was a typo. Using .882 W, that calculation would change V0 from 4.31 to 4.41.

Also, you are correct that we have no way to know the exact voltage at the beginning of the final 10 minute period. In the graphs of Fig 6, the width of the vertical voltage line represents about 50 minutes according to my measurements - it is certainly more than 10 minutes. However, in all four graphs you can clearly see that it hits 50V before the last jog of the vertical line to the right, meaning that the last 10 minute period must start at 50V or more. Using 50 is still conservative.

I did find a math error though. We cannot use 1.54V for V0 because of the way I assumed the same current for the initial and final conductance. Instead, we need to use the minimum voltage that could drive .5A. In Fig 6C, that is at power 3.355W or 6.71V. Rerunning the numbers, that changes the result to being off by a factor of 2.7 instead of 10. The COP comes to 1.83 and the results are not so clear. There are still several other errors, like using 10 min in the calculation while the text says it took 11 min, the overestimate of enthalpy out due to remaining liquid after boil off, the uncertainty in the voltages, and the distribution of the bubbles. But it still seems pretty clear that the paper calculation of excess energy is way off due to omitting any consideration of void fraction.

As you say, this is still just a rough estimate due to the fact that the bubbles will not be evenly distributed throughout the remaining liquid.

This looks like a pretty painful way to do data acquisition.

You could use a scope (even a cheap USB scope) to simultaneously capture voltage and current. Your average current is low enough that you could just put in a current shunt like a 0.1 ohm resistor to measure 10A per volt.

Many of the USB scopes can capture over long periods to a file. Or you could get a low-cost data acquisition system . The Labjack U3-LV has up to 16 12-bit analog channels and is only about $100. Several on this list have LabJack experience and could give you pointers.

Returning to a scientific detailed of the Fleischmann 1992 paper.

In an earlier post, I talked about how the voltage graph by itself should be able to show that the cell could not have been half full at the beginning of the final 10 or 11 minute boil off. The enthalpy calculation depends on the cell being half full then. My earlier comments were either not clear or not understood.

It seemed like someone should have already figured out the relationship between voltage and electrolyte conduction. Once I found the right search term, I came across several relevant references. The key term is void fraction which is a ratio of the bubble volume to liquid volume. As the void fraction increases, the conductance from anode to cathode decreases (in other words, the resistance increases). The 1992 paper omits the void fraction in the enthalpy calculation which is a serious error as shown below. This term of art should have been well known to a leading electrochemist like Fleischmann.

In the 1992 paper, the long steady increase in voltage at constant current is due to increasing bubble volume. By using a constant current source, bubbles increase resistance which increases voltage which in turn creates more bubbles in a positive feedback loop until eventual thermal runaway.

This paper talks about the relationship between void fraction and conductance:

L. Sigrist, O. Dossenbach, On the conductivity and void fraction of gas dispersions in electrolyte solutions, JOURNAL OF APPLIED ELECTROCHEMISTRY 10 (1980).

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00726089

Unfortunately, this paper is behind a paywall, but below I have copied a key figure and part of the text.

(The basis of this work was done by James Clerk Maxwell of Maxwell’s Equations fame. This work is from A Treatise on Electricity And Magnetism – Volume 1 – 1873.)

Much of the same material is covered in the Lumanauw MS Thesis which you can freely access. This reference also covers the details of bubble formation and combination and talks about gas holdup that causes layers of “froth.” (See p. 92)

D. Lumanauw, Hydrogen bubble characterization in alkaline water electrolysis, 2000

https://tspace.library.utoront…/1807/14070/1/MQ54129.pdf

Equation (5) of Sigrist says that conductivity drops as the void fraction approachs 1. Conductivity K is the inverse of resistance R, thus the left side of the equation K/K0 equals R0/R. At constant current, R0 = V0/Iconst and R = V/Iconst. Dividing these, the left side of the equation = V0/V which I will call Vratio. Then:

Vratio = (1-e)/(1+e/2) where e is the void fraction.

Solving for e,

e = (1-Vratio)/(1+Vratio/2) (Equation B1)

where e is the void fraction and Vratio = V0/V

The Fleischmann graph in Fig. 8C shows the lowest power as .862 W at 200 ma which would make V0 = 4.31 V. But the bubbling should really start where the electrolysis begins which would make V0=1.54V

The enthalpy calculation starts when the cell is supposed to be half empty. During the last 10 minutes, the average power is 37.5W at .5A which makes the average voltage 75V. We can assume conservatively that the voltage ramps linearly during that time from 50V to the final value of 100V.

Using 1.54V for V0, if the start of the last half-cell boil off is 50V, then at that time Vratio = 1.54/50 = .031. Using equation (B1), the void fraction at that time is .95 (only 5% liquid).

(Using 4.31V for V0, the void fraction is .88 or 12% liquid.)

This means that the enthalpy calculation should have been based on 5% full instead of 50% full and the calculation is off by about a factor of 10.
This would reduce the COP from the paper's claim of 4.85 to a COP of .44 (if both the conduction and vaporization are reduced due to the void fraction), or a COP of .71 (if only the vaporization is affected).

This calculation shows that the entire energy from the boil off could have come from the runaway input power supplied during the last 10 minutes.

A couple thoughts:

The current measurements could be way off depending on the sampling frequency of the current meter. Many are designed for 60 Hz sine waves and cannot accurately record current spikes or non-sinusoidal waveforms. Also, the resistance rises sharply at high temperature if you are using copper wire. You need to integrate simultaneous V and I samples at high frequency if you want to get accurate power measurements.

Regarding the noise, I came across an interesting paper with many measurements of acoustic standing waves during electrolysis. See:

Kenneth E.Tempelmeyer, Electrolysis Bubble Noise in Small-Scale Tests of a Seawater MHD Thruster, 1990.

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a227548.pdf