Posts by esskumar

It is the beginning of a propaganda war. First you try to kill it by saying it does not work at all. Now that that is about to be proven false, you say it is dangerous!
But this should not be taken lightly. These guys specialize in messing up the minds of ordinary people.

The reason extraordinary degree of proof is necessary for a revolutionary departure from established science is that any application of that "modified" science is going to consume a lot of resource - human, financial, organizational. People can design a spacecraft based experiment on Mars only because the physics underlying the design tools has been verified to an extraordinary level of precision and reliability. The only way LENR is going to advance is by its protagonists trying their hardest to DISPROVE its existence.
Recently there was a lot of flurry in physics circles when there was experimental data showing that neutrinos were traveling faster than light: the pulse of neutrinos created along with gamma rays reached the detector 60 nanoseconds before the gammas. There were people ready to jump up and down and say here at last is evidence that faster than light travel is possible. But the scientific team put their entire data and error calculation on arXiv and requested scientific community to point out where there might be a fallacy. It was discovered that a fiber optic cable connector (one out of several hundred) was slightly loose. After it was tightened, the discrepancy vanished.
There may be umpteen artifacts that may produce effects that mimic excess heat. The challenge of the LENR protagonist is to show that there are no conceivable artifacts. Let me remind everybody: The failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the motion of the hypothetical ether led to suggestions of many artifacts. They went to the extent of mounting their experiment on a concrete support floating on mercury - an extreme step for today's scientists. That is the kind of dedication the LENR supporters should have to address all suggested artifacts.

I do not think rectifying the high frequency discharge is necessary. This is because the dust grains will always be negatively charged regardless of HOW you start the discharge: whether using unipolar pulses or a high frequency high voltage discharge. In fact, the most popular ways of studying dusty plasmas use a capacitively coupled radio frequency oscillator. The dust grains get negatively charged for a very fundamental reason: electron mass is many orders of magnitude less than ion mass so that electron thermal flux on the surface of any solid body exposed to it is always much more than ion flux. In a very short while, the grain becomes electron rich and negatively charged so that newcomer electrons are repelled. As a side effect, I suggest, protons would be attracted to the grain and will collide against the solid surface with enough kinetic energy to get implanted a few atomic layers below the surface. This should be non-equilibrium loading of hydrogen in nickel, which might create physical environments not previously encountered.

Eric, the local electric field enhancement by micro-structure of the surface is a very well studied phenomenon and comprises an essential element of the physics underlying Relativistic Electron Beam Generators. Spontaneous electric charge on the dust particles floating in a plasma is also a very well studied phenomenon and forms the core of the discipline of dusty plasmas. What is not studied is the effect of the PLASMA on the properties of the DUST. This may be the secret behind Rossi's idea.

"Could you elaborate how this I going to work. Is the high field supposed to accelerate charged particles like an accelerator? "

When you apply a high voltage across two electrodes and the space between them is filled with a powder, you can imagine the powder grains and the space between them as a capacitive voltage divider. So each inter-grain space (filled with gas) is like a two electrodes separated by gaseous insulator. The local electric field in this gap is enhanced over the average electric field in the system because of sharp points (small radius of curvature 'nanoscale' features??). A stray electron from the ambient radiation background (or thermally excited free electron) would be accelerated in the local electric field and would lose energy by collisions. If the energy gained between consecutive collisions is greater than the ionization potential of the gas, the accelerated electron will precipitate an avalanche breakdown of the gas. Or, the electron may hit a dust grain and cause secondary electron to be ejected. Thus the entire space containing the powder can get immersed in an ionized medium (a gaseous plasma). The dust particles will act as electrically floating bodies being bombarded by both ions and electrons. Over time, the average energy of electrons and ions may become comparable (if not exactly equal). Then the thermal flux of electrons bombarding the dust particle will be much larger than the thermal flux of ions in view of their much smaller mass and consequent much higher velocity. So each dust particle will get negatively charged. This surrounds each grain with a high electric field region called a Langmuir sheath. The electric field in the sheath decelerates electrons and accelerates ions until their resultant flux becomes exactly equal. The hydrogen ions so accelerated will have sufficient energy to get implanted within the surface layer of the Ni powder grain creating a hydrogen loading ratio much larger than what is possible in thermodynamic equilibrium at moderate pressures and temperatures.

Alan, it should not be difficult to have a repetitive unipolar high voltage pulse generator with 100 kHz rep rate. Up to 30-40 kV, a heavy duty automobile ignition coil with an electronic timer circuit can do the job. For 100 kV, there may be off the shelf pulse generators but I do not think 100 kV is required to form a dust plasma.

Further to what Walker has posted, electron beams of few million electron volts traveling in atmospheric air are routinely used for cross-linking of polymers in a range of industries: one of them is high voltage cables. The cross-linked polymer is difficult to extrude. So the cable is extruded into a finished form and then passed in front of the electron accelerator in atmospheric air. The beam is accelerated in vacuum, and taken out into air through a rectangular slit covered with titanium foil.

The Rossi "secret" makes very good sense. He mentions a DC source: it just means that the voltage has a fixed polarity. It could simply be a 100 kV repetitive unipolar pulse generator. A powder of Ni is a dielectric: if you insert multimeter probes into the powder, you will see an open circuit. This dielectric can have a high voltage breakdown: during the initial phase of the breakdown, electrons would indeed be accelerated to 100 keV. By repeated impact ionization, the powder dielectric can become electrically conducting in the form of a unique state of matter not so far investigated: a "dust plasma" not to be confused with a "dusty plasma" which is a sub-discipline of plasma physics being actively studied. In a dusty plasma, the plasma medium is modified by macroscopic particles floating in it and the emphasis is on what the dust does to the plasma. In a "dust plasma", the gaseous medium between the dust particles contains electrons, ions and neutrals, being maintained by a repetitive high voltage breakdown. The emphasis would be on the effect of the plasma on the dust particles. For example, it is known that the dust particles would acquire a negative charge because of the difference in velocity between electrons and ions at nearly equal average energy. This would accelerate positive hydrogen ions (protons) to the floating potential which would therefore get deeply embedded within the surface layer of the dust grain. This would be similar to electrolytic loading of metal lattices with hydrogen. This possibly triggers the Rossi effect. This may be what the patent is claiming. By the way, does the premature leakage of the patent destroy its novelty? After all, this has come into public domain.

I am very much a newbie but getting ready to start Parkhomov type experiment. To my unprepared mind, a simple question is puzzling: the amount of fuel is about 1 gm, it should really be contained in a very small volume. Why then does Parkhomov and every body who is trying to replicate Rossi's Hot cat using a ceramic tube that is orders of magnitude larger in internal volume than the volume of 1 gm of Ni powder? Is it because a wire-wound heater has to have certain dimensions in order to accommodate sufficient length of heater wire to have a certain minimum amount of resistance?