Posts by Ascoli65

Quote from oystla

The paper you have analysed from 1992 does not seem to correspond to the official one released in mainstream science Journal in 1993.

The official mainstream Science paper with the same title was revised and published in March 1993 in Physics Letters A, and includes the most important discoveries of F&P : Heat bursts that occurs during electrolysis;

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/l…n-Pons-PLA-Simplicity.pdf

ref:

"we have already drawn attention to the fact that, after prolonged polarisation, one can sometimes observe regions in which there is an increase of temperature accompanied by a decrease of cell potential with time for Pd-based cathodes such as that shown in fig. 1."

...

" One can therefore pose the question: “How can it be that the temperature of the cell contents increases whereas the enthalpy input decreases with time. 9” Our answer to this dilemma naturally has been: “There is a source of enthalpy in the cells whose strength increases with time.” At a more quantitative level one sees that the magnitudes of these sources are such that explanations in terms of chemical changes must be excluded [ 7 1."

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What I have analyzed are the available data of the Four-cell Boil-off test carried out in April-May 1992, which were reported by F&P in two main documents: the paper presented at ICCF3 in October 1992 (1) and the article published on Physics Letters A (PLA) in May 1993 (2). The two documents are almost identical.

In the PLA version, a couple of figures were removed and, considering that the article was addressed to a less specialized public, an introduction was added containing the two excerpts you quoted.

These excerpts doesn't address the results of the experiment which were presented in both the 1992 paper and 1993 article. The subject of these last documents is well described at the beginning of their identical abstract:

As you can see, the subject of the ICCF3 paper and the PLA article (the last article published by F&P on a main stream scientific journal) IS the "specific excess enthalpy generation (> 1kWcm-3) at temperatures close to (or at) the boiling point", ie what I proposed to call a HXH claim.

Moreover, as said in the above abstract, this HXH is "based on measuring the times required to boil the cells to dryness". And, finally, this measurement was done "by using time-lapse video recordings".

Going backward: the video recordings, those that you want to ignore, are the experimental evidences for establishing the boil-to-dry times, on which the excess heat is calculated in the major paper of F&P, who are the founders of CF.

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Anyhow: I haven't found any major errors in these papers yet, so any specific main critical points you would like to point to? which is actually inside the paper and not in some old video tapes not part of the paper?

I already pointed it out many times. The major error is in the boil-to-dry time of the last half of the liquid water content that F&P used at page 16 of their ICCF3 paper to calculate the presumed excess heat. This time (600 s = 10 min) is strongly underestimated, even if referred to the vaporization of only half of water content. In fact, before this "grand finale", the cells were boiling for hours and their water content was already gone, leaving foam - nothing but foam - at its place. The boil-to-dry time, used by F&P in their calculation, was nothing else than the settling-down time of the foam during and after the boiling away of the last few grams of water.

No wonder that you don't see this error. It's big as an elephant in a room. This is probably the reason why it has not been seen in almost 30 years, even by people that have deeply scrutinized and heavily criticized the work of F&P. Nobody would have thought that the room was hosting such an improbable animal. Moreover, the old householders have camouflaged it quite effectively and dimmed the lights. And now, the new householders tries in every way to move the visitors to the other rooms.

If you really want to see the error, you should pay enough attention. Get the videos - which, as explained before, are an integral part of the paper - look at them very carefully - possibly a couple dozen times, as Robert Horst did (3) - and you will see the elephant in the room.

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(2) http://coldfusioncommunity.net…n-Pons-PLA-Simplicity.pdf

(3) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from oystla

Where did you get the idea that the 1992 paper is the most important paper by F&P ?

Please ask Rothwell (1): "McKubre pointed out that Fleischmann was a master of theory and mathematics, […] The title of his major paper says it all: “From simplicity via complications back to simplicity.”"

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Well let me inform you: it is Absolutely not!

The most important F&P paper is their detailed 58-page seminal paper "Calorimetry of the Palladium-Deuterium-Heavy Water System," published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry In 1990.

Who did established that?

Anyway, should I conclude that you have finally realized that the ICCF3 paper and PLA article titled “From simplicity via complications back to simplicity” are no longer defensible?

(1) http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanlettersfroa.pdf

Quote from kirkshanahan

I understand your attempt to divvy up the curve but I would perhaps do it based on a little different reasoning. Similar breakpoints but for different reasons.

OK, I like the idea of the breakpoints. This facilitate the definition of the three XH regimes (LXH, HXH and HAD). Let's go to first identify these breakpoints, starting form the last to happen.

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The HAD region is clear, no current forms the breakpoint.

Yes, the interruption of the current, and therefore of the input power, is the obvious definition of the HAD breakpoint as imagined by F&P. But in reality the current didn't stop and the HAD claimed by F&P is an artifact derived from inadequate measurements of the electric parameters, their logging and the plotting of the experimental data.

Consider that the HAD has been claimed only for Cell 2, not for the other 3 cells. Its real breakpoint occurred when, for some reason to better investigate, the measuring and logging systems of the electric parameters were no longer adequate to provide the correct value of the input power.

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The division between LXH and HXH I would do based on whether or not any of the cathode is exposed to the gas phase.

It happened much earlier. HXH is defined on the basis of the rate of vaporization of water, so HXH breakpoint must occur when boiling onsets, ie several hours before the cathode starts to be exposed. In this case the artifact consists in having assumed that half of the water vaporized in the last 10 minutes, instead of the almost one hour it took in reality.

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During 'normal operations', ie with the electrodes fully covered by electrolyte, the excess heat results seem to fit the curve shape of the P/(P*-P) term. IOW, the apparent excess heat would seem to explainable fully as an artifact of the F&P model, in particular the enthalpy term for the electrolysis gases. See the attached plot to observe this. I used the vapor pressure of water from

I didn't check yet, but this explanation of LXH seems reasonable to me, provided that the 'normal operation' is defined by the correct breakpoint between the LXH and HXH regimes, ie at the onset of boiling. In fact, at temperatures close to the boiling point the P/(P*-P) term is no more adequate to represent the heat lost by evaporation, because the denominator goes towards zero and the inaccuracies skyrockets. This choice would be in agreement with your curve, which only includes points very far from the boiling temperature.

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However, if you want to talk about LXH and HXH, I can adapt.

Thank you. I appreciate. I would also add the HAD. But for the moment I would propose to start from the HXH, whose claim was the precise and only scope of the ICCF3 paper, as specified in its abstract (1):

"We present here one aspect of our recent research on the calorimetry of the Pd/D2O system which has been concerned with high rates of specific excess enthalpy generation (> 1kWcm-3) at temperatures close to (or at) the boiling point of the electrolyte solution."

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

Quote from oystla

You keep bringing on "blue arrows" as if related to the paper.

I see no blue arrows in the paper, or in the video linked in the paper.

So let's forget about blue arrows and move on.

You can forget the videos, if you don't like them. This doesn't change the situation. As I already explained to you (*), the blue arrows in the "Four-cell boil-off" video (1) are intimately related to the F&P paper (2). I'll show you again the evidence of this strict relationship:

This explanatory video has been very probably shown during the Pons presentation at ICCF3 in Nagoya, on Friday 24 October 1992, as explained in a previous comment (**). As shown in the table at the end of that comment, the biggest problem in the data used by F&P in calculating the extraordinary excess heat - during the "grand finale" at the end of the boiling period - is the origin of the 10-11 minutes that they used in the calculation at page 16 of their paper (2).

Could you please explain me where this crucial datum come from?

(*) FP's experiments discussion

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAIIZU6Oj8

(2) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(**) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from kirkshanahan

The latter heat, near boiling, however was claimed to be a 'Heat-After-Death' event, which is distinguished from excess heat during the run by the fact that current flow was stopped.

Not exactly. Considering also the supposed HAD, the number of XH (excess heat) types are in total 3, each resulting from a different source of error. As explained in (1), HXH (Higher eXcess Heat) - relative to boil-off phase - and HAD (Heat After Death) are two different types of XH claimed by F&P, and are caused by errors that are still different from those originating the LXH (Lower eXcess Heat) reported during the run of the test.

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But the bottom line was that the method was never used again. In fact Pons later reported on an 'improved' calorimeter system where "Foam rise in the calorimeter at the boiling temperature has been minimized." (http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RouletteTresultsofi.pdf) I don't know why they would do that if it was a better method to detect excess heat.

Closed cell calorimetry didn't lead to results comparable to those claimed in the 1992 paper for the boil-off experiment using open cells. Knowing how these HXH results were obtained allows us to easily understand the reasons.
After 1992, the CF/LENR field continued to exploit those mythic results to date.

Anyway, I would like to know your opinion on the distinction in 3 XH types proposed in (1), and if you agree to keep the debates about this different XH types as separate as possible, in order to simplify the analysis of each of them.

(1) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from oystla

OK, Try to invert the relationship one more time and see if you get another number

Thanks. It was a typo. I got this result: 9.09 x 10^-10. Writing it on the post, I used the exponent -9 to conform it to the format used in the F&P paper (1), but I forgot to modify the first part.

For sure, it's not the only error I made, and I appreciate any correction to my posts and jpegs. It could happen if you are debating in a web forum, especially if much of your attention is spent to do it in a foreign language.

It's much less expected, instead, that in a paper that should have revolutionized the science, written by two world class scientists, the same coefficient appears with and without the exponential part:

0.7280 × 10^-9WK^-4 (at page 4)

0.7264WK^-4 (at page 5)

0.728 × 10^-9WK^-4 (at page 7)

0.747WK^-4 (at page 7)

0.892 × 10^-9WK^-4 (at page 11)

Moreover, the first two numbers are also reported in two consecutive pages (121 and 122) of the peer-reviewed (sic) article on Physics Letter A (2), published 8 months after the ICCF3 paper!

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And then you may look for the K value in the paper.....and find it....as I did

I didn't find 0.909 x 10^-9 WK^-4. I found instead 0.892 x 10^-9 WK^-4. Well not a big difference, less than 2%, but at this point I wonder why F&P reported some k values with 3 or even 4 significant figures. Just to enchant the most naïve readers?

And look at what F&P said about this k value (bold added):

"As for the case of dissolution of H+ in Pd, this phenomenon decays with the diffusional relaxation time so that (k'_R)₁₁ increases towards the true value for this cell, 0.892 × 10^-9WK^-4. However, (k'_R)₁₁ never reaches this final value because a second exothermic process develops namely, the generation of excess enthalpy in the lattice."

Is this kind of accuracy, which you were referring to, when you wrote:

Quote from oystla

Firstly Fleischmann did a thorough investigation in identifying the heat transfer coefficient to the surroundings. So his calculation of the losses the last 10 minutes is most likely very accurate at reported 6700 joules.

Quote from oystla

The K'r number is Ascolis calculation, not mine or Fleischmanns.

So Yes, Ascoli is in error by a factor of 10

Yes, I was in error, it was a typo. But as I showed you, I'm still 8 (1 to 9) orders of magnitude behind F&P!

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(2) http://coldfusioncommunity.net…n-Pons-PLA-Simplicity.pdf

Quote from oystla

"The only experimenter, that is considered to have been successful in replicating the F&P boil-off test was Lonchampt."

Really? I mean - REALLY?

This is what Biberian wrote in 2016 [bold added]:

Quote

Until 2009 there was 152 Peer-Reviewed papers with successful Excess Heat Events.

After 2009 there number has grown further.

See if you can a find a "few" more than Lonchampt below

I looked for the F&P article "Calorimetry of the Pd-D2O system: from simplicity via complications to simplicity" and I found it. It is at the 38th position of the alpha-chronologic list, but it should have been at the first position in a list based on the importance with respect to the CF/LENR field. Anyway, this peer-reviewed article (1) - published by the prestigious Physics Letters A – contains a lot of errors. To mention one, the first formula in the "Calculation" section at page 128 - the most important section in the article – is dimensionally wrong. This error could have been detected even by a secondary school student, who knows nothing about electrochemistry. Just to say that the peer-reviewed status of an article doesn't guarantee its correctness, not even the formal one.

As for the other 151 peer reviewed articles, and the others issued after 2009, before taking them into consideration, let's first conclude the examination of the most important work in the CF/LENR history. It's very likely, IMO, that the further examinations will be restricted to the much shorter list of the articles that don't mention F&P at all.

Quote

“We have been skeptical about this [discovery] for five years” - M. Fleischmann 23.March 1989

IMO, they should have kept their skepticism even after the first 5 years.

(1) http://coldfusioncommunity.net…n-Pons-PLA-Simplicity.pdf

Quote from oystla

Foam vs water the last 10 minutes:

First of all, can you tell me where the 10 minutes come from?

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If, as Ascoli believes, the tube was mostly foam filled and not 50% water at the start of the last 10 minutes in the F&P paper, i.e. No excess heat caused by LENR, it would mean that the actual water level would have to be very low;

Yes, very very low, less than 1 cm, judging on the basis of the first blue arrow, which - in the boil-off phase of each cell - appears in the explanatory "Four-cell boil-off" video (1).

Quote

Firstly Fleischmann did a thorough investigation in identifying the heat transfer coefficient to the surroundings. So his calculation of the losses the last 10 minutes is most likely very accurate at reported 6700 joules.

The accuracy in the calculation of the heat transfer coefficient, reported in the first part of F&P paper (2), is only apparent. You can't calculate a single value for a coefficient that should be applied to the entire temperature range, especially if this coefficient is multiplied by the fourth power of the temperature. It is a total nonsense.

Anyway, inverting the relationship shown on page 16, we obtain k'_R=9.09 x 10^-9 WK^-4. Can you find this specific value in the plethora of k values reported in the previous 15 pages?

Quote

We also know the electrical input energy the last 10 minutes at 22500 joules is accurate at +/- 0,22%

That accuracy was calculated by you, making some confusion with the numerical accuracy. Actually, you can't assess the accuracy of the electrical input energy because you don't know all the values involved in the first equation of page 16. In fact the value of E_cell is not specified.

Well, inverting the relationship, assuming that the current remains constant at 0.5 A and adding the time length of 600 s - that F&P forgot to include in the formula - we get a value of E_cell=76.54 V (=75 + 1.54). But the F&P paper (2) don't say where this value comes from, so we can't know its accuracy and, consequently, establish the accuracy of the electrical input energy.

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So, if there where no excess heat generated at all, the water volume at the beginning of the last 10 minutes would be 7,6 grams, or less than 10% of the original 5 mole test tube volume.

No wonder, as already said, the initial water level was even lower. All the rest was already foam.

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So the suggestion that F&P in the hundreds of tests during the 80's and 90's read off wrong water level, like 50% when the actual level was less than 10% is Absolutely nonsens.

It could be that the real absolute nonsense is that F&P have been trusted by so many people for nearly 30 years. But, this is an argument worth to be discussed only when will be reached a larger agreement on what happened in the four-cell experiment. Let us stick on the 1992 paper (2) for the moment.

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F&P also had many "live" cells that did not produce excess heat in addition to control cells, which means they where able to see the differences when the video tapes where fresh.

Let me give you an advice. Base your opinion on your eyes, rather than on F&P's says.

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And again, several third party confirmation leads to the easy conclusion that nature tell us something that requires further investigation.

The only experimenter, that is considered to have been successful in replicating the F&P boil-off test was Lonchampt. As already said (3), his paper deserves a more thorough examination, but the original has the priority.

Quote

"I feel like the visitor looking at the giraffe and concluding, "there ain't no such animal." " - Edward Teller on Cold Fusion (1992)

Well, don't behave like that visitor. Look more carefully at the video and you will conclude that, at the beginning of its boil-off phase, each cell was full of foam.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAIIZU6Oj8

(2) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(3) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from Alan Smith

....Where the lithium-bearing droplets condensed and dried, leaving the lithium deuteroxide inside the evaporation tube as a thin film.

I don't think so. Leaving aside that I don't understand how a liquid droplet can condense and dry, the images (pictures and drawings) show that the vent pipes of the F&P's open cells were short and straight, so it's very likely that the droplets entrained in the electrolyses gas flowing through these vents may have escaped the cell.

Quote from RobertBryant

Premeditated and postmeditated boiloff

The boil-off was more simply expected.

Since 1985, F&P have had the opportunity to run hundreds of similar run, so they knew what would have happened. In 2009, Krivit reported this experimental confidence in this way (1): "By 1993, Fleischmann and Pons had developed such control of their experiments, particularly the cathode material, that they had the confidence and ability to set up a row of four cells side by side and initiate anomalous-heat reactions on all four at will."

So, they started the experiment on April 11, 1992, knowing that in a few weeks each one of the 4 cell under testing would have reached the boil-off phase, as they had experienced in the past also in their blank tests, as documented by Hansen in 1991 (2).

The reaching of boiling condition does not require any triggering with heat pulses. The cause of this behavior of the F&P open cells was explained by Morrison in 1993:

What you have underlined in red is very important for other reasons. First, because F&P stated that they have accurately examined the videotape recording. Second, because they included in their paper to ICCF3 (3) the video stills of the boiling phase of Cells 1 and 4, but, strangely, not the video still of Cell 2, the only one that was claimed to have undergone a HAD event.

(1) http://newenergytimes.com/v2/l…ivit-S-ANewLookAtLENR.pdf

(2) http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/HansenWNreporttoth.pdf

(3) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

Quote from Alan Smith

Goddam water, just keeps evaporating when it shouldn't.

It was made to believe that it was still evaporating when it couldn't anymore, because it had already evaporated.

Goddam videos.

Quote from JedRothwell

Along similar lines, many crackpot opponents of cold fusion present highly detailed theories without first establishing whether the theories have any basis in reality -- which they do not. An impossible answer that violates the laws of thermodynamics is not improved by calculating it to 4 extra digits, or by writing 50 extra pages of idiotic blather. One paragraph -- heck, one assertion -- is all you need to see that Shanahan and Morrison are crackpots. Fleischmann showed that Morrison was wrong with "a discrepancy of a factor of ~1700." It would not be more persuasive if he said the factor is ~1692.3076. (1.1 MJ/650 J) The tilde makes that assertion ridiculous.

Being the expansion coefficient of water at atmospheric boiling condition equal to 1672, "a discrepancy of a factor of ~1700" adequately represents the error due to the misrepresentation of a settling-down and vanishing layer of foam as it were liquid water, which was evaporating at an incredibly high rate of vaporization, thanks to an alleged and extraordinary nuclear phenomenon.

The ridicule is not in a tilde, but in a tide of foam.

Quote from Robert Horst

Why did they throw away 8 orders of magnitude and estimate input power to the nearest 100J? Did they round up or down?

The round up of the input energy was more than adequate, especially when compared to all the other sloppiness, unexplained input data and arbitrary assumptions contained in the calculation on page 16 of the F&P paper presented at ICCF3 in October 1992 (1). Consider that this page containes the most important result of that paper and in the whole CF history, that is the 3700 W/cm³ of specific enthalpy which is at the basis of the definition of FPE.

As already said by THH, the first line of that page is not even dimensionally correct. Well, the authors forgot to include the multiplication by time, it can happen, but the most incredible thing is that the same omission is reported at page 128 in the peer reviewed (sic) article published by Physical Letters A in May 1993 (2), many months after the ICCF3 paper!

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Similarly, they show boil off time as exactly 600 sec, not 599 or 601. But earlier in the paper, they say it was 11 minutes (660 sec). Why did they choose to round that down and make the excess power look higher instead of more conservative?

Yes, exactly. The calculation sheet reports an excess heat of 144.5 W (notice the decimal digit!), which derives from a 10% error, due to a not conservative round up in the choice of the boil off time.

But, even worse, the 11 minutes themselves didn't fit with the times written on the explanatory "Four-cell boil-off" video (3). Please, take a look at the table at the end of this previous comment (4), could you answer the beneath question?

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Is this really the best paper written to support excess heat with electrolysis?

Yes, it still is, at least for the most informed people of the CF/LENR field:

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(2) http://coldfusioncommunity.net…n-Pons-PLA-Simplicity.pdf

(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAIIZU6Oj8

(4) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from Wyttenbach

You are the one that claims that the best experts in the world did not have your limited understanding...

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean, and I don't remember where I made that claim. Could you, please, explain and provide a reference?

Btw, let me ask you. What is your opinion on the "IMRA time lapse" video whose link was posted by Robert Horst (1)?

Is it liquid or foam that, for example, fills Cell 1 at 0:53 of the video (21:23:58 on the screen) and thereafter?

(1) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from oystla

The critisism and misunderstandings of Wilson and Morrison were cleared in the 90's, ...
The Shanahan critisism where also answerred, ...

The scope of my last jpeg was not to rehash the debates between the most famous critics of the field and the CF/LENR protagonists, it just was to make order in the subject of these controversies about the F&P claims on the excess heat.

It seems to me that you have no major objection on the proposed classification in 3 types.

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LXH - low excess heat: everything is relative, and LXH is Not low excess in itself, but compared to the end event it may be considered low.

I agree on this point. Even a real 20% excess heat would have been an epochal scientific discovery, and could have had also some practical uses. Of course, this also means that the claim of an inexistent 20% excess heat is an extraordinary mistake if made by world class scientists.

Anyway , from now on, let us agree that the acronym LXH and HXH stand for Lower-level eXcess Heat and Higher-level eXcess Heat with respect to the range of the XH claims made by F&P.

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Anyhow as Fleischmann explained, he did calculate and consider recombination and other possible artifacts.

Remember again that in the hundreds of cells over the years he never saw control cells with this behaviour, which they should If your explanation where true.

This is a good point. We must always remember how many hundreds of tests they ran over many years before the 1992 experiment, in order to understand the meaning of their work.

Anyway, since the 4 cell boil-off test provides the only public visual evidence of the behavior of their cells under testing, I would suggest to postpone the discussion on what F&P really saw in their early tests after a thorough examination of this 1992 boil off experiment.

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HXH : you claim to see water levels on some low quality pictures, which I do not. So you are entitled to your claims but not your " facts."

If you are referring to the explanatory "Four-cell boil-off" video (2), I too can't see the water level in correspondence of the blue arrows, because the pointed out cells are shown when there is only foam in there, so it's impossible to see any water level.

Btw, you haven't yet answered my previous question (1): what do you see in the cells, foam or liquid?

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HAD - heat after death. Voltage as you refer to is not important, It's input power and energy that matters, which requires voltage And current. As seen from the graph the current goes to 0 when water is boiled off, which also means input energy goes to zero.

I partially agree. No doubt the power depends from both voltage and current, but the current goes to zero only AFTER the boil-off and the video (2) show that the boil-off lasted until nearly the end of the presumed HAD period.

In fact the last arrow and the corresponding time (3:46) for Cell 2 - the sole cell for which a HAD event was reported - appears at 1m47s of the video time, nearly at the end of the relative video clip. The length of this video clip is represented by the wider vertical pink bar on the Figure 8 shown in a previous jpeg (3). You can see that this wider pink bar is in correspondence with the maximum of the temperature curve, almost at the end of the 3 hours period of which was highlighted the persistence at high temperature after the presumed drying-off of the cell. So, the video shows that the boil off happened at the end ot the 3 hours period reported by F&P as the HAD event. Therefore the current and the electric power were flowing until almost the end of that period. In conclusion, there was no HAD event at all.

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Heat after death must therefore have some cause to be explained at zero input electrical energy, like Continued LENR event.

Yes, I agree that it is really important to find out the cause of the F&P claim of this presumed HAD event, but I would leave an extraordinary phenomenon such as LENR as last hypothesis. There is a lot of much more mundane causes that can explain that claim, on the basis of what has been shown by F&P, and also on what has been hided.

(1) FP's experiments discussion

(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAIIZU6Oj8

(3) FP's experiments discussion

Types of claimed XHs and possible causes of error

In the present discussion about the possible errors contained in the F&P paper to ICCF3 (1), it often happens that different sources of error are mixed up. To avoid the resulting misunderstandings, it's useful first to identified the different types of excess heat claimed by F&P, which are affected by completely different source of errors.

Although F&P, and the researchers who endorsed their claims, postulated the existence of a single nuclear effect, the FPE (*), which should have been the cause of any reported anomalous manifestation (excess heat (XH) or nuclear radiation), a more careful analysis of the HX anomalies suggests that they derive from different artifacts depending on the mathematical models used to analyze the experimental data, or even from a wrong determination of these data. The mathematical models and the experimental data used by F&P and their replicators are not uniform, but varies in accordance to the experimental regime, as better clarified by Lonchampt in paragraph 3.3 of his ICCF6 paper (2). Therefore, in analyzing these source of errors, it is essential to distinguish the various regimes or phases which onset during the F&P open cell tests and the type of excess heat claimed in each of them.

The following jpeg should clarify the situation:

By putting together the (a) and (b) regimes identified by Lonchampt (for which the same relation is used, neglecting only one term for the first regime), the following 3 types of excess heat can be identified:

1) LXH - the Low-level eXcess Heat (about 1 W) that F&P claimed to occur during the entire run of their test until the cell temperature remains quite far from the boiling point. This LXH derives from the complicated mathematical model used by F&P to determine a single heat transfer coefficient k (see, for instance, equation [4] in (1)) which should take into account all heat losses at different temperatures and times. Consequently, this approach results in calibration problems due to neglecting or miscalculation of various possible side effects, such as partial recombination, droplet entrainment, etc., as has been pointed out by various authors long ago, for example Wilson (3), Morrison (4) and Shanahan (5);

2) HXH – the High-level eXcess Heat (hundreds of W) that F&P have claimed to happen when the cell is allowed to boil-off to dryness. This HXH derives from a totally different path than LXH. Mathematics is also different. In (1), the HXH math is applied in the "CALCULATION" section on page 16, in which the equations are different from those shown in the section in which F&P explained their "Method of Data Evaluation" used to calculate the LXH. However, in the HXH case the error is not in the equations, but in the input data, which are completely out of the reality. F&P assumed that half of the initial water (i.e. 2.5 moles = 45 cm3) vaporized in just 10 minutes (600 s), but in reality the water evaporated in a much longer period, lasting several hours. F&P supported their wrong assumption by showing in their videos the rapid decrease of the foam at the end of the boiling period of each cell, assuming that it was rapidly evaporating water (6). Even if not explicitly stated, F&P have hinted that this HXH was produced in all the 4 cells of the experiment described in (1);

3) HAD – Heat After Dead events have been claimed by F&P to have occurred many times, but it has been documented only for one cell in the experiment described in paper (1). More specifically, they claimed that it happened after the conclusion of the boil-off phase of Cell 2 because, as shown in Figure 8, the cell temperature remained at the boiling point for about 3 hours after the presumed opening of the circuit due to the complete dryness of the cell. It's not clear which error led to this wrong claim, but, as already shown (7), a useful hint comes from the observation that during the 3 hours of presumed HAD the electric circuit was not open at all, as indicated by the voltage, which remained above zero for all that period.

(*) It should be taken into account that the real FPE is considered to be associated with power densities greater than 1000 W/cm³, which have been claimed by F&P only in the 4 cell experiment, as said in the preface of the ICCF3 paper (1): "We present here one aspect of our recent research on the calorimetry of the Pd/D2O system which has been concerned with high rates of specific excess enthalpy generation (> 1kWcm^-3) at temperatures close to (or at) the boiling point of the electrolyte solution." This power density was calculated in 3700 W/cm³ on page 16, so it refers to the HXH only.

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(2) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LonchamptGreproducti.pdf

(3) http://newenergytimes.com/v2/l…AnalysisOfExperiments.pdf

(4) http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf

(5) http://coldfusioncommunity.net…4/SRNL-STI-2012-00678.pdf

(6) FP's experiments discussion

(7) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from kirkshanahan

Note they report .07 to .17W excess heat.

I fear, that we addressing two different sources of alleged excess heats: the low level XP who was claimed to happen even at low temperature - and that can be easily explained by one or more sources of CCS - and a much higher XP, that F&P claimed to have obtained only when their cell was brought to boil-off conditions and that can be explained with the foam issue.

I'm dealing, for the moment, only with this second HL-XP because it is the specific subject of the F&P paper presented at ICCF3 (1): "We present here one aspect of our recent research on the calorimetry of the Pd/D2O system which has been concerned with high rates of specific excess enthalpy generation (> 1kWcm-3) at temperatures close to (or at) the boiling point of the electrolyte solution."

So I think that also RobertBryant was meaning this last larger source of excess heat, when he asked about the errors in the Lonchampt's paper.

Both the LL and HL excess heats have played important roles in the development of the F&P affair, however I fear that mixing up them does not help in understanding which were the real causes of their respective miscalculations.

So, if you agree, I would propose to deal with one of them at a time, or at least to indicate clearly which XP we are talking about, the LL-XP or the HL-XP.

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

Quote from Wyttenbach

May be you could tell us about your independence...

I admit my strong dependence on what I see and, looking at the video linked by Robert Horst (1), I see foam, a lot of foam, where and when F&P had instead reported seeing liquid water rapidly boiling away thanks to their nuclear FPE.

And you? What do you see in that video, liquid or foam?

(1) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from RobertBryant

What error have you, Ascoli, estimated for Lonchampt's paper and with what confidence interval?

My estimate is that Lonchampt's errors coincide with the excess heats he reported in his paper (1). No confidence interval. This is my preliminary evaluation, based on the assumption that if someone claims to have reproduced a wrong result, his result is also wrong.

As for the merit of the possible specific cause of these errors, it may not be so easy to find because his paper lacks many information and we don't have any video, as in the case of F&P's experiment. It is also inaccurate in many details. Just to cite one, in the first row of Table 2, which reports the experimental data of his best test, the sum of the "Enthalpy losses" and of the "Available Enthalpy" doesn't match the "Enthalpy Input" as it happens for all the other tests in the table.

However, as Lonchampt is considered the only one to have successfully replicated the F&P boil-off experiment (the most important in the CF hystory), its paper deserves a more thorough examination. But for the moment the priority goes to the original, the F&P boil-off experiment that he claimed to have successfully replicated.

So let me ask you. Have you watched the "IMRA time lapse" video whose link was provided by Robert Horst (2)? What is your opinion? Is it liquid or foam that, for example, fills Cell 1 at 21:23 and thereafter?

(1) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LonchamptGreproducti.pdf

(2) FP's experiments discussion

Quote from oystla

I believe your green and Blue lines are incorrect.

I'm sure they are not fully correct. I also put a couple of question points along them. But they are representative of what happened in the F&P cells during the boil-off experiments.

What really matters is the blue line. Its trend is easily recognizable until the moment of image I. The position of the level on image J has been roughly estimated observing the level drop during the 47 minutes between images K and I and considering the 89 minutes (almost the double and at a higher power level) to get to image J. This level also complies with the estimate made in (1).

Quote

As I said before, the video have degraded from 1992 until it was digitized some 17 years later.

Until now, we have identified 4 public videos. You don't know when each of them was digitized and when it started to circulate within the LENR community (btw, this is one of the most interesting thing to know).

The longest and more detailed video is the one posted on YouTube by Rothwell in 2015, 23 years after the test. But Rothwell also wrote that (2): "This video was provided to LENR-CANR.org by Prof. Martin Fleischmann, IMRA Europe". Fleischmann retired from IMRA in 1996, so it is likely that Rothwell received that video in 1996, or even earlier, already digitized "in a gigantic file" (3).

Quote

It is not possible to see the actual water levels from pictures.

If you mean from the images on my jpeg (4), you are right. For this reason I have specified for each image its exact position in the video from which it was obtained. Watching the videos allow to more easily locate the position of the interface between the different layers.

Quote

Flweischmann had an easier job when the video was fresh.

Sure. He and Pons also had the possibility to observe the buildup of the foam in real time just by looking directly at the cells. But this only reduces the chances that what is reported in their ICCF3 paper derives from an involuntary mistake.

In their paper (5), F&P wrote: "As it is possible to repeatedly reverse and run forward the video recordings at any stage of operation, it also becomes possible to make reasonably accurate estimates of the cell contents. We have chosen to time the evaporation/boiling of the last half of the D2O in cells of this type and this allows us to make particularly simple thermal balances for the operation in the region of the boiling point."

Robert Horst, a serious, competent and active member of the LENR community, has recently admitted (6): "However, I looked at the video a couple dozen times and am inclined to agree that the arrows are foam levels, not liquid levels."

The videos are now "out of the bag". It's time for everyone to take their own position: foam or liquid?

(1) FP's experiments discussion

(2) https://www.mail-archive.com/v…eskimo.com/msg102718.html

(3) https://www.mail-archive.com/v…eskimo.com/msg102627.html

(4) FP's experiments discussion

(5) http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

(6) FP's experiments discussion