Posts by Ecco

Quote from axil

The gas must be a dielectric, oxygen or chlorine may work well and so will water. That's it.

I must first of all stress that by all means I'm not a chemistry expert, but aren't H₂ along with the O₂, Cl₂ and H₂O you're mentioning here, molecules forming covalent bonds? Did you list them on purpose?
This made me recall that earlier in this thread I quoted Holmlid's patent stating that Rydberg Matter in the case of hydrogen can formed when hydrogen atoms are prevented from re-forming covalent bonds, and that Holmlid is doing this catalytically. Are you suggesting that the same (EDIT: or a similar process) could work for other gases having similar properties (like also N₂)?

@Eric Walker: are you suggesting something along the lines of what axil seems to be implying here?

@AlainCo, @Eric Walker: I don't think the recently granted Fluid Heater patent is obfuscated (EDIT: or at least, not blatantly so), but it does not seem complete. Many details are vague, missing and/or implied. Patent attorney David French also wasn't really impressed for the same reason, although he appreciated it is "to the point" compared to many other LENR patents.

http://coldfusionnow.org/analy…13-issued-25aug15-part-1/
http://coldfusionnow.org/analy…13-issued-25aug15-part-2/

@Eric Walker: no Nickel, that's quite possible given circumstantial evidence that Rossi may have not always used it, but no hydrogen? I would somewhat agree if you mean "not directly".

If on the other hand you're referring to Rydberg Matter Potassium as also observed by Holmlid, or other possible forms of LENR or LENR-like effects not involving hydrogen (ponderomotive forces??), To be frank I have no idea if they have actually been used by Rossi. I'd like to keep this thread about LENR involving hydrogen/hydrogen compounds and catalysts so that it won't completely become open-ended.

And now for something slightly different.

In the opening post I observed how Rossi's 2009 TOF-SIMS analyses didn't seem to contain Nickel at all. Weird? Perhaps not much if we think of Leif Holmlid's experiments. However there's something else that perhaps not many people are aware of: according to some of the claims in Rossi's early E-Cat patents, Nickel isn't actually required.

Have a look at this translation of the claims of Rossi's italian 2008 patent, posted on New Energy Times:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/docs/Rossi-ECat-Italian-Patent App-Claims-English.pdf

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[...]

12. Apparatus according to one or more of the previous claims, characterized by the fact that the nickel utilized for the nuclear reaction can be of any isotope

13. Apparatus according to one or more of the previous claims, characterized by the fact that the nickel utilized for the nuclear reaction can be substituted with other elements, in particular copper.

His 2009 world patent application also stated something similar, before many claims were amended later on:
https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2009125444&recNum=1&tab=PCTClaims&maxRec=&office=&prevFilter=&sortOption=&queryString=

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[...]

12. An apparatus according to claim 5, characterized in that said nickel powder is a nickel isotope powder.

13. An apparatus according to claim 5, characterized in that said nickel powder is replaceable by a copper powder.

The international patent is less general here, but I think it's clear that Nickel was not originally thought to be necessary.
This is consistent with the analyses shown in the opening post.

Quote from Ecco

[...] The bottom line is that Rossi probably didn't use nickel at all in his first E-Cat experiments.

Quote from Eric Walker

If Rossi has intentionally obfuscated a critical component of the device in the patent, he has not provided an "enabling patent," i.e., one that a practitioner skilled in the art would be able to replicate. If true that brings a number of interesting implications with it. If his intention was bona fide IP protection, he will have made to the best of his knowledge an enabling patent.

I think Rossi has most certainly been intentionally obfuscating things up since he started working on the E-Cat, however this would have to be demonstrated.

If you recall, he used to say both on JONP and his first patent application that undisclosed catalysts (claim 8.) could be used (and were used) for the exothermic reaction. Later on he dropped that claim (check out the documentation in patent application 12/736,193 on the USPTO public pair) and stopped writing about them on his blog.

Now it turns out that nickel itself is apparently the catalyst. Perhaps it might be true in some circumstances (nickel dehydrogenation catalysts do exist too after all, and properly prepared ones, instead of just plain nickel powder, might turn out useful for more quickly observing LENR effects), but if some sort of alkali-promoted iron oxide catalyst is still needed for abundant excess heat, by "accidentally" using stainless steel parts in his patents he might now be able to claim that he thought Nickel alone (+ Li, LiAlH4) was sufficient, while something else is actually occurring (albeit probably only with very much luck - and that why I'm saying that in practice he'd likely use his secret catalyst in his experiments).

Granted, this is mostly conjecture, and I don't really know how things would actually work out in this case if it were true. It's also mostly built up on the initial premise of this thread where the Rossi reaction is actually similar to Leif Holmlid's, regardless of its true nature, in that it needs certain catalysts for facile molecular hydrogen dissociation.

@Longview: several people (me included) did suggest him to perform some sort of calorimetry to confirm the effect he thought he was seeing, but he always quite aggressively refused (together with some of his friends who also built similar devices), ranting that others were actually trying to make him pass as a sort of idiot and put his ideas down. You can find several videos on the subject on Youtube by him and others, titled "H-Cat" (not "Hot-Cat").

He might have not had much more than a catalytic burner, but in light of Erwin Lalik's results in the paper presented in this thread, chances are that there could have been more to it.

By the way, the video above is a repost of this (2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqIBdhtvZ9o

JC hasn't posted much on the subject in a year or so.
His channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/jdcproducts/videos

@axil: now that it's clearer (from Industrial Heat's patent) that the inner walls of the inner tube in the Lugano experiment might have been made of a different material (eg stainless steel) than ceramic, a corrosive metal such as lithium might have been more easily used. However, while Lithium would probably be a great material for transferring heat at high temperature, I'm not sure it would be ideal for providing hydrogen to the active sites upon condensation. I figured that the working fluid would be one containing hydrogen and capable of more or less easily dissociating at the surface of this iron-oxide catalyst supposedly used in these reactor tubes.

* * *

Back to the topic of this thread. Speaking of stainless steel, I have more thoughts on the matter.

All patents and written information published so far by Rossi have always omitted that it's quite likely he's used a typical iron oxide petrochemical catalyst all along for, at the very least, efficiently dissociating molecular hydrogen into atomic hydrogen (and speculatively for creating hydrogen Rydberg Matter and ultra-dense hydrogen).

However, it's also true that the chemical composition of these catalysts can look like that of stainless steel (with Fe, Cr, Mn content).

I'm wondering if people who somehow managed to replicate the Lugano experiment (assuming no errors or something worse) serendipitously created such catalyst in-situ by using a stainless steel fuel container modified with heat, stress, embrittlement and contaminants from the initial atmosphere and possibly with Li from the LiAlH4 as an alkali promoter instead of potassium or sodium. High temperature steam traces especially, which are expected to be created from hydrogen and oxygen from the starting atmosphere, should be a quite powerful oxidizing and corroding agent to steel, together with hydrogen.

If this is the case, then when Rossi patents mention SS containers being used for the reaction chamber (like AISI 304, 310, and 316 as in [lexicon]Industrial Heat[/lexicon] patents) this might be actually needed, in a way, for including the "secret catalyst" without letting others know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_steel_grades

Since Rossi obviously knows what the "secret" catalyst is - assuming it's actually the one I'm referring about, although at this point I'm relatively convinced about it - he wouldn't need in practice to create it in-situ from stainless steel, as he could simply include it in the fuel. The catalyst could then pass as SS contamination in the ash analysis.

Past ash fuel analysis in Rossi's case have always shown particle content consistent in several ways to these iron oxide catalysts. Of course, if these were fundamental in making his devices work, then the idea of Nickel alone as a starting powder might have acted as a smoke screen to conceal the true nature of the reaction.

@me356: some ideas. Thanks to a suggestion on ECW I realized that the 2014 [lexicon]Industrial Heat[/lexicon] patent includes some more information on the internal reaction chamber used in the Lugano experiments than previously assumed. Some claims are interesting on that regard, especially claims 0069-0077. For example:

https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2015127263&recNum=1&maxRec=&office=&prevFilter=&sortOption=&queryString=&tab=PCTDescription

http://i.imgur.com/n2x0SEl.jpg

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[...] Although the reaction chamber 12 is illustrated as a cylinder, the reaction chamber may have other shapes in other embodiments which may have cross-section which may be a regular polygon and/or any closed geometric shape.

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[...] The reaction chamber 12 may be formed of any suitable thermally conductive material, such as ceramic and/or a metal. [...] The reaction chamber 12 may be formed and/or may otherwise include a metal, such as stainless steel. For example, stainless steel 306, 310, and 316 are each suitable.

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[...] When stainless steel or other electrically conductive material is included, resistance wires 16 may be separated from the electrically conductive material to prevent arcing or other forms of electrical interference. For example, a ceramic material may be included between the electrically conductive material of the chamber 12 and resistance wires 16.

Quote

[...] the reaction chamber 12 may have one or more guides, such as provided by a grooved surface, in order to receive the wires 16 therein. Positioning the wires 16 on a grooved surface may reduce a risk of or prevent the wires 16 from touching or arcing, thus reducing failures.

From this I infer that the internal tube in the Lugano experiment could potentially have been made of stainless steel, have had a non-cylindrical cross section (imagine like a Torx socket) and been electrically insulated from the heating wires using a ceramic layer. Using alumina or a similar ceramic for the internal tube doesn't sound necessary after all. However it looks as if electrically insulating the powder might be.

@Lou Pagnucco: in principle it might be, since Church's experiments too have been about recombining hydrogen and oxygen over a supported Pd (and also Pt in his case) catalyst - although in Church's case it's from an automotive catalytic converter. However, Lalik's paper was worded in a way as to not imply that there really is anomalous heat production (ie: excess heat), but rather anomalous heat evolution (excess rate of heating).

Several gas-loaded LENR experiments employ micro/nanostructured catalysts, and my opinion is that they could be the key for understanding these phenomena. Erwin Lalik's comment earlier in this thread seems to point that compact hydrogen species could be at play, and was one of the main reasons why some time ago I started considering more seriously Rydberg matter Hydrogen (as per Leif Holmlid's research) as a possible explanation for the effects observed so far in the LENR field, and possibly also by Rossi.

@axil: with your discussion about ridges in the internal ceramic tube, are you suggesting that the Lugano experiment might have been internally shaped like a sort of heat pipe?

In principle this could ensure a constant flux of hydrogen on the active sites, needed to observe the effect (ie to form ultra-dense hydrogen according to Leif Holmlid).

EDIT (for better wording):
In real life applications a working fluid (usually water or alcohol) able to exist in both gaseous and liquid state is used in these pipes. How could it work in this case?
That is, unless you meant something else.

EDIT2: again sorry for the number of edits :dead:
Mostly cosmetic changes, though.

Quote from ogfusionist

What could be simpler? Load an Al2O3 cylinder with ultrafine nickelous oxide suspended on alumina fiberfrax and flow hydrogen gas through the cylinder. Fusion initiates at 830 C.

I meant that it wouldn't be simple to run this in a modified piston engine. The modified piston engine part especially.

However, In a regular reactor tube with external hydrogen feed like you're often suggesting, it would be a simple experiment.

@axil: I'm really not convinced about the silica aerogel hypothesis, although I think it's possible that some of the reactor material was also removed in the process, and thus that it contained Si, possibly SiO2.

Anyway, I tried performing the same data extraction process for the ash grain analyses in the Lugano report (from page 52) and indeed, as @pjs highlighted, it looks like alkali metals in the ash might have evaporated on the inner tube walls, from where the grains were scraped off (at least according to the Rossi-Cook paper). Both grains appear to show a fairly different composition and are relatively abundant in alkali metal content, and I'm not sure what to make of these results. Hopefully others will try checking out for themselves and correct any error here or improve the data interpretation below. The takeaway message is that is that alkali metals and metal oxides can indeed easily evaporate over time with heat due to their low vapor pressure.

By the way, the fuel ash grain with Li actually didn't contain much Li at all. From a.m.u 20 onward, counts are supposed to be 100x larger than depicted. Or have I got it backwards and counts depicted are actually already 100x larger than normal?

I used this tool to digitize the graphs: http://arohatgi.info/WebPlotDigitizer/app/

Quote from pjs

Potassium and sodium oxides and also other alkali metal oxides have significant vapor pressure already below 1000 °C.
They would have vaporized from hot areas of the reaction chamber and condensed in cooler areas of the reaction chamber.

High temperature vaporization behavior of oxides. I. Alkali metal binary oxides
nist.gov/data/PDFfiles/jpcrd241.pdf

The powder would have lost alkali metal oxides during long heating time.

I was already aware that alkali metals have a low high vapor pressure, especially lithium (since it's been often used by experimenters in the past year or so and much information about it has been found), but I didn't know that even alkali metal oxides (and compounds with other elements?) would also easily evaporate with a high enough temperature (and low enough pressure).

If this is actually the case, then if I were Rossi I might have wanted, after the experiment ended, to pull the hardest vacuum I could and heat the powder to make most alkali in the "ash" evaporate before handing it out for third party analysis, for added obfuscation. This might have not been possible for the Lugano experiment, but it could have for that of the ash powder of Edström's 2013 analyses.

EDIT:

Quote from axil

In the Lugano test, there is a silica aerofoam inside the tube that kept the big fuel particles near the front of the tube and de facto preselected the big ash particles for ash assay analysis. All the small particles were trapped in the aerofoam and the testers only had access to the big ash particles. Note: There was silica particle in the ash that did not go in as fuel.

The Rossi-Cook theory paper here implies that the ash was scraped off the internal walls of the reactor tube near the center of the charge:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1504/1504.01261.pdf

Quote

[...]Nickel was found to be encrusted on the internal surface of the reactor, from which a 2 mg sample of “ash” was obtained near to the center of the charge.

Besides, there was a small amount of Si in the fuel too if you check the fuel analyses carefully.

EDIT2: anyway, I'm not totally convinced myself as there seems to be way too much Si in the ash compared other elements, and I am going to look into it more in detail later.
It's not clear how the encrusted powder was removed from the inner walls, but I guess it's possible that part of the inner tube material was also removed in the process. In this case, the Si could come be from it, indicating that it was made of a different material than alumina (which is to be expected).

EDIT3: way too many edits...

I just recalled that Curt Edström's E-Cat fuel analysis performed in 2013 also might be showing that a typical iron-oxide dehydrogenation catalyst could have been used. When these analyses got released, people did notice unusual amounts of Fe in the fuel. But what about now, under a different light?

In this case, the "new" powder probably only contained Nickel powder, while the "used" powder Nickel powder+catalyst and copper contamination.

http://www.lenr-forum.com/foru…achment/11-Askanalys-pdf/

For example, Fig. 6, showing one of the larger grains in the used powder, could be consistent in content with Fe₂O₃, Cr₂O₃, C (on the surface, although this might be interference from the carbon tape used for the analysis) being present. Chromium oxide is a typical structural metal oxide used in these catalysts as a support and anti-sintering agent (notably, it's also used in the Shell 105 styrene/dehydrogenation catalyst also used by Leif Holmlid).

Fig.15: it looks like silicon dioxide (SiO2)
Fig.16: Fe2O3, Cr2O3, C, and some Ni "contamination"

As far as I know lighter elements cannot be properly detected with EDS analysis, so it's possible that Na was also present in some amount or disguised on purpose by the addition of other elements. Or could this be only wishful thinking?

EDIT: after documenting myself a bit on the process (and referring to the tables on pages 18-21) this doesn't seem likely however. K or Na would have been probably detected if present. Li, on the other hand definitely would have not, as also as noted in the report.

Robert Greenyer suggested on E-Cat World:

Quote

With the 100um Fe2O3 fuel Particle 3 in the Lugano report, free O2 in the air and Al from the LiAlH4, could it be that a dehydrogenation catalyst was being made in-situ in the Lugano reactor by careful decomposition/heat treatment of the reactants and atmosphere?

Following Greenyer's suggestion that a catalyst similar to those used by Holmlid could have possibly been synthesized in-situ in the Lugano reactor, I tried looking more into it.

The "iron-rich" fuel particle in the Rossi/Lugano report on page 51 is interesting. It looks like its composition from the TOF-SIMS analysis is similar to that of a typical potassium/iron-oxide catalyst.

I tried digitizing the graph using the same technique I used for that of the analyses in the opening post of this thread. Perhaps others can come up with a better interpretation, but for the most part it should be something along these lines. Ni-Li (and perhaps other minor elements with the exception of C) were probably contamination from the rest of the powder:

Even more interestingly, particle 3 (d) from EDS analysis on page 44, with Fe, O, Si, Cr, Mn, and some C (in decreasing order of abundance) also seems quite consistent with some sort of typical dehydrogenation catalyst being used. Potassium is missing here, but it's abundant in the TOF-SIMS analysis of the iron-rich particle (together with sodium, which also was in Rossi's 2009 fuel analyses posted on New Energy Times).

So, assuming it's the same particle type, I would guess that there was some sort of ground Fischer-Tropsch/styrene/dehydrogenation catalyst in the initial powder in the Lugano reactor, and that it wasn't made in-situ.

So is the "secret catalyst" indeed a Fischer-Tropsch (or similar) catalyst?

(As a side note, this also gives more support to the initial hypothesis that the reaction in the Lugano experiment indeed occurred within/from the powder as expected, and not elsewhere - reactor walls or even the heating wire - as I and others speculated).

@axil: since reactions within the dense hydrogen rydberg matter generated have been observed to also spontaneously occur (albeit at a slower rate) it would probably not take much else to eventually see something, provided that enough of it is produced (which could have possibly not been the case in that report of failed replication in the latest SRI meeting).

However if one already managed to adapt a piston engine to a LENR experiment, I guess it would be trivial to also add high voltage spark ignition, especially if it's an automotive combustion engine that we're speaking of.

@axil: I won't comment your entire post as it would take ages and derail the thread, but if the point in LENR experiments is causing as much hydrogen as possible to desorb in large amounts from the active material and doing it continuously (ie having a flowing stream of hydrogen on it), then a possible way for achieving this could be doing it by mechanical means. A modified piston engine (for example from an air compressor) with the active powder or pellet located on the cylinder head could therefore work.

I guess this would make the experiment closer to a Papp engine.

@ogfusionist: and this would likely also work for the Al₂O₃-NiO supported nanocatalyst you've often suggested employing.
It wouldn't be a very simple experiment however.

Replications urged.

It looks like a big challenge will be preparing the potassium/iron oxide catalysts properly. They're not really "plug and play": even in the petrochemical processes they're commonly employed for, they need a dedicated "activation" process in order to function properly.

Jones Beene reported on vortex-l that it might possibly take weeks for enough ultra-dense deuterium to accumulate in order for any effect to show. I find this strange as there was no mention of this in any of the papers from Holmlid et al I've read. Could it be a worst-case scenario in case of improper catalyst preparation and no active hydrogen flux through it? (ie: as in typical LENR experiments where the active material is simply heated in a hydrogen atmosphere) Confirmation needed ASAP.

FYI, back in July a paper on an experiment yielding excess heat using a palladium wire wound on an alumina cylinder was published. You might find it helpful if you have academic access to it. See:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S0036024415080348
http://www.e-catworld.com/2015…um-system/comment-page-1/

@me356: my primary point is that it should be possible to cause pressure changes like you've done with lithium in the past weeks. Given the possibility that excess heat might be occurring, it could be worth trying that manually a few times before shutting down the experiment. In addition of potentially being able to trigger something at the Ni wire, LENR effects might occur in the Ti powder itself, especially during abrupt temperature changes or even thermal shocks (although reports of LENR from such experiments with Ti powder usually indicated deuterium being used).

As a side note, according to the phase diagram I previously posted much of the hydrogen is likely still alloyed with the Ti powder. It looks like complete hydrogen release only occurs above 1000°C.

@me356: assuming there is excess heat and that it's being produced by hydrogen flowing through active sites on the nickel wire and at the interface between the wire and the internal alumina tube, what about cycling power between the current power level and a lower one at a rate like 1 minute low power (or no power) / 4 minutes high power? There should also be a limited hydrogen gettering action by the titanium powder at this temperature and pressure range.