Posts by user1815

If pores are needed there are ways to obtain them. I would suggest to also try looking on the so-called "pore forming agents" which are often used in heterogeneous catalyst production. Alkali metal carbonates are also used for this, for example.

However if hydrogen loading alone is able to form new pores and voids in a certain material then the same material may not be able to hold structural integrity for very long or even at all. This is one of the problems that plagued reproducibility in Pd-D LENR as far as I know. For example, Palladium expands significantly under loading (~10% volume) and eventually cracks, pulverizes, relieving pressure that may have formed inside the pores and crevices formed under loading. This is why pure Pd rarely worked and why only that from certain producers, which contained specific impurities, did.

With this in mind, it is also worth noting that high loading as Edmund Storms also observes - at least for Pd - is only needed initially to permanently alter the material. Once the proper cavities are formed a high loading is not necessary anymore. So this could be hinting at the possibility of being able to form a properly working material before hydrogen is even added.

On a loosely related note I wonder if by coating a metal that expands a lot when absorbing hydrogen with a very hard one (perhaps a non-metal, like a proton conducting ceramic) that does not expand at all an even higher pressure at the interface between both materials could be achieved.

Quote from axil

Regarding: "The likely reason for so many replications failing is the lack of HYDROGEN ABSORPTION and not the isotopic ratio of lithium."

The cause of LENR failure is the use by experimenters of impure and contaminated chemicals in their reactor experiments.

I do not think this matters as much as you state, but if isotopic purity is paramount why not use alternative elements that are more likely or cheaper to be found in a pure form?

For example cesium instead of lithium, or cobalt or manganese instead of nickel. Just consult any table of nuclides and see which elements have the least number of stable isotopes.

https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html

New paper from Holmlid, open access:

"Leptons from decay of mesons in the laser-induced particle pulse from ultra-dense protium p(0)"
http://www.worldscientific.com…10.1142/S0218301316500853

Direct link to the paper (pdf): http://www.worldscientific.com…10.1142/S0218301316500853

Something like this?

I do not think that most amateur experimentalists would have the capability of creating such structures in a controlled manner, however.

What Piantelli is describing to me seems more something akin to an effect initiated by electric field emission from the isolated (small) transition metal nanoclusters. In other words it may have more to do with plasma physics than condensed matter physics. Small particles or nanoclusters in particular in the form of sharp elements can act as local electric field concentrators. The following paper may be quite relevant.

"Controlled growth of nickel nanocrystal arrays and their field electron emission performance enhancement via removing adsorbed gas molecules"
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content…e/c2ce26456k#!divAbstract

In practice these small antennas given a suitable input would excite and ionize the hydrogen atoms adsorbed on the surface and located just above the surface.

Besides, in a different patent from Piantelli it is also suggested that for producing a larger amount of H- ions in addition to those created at the surface of the transition metal clusters it is advantageous to use various methods of ionization (see the abstract here: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2013008219A2 ). I think would be a quicker and easier way to obtain the same effect than relying on precisely crafted delicate nanostructures.

I think what Piantelli is saying here is that absorption is a competing process for the reaction and should be avoided whenever possible. As far as I know the transition metal clusters he uses are currently in the form of thin films, so there is not much potential for absorption there in the first place. To prevent chemisorption and favor adsorption he also provides hydrogen by external means at a low speed and low incident angle relative to the clusters (which is again the complete opposite of what Rossi has suggested in the past, as far as I remember). This is also mentioned in the previously indicated document.

I do not think that the H- ion formation theory may necessarily be correct, but I do think that many people have misunderstood what Piantelli actually does. With this document his theory of operation should be clearer.

Not everybody may be aware of this, but according to Piantelli et al. chemisorption (absorption) is a deleterious effect for the LENR effect and must be avoided. The LENR effect for all intents and purposes occurs on the surface of the metal, where atoms are adsorbed. This is the exact opposite of what other proponents - Rossi in particular - have suggested so far.

A detailed explanation of the Piantelli theory was provided on a patent opposition appeal for the European patent application EP09806118 on 2016-03-14 ("Statement of grounds of appeal") here: https://register.epo.org/application?number=EP09806118&lng=en&tab=doclist

Here is a gallery of screenshots from the document: http://imgur.com/a/D6ivn (24 pages)

Some selected excerpts below. I would suggest to read the entire document.

Quote from MrSelfSustain

The number one requirement for nickel powder to absorb hydrogen is that it is free from oxides.

Nickel does not absorb significant quantities of hydrogen under normal conditions, no matter how clean the surface is. Surface cleanliness should only affect the rate of absorption, not the amount of hydrogen absorbed.

If large differences in absorption are observed they have to be treated as an anomaly to be further investigated, not dismissed as ordinary behavior. It is not the ordinary behavior of bulk nickel to absorb large quantities of hydrogen.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02882416

On the other hand, adsorption inside newly formed pores and cavities, segregated pores, or inside cavities that are not large enough to trap other gases may be mistaken for absorption. But if it is porous materials that one is looking for then there are more efficient ways to do that, and other materials may be used too.

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you can perform baking under vacuum to produce the micro-cavities (which Rossi describes) and other surface and interior defects

No such thing will be produced just by baking under vacuum.

On the other hand, by suddenly introducing hydrogen at very high temperatures the nickel oxides will be completely and quickly reduced, leaving a porous structure at the nanometric scale even inside the bulk of the material. So an idea could be directly starting from NiO instead of clean Ni. This paper has already been posted a few times in the past, but it looks like people are not interested in simple and effective ideas: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpcc.5b04313

It looks like in the end the scientist was Vladimir Vysotskii and the experiment was the one about biological transmutation.

If ordinary gaseous hydrogen transitions to Rydberg matter or ultra-dense hydrogen, pressure should decrease. The latter two are not gases.

Rydberg matter (H(1)) has been calculated to have a density of about 0.6 Kg/dm3 (8-9 times the density of liquid hydrogen).
Ultra-dense hydrogen (H(0)) is supposed to have a calculated density of about 140 Kg/dm3 and to usually form thin films on metal and metal oxide surfaces.

The conversion to ultra-dense hydrogen alone should be strongly exothermic, releasing a few hundred eV per atom. This however is still well below the realm of nuclear energy.

Once H(1) is formed the transition to H(0) should be spontaneous.

Redacted,

The production catalyst could be something as simple as a tube or conduit containing a foamy metal oxide surface doped with alkali metals like potassium and heated to high temperature and low pressure. Then as hydrogen is made to flow through this tube the H(0) would be eventually produced and potentially collected in some way. As it has been observed to be a room-temperature superfluid, it will not be easy.

Alan Smith,

From what you described it seems like that it could be something decaying with electron emission inside the tube over the course of weeks, leaving it negatively charged.

I have sometimes read (not on JONP, nor on EcatWorld) suggestions that Rossi may have used triboelectricity to achieve 'effects' in his reactors, but this would imply in your example that something keeps vigorously moving inside the tube even at rest, and I guess that it would emit some sort of noticeable noise if it was the case.

To steer the thread back in-topic, If ultra-dense hydrogen was absorbed by materials and then decayed over time to regular hydrogen (which has a much larger size), immense pressures could be generated within the lattice, which could eventually crack, producing high voltages and I believe also noise. This process would be reminiscent of the one called hydrogen embrittlement.

Cold and disconnected reactors ... effect lasting for weeks ... it could be wishful thinking but now this starts sounding a bit more like the muon emission effect reported by Holmlid and Olafsson, which would be in-topic with this thread.

However, if it could be only felt by touching then it was not due to particles emitted to any significant distance outside the tube.

Alan Smith,

I have read that from you some time back in a different thread and I recall I gave a possible speculation on the nature of the effect, but it was not clear that it showed from 'used' and presumably cold reactors and that the effect lasted for weeks.

Just a question:
'used' = "in the process of being used" or "that have been previously used" ?

Eric Walker,

I do not know much about the subject of superconductivity but I am aware that ordinary superconductors have a critical magnetic field strength above which their superconducting state is removed:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solids/scbc.html

It could be that I misinterpreted the observations of Holmlid et al. and just assumed that something similar was happening. I will need to check again in detail, but I cannot guarantee anything.

The directly related papers, as far as I know are:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10948-011-1371-6
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10876-014-0804-3 (more recent, for p(0))

You can use the usual sci-hub for access if you really are interested.
I do not recall if there is more in other papers.

Quote from Eric Walker

Somewhere above you calculated a bond energy of ~ 630 eV for H(0), which means the transition to H(0) is highly exothermic. Let's go with this thought for the sake of argument.

I only calculated the possible energy release in joule in a specific example. The 630 eV (later revised to 640 eV) value comes from papers by Holmlid et al. He has indeed written that this transition releases "a few hundred eV per atom", so believe he must be aware that it is strongly exothermic. See this post from page 21 which contains some excerpts where he writes it clearly. You must have already seen it:

"https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Thread/3728-Can-we-talk-about-Homlid/?postID=38015#post38015"

I also wrote in later posts that in my opinion many excess heat claims in watt- or subwatt-scale cold fusion experiments may be explained by this energy release alone. I do not know if Holmlid has written this.

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I believe you would need a thermal distribution with a high energy tail in the range of 630+ eV to get an appreciable portion of those H(0) out of that state.

Holmlid has written that it this H(0) material has a strong bond and that it is stable so I believe that he must be aware of this as well.

Yet a strong magnetic field can apparently cause it to easily transition to H(1). I do not think I am able to provide a precise explanation of why this occurs. However, since it is supposed to be a room-temperature superfluid and superconductor, it may also be a consequence of these properties.

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Also recall that (1) the temperature of the lattice sites in a metal is sub-eV and that (2) the energy needed to dislocate a lattice site is ~ 25 eV. So if there were a thermal distribution with a tail that approached an energy in the range of 600 eV (~ 7,000,000 C), the host metal would no longer be in the solid phase.

The same could be said if any nuclear reaction occurred within the lattice as in countless other LENR claims. The reaction sites would eventually all get destroyed. Craters and local melting may visibly appear too. I think these are common problems in LENR systems that have been reported to be working.

While I used that example as an explanation of some LENR claims (for example Piantelli), my proposal is that the production of H(0) should occur in a separated area from where the reaction actually takes place. If the H(0) diffuses into "carrier" metals as well as Holmlid appears to suggest, there is no need to have a nanostructured metal for the reaction to take place. It could simply happen in the lattice interstices. So, local melting would not be a long term problem.

At least this is my 2c. Do not take too seriously what I write; this is not too much more than brainstorming.

I previously had the following assumption about the 2016 paper on the superfluid transition temperature of H(0) by Holmlid and Kotzias. This excerpt is from private notes:

Quote

[...] my assumption was that above the transition point the large clusters would somehow reorganize themselves into smaller non-superfluid clusters, implying that the total amount of H(0) on the carrier does not change. [...]

The previous assumption was probably incorrect, and the following is likely the right one, from the same notes:

Quote

However, this [assumption] would be incorrect if above the superfluid transition temperature the large H(0) clusters would instead transition to higher energy states (H(1), H(2), etc), implying a loss of the overall H(0) amount. After paying a bit more attention to the TOF spectra in the paper it looks like this could indeed be the case.

After thinking a bit more about it, I realized that if 2.3 pm H(0) clusters are present inside a suitable metal lattice exceeding the temperature threshold where the clusters are superconductive would cause the formation of higher energy states (H(1), H(2), etc) of much larger size (150 pm). This would cause a condition similar to the previous “magnetic ignition” suggestion, where enormous stresses and possibly a shock to the lattice, if fast enough, could force the remaining H(0) to the denser state where nuclear processes are spontaneous. A similar behavior has been often described in the LENR field.

This threshold temperature has been found by Holmlid et al. to be proportional to the melting point of the material used to carry the H(0), and therefore it is not fixed. This temperature is also lower for D(0) than p(0). For p(0) on Ni, it is approximately 150°C. I find conceivable that Piantelli thought that this transition temperature that had to be exceeded to obtain excess heat was related with the Debye temperature of Ni since it is so similar.

A further deduction is that if temperature is decreased below this superfluid transition temperature of H(0), the H(1) should spontaneously transition back to H(0), since it is a lower energy state. This will cause the lattice to be relieved and any stress-induced reaction should stop. However the process should preferably be slow (or heat be removed very quickly), otherwise the energy of formation of H(0) could induce a shock in the existing H(0) layer, potentially causing additional reactions analogue to a “heat after death” effect. Holmlid described a similar effect in a paper I cited a few pages back.

I find that within the framework of Rydberg matter/ultra-dense hydrogen this explanation could also work for the neutron production by thermal shock in some deuterated materials that has been recently suggested as a possible MFMP experiment, and that Storms calls fractofusion (a hot fusion derivative). This would have some implications: are minute amounts of ultra-dense metallic hydrogen (generally speaking) formed in certain hydrides?

With the realization that small H(0) clusters may penetrate at any depth into a non-porous solid lattice, I am wondering: if as previously indicated the application of a large magnetic field causes the H(0) clusters (2.3 pm size) to transition to higher energy levels (H(1), H(2), etc) that have a significantly larger size (150 pm and above), what would happen if after enough of the H(0) clusters were loaded into a metal lattice a strong magnetic field was suddenly applied?

My suspicion is that enormous pressures would be generated within the lattice, causing a large enough shock that all or part of the remaining H(0) would transition to the denser state (0.56 pm) where nuclear fusion processes and other processes (neutral particle ejection) are supposed to be spontaneous. This may also cause the ejection of protons from the material as some (notably, Piantelli) have seen.

This process could even happen at room temperature, but it would require the concentration of enough H(0) clusters in the lattice, which probably does not easily happen under a magnetic field (as H(0) formation is prevented according to the linked paper).

Quote from Wyttenbach

So far H(0) clusters have been a surface effect. Of course inner surfaces are allowed too, but always keep in mind they must be in 2D, because magnetic attraction only works in "one" direction!

Read: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2858.pdf

Thus if Holmlid is talking of a density, he is just extrapolating the one layer to a bulk volume!

I could not readily find references disproving this in the papers from Holmlid et al. that I have read so far, so I tried asking him directly (I usually refrain from doing so due to his amount of publications and the possibility that the answers could be already there somewhere, and because I do not exactly have any relevant credentials unlike others here).

According to him it seems that there is no depth limit to H(0) cluster diffusion into the bulk (just like ordinary hydrogen) and that it is "certainly expected" that small H(0) clusters would eventually fill the interstices of a non-porous metal lattice. However, H(0) cluster diffusion has not been studied in depth, and due to the strong bonding the diffused clusters may be "not easily recoverable" (I am assuming recoverable in the ultra-dense form).

Quote from axil

"A little bit of lithium does a lot for hydrogen" [...]

I think a natural deduction from these excerpts is that transient lattice stresses (or for example large bubble collapse during cavitation in liquid hydrogenated metals) may in some cases, depending on the materials used and experimental conditions, form stable or metastable metallic hydrogen.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Pd can be loaded up to 110% I saw Ni papers with up 150%!!. I recommend to leave the LENR field and dig into the H2 metall storage research (for fuel cell cars!)which got hundreds of Millions to do their research. They published plenty of interesting papers with new materials.

What I meant was that, potentially, more suitable materials could be loaded directly with ultra-dense hydrogen by an arbitrarily large amount (made-up number: 100000%) because it is composed of very small atoms that seem in certain cases to readily diffuse in the surface. If such materials could absorb so much hydrogen they would become macroscopically heavier.

http://scitation.aip.org/conte…dva/6/4/10.1063/1.4947276

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[...] Due to the large difference in scale between the ultra-dense material and the carrier surface (typically 2 pm instead of 200 pm for the carrier), many novel effects may be possible. It means for example that an entire chain cluster H2N may fit in between two metal atoms on the surface, and that diffusion of small clusters into the surface may be fast

Quote

[...] Results have also been obtained for the behavior of H(0) at high temperatures. For example, on Ni the signal due to D4(0) clusters decreases at higher temperatures, as shown in Fig. 7. This behavior is more pronounced for D(0) than for p(0). This effect is not observed on Ta surfaces, and is concluded to be due to diffusion of the hydrogen atoms into the metal surface.