Have you submitted your SO(4) to a peer reviewed journal? The feedback from expert reviewers will be of value to you.
Bruce__H
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Posts by Bruce__H
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As for Ascoli's 'foamgate' ... he has (I am told) a vested interest in hot fusion so there may also be a conflict of interest there.
Ascoli has answered this and his answer was moved off this thread. If that is to stand, then Alan's comments abut "vested interest" should also be moved.
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Anyway, your thoughts on this are off-topic here.
No.
Ascloli65's thoughts are completely on topic for this thread. He actually mentions the line in Storm's preprint that he believes is wrong IF his (Ascoli65's) observations and prior arguments are correct and his point is logical.
You emphasize the "IF", which is completely legitimate, but don't call his post off topic just because you disagree with his views.
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... give the old timers the respect they deserve.
TTH is being respectful. He listens and then gives his own views. This is respect.
What you can't know, Shane, because of your background, is that many of TTH's posts sound just like the sort off thing one gets back from referees in peer reviews of submitted manuscripts. Such reviews are closely attentive, precise, usually well written, sometimes pointing at general flaws and sometimes at teensy particular ones ... but always direct. It is how the academic world works. The process is sometimes painful but can also be unexpectedly productive. The point is that someone smart is listening closely and replying as best they can. And that is what TTH is doing.
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You don’t even understand that the system has to be modeled as a series of barriers with specific internal, and external temperatures and heat flow characteristics and the dynamics are further smeared out due to thermal mass ....
I do understand that the system can, accurately, be modelled this way. I just don't think that those details are significant for understanding the qualitative behaviour of the reactor such as presence or absence of inflection points, thermal escape, and hysteresis. A lumped model seems OK to me because I think that thermal inhomogeneities are small compared with the natural time and space scales of the system.
If the LENR activates exponentially with temperature, as you advocate, I continue to believe that thermal escape will always be preceded by an inflection point in the temperature time course ( if by "thermal escape" one means a situation where the reactor generates long-term heat even when all input power is switched off). Nothing you have said is any sort of "proof" otherwise.
I can see that we are just going back and forth on this. I'll tell you what. I am going to temporarily put all this down to allow things to cool off. I'll do that until you post more data. I'll give you the last word here and not respond to your reply, if you have one, unless you specifically ask me to respond..
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Ah. I see. My confusion regarding Alan's comment stems from my terminology in the post a little before his. I called the red and blue lines there "heating (red) and cooling (blue) curves", and I thought he was referring to these. Now it makes sense.
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... heating/cooling curves for working LENR systems are far from symmetrical around the peak temperature point ...
Does anyone know what Alan means by this?
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I think you will find that heating/cooling curves for working LENR systems are far from symmetrical around the peak temperature point, and they suffer from lag, which is not the same thing as hysteresis.
What do you mean by peak temperature point?
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I think the calibration curves over a broad enough range will not be linear. But over a shorter range nearly all functions degenerate into a linear approximation, kinda like the flat earthers proclaim.
Understood. I am 100% on board with this!
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Bruce we can’t even agree on the basic terminology. You don’t know what hysteresis means let alone understand basic thermodynamics or even freshman calculus. Hysteresis is when a function differs at the same X with a different Y value depending on which direction the value is approached from.
Part of my experience and training is in dynamical systems theory and, in particular, in the mathematics of nonlinear oscillations. So I am coming from a particular tradition with its own usages. Nonetheless, I think that the way I am using the term in this case pretty much tracks with how you are using it. Some systems can possess multiple states for the same input. Which of these states is actually occupied at any time depends on the route that was taken to get there.
I summarized my overall take on how this applies to your reactor/incubator system in a previous post on this thread (here). I have reproduced some plots from that post below. The bottom plot shows the equilibrium points expected from the system. Stable equilibria are shown by the solid line and unstable equilibria by the dashed line. If you start from room temperature and apply a moderate input power the system will eventually reach a stable equilibrium (1) point somewhere along the solid line. If the input is larger, all equilibrium points disappear and the system rises in temperature (2) experiencing thermal runaway. Now, having reached a high temperature, as shown by the red trajectory, if you shut off all inputs the system will find itself trapped in the upper left part of the plot (3) above the dashed line of unstable equilibria. It still increases in temperature being pushed ever higher by the [positive feedback between LENR activation and systems temperature. This is hysteresis. The same input, 0 Watts, yields either a stable room-temperature equilibrium or an ever increasing thermal trajectory depending on history.
The upper plots show the nature of the heating (red) and cooling (blue) curves underlying all this. The phenomenon of hysteresis depends only on the topological relationship between the heating and cooling curves and how they cross or don't cross depending on input power. In these plots I have used a completely linear cooling curve, but you can see how the number of times that the blue and red lines cross doesn't really depend on the blue line being completely linear. It can wiggle around a little bit and all qualitative conclusions would remain the same.
Having understood that your steady state calibration plots are often almost linear makes me think now that this analysis is highly relevant whatever the detailed picture of radiation, conduction etc, might be.
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I think we are reaching a point where we will have to simply agree to disagree again.
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As mentioned before I will post the incubator design here so people can critique but please be kind to me and do your homework first!
OK. Sounds good!
I would like to point out that we are both heading in the same direction. In particular, considerations of thermal runaway and hysteresis (hysteresis means that after runaway you can remove all input and the high temperature reaction is self sustaining). I am also in favour of looking for inflection points in the temperature time series because these are indications of incipient runaway. Early on I began to wonder why these had not been a feature of your results and mentioned it to you. You did not see the relevance at that point. I hold that they are relevant now and were relevant then too.
So I began to construct a model. The simplest model possible consonant with the data you had released. And that is what you have seen so far -- a model based on the data you have released. Having done this, I realized last Spring that further progress (the relative importance of radiative cooling) required more data so I began asking if you would release more. You have chosen not to do that yet, which is fine. It is your decision. But to say I have not not doing my homework is wrong. My results are just deductions from the partial information you have released.
Last thing. Do you still have confidence in the temperature/power plot you released in 2021 (which I replicate below where x-axis is input power in Watts and y-axis is temperature in degrees C)? If so, how do you account for its being so linear if radiative cooling is a major factor involved? Have I been overly influenced by the fitted straight line in the plot?
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The purpose of my example calculations was to show how difficult it is to get a thermal runaway with the current system and I think I sufficiently proved my point.
Don't forget that you are proposing that LENR output has an exponential dependence on temperature. That beats out T^4 dependence very quickly.
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Bruce was claiming that radiative HX is so low that he can leave it out of his model ...
I continue to think that radiative cooling is a minor player at the temperatures over which you say the LENR process activates. How else do you explain how nearly linear your steady-state temperature/power plots are?
You give a surface area of 0.5 m^2 and an emissivity of 0.9, but I think that these must be for the reactor part of your system. The model I have been developing is thermally lumped and considers the inside of the incubator as isothermal. This means that the relevant surface area and temperature for the radiation calculation is about 8 m^2 (for the Yamamoto oven you were using early on) and whatever the temperature of the outside skin of the incubator is when in operation. I really have no idea that skin temperature is (unless it is the 80C that you mentioned?). Is the emissivity of 0.9 the figure for the outside of the incubator?.
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What I meant here by “runaway” means a self heating reaction creating more heat than is emitted so that external energy is not required and COP goes to infinity.
Yes. This is exactly the sense in which I have been using the term. It isn't LENR specific. It equates to the concept of ignition for ordinary materials.
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Bruce again you misunderstood what I wrote. There is no deactivation process but there are thermodynamic processes at play which was the main point of my claim and you conveniently ignored.
I understand that there is no deactivation process in your system. The only reason I brought it up on this thread is because, in 2018, Alan Smith described an LENR behaviour (spontaneous thermal bursting) that I thought at the time indicated a deactivation process. You see me remarking to him that you say that your system has no such thing. That is it. That is all I said. I didn't misunderstand you. So don't worry about deactivation. It is not in the model I am using and never was.
I have a suspicion that you are calculating the radiative heat transfer wrong. Perhaps you are focusing on the radiative output of the reactor only. But the proper energy balance has to consider the incubator. Even at 0.5m2 and emissivity of 0.9 and 80C the incubator will radiate more than 400W, much more than the excess heat.
I am modeling the reactor and incubator as a lumped system. In other words, I assume that the temperature gradients inside the incubator and reactor are small (i.e., the Biot number is less than 1). I think that this is a worthwhile starting point, particularly as the air inside the incubator is mixed by fans. So I model radiative transfer as from the incubator to the surrounds. Your information about an emissivity of 0.9 is important. I have been using an emissivity of 1 because I didn't know otherwise.
My primary consideration when I first started considering how to model all this was the temperature-power plots you posted in 2021. They appear linear (with little hint of a T^4 dependence) and this is the mark of Newtonian cooling. While I realize that there is substantial radiation out of a system even at room temperature, there is also absorption from the room-temperature surroundings back into the system. I had assumed that this partly explained the linearity of the observed calibration curve near 20C with T^4 dependence only really making itself felt substantially above 20C. Perhaps I was wrong. Do you know why your 2021 temperature-power plots are so linear?
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Bruce, this is where you are misquoting and misunderstanding. There is no separate deactivation process.
I understood you perfectly. When I said to Alan that you see ".... no hint of a separate deactivation process" in your system, what I meant was that I thought that you saw no hint of a separate deactivation process. That is why I said it. There is no misquoting or misunderstanding. There is no deactivation of any sort in the model I am using.
My findings of thermal escape, hysteresis, and inflection points all stem from the topological relationship between LENR heating and standard thermodynamic cooling. I continue to think that radiative cooling is a small effect relative to Newtonian cooling at the temperatures you have been saying the excess heat activates. The calibration data you showed when first describing your results on this thread certainly suggest this (see Feb 2021 incubator calibration curve). And as I mentioned, adding a radiative term to the model does not change the topological relationship between the heating and cooling curves or the qualitative results.
My findings seem to be what you intuitively expect to see anyway. You say you expect to see thermal runaway. Would you not like to understand at what input power that runaway point is expected to occur? With a sufficiently refined thermodynamic model I think this could be done. Then, if you do not actually see runaway in that zone, I think it would mean that there is something wrong with your claim of exponential activation of excess heat.
As an alternative, I once again suggest that you use your incubator/reactor system as its own model of itself. You say that the incubator heater is fully programmable. Take a system without an active mesh and program the heater to supply extra heat with the sort of exponential dependence on system temperature that your think the LENR process supplies. I would expect that you would then get thermal runaway, hysteresis, etc. If the behaviour you see is different from what you see with your active-mesh tests then it must be the proposed LENR excess heating that is mischaracterized.
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You choose to ignore the most important component of heat flow. So your model is wrong. Stefan Boltzmann radiation is increasingly the major form of heat transfer at the system warms.
It is legitimate to say that the model I am using is inadequate. The problem is that this is always true, to some extent, for any model. We always neglect some things when we create models. In some ways that is what models are for ... to leave out what is negligible so as to leave the simplest picture of what is important. The trick in model making is to start from the simplest picture and then add more elements only when it is established that they are needed.
The real question here, then, is whether radiative transfer is important in relation to convective cooling over the range of temperatures your system works at. I have been considering this since last Spring. It is dead easy to add a radiative component to the model I am using and that is what I did at that time. Adding this additional cooling mechanism did not change the qualitative phenomena I have mentioned -- i.e., the presence of thermal runaway, hysteresis, inflection points in the heating timecourse -- unless it is much stronger than it appears from the few steady-state temperature power vs input power plots you have posted.
But this is not very satisfactory. I am just eyeballing your plots and making guestimates. This is why, beginning last Spring, I began asking if you were willing to provide more data. It was exactly so that I could add radiative transfer to the mix in a reasonable way.
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Never mind Bruce, you are a very dubious character yourself.
Ad hominem.
Say it about my posts if you like. Not about me please.
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Our data shows an output exponentially proportional to temperature AT STEADY STATE.
Exactly. That is what I told Alan you were saying.
I told him you are "... absolutely definite that steady state activation in his system has an exponential dependence on temperature...". So I don't see how I am misquoting you or mischaracterizing the context.
As for the rest, I have used a simple lumped model of a thermal mass with Newtonian cooling and a temperature-dependent internal heating to model your reactor/incubator system. I think that this model is adequate to explore, first of all, what sort of steady states to expect. I have used the techniques of a branch of mathematics called "dynamical systems theory" to do this. The analysis shows that at low input power there will be 2 coexisting steady states ... one of which is stable and the other unstable. Operationally you will only be able to easily measure the stable steady state. That is what you are seeing in your experiments. As you increase the input power, however, the stable and unstable steady states will approach each other and then mutually annihilate. This is called a bifurcation point. Beyond it, at higher input powers, there is no steady state possible and you get thermal runaway.
These are all just simple, straightforward predictions of how a incubator system like yours should act when it finds a temperature-dependent heat source inside it. They are robust, qualitative results in the sense that the precise form of the temperature dependence and of the cooling relation don't matter too much. That is why I don't think that adding radiative cooling to the model will change much. And it is also why it puzzles me that you don't see thermal runaway in your system.
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I would caution you against the idea that this is in any way a thermally symmetrical reaction, from my observation it is more complex than that, with a tendency for LENR to just 'switch off' suddenly at below certain critical temperatures, but has more 'leeway above that point, probably because Stefan Boltzmann ensures (personally) that radiated heat is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature. So while you might get shutdown suddenly at 300C you might under some circumstances see the system temperature increase to over 1000C before energy output is affected. But technically speaking proportionate cooling is not difficult to construct or control.
I have asked Daniel_G several times about this and he is absolutely definite that steady state activation in his system has an exponential dependence on temperature with no apparent hint of a separate deactivation process. No word of complications. So my observations (and my puzzlements) stand.
I do recall that you described a more complicated range of behaviours for the Russ George fuel. There was word of several different ranges of temperature activation, and a bursting behaviour that I interpreted at the time as evidence of a slow inactivation. But it is all so dubious! All original posts on the matter were taken down from LENR Forum and, 5 years later, there have been no subsequent publications and no release of information that would enable any sort of replication.
