Posts by JedRothwell

Quote from Shane D.

Peer review sure is bloody.

It can be. As Schwinger wrote:

"The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SchwingerJcoldfusiona.pdf

On the other hand, sometimes peer-review is helpful. Mel Miles says it has often helped him correct mistakes and improve papers.

From my point of view, coming from the world of commercial programming, peer-review is an outrageous violation of antitrust law. The whole institution of academic journals and publishing is an antitrust violation, and so are all of the funding mechanisms. If we did this kind of thing, we would be in trouble with the SEC. Imagine letting experts at IBM approve software projects in other companies, funding for start-up companies, advertisements, publications and so on in other companies. Computers would still use core memory. The industry would be stuck in a time warp in 1965. Our late friend Mike Melich once said to a high muckety-muck official at the DoE, "why have you put the editors of Nature in charge of energy policy?" The official was not pleased. I think the answer is: "it is an academic tradition." A recent tradition. I think it was in the late 30s or after WWII that Einstein first had one of his papers submitted to anonymous peer-review, a custom he had never heard of. It came back with comments. He said something like: What is this? Who marked up my work, and who does he think he is?

Anonymous peer-review is a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance, and not even as much fun as carousing all night long, so it doesn't even have that to recommend it.

Quote from Alan Smith

As for scientific conspiracies, it might interest you to read about the 'Jasons' a top secret group of US scientists who act as 'gatekeepers' for the development of advanced technologies.

They advise the government about what R&D programs to support. I think mainly in physics and weapons. I do not think they have any influence over government spending in things like biology, medical research or at the CDC. They have no influence at all over private industrial research, where no one has heard of them. They have no influence in other countries. So I wouldn't call them "gatekeepers." They have limited power. The gate they keep can easily be gotten around. They have been strongly opposed to cold fusion. Perhaps they managed to torpedo some of the funding. Many other people and organizations are also opposed to cold fusion, so perhaps these others did all the torpedoing. I wouldn't know.

I have been busy. I have fallen behind answering people's questions. If you asked something and I did not respond, ask again. E-mail me directly.

Quote from Director

If the community were to provide Mizuno with a smaller reactor vessel (perhaps one half the size or smaller) with all the appropriate ports for gas injection, vacuum, heating elements, and so forth, would he be willing to run a test with lets say only one sheet of palladium covered nickel mesh?

Nope. He is way too busy. People who are skilled in the art, who have laboratories with glove boxes and whatnot, should just do this themselves. If it does not work, Mizuno and I will do all that we can to help.

There are some skilled experts at work trying to replicate this. It would be nice if they could do it before ICCF22, but I doubt they will. These things take time. We don't need a crowd of people trying to replicate. We don't want amateurs to try. Nickel nanoparticles are toxic. A person could get hurt doing this, so don't do it unless you know what you are doing.

Also, I would say, don't do it unless you plan to replicate. Several people have contacted me to say they intend to replicate, only at much higher temperatures, or with pressure higher than Mizuno recommends, or with a ceramic reactor instead of a steel one. I expect any day now someone will tell me they intend to use a steel mesh of nickel, or a plate instead of a mesh. In other words, they intend to do a different experiment. What is the point? It will probably fail and you will have wasted time and money. Mizuno already explored many options that did not work. What I fear is that people will do different experiments, the experiments will fail, and then they will report that Mizuno's experiment cannot be replicated.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

IIRC, there were no good attempts, largely due to lead acid batteries. The EV-1 was much praised but it wasn't that great. Lead acid batteries mean short range and long recharge times.

There were any number of niche markets, and many countries, where the range would not have been a problem. Something like the first generation Nissan Leaf with a 70-mile range could have been made any time in the last 60 years. It might have been expensive at first but the cost would soon have fallen. It was not made mainly because people lack imagination. There are any number of technological improvements that might have been made, but have not been. Modern wind turbines development could have started after 1910. It did not begin until the 1970s, and it was mainly carried out by counterculture people at first.

These are not failures of technology. They are failures of imagination, or victories by politics and big money standing in the way of progress. There are countless examples. Everywhere you turn you see dysfunctional technology. You see dangerous, stupid machines that should have been replaced decades ago, or generations ago, such as coal fired generators. Millions of lives are lost and billions of dollars are wasted by problems that should have been fixed long ago. Problems such as air pollution in London, England could have been ameliorated or even fixed were not even addressed until the 1950s. There were proposals as far back as 1200 AD that would have reduced this problem! Certainly, any time after 1650, there was sufficient science and technology available to reduce it, by improving complete combustion. There were tests burning coal soaked with cat-piss to test for complete combustion. I quoted Samuel Florman on this in the introduction to my book:

Sir Hugh E. C. Beaver, addressing the First International Congress on Air Pollution in 1955, traced the seven hundred year long campaign against air pollution in England. Complaint after complaint, committee after committee, report after report — all were ineffectual, as the centuries passed, and conditions grew progressively worse. Finally the London Smog of 1952, with its horrendous 4,000 deaths, set the scene for a new investigating committee, which was chaired by Sir Hugh. The committee’s report was well received, said Beaver, and led to effective action, not because the report was exceptional in any way, but because the public was, at long last, receptive. The lesson to be learned, according to Beaver, is that "on public opinion, and on it alone, finally rests the issue."

Quote from seven_of_twenty

[It is possible there is such strong political opposition to cold fusion it will never be developed.]

Absolute, complete, total, incomprehensible nonsense.

I suggest you read more history. Ask yourself why there were no electric cars from 1908 to around 2000. Hybrid cars were patented around 1910 as I recall. Why were there none until the Prius? Read about Preston Tucker. Read the autobiography of Townes and you will see that the development of the laser was nearly prevented by opposition and academic politics.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

I don't remember if you were physically present for these experiments. If not, while it seems more probable than it was before

I spent a couple of months there seeing various experiments. Seeing the data is the same as being there after you have done that. Regarding the possibility it is wrong, I am sure I included the caveat "if it can be replicated." That is a get-out-of-jail card for the evaluation of any experiment.

Quote from THHuxleynew

[What on God's Green Earth are you talking about?? There is no 60 W loss on 5/1, or any other date.]

Thanks Jed, obviously I am misunderstanding some other part of the paper. From page 3:

Losses from the walls are estimated by calibration. The air-flow calorimetry recovers 95% of
the heat when the reactor vessel is at 40°C, but only 77% when it is at 360°C (Fig. 2). When this
heat recovery rate is applied, nearly all of the heat is accounted for (Figs. 3, 7).

Ah, ha. I begin to see what you mean. You are not talking about what I would call "watts lost." "Lost" would be "unaccounted for." You mean heat that is not recovered from the stream of warm air, but is instead radiated from the walls of calorimeter box.

Going back over the numbers . . . I may have mixed up SI units and U.S. standard units for the R-value. I may have that wrong . . . Let me do some checking here.

In SI, which is what they must use in Japan, the R-value is degrees K * m^2 / W

In U.S. it is degrees F * square feet / BTUs per hour.

That's 5.7 times higher than the SI unit. So a U.S. R-value of 11 is 1.9 in Japan. I will have to go over Mizuno's first-principle estimate again and see if I dropped an order of magnitude by accident. Which is something I often do.

The area of the aluminium insulation is 1.9 m^2. The R-value is also 1.9, which is a coincidence.

With the checking I did in the ICCF21 paper, at low power, this error would be small. I thought the box was leaking 1 or 2 W. It might have been 6 or 12 W. You could hardly tell the difference by measuring surface temperatures and other temperatures. If it was ~12 W, there was more excess heat than I thought, not less.

Suppose the reactor is producing 300 W, either in a calibration or total heat in an active run including excess heat. The reactor temperature will be 380°C. Figure 2 shows that 78% of this will be recovered by the airflow calorimetry, meaning 22% will be lost through the walls. That's 66 W. Let us assume that is correct and figure out the R-value.

First of all, we cannot use the emerging air temperature to determine the R-value (or vice versa). The air coming out of the box is 13.6°C warmer than ambient (so it is ~34°C). But that is not what dictates the R-value. The R-value depends upon the difference between one side of the aluminum insulation and the other. Objects in the box are warmer than the warmest air, as you would expect. I think the inside of the aluminum insulation must be considerably warmer than the air. It is reflecting heat from the reactor. I think it is heating up the air, just as the reactor is.

If the R-value were 11, as I thought, the insulation would have to be 243°C on the inside. That seems unlikely. If I have mixed up SI and U.S. units, and if R-value should be 1.9 SI, then the inside of the insulation is around 66°C warmer than ambient (the same as the number of watts lost -- same coincidence). Ambient is 20°C so I guess the insulation is ~88°C.

R-value 1.9 = 66 K * (1.9 m^2 / 66 W)

Right?

If all of the heat were transferred to the air, and none of it leaked from the walls, the air would be 16.6°C warmer than ambient. The spreadsheet shows it emerges at 13.6°C warmer than ambient. 3°C is lost through the walls. That's 54 W according to my calibration constant, which is within shouting distance of 66 W from Fig. 2. Figure 2 is probably closer to the truth.

Quote from nickec

I believe R19 was never heated outside the calorimeter. R19 simply never saw as many sheath heater watts.

Correct me if I am mistaken.

I do not know.

Quote from Rob Woudenberg

You are now making the impression, by starting this topic, that you are becoming more optimistic that LENR technology has taken an important step toward reality.

That is a remarkable milestone!

Yes. I think that if Mizuno's latest experiment can be replicated, this is an important step toward commercialization. I think it proves beyond question that the effect can be scaled up and made into a commercially useful source of energy. It is only a matter of engineering. It also shows that there is enough palladium in the world to generate all the energy we need. We now know the reaction can occur at high temperatures and high power density, and that it can be controlled at least as well as a burning pile of coal or a fission reactor core.

When I wrote my book, I did not know for sure whether it was even possible for cold fusion to become a useful source of energy. It seemed likely. The book is predicated on the assumption that it can be made practical. I think we now know for sure that it can be. It only has to be proved once, with one experiment, since the effect itself has been widely replicated and there is no doubt it exists.

It is possible there is such strong political opposition to cold fusion it will never be developed. However, we now know it can be.

Quote from THHuxleynew

If you reckon the R20 measurements are definitive then why bother thinking about R19?

That's a strange question. Is there a rule you cannot study two reactors at the same time?

Quote from THHuxleynew

If I am wrong about radiation, then there is as yet no explanation for the 60W lost from the 5/1 R19 data except the unconvincing ones I've also proposed

What on God's Green Earth are you talking about?? There is no 60 W loss on 5/1, or any other date. Input + excess is ~300 W. The reactor temperature is the same as other days with 300 W. The calorimetry measures 300 W output normally.

I must have missed this discussion about missing watts. Anyway, there are none. It is some sort of confusion. I am too busy to look back through the messages to find out who is confused about what. Just forget it. No calorimeter loses track of 60 W.

Quote from Robert Horst

What about the heater wires? Copper is an excellent thermal conductor. If one end of those leads is at 380C and the other end is at 20C, much of the total length will be warm.

This would show up during calibrations at high power. It does not show up. The balance is zero at all power levels, after taking into account known losses from the calorimeter chamber walls.

No doubt a little heat does escape by this path, but the power is too low to be measured with this calorimeter. It is in the noise.

I have created a new document to supplement Mizuno's recent paper:

Mizuno, T. and J. Rothwell, Supplemental Information on 'Increased Excess Heat from Palladium Deposited on Nickel' 2019: LENR-CANR.org

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTsupplement.pdf

So far it includes three sections:

Nickel Toxicity

WARNING: The steps described in this paper can produce fine nickel powder, which can be toxic. The procedures in this paper should be performed in properly equipped laboratory, in a glove box or other enclosure. Disposable gloves and masks should be worn when handling these materials. They should also be worn to avoid contaminating the materials. Only people skilled in the art should attempt to replicate this experiment.

Q&A Responses by Mizuno

Uploaded here already

Temperature Distribution Study

An image and graph showing the surface temperature of the reactor.

Quote from anonymous

If I was in high school and needed a science fair project it could be "Does Emissivity of a heat source effect an Air Mass Flow calorimeter's Heat Capture". It's easy enough for a high schooler to build -- fans, acrylic boxes, home depo insulation.

If emissivity does have an effect, I guarantee you would not see it with this instrument. It would be much too small. The margin of error is 1 or 2 W. The noise from ambient temperature change is huge, as you see in Fig. 7. If you put this instrument in a lab at SRI or MIT, where the ambient temperature is controlled to less than 1 deg C, those fluctuations would be 10 times smaller.

There are many known sources of error with this instrument. You don't need to go looking for hypothetical tiny ones. The big ones are readily apparent! I expect the kind of thing you are talking about is in the milliwatt level, if it exists at all, and we can't even measure 1 W with confidence. At low power, the acrylic box and insulation radiate ~3 W. Emissivity would have to be a small fraction of that.

A high school kid building one of these would learn a lot, but the calorimeter probably would not work well. There are many people here who would learn a lot, and I wish they would undertake the exercise.

Quote from IH Fanboy

Jed, while I agree with your statement, I think what anon is contending (he can confirm my interpretation of his position) is that radiative heat causes the air circulating within the calorimeter to be heated more slowly than convective heat, and therefore the difference in the kind of heat transfer matters for air flow calorimetry. Can you comment to this specific critique?

I do not know if it is true that the calorimeter air is heated more slowly with one path or another (radiation versus convection). If it is slower, the calorimeter will show it takes more time to heat up. Eventually, all the heat will emerge. As long as it emerges with a power level of ~5 W or more, this calorimeter will detect it. A calorimeter measures heat energy, not instantaneous power.

Suppose you get an energy burst of 9,000 joules. For some reason it emerges very slowly, at a power level of ~1 W. This calorimeter will not see it. That's in the noise. The margin of error. But if it comes out at 5 W for 30 minutes or 10 W for 15 minutes, the total energy is the same, and the calorimeter will show pretty much the same 9,000 J. It becomes less accurate at low power, as it enters the noise. Then at high power it goes to pieces again. Any calorimeter has a best range of operating power.

I am going to upload a nifty IR camera based scan of a reactor temperature distributions tomorrow or Wednesday. Kind of busy tomorrow.

Quote from RobertBryant

What happens to a plastic floor which is in contact with a 300C ss reactor?

There is no acrylic plastic on the bottom. The top box fits into the chunk of yellow insulation at the bottom.

I think Mizuno referred to the stuff at the bottom as "bricks." Maybe they are bricks? High temperature insulation? I did not look closely. Anyway, the bottom is well insulated.

The world energy market is roughly $6 trillion per year:

https://www.enerdata.net/publi…-energy-expenditures.html

$1.8 trillion per year is invested in energy, in things like digging wells, R&D, erecting wind towers and so on.

That is the pot of money you can tap into with cold fusion. $1.8 trillion is the amount people will be willing to invest in cold fusion R&D per year, once it becomes clear that cold fusion will become a practical source of energy. $6 trillion per year is how much money you can divert from the oil, gas and coal companies earnings into your own pocket if you succeed in commercializing it. Not overnight, but in a remarkably short time. Roughly the time it took automobiles to replace most horses, which was from 1908 when the Model T was introduced, to 1928.

So, how do you make this money? Not by trying to sell energy! That is a highly regulated industry. It is a difficult and complex business. The way to make money is to sell equipment. You gradually divert the earnings of energy industry into earnings by you. Many companies are already doing this, by selling machines with improved efficiency. Suppose you make an efficient water heater. You can sell it at a premium, and make more profit. The customer is willing to pay more because it reduces the natural gas bill and saves money overall.

The average water heater costs $55 a month in gas. Suppose the customer ends up paying you $10 month more for your heater, but he saves $20 a month in gas. In effect, you are reducing the gas company's earnings by $20, and splitting the money between you and your customer.

The potential is greater with cold fusion, because you eliminate the entire cost of fuel. You and the customer spit the $55; the gas company loses the whole amount.

It is even more attractive for big ticket equipment. If an apartment complex pays $1000 a month for the gas space heating, you sell them a heater that costs about $500 a month more than a gas heater. The natural gas company loses $1000, you and the customer each make $500. After 20 years the equipment wears out and you sell a replacement. It is a steady stream of income. It is siphoned off from a $6 trillion pot of money, so there is plenty more money to grab. There is no way the energy companies can compete or under-price you.

This is not a one-time profit. It is a steady stream of income, because the equipment wears out and must be replaced.

In real life you have competition, and as you gradually wear away at gas, oil and coal company earnings, they lower their costs, and the amount left on the table decreases. But in principle, that is how it works.

This only works out well if the cold fusion apartment complex space heater costs roughly as much to manufacture as a gas-fired heater. I think it will, because it is not particularly complicated and the materials are not rare. For the most part, it consists of pumps, thermostats and whatnot that are the same as the ones in a gas-fired or electric heater. Once the technology matures, there is no reason to think it will cost more. But you can sell it for much more, with much larger profits. The customer will be happy to pay more, because it eliminates the cost of fuel. Over the life of the machine, the fuel costs more than the equipment. So you have a tremendous potential profit margin. If the customer cannot afford the up-front cost, you can arrange for leasing. As long as it ends up costing substantially less per month, the customer will be happy. As old gas-fired equipment wears out, your equipment gradually replaces gas fired heaters. Then as your equipment wears out, you keep selling cold fusion heaters.

To reiterate, the money goes from the natural gas company into your pocket, and into the customer's pocket, even though you are not selling energy per se. The amount of money waiting for you to tap into and transfer is $6 trillion per year. That is the most lucrative business opportunity in history. Every industrial company will understand that the first day it becomes generally known that cold fusion is real. They will soon be spending billions of dollars per year to develop it, just as they are now spending billions to develop self-driving cars.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Do you think most of the calorimeter heat loss is conductive? Maybe you don't have as good insulation on the base?

Do you mean between the reactor and the table? This is shown in the ICCF21 paper, Fig. 5. Not clearly, but you can see the reactor is sitting on a large yellow pad of heavy insulation. It is much better than the reflective padded bubble insulation in the box. The R-value is higher. I don't recall what it is.

As I see it, the easy way to estimate this is to say the bottom has perfect insulation, the acrylic in the box does not insulate at all, and the reflective padded bubble insulation has an R-value of ~11. If you believe the manufacturer. I ran it the other way. I assumed the losses as measured by Mizuno are correct, and I computed the R-value. It came out roughly 11. Close enough for government work! Mizuno did a first principle estimate based on the properties of aluminum foil and the size of those bubbles with air in them.

Try it yourself.

I am not a stickler for accuracy or precision when I am writing on a piece of paper. Only when I use a computer program. Face it, I'm lazy. And careless . . . I tend to drop orders of magnitude. Something my late mother would frown upon. As she said, "you should learn to use a slide rule, because it forces you to keep track of the zeros." I think she wanted me to treat those numbers with respect.

Quote from THHuxleynew

You need to consider all of it if wanting to evaluate the R19 results

You can ignore it if evaluating the much larger R20 results.

They are not much larger. The absolute excess power (when present) ranges from 40 to 101 W. See Table 1. That's not much smaller than 250 W. It is just as easy to measure, with this calorimeter. I doubt the signal to noise ratio is significantly better with 250 W.

I do not think you need to consider more factors to measure 40 W compared to 250 W. The resistance heating input power can be measured with great precision, and subtracted completely in all cases, down to a few milliwatts. Whether the input is 50 W or 200 W, the margin of error subtracting it is so small, you don't need to worry about it. It makes no difference whether it leaves noise of 0.00011 W or 0.00052 W. With electrolysis input power, the margin is very slightly higher, because there are fluctuations from bubbles. In this experiment, with the HP gadget, input power is measured and averaged 20,000 times a second every 5 seconds. It varies from one 5-second to the next, but those are real variations, not instrument noise or instrument artifacts. Input power is stable. Example (W):

Quote from THHuxleynew

Obviously this is 20X larger than the example from the paper, with 320C across the insulation.

You are confused. Understandably so, because I used different standards in the two examples. The 320°C is the reactor body temperature. The "∼36°C (16°C above ambient)" is the difference between the air temperature in the box and the ambient air outside. The insulation NEVER sees a difference as large as 320°C. I suppose the insulation would crinkle up and the bubbles would pop. It is basically aluminium foil with air bubbles. I do not think the air temperature is ever more than 50°C hotter than ambient (at ~1000 W * 0.05522 W/K, which is the limit of this instrument). That is the biggest difference across the insulation. The air is moving through the box at 13.4 L/s so it does not have time to get very warm.

Mizuno used the reactor temperature in Figs. 2 and 3 because it is measured more accurately and it is more sensitive. A graph of air temperature would be more scattered. However, you can do this with air temperature. I have done it. This allows you to use the manufacturer's spec sheet for the insulation and double check the result. These R-ratings are so high, and the heat losses so small at most temperatures, the numbers are only approximate. It is a good sanity check, but for precision I would stick to the numbers shown in Figs. 2 and 3.