Posts by BobHiggins

Quote from Shane D.

Speaking of Piantelli on another thread; I can not think of a more important person to be interviewed by Ruby. He is up there in age, been pursuing LENR for 28 years, and a wealth of practical and theoretical knowledge. It would be such a loss were he to go and take much of that knowledge with him. Yes, most of that information will be retained for the next generation through his meeting with MFMP, patents, Nichenergy partners, and family, but sometimes interviews bring the little things out that count.

Anyone know if Nichenergy is still funded, and active?

I inquired about Piantelli at ICCF. He is still alive, but in poor respiratory health. Apparently he no longer goes to his lab and has no protégé to carry on his work. Nichenergy will get the patents, but without a protégé, his technology may be lost. MFMP was only told the basics of his older stuff. It would be wonderful if Ruby could get an in depth interview, but he doesn't speak English, and is super-sensitive to his image. These both conspire to make video interviews problematic.

@Director I worked with some folks that were growing diamond films for the NEA as electron sources in field emission display development. That's where they discovered that the facets of the diamond allegedly having NEA, instead had CNTs growing out of that face that were responsible for the emission. The CNTs were too fragile for reliable long life emission even in the best possible gettered vacuum. This was a commercial activity and probably wasn't published, planning instead to keep it a trade secret.

@franco malgarini I probably will try this experiment. I have tritium ampules, an RF excited coil, and a neutron detector. However, if there is a paper where this has been done, I would love to have a reference to it.

@Director I believe that negative electron affinity of diamond has since been proven to be carbon nanotubes growing on that <100> face.

@franco malgarini Why do you think that RF excitation of tritium will cause neutron emission? Tritium is a beta- emitter. Do you have a reference for tritium release of neutrons?

@franco malgarini Can you elaborate more on what you are thinking? Note that old EXIT signs had glass ampules of tritium - there was a separate ampule for each letter segment. Tritium decays to 3He, so these tubes will be filled with T & 3He after the normal operational life of the sign. The ampules could easily be put into a coil and RF excited to check for neutrons. However, from your diagram, it is not clear what is the purpose. Your equation implies the presence of deuterium, and there would be no deuterium in the EXIT sign ampules.

Under heat or other stimulation, nickel will grow whiskers. Here is an SEM photo of some of my Ni powder that was mixed with Fe3O2 nanopowder and heated in hydrogen. You can seen the whiskers growing on the Ni in the center of the image. Ni is well known to grow such whiskers and it is problematic in the microelectronic industry.

can The pancake detectors are large. It would be possible to place a silver foil in front of a portion of the detector. Then if the radiation starts reading high, you can run, or pull out the silver foil and see the difference in the counts when the silver foil is removed. Ed Storms ran a similar set of tests to determine the characteristics of the strange radiation he encountered. He ultimately concluded that the strange radiation activated the mica in the window of his GM pancake tube.

can I am not sure which test you are talking about. In some of Alan's earlier work, detection was based on the stock GMC-320 or GMC-320+. As time progressed, Alan changed out the detector tube for an LND pancake tube. It is the tube that determines the sensitivity and the modified GMC-320 with the LND pancake tube will be very sensitive. As far as I know, Alan only has one of these because the LND tube is expensive. The surplus SI-8B Russian pancake tubes are also quite sensitive, but are much less expensive ($60).

Quote from axil

Now the Doctor in charge of teaching EDS analysis at Masaryk University Brno could not get the SEM/EDS apparatus and software to determine a material in the main affected area of the LION reactor, this was a first in her experience.

An important part of EDS analysis of such new phenomena/materials is to take an un-excited (no e-beam) x-ray scan of the material prior to attempting any material analysis. I know that at least some EDS systems provide that capability. If there are x-ray lines with no e-beam excitation, the material recognition software will be fooled. One may need to subtract the un-excited x-ray spectrum from the excited x-ray spectrum to remove the radioactive lines so that the secondary electron x-ray characteristic lines can be analyzed. Some EDS software allows you to mark lines in an x-ray spectrum to ignore. Instead of doing the subtraction, it may be possible to simply mark those lines found in the un-excited spectrum as to-be-ignored for doing the material analysis. You don't want to just blindly believe the line recognition software in this case - they presume nonradioactive material in the analysis.

can No, I don't have two identical GM counters available. However, one will work with either a silver foil and/or an indium foil as witness materials. Indium is useful as a neutron witness material as it will be readily activated by a neutron flux. This is what Parkhomov did for neutron detection. The activated indium is radioactive for a reasonable length of time, providing the opportunity for measurement after the exposure. In the case of strange radiation, my understanding it that it also causes activation - per some of the posts, it appears that Ag may be a good witness material for strange radiation. Ed Storms says that the strange radiation he has measured caused hours of activation.

@franco malgarini That link times out.

Wyttenbach Perhaps so, but I don't believe that explains charge clusters.

@Director Thanks for the interesting papers. I have not read more than their abstracts at the moment, but I don't believe Maxwell can be used to explain these objects. I have my own theory that explains many things that Maxwell cannot - such as photons, Shoulders' EVOs, and many more phenomena.

@H-G Branzell Amen to that. But, sometimes all it takes is even a mistaken belief that it can be done to figure out how it really can be done.

Quote from H-G Branzell

You are building a Dream Castle in mid-air.

Success begins with a dream. Imagine something impossible and then do it. The best things are invented by those who don't know it can't be done.

Quote from H-G Branzell

When your nano diamonds begin to produce lots of EVOs that induce a copious amount of LENR nuclear fusion reactions, isn't it inevitable that the NAE (Nuclear Active Environment) within seconds or minutes will be destroyed by the ensuing high energy radiation thus terminating the reactions?

Whether the NAE gets destroyed or not, the electron emission properties of the nano-diamond will get immediately snuffed. DLC field emission structures were used in hard vacuum miniature tubes, but never went into manufacture because the accelerated electrons striking the anode knocked loose small positive ions that were back-accelerated to damage/contaminate the DLC, causing rapid degradation in the field emission properties of the DLC film. This happened in an environment that was as clean as it can be made. Inside a discharge LENR system, it is extremely "dirty" in terms of metallic ions that can contaminate a space charge system. Such systems have to be designed to deal with frequent electrical shorting. That is probably Rossi's QX is pulsed, because a pulse must be introduced to evaporate the condensed Li shorting of the electrodes - like melting a Li fuse and then following on with a plasma discharge.

Seiber Troutman Some of your photographs look like manufactured meta-materials.

Quote from Director

If you could provide an explanation of your theory of the vacuum ether, I'd appreciate it.

Contact me offline at [email protected] and I can send you a draft for comment.

@Director A couple of thoughts...

The carbonyl Ni comes from the manufacturer very clean - direct from nickel tetracarbonyl decomposition. Experiments, particularly those of Jiang, suggest that as it comes from the manufacturer, the powder is pretty LENR active, but it quickly loses that activity, probably due to oxidation. Chemical cleaning is likely to leave the powder more contaminated than it was to start. Ni oxide is a weak oxide and pretty easy to remove in H2, particularly in an H2 plasma.

Argon in a plasma has much heavier ions and because of this, when it strikes the Ni it is much more likely to knock off a pico-cluster of Ni atoms. This will have an advantage in Ni crystal growth and surface morphology change. It is surely worth trying - particularly a mix of Ar+H2. Ar+H2 is a common welding gas mix and should be readily available.

I am not sure for what the Li-doped nanodiamonds are useful. The Li doping makes diamond into a semiconductor. If you use DLC, it is naturally conducting/semiconducting and will have its surface coated on some faces with small CNTs that become field emission sources. Diamond films have been used as field emission sources for vacuum tube operation, but it was DLC that was most effective in being an electron emitter. Doped diamond has been used mostly with single crystal diamond in making diamond transistors. Do you have a reference for use of Li-doped nano- or micro-diamonds to some particular LENR benefit aside from electron emission?

Your 7) statement is a lot like the work of Peery and Suhas and others that ascribe electrical discharge stimulation of dusty plasma LENR. It could also be what Rossi is claiming in his QX. Electrical discharge is definitely worth trying.