Posts by BobHiggins

There is a strong danger from adding carbon to the mix. If oxygen becomes present in the system (and it begins with oxygen present) then CO will form and then Ni(CO)4 will form at high temperatures. Ni(CO)4 is a highly volatile liquid which vaporizes at low temperature. It is HIGHLY TOXIC and is known in the industry as "liquid death". You must be ultra-sure to control where the exhausted vapors will go when you take gasses from the reactor or open it if carbon has been added.

At some point though, one must consider the value of preponderance. So let us continue gathering data.

Yes, misunderstandings are frequent. I am trying to keep true to what was asked and answered even if there was some misunderstanding.

I have posted a version 2 of Zhang Hang's report #2 having a "Postscripta" section at the end. This section has the first round of questions and answers from Zhang Hang. Additional versions will be created when additional questions are answered. Here is the link to the folder having all present and future versions (same as previously posted):

https://drive.google.com/open?…Pc25a4cOM2Uzk3NzdfMl9BeE0

Go there to pick up version 2.

I have translated Zhang Hang's report #2 and placed it in this folder on my Google drive:

https://drive.google.com/open?…Pc25a4cOM2Uzk3NzdfMl9BeE0

This is a link to the folder, the paper is inside. I anticipate several updates to the paper. The details reported are slim, so I have sent him a number of questions that I will add t the report. Look in this folder for any updates.

What evidence could Rossi have that Brillouin's experiment had come from IH? There were pictures, substantial descriptions, and analyses of the fuel and ash published publicly (Lugano report). This allowed Parkhomov to create his hotCat-like experiment. It allowed MFMP (Ryan Hunt and his team at HUG) to reproduce the molded ceramic heater tube assembly with the integral heater coil (hotCat copy - actually looked better than the Lugano reactor itself). The Lugano report was released 10/8/2015, and by 10/16/2014 I had made drawings from which MFMP and Ryan Hunt were building a replica. Here is a photo of the replica being tested at Ryan's lab:

HUG-hotCat replica: https://drive.google.com/file/…hMm1Td2c/view?usp=sharing

There have been so many people trying to replicate hotCat and Parkhomov technology - it is in almost every lab working on LENR. With all of this public disclosure and public experimentation, what is it that that made Rossi believe that IH gave confidential information to Brillouin? Can he testify to a specific transfer?

I have seen the claim that "IH built the Lugano reactor". OK, even if true, the arguments posted by Thomas Clarke and I on the web have shown that while the test may not have been a total failure [test bungled], any excess heat was small, and probably not of commercial value. Meanwhile Rossi is boasting about MW heat outputs and COPs of 50. THAT technology would be of commercial interest and THAT would be the technology important to transfer to IH. It is double-talk and specious for Rossi to claim he transferred THE technology if what he is referring to is the Lugano hotCat technology - sort of like throwing IH a [worthless] bone. Did Rossi transfer the kW/MW eCat technology to the extent that a high COP was measured in IH's lab with Rossi and IH engineers agreeing on the result? This would seem to be a mandatory part of the technology transfer. I think this is the core question to be resolved. Because, if this technology transfer didn't happen, then it makes no difference what Rossi thought he proved in the 350 day test.

Going back to the original cast of this thread ... IF IH is truthful in their claim that they cannot make any of Rossi's technology work (and this will probably be tested in court along with evidence of IH due diligence), then either: 1) Rossi has no real technology, or 2) he has failed to transfer that technology to IH (which I presume is a fundamental part of the contract). Failing to teach IH how to make the technology work is failure to meet the most fundamental part of a license agreement (unless the license agreement was written by morons). Rossi's claims that IH's attempt to get IP protection is evidence that the technology has been transferred is a very weak argument that won't stand up to court scrutiny. How can Rossi expect to move on to the next phase of the license agreement and get paid for further milestones without transferring to IH the know-how to build high power, high COP LENR reactors? This is the whole point of a paid license agreement - enabling the licensee to manufacture a product that will produce a profit. Rossi is reaching a real "put up or shut up" moment in this saga.

If Rossi really has a working technology, then this whole drama could be eliminated by going back and working closely with IH's engineers to make the technology understood and reproduced within their staff. I hope the courts order exactly that. If Rossi is uncomfortable with releasing his "secret"; too late - he should never have signed the license agreement and accepted the $11M.

@Peter Ekstrom ... I have not changed my thinking - I still believe the N in LENR is for nuclear.

This is probably the wrong thread for the [fun] discussion of how LENR may work.

Quote from Eric Walker

Concerning Ed Storms's claims about the heat-helium ratio in PdD work, and the proposition that it is >10 MeV per event—my assessment is that this whole set of conclusions is highly speculative at this point and rests on a number of assumptions and generalizations from disparate experiments and patchy data sets and could use a whole lot of tightening up. I would not generalize the >10 MeV part into a general observation, for example, and I certainly wouldn't assume that the ratio is a constant one or that it centers around 24 MeV, as Storms does. Much more rigor must be brought to bear upon the question of the heat-helium correlation. Until then people are racing ahead of the evidence when they assert strong claims in this area.

Yes, I agree. If, for example, He is only produced in -some- of the exothermic AHE events, it would inflate the Heat/He ratio. Ed Storms does talk about side reactions occurring (such as transmutations) within his theory. What if the He is only produced 1% of the time, with heat being produced in the other 99% of the AHE events? Wouldn't this tend to inflate the Heat/He ratio by about 100x?

@axil
Certainly including measure of the magnetic field (a quasi-DC effect) is worth acquiring in an experiment. I also want to measure the RF spectrum and have a spectrum analyzer being prepared for measuring that data. We should put some compasses in the view of the webcam monitoring the experiment. But, these would only be a little useful because a small amount of DC in the chopped AC waveform would stimulate a magnetic field from the heater coil as a solenoid.

RF measurements will be hard to justify as emissions from the reaction if the stimulus includes broadband excitation like is used by many experimenters in the triac/SCR/IGBT switching of their heater power. If any sense is to be made of the RF emissions, the heater power source is going to have to be "quieter". That is why I have been recommending use of DC drive for the heater or AC drive with a variac controlling the heater power so as to limit the bandwidth of the heater drive. Further, I wind my heater coils as a double helix with the wires coming out of only one end to cancel most of the magnetic field produced in the heater coil.

Quote from Wyttenbach

The simple perception that a single H reacts e.g. with Ni, Cu etc. is not compelling. From hundreds of papers we know that mass increases may happen in junks 2,4,6,8 often followed by a beta decay.
For a better understanding of the process I can only recommend to read through the Randell Mills stuff. He has a clear model, which elements may help to increase the outcome of LENR.

The other fact: LENR is mostly a surface effect and heavily dependent on the size of the nano-particles used, which points to a resonance.

Mills' theory is built upon many previous works, including the important one "Classically Radiationless Motions and Possible Implications for Quantum Theory" (G. H. Goedecke, Physical Review, 13-July-1964, pp B281-B288). Mills believes that the AHE comes from the exothermic evanescent transition to the sub-ground states his equations predict to exist (as does the work of Dirac according to Naudts, Maly-Vavra, Muelenberg, Palliet, etc). The problem with this is that these transitions provide less than 100eV per event according to Mills. Mills does not believe in LENR as a nuclear effect. In fact, if the AHE is proved to be a nuclear effect, it invalidates some of Mills' patents. That doesn't mean that these exothermic evanescent sub-ground state transitions don't exist, only that they may not be able to explain the AHE.

As Ed Storms points out in his books, there have been good experiments showing the Heat/He ratio in PdD work that support a >10 MeV per event. At this energy, and with associated He production, the AHE cannot be non-nuclear. Additionally, radiation has been detected as well (probably not commensurate with excess heat) that show that higher energy events are occurring than exothermic evanescent sub-ground state transitions can explain. For example, in the recent radiation measurements made by MFMP (GS5.2), the gamma was a spectrum that suggested Bremsstrahlung radiation from a distribution of high energy electrons. By the fact that the gamma tail extended to over 1 MeV, the electrons causing the Bremsstrahlung must have had energies over 1 MeV is some portion of the distribution. Such energies cannot reasonably be supplied to a single particle without a nuclear deficit in mass to supply the energy to the particle - again suggesting a nuclear effect. Even if the bulk of the excess heat is not commensurate with the measured radiation, the fact that this radiation is produced says that nuclear effects are happening at least in some peripheral way around the reaction that is producing the heat.

Personally, I believe such radiation measurements provide the best possible probe of what may be going on in LENR experiments. The more radiation data obtained, the more information we will have to form a theory. And, as in the case of Mills, high energy radiations, if proven to exist, can set aside a class of theories as not being capable of explaining the measured radiations. Of course, as Ed Storms says, a theory must explain all of the observed data, not just cherry picked portions.

@me356
Well, it sounds then like it is an affect worth documenting. Let's open it to scrutiny.

@axil
The nature of RFI is that every exposed semiconductor junction in an instrument has the potential to produce a rectified quasi-DC offset related to the RFI envelope (like a crystal radio). The noted manifestations of RFI include circuits having DC offsets that will generally mirror a slow envelope of the RFI, but the when the RFI is off, the time constants in the circuits apply. So an RFI could cause a DC offset reading in a magnetometer, and the reading could take seconds or minutes to reach the original quiescent point after the RFI ceases depending on the time constants in the affected areas of the instrument's circuit.

They should have used a simple needle compass to confirm, which is not subject to RFI. It would be wonderful to discover high magnetic fields caused by LENR, but there is too little evidence of sound measure from Defkalion to get excited about it.

@me356
What you are describing doesn't sound like RFI. It sounds more like conducted interference on the AC power line. Switching the AC power line is a very nasty source of interference if power line filters are not present. Without filters, this chopped AC interference can get into everything. That is why I have recommended use of a variac or DC power supply (which I use) to drive the heater. Since Alan's AC chopping was on the secondary side of an isolation transformer, the transformer itself filtered out a lot of that potential interference.

@axil
The RFI that Defkalion found was clearly due to their high power capacitive discharge sparking provided to their reactor. Those repetitive impulses going to the reactor created huge broadband RF noise. It is not the same case here, and I suspect what ME356 is describing is not radiated, but conducted noise. The Defkalion impulses were fast enough that the lead wires could become effective radiators for broadband emission out to 100 MHz. With ME356's AC chopping, I suspect the harmonics are less than 1 MHz and the connecting wires carrying that current are short enough compared to a wavelength that little RFI power is radiated. Since he is still seeing ubiquitous interference, I suspect conducted interference through the power lines.

@Ecco
The NaI scintillator tube is encased in a continuous aluminum shell, almost completely immune to RFI. It is connected to the Spectrum Techniques MCA by high quality coaxial cables. The Spectrum Techniques UCS-30 is in a metal box, and while not perfectly shielded, only its front end could be susceptable to RFI - after that it is all digital. The digital portion would require extremely high RFI and then would probably crash the internal uC (which did not happen). RFI effects are unlikely in the NaI scintillator/UCS-30 system until levels would be so high your computer would probably malfunction.

What was the experiment you had Alan run to test for RFI sensitivity of the X-123?

@Peter Ekstrom
I agree that catalysts seem like magic; but to a chemist, they are sufficiently understood to make good use of them. In the case of LENR, I am not using the term "catalyst" as some kind of "nuclear catalyst"; but rather, the conventional use of chemical catalyst.

In the case of Rossi's fuel mixture, I have often questioned how the possible inclusion of a chemical catalyst could affect the LENR reaction. My early hypothesis was that that "Rossi's catalyst" was responsible for acting upon the H2 molecule in such a way as to provide monatomic H or [H+, H-] pairs for LENR. However, given the gas pressure of the early Rossi reactors in the 5-20 bar range once at temperature, it seemed unlikely that if a chemical catalyst produced such monatomic H or ion pairs that these would survive transit from the catalyst particle to the Ni surface where the reaction was presumed to occur. So, the thinking about independent catalyst particles was abandoned in favor of surface treatments of the Ni powder to avoid the transit problem.

Then Holmlid's work came to light with possible implication of hydrogen RM (HRM) to LENR. HRM is more stable than the monatomic H or ion pairs and if HRM were implicated in LENR, then a chemical catalyst in just reasonable proximity which created HRM could potentially benefit LENR. Thus, the thinking about chemical catalysts was renewed.

Do you believe that chemical catalysts are of no value in a hypothetical Rossi eCat reaction?

The "customer" semantics here is unimportant. I think that IH, as Rossi's LICENSEE, is more than just a customer. A customer is not entitled to reproduce the technology, just to use it. The LICENSEE is entitled to not only use the technology at will, but is also entitled to be trained to reproduce the technology so as to produce products using it for sale to other customers to the extent of the license contract.

It is hard to say what will happen in the Rossi/IH litigation. It would appear that Rossi has not lived up to the terms of the license agreement. I presume the agreement specifies that Rossi must teach IH how to recreate his technology. Since IH says they cannot make anything of Rossi's work, then Rossi has not lived up to the most important part of the agreement. Even if the 350 day test worked, if he has not adequately taught IH how to do the same, then Rossi has not completed the bargain. From their statements, IH certainly does not feel in a position to engineer products based on Rossi's technology.

If it were me, I would argue in court that Rossi has not completed his end of the agreement, at least in transferring the technology to IH. This has to be the most fundamental part of the license agreement because it is the only portion that will allow IH to profit from having the license they are paying for. If IH believes Rossi has any technology at all, they should NOT allow the license agreement to be dissolved. Instead, IH should insist that Rossi live up to the contract's (presumed) terms and train IH as necessary to recreate the high power LENR in IH's laboratory. Rossi should not expect to receive further monies for other milestones in the contract until this most fundamental part has been completed. A "see I did it" attempt to reach a milestone is useless to IH if Rossi does not dutifully transfer the technology into IH's laboratories. Of course, IH must also invest in this transfer by having engineers and scientists skilled in the art to work on the reproduction of Rossi's technology under Rossi's direct guidance. IH gives every indication of having made this investment. Either Rossi has not been forthcoming with the details or the training needed to transfer the technology, or Rossi doesn't have any technology to transfer (I am not an insider and don't know which is true - maybe only Rossi knows which is true).

The original $11M IH investment is probably not recoverable now from Rossi. I would use the license contract (and if necessary, the courts) to insist that Rossi not be allowed to do anything with his technology until he has lived up to the technology transfer into IH. In that case Rossi could be stopped in his tracks until he proved his technology was real and transferred the know-how into IH. If Rossi really has no technology, then that would be an end-game exercise for him.

Quote from Peter Ekstrom

So my safe conclusion is:
fuel: no Li, not magnetized
ash: some Li in clumps, magnetized

My impression of the reading of those reports at the time was that Rossi had supplied a sample of the starting Ni powder he used to prepare his fuel, but not the actual fuel itself. So, it would not be surprising to find that there is no Li in this material. Rossi is well known to use Vale T255 Ni powder in that era. I believe a jar of that powder could be seen in one of his videos.

When you say that the Li in the ash is in clumps and is magnetized, could it be that the Li is in the FexOy particles as the alkali metal dopant for a catalyst? Or, have you specifically isolated the Li to coincidence with the Cu particles?

In case it hasn't been said, thank you for joining the discussions!

@Peter Ekstrom
Are you describing the sample that was analyzed in 2012-04-12 by Anderson & Schoberg, in which the 11% Fe, 9.6% Cu, 0.4% Zn, and 0.4% Li were reported in the "used nickel"? The authors said that the samples had been obtained from Sven Kullander. The method of analysis was ICP-MS.

I always wondered why in the text that the ash was described to have "substantial amount of Cu, Fe, and Zn", but the Li was not mentioned, though the concentration they measured for Li was the same as for the Zn.

If you are measuring the same ash sample, and just to test my understanding, are you saying that you believe the 9.6% Cu to be a particulate contamination and the Li to be a contamination in the Cu?

SEM/EDS analysis of what I presume to be the same powders was done by Edstrom and Nowacki and reported in a paper dated 2013-01-17. The EDS analysis seemed to show both Fe and Cu on the surface of a predominantly Ni particle. This would suggest that the Cu was not a particulate contamination of the ash, but was actually a part of the surface composition of the Ni particle. Interestingly, in this same paper, analysis was done for a "wire structure" particle in the ash that appeared to have been created as a hollow body (from the image of the section). This particle was predominantly an iron oxide and is highly suggestive of a Fischer-Tropsch catalyst. It would be desirable to test such a particle for a possible alkali dopant.

@axil
On the contrary, the sintered Li coated carbonyl Ni particles look different - they are much more porous. It is just an observation.