Posts by Longview

Quote from me356

I think that working with hydrogen bottle is safer in some areas. But there are also next possibilities, that could end fatally.
If you are working with powder in correct environment, you can't do anything wrong. You can work with amount you wish and such amount is mostly very, very small.
In our experiments not more than 1g.
If you have hydrogen bottle, releasing 1g or 20grams might be without any noticement. Hydrogen can autoignite with air in some condictions, if you are overlooking some sealing issue, then your room or container may be full of hydrogen. This can't absolutely happen with powder. You can't exctract more hydrogen than what you have loaded.

LiAlH4 is not without hazards of its own. Besides the 4 moles of hydrogen that can be generated from one mole of LiAlH4 with water:
LiAlH4 + 4 H2O → LiOH + Al(OH)3 + 4 H2--- (molecular wt. of LiAlH4 is about 38, 4 H2 is about 8, so about 4.75 g of the solid hydride gives a gram of hydrogen. Put another way, one gram of LiAlH4 with water generates 0.21 g. of hydrogen, at 22.4 mol / liter, that says it can release about 2.2 liters of hydrogen gas.

Either the hydride or hydrogen in small quantities can still give a nasty surprise, if rapid oxidation of hydrogen with air drives glass or metal into vital tissues such as the eyes.

But, we still have not defined the lack, or presence, of an aneutronic production of beryllium from this system. Beryllium 8 from addition of a proton to the natural 92% lithium 7 immediately decays to two alphas of low penetration energy (at 103 keV, generally harmless unless the decay occurred inside living cells).

HOWEVER, if Be is produced from say the 7+% lithium 6 natural component and yields ⁷Be it is an entirely different story. Be 7 has all the extreme physiological toxicity of beryllium itself, as I mentioned here some months back, but further, unlike the beryllium 8 with prompt decay to helium, the beryllium 7 isotope is radioactive, having a 54.5 day half life releasing a 479 keV gamma. Freethinker's recent CPM reports remind us we do not yet understand everything concerning this LENR system.

Well, what and where is the cold sink? That is where does the body heat get removed after doing its work? Real inverse heat pumps exist, at least experimentally as models. Sterling engines require a cold side. Thermoelectrics using the Seebeck effect work only when there is a temperature differential. "Lumen" might work in Siberia and other cold places or cold seasons, but surely not in many warmer environments, ie. where the ambient is near 37 degrees C. In a closed system, such as is likely here, there surely is somewhere for the waste heat to go after it does the work. An open system would require an expendable working fluid, say CO2 --- but you may as well carry a battery in that case.

Better to rely on body movement, rather than heat, as mentioned here awhile back. That technology already has a long history of low powered "successes".

Quote from StephenC

ogfusionist. It looks to me that the various ideas and experiment data are converging. This is a good sign I think. I have a question about the He you saw in your experiments:

Did you make an isotopic analysis of the gas to see the relative proportions of He3 and He4? I suppose it could be done with a spectral analysis of the gas?

Since He3 can only be produced in certain ways it's relative proportion might tell us something about what process are occurring. He3 can be produced from Tritium decay, Proton bombardment of Lithium 6, Pion induced Fission of Lithium 6 and Lithium 7, maybe some others I did not think of. I suppose there might be a characteristic signature based on final and initial abundance the produced radiation and processes involved.

Edit: If I understand correctly your experiment didn't use Lithium is this right? It might still be interesting to see the He3 relative abundance though. It might be also interesting to look at the Hydrogen Protium/Deuterium ratio if possible

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[Do not want to bump StephenC's good question from the top.]

Here is a link to a white paper from Fairchild Semiconductor on 4th generation IGBTs

https://www.fairchildsemi.com/campaigns/wp-field-stop-igbts/

For those who may wonder why IGBTs for nanosecond power switching, It is otherwise difficult to get to this end using solid state circuitry, see link below if you have institutional or member access (I don't):

"The pulsed power generator produced a pulsed-high-current of 3.7 kA with a rise time of 7 ns at a repetition rate of 1000 pulses
per second (pps). This generator is able to generate an output voltage of about 20 kV with voltage rise time of less than 10 ns. We did the operation test and generate the streamer discharge with 1000 pps"

Linked here:
eeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6191403&url=http%3A%2F
%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6191403

And a white paper here:
https://www.fairchildsemi.com/campaigns/wp-field-stop-igbts/

Pulsed Power Conference (PPCP, 2011 IEEE
19-23 June 2011
Page(s):
140 - 145
ISSN :
2158-4915
Print ISBN:
978-1-4577-0629-5
INSPEC Accession Number:
12696753

For an easy access application page, see this Fairchild link:
https://www.fairchildsemi.com/products/discretes/igbts/

So natural selection is the designer. Fair enough. I can live with that.... at least until I'm selected out. :dead:

Thanks Eric. Interesting.

Thorium sounds like a good candidate. Are there lighter weight alpha emitters that might give much higher output to mass ratio for such application?. Of course it would have to be an alpha emitter with relatively long natural half life, otherwise it would be exhausted too fast for long endurance power output.

Is there other evidence of laser stimulation of alpha decay other than say Letts / Hagelstein?... it is a fascinating idea to me.

And of course we have Lipinski UGC which would use lithium 7 and hydrogen (via microwave proton generators, as described many times in Review of Scientific Instruments, and elsewhere). I never thought of theirs being a candidate deep space sustained thrust source before.... it is really a very clear application, with the lightest possible fuels and surely very high specific impulse for the functional equivalent of an "ion" engine.

To Ogfusionist....

Better the "anthropic principle" with its various issues. ID is surely complete crap. e.g. Who designed the designer?

With due respect, isn't Papp producing rotary power? If so, how can that be useful in free space? I suppose that the "thrust" can to used to do work on something other than a piston or turbine. I suppose that puts us back to ion thrust engines, which work OK in space. But of course I am ignoring the novel drives presented here recently. Forgive my "addiction" to conservation of momentum. It is a reflection of "old physics" admittedly.

BTW, What is good reference link for Papp, that you find convincing and simple enough for those with at least basic college physics and chemistry for majors. Thanks!

Longview responds to "Henry" from ~7 hours ago:

"Believer" is your word-- rather an inappropriate one in my case, but we don't need to dwell on that here.

Some of their unpublished experiments may well have gone above 800 C. One viable strategy for scientists and engineers enmeshed in a research and publication establishment is to approach controversial findings cautiously. Your own incredulity is evidence that such caution is necessary. It is in any case necessary to show what does not work, and to show that it can be consistently assessed long before the daunting task of showing what is likely to bring strong critical analysis and even disbelief.

It is a form of negative control (I know a lot about this in science], that is a deliberate negative is abundantly included to control for untoward sources of positive signals. If the negatives all behave as expected, then one can look at the conditions or inputs that may or may not give a positive (in this case over unity COP as an endpoint) signal. Here, as a preliminary, they chose to show a simple case. That is the range of temperature variation already known or at least widely suspected to give no excess heat production in a Lugano / Parkhomov and now others "replication" which are often loosely based on putative Rossi designs and on his predecessors.

Even if these authors do not go on to complete the experiment [I will wager they do], they have set a protocol for a plausible negative or at least sub unity COP. The near 99% COPs, also demonstrate that they have good methodology with respect to heat balance and measurement.

But what do I know? I am not a physicist.... but then again one very famous physicist has confided to me that he would "never again trust any physicist" for a critical view of the LENR / CF field [I paraphrase, except for the quote}.

This may have been cited here before, but to me it is new and well worth the easy read. Interesting muon versatility is explicitly accepted by Funamori et al at:

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep08437

These authors consider a positive muon to be the equivalent of an "isotope" of the proton-- a fascinating stretch of the older atomic isotopic concept. They also give arguments that muonium is present in terrestrial minerals, through electron capture. Perhaps something akin to this might apply to LENR phenomena--- even more so if similar processes operate in the reverse direction. That is, under appropriate conditions a proton may catalyzed to "decay" to form a positive muon with the conservation of mass/energy being maintained by kinetic energy imparted to one or more participating components.

Hydrogen in the Earth's deep interior has been thought to exist as a
hydroxyl group in high-pressure minerals. We present Muon Spin Rotation
experiments on SiO2 stishovite, which is an archetypal
high-pressure mineral. Positive muon (which can be considered as a light
isotope of proton) implanted in stishovite was found to capture
electron to form muonium (corresponding to neutral hydrogen). The
hyperfine-coupling parameter and the relaxation rate of spin
polarization of muonium in stishovite were measured to be very large,
suggesting that muonium is squeezed in small and anisotropic
interstitial voids without binding to silicon or oxygen. These results
imply that hydrogen may also exist in the form of neutral atomic
hydrogen in the deep mantle.

It certainly is an eye-opener to see the conjunction of muons, muonium, prrotons and MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) structures, all in the context of our own planet's likely mantle geochemistry and geophysics. The article confirms recent ideas that mass arithmetic and other limitations by conventional collisional physics (that is deduced from accelerator, artificial plasmas (NIF, solar observations, and thermonuclear blasts) is once again likely not the whole story. Note the authors postulate a reaction or configuration of Si⁴⁺ --> 4H⁺, reminiscent of the tetrahedral or 4 nucleon transmutation evidence often reported.

As always in the history of science, we often only see what we are prepared to see, or only accept what we have come to expect. It is a natural limitation on our perceptions. Often useful, but sometimes debilitating.

[ I give again the caution that processes which are "too easy" can have "impossible" implications for cosmological evolution, and in this case, depending on the concentration or abundance in the mantle or core, even for geothermal processes including the magnitude of terrestrial interior heat balance and heat flow... once attributed largely to natural radioactive decays.]

Budko and Korshunov's effort is apparently technically competent. It may well be strategic that they have chosen to publish data for a temperature range (25 to 800 degrees celsius) that has rarely, if ever, shown reported over unity COPs in the past. So essentially this would establish the baseline, that is the first of several subsequent investigations in which the temperature is further raised and other parameters might also be varied.

Yes, thanks for fixing or updating that link Henry.

Henry's first link above appears not active at this point.

Hard to look at or "to consider" dead links..... even for agnostics.

Quote from Longview

The mere fraction of an eV that 830 C (in your reactor) represents, versus the huge energy yield of a fusion, makes the "budget" for activation energy an easy "do" for self sustaining and more. Earlier ideas still persist that electrolysis contributes to the formation of atomic hydrogen and/or protons to diffuse into Pd. That electrolysis is not necessary for the fusion itself, if Ed Storms is correct. In your RAGOEL reactor, the surface area is immense, the number of active sites in likely immense, and the insulation properties are very high. You are likely suggesting that your reaction was occurring on the surface, in fact on some sort of Ni-O-Al site available in your treated fibrous matrix. As I and perhaps others here have mentioned, in such a highly insulated matrix, even a modest over unity reaction could result in a "runaway"-- for example, under Storms' recent scenario if it applied to your fibrous aluminum oxide matrix. You, ogfusionist, have also repeatedly pointed out that at 830 C the proportion of dissociated H2s becomes favorable... making that a possible key factor in your "reaction" and meltdown at 830 C.

To the above, ogfusionist replied:

"I guess the serendipity was a blessing but it has been overwhelming. Thanks for your reply. "

Longview then replied:

"As always, you're welcome."

[Longview makes this editing change in an attempt to bypass the "new page" forced by something or someone here. That innovation of a new page, is not conducive to thoughtful exchanges here. It has now been in place and apparently corresponds to some extent with my increasing dissatisfaction here. It has resulted in deletions of portions of my posts (by me)... exactly those portions which might have been most valuable. I'll leave it to others to guess why I , or others might make such deletions and how such deletions might destroy the archival and "record" of progress in this important field. An all engineering approach is fine, but some attention to the knowledge of what went before can avoid the "reinventing the wheel". Here ogfusionist, Thomas Clarke, Ecco, FreeThinker2lenr and others with a desire to think and discuss.... including even Yugo/Hody may be helpful to those just getting underwy.... The failure to listen "up front" may well waste a huge amount of effort.

Perhaps once again, evidence for the need of Parkhomov / Rossi / "all replicator" Forum and a Forum for LENR in a more general sense. I like reading the dialog on replications as much as anyone. But the discourse there is rapidly becoming its own universe and deserves its own location-- but to the effective exclusion of constructive comments?? Something such as this forced "new page" may have caused my earlier deletions and then perhaps even those of "Ecco, the Dolphin" --- I don't know, but the atmosphere has for quite sometime been pushing the Forum toward the single mind set apparently "judged" a priori, to be "where we all want to go". Too much "voting" in the back room for me. It looks like the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago.]

Here the physicist (I take Thomas Clarkes word for this, at least) pretends to "understand" catalysis. It is all overlapping wavefunctions, or some such. For those who may be young in science, there have been many dogmatic barriers erected by the old guard in many fields of science. These may be well meaning extension of long years of undergrad homework, years of graduate school and pleasing the "committee", and many more years of directing grad students and post-docs and/or teaching various level of classes in the particular discipline, followed by decades of grant writing and grant reviewing. Often with "consensus" as an sustained underlying motif. Finally there is the efforts to fend off the "barbarians" at the gates of the beautiful and fanciful "castle" that represents the edifice of physics so dear to self and peers all those years.

Elsewhere, Mary George Yugo Hody claims to have said "NOWHERE" that exothermicity is the equivalent of spontaneity. Certainly not in those exact words, since neither exothermicity nor spontaneity have ever been used by her/him. Precisely, I am guessing, because this entity "Mary" really has no recent training or working experience with the concept of free energy or with activation energy-- concepts that are essential and key to understanding the distinction between exothermicity and spontaneity. These concepts are so fundamental to chemistry and thermodynamics.... even the old guard Thomas Clarke surely knows that score full well.

I will cast my lot with the "believers" to the extent that I see great injustice was done to F & P and others daring to continue the work. I will cast my lot with the critics who insist on a Popperian notion of falsifiability.... that is we should be able to eventually construct experiments whose outcomes are capable of disproving the central hypotheses adduced to explain our observations. We are quite fortunately not in the position where we can claim that such tests are impossible.... it is not like cosmology or natural selection-- where deep history of observables, consistency of theory with observations, ability to make good predictions from the theory, the "reputation" of the theorists, and "consensus" with other theorists are often the only probative tools....Instead, it is really basic physics and nuclear chemistry.

WLS can be tested, SOME of Axil's many ideas could be tested. Many LENR / CF central assumptions are now surely testable. I have stopped suggesting such tests here, since there seems to be few, if any, who recognize the importance of such tests to this burgeoning, and rapidly evolving field of inquiry. My former, and naive, view here was "Get the ideas out there, let the tests begin". But, so far, gazing at replications is the only sustaining fascination for majority of readers here... perhaps it is inevitable. If so, a renaming of this Forum as "LENR Replication Working Group" or some such may be more appropriate.

As always, you are welcome !

Quote from H-G Branzell

Alpha and beta particles can be stopped efficiently in matter, but this process will also generate gammas or X-rays.

For alphas, that is energetic helium nuclei, this is not a source of danger at the energies typically seen, or theoretically expected, that is under 30 MeV. Helium 4 alphas at 8 MeV penetrate less than a mm of water, and far less of stainless steel. The resulting impacts inside a steel vessel are thermalization only, and of course helium 4 gas. 8 MeV is a good example since the aneutronic process very thoroughly described protocols of Lipinski UGC yield two such alphas, whose combined mass is about 14,000 times that of an electron.... hence their relatively low velocity. See the middle 50 pages or so of: http://unifiedgravity.com/reso…014189799-PAMPH-330-2.pdf

Quote from Andrea Calaon

Dear Eric Walker,
thank you for considering my theory and for the detailed and interesting comment.
About your question:

Thanks for your excellent efforts, Andrea Calaon! Please see also my reply to Eric Walker above.

Longview

Quote from Eric Walker

Calaon's slides he proposes a number of possible reactions, a good portion of which have neutrinos as daughters. This means the weak interaction would be involved. The weak interaction is incredibly slow compared either to the electromagnetic force or to the nuclear force. For this reason reactions involving the electromagnetic and strong interactions can be expected to outcompete those involving the weak interaction by many orders of magnitude in any normal circumstance, apart from radioactive decay (which is not a "reaction")

First, welcome to this Forum, Eric Walker.

Andrea Calaon is proposing a specific mechanism for the conditions that are not "ordinary". He is not the first, but certainly makes an interesting, if not compelling case.

Your (Eric Walker's) comparative rate question is, in my present view, not an issue. High activation energies make rates infinitesimal (consider diamond stability at ordinary temperatures, whose decomposition is favored and predictable based on delta H i.e. enthalpy, but whose activation energy for decomposition to amorphous carbon is very high). Heat and catalysis are surely the general category of mechanism for condensed matter nuclear fusion.

But, I would not expect the exact nature of the likely CF/LENR or EMNR catalytic mechanism to be obvious.

Physicists, chemists, chemical physicists, physical chemists and the like have spent now nearly one hundred years in the effort to understand exact chemical catalytic mechanisms. That such processes work chemically is undeniable, such mechanisms underlie industrial processes ranging from petroleum reforming to pharmaceutical manufacture. Catalysis in condensed matter nuclear reactions is likely at least a significant portion of the general mechanism---It appears to me that Andrea Calaon is offering aspects of the specific mechanism while answering many of the long standing critical comments from the physics community ---for example Huizenga's three "miracles". [Which, may have been deposed in other ways before.]

Since neutrinos are "everywhere all the time" and in every form-- apparently varying on some Planck determinate, time-constrained and perhaps universal hidden variable-- neutrino accounting (originally a spin and mass conservation construct) hardly suggests a credible critique of Calaon's interesting and quite comprehensive theory. Radioactive decay is a "reaction" if one regards neutrinos as a "reagent" even if of high and variable concentration and perhaps not strictly "limiting". Keeping in mind that neutrinos are also a time variant form of their own antiparticle, their own flavor and anti-flavor and even their mass variants... etc.

Even if neutrino fluxes are seen not to be involved, radioactive decay can still be regarded as a "reaction", in that case a "zero order reaction"-- that is a reaction not dependent on the concentration or temperature of the decaying isotope. Even then, one has to regard the occasional reports of chemical and physical effects on "natural" decay rates as potentially suggestive of higher order reaction effects in radioactive decay.

See:

http://profmattstrassler.com/a…nd-neutrino-oscillations/

And:

http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Ph…ates/Zero-Order_Reactions