Posts by Arun Luthra

Hydrogen flow through metals is exceedingly relevant to LENR.

Is there a concise reference that lays out the fundamental equations and concepts (solubility, partial differential equation for diffusion in metal, etc.) and some engineering equations (I want to know the flow rate through an area A of metal with pressure P on one side)? What is the role of surface treatments?

I want to do something really basic: Given a piece of nickel at temperature T with area A and thickness d, with vacuum on one side and hydrogen gas at pressure P on the other, what is the flow rate of hydrogen through the metal? I have resources for the diffusivity of the nickel as a function of temperature, but I need an equation for the flow rate. Morover, what role does solubility play? It may be an important gating factor and I need more background info on this.

This is for a SAFIRE/Holmlid replication.

So actually there are all kinds of commerical gas feedthroughs that exist and my real problem is lack of knowledge and comfort with VCO, VCR, swagelok, etc. tube connections. I probably want to weld a tube to my anode that can be VCR-connected (or similar) to a gas feedthrough that has a VCR-ended tube on the vacuum side.

So your method is somewhat plug and play because you only have to chip away/drill out the epoxy that is on the surface if you want to put a different electrode there.

I think a more plug-and-play method might be an "airlock" type connection. For example, a KF-16 "full nipple" could be welded to a steel baseplate or epoxied to an acrylic wall. Then, the gas tube could be welded or vacuum-epoxied to a half nipple. This half nipple can then be attached to the KF-16 full nipple airlock in true plug and play style with a KF clamp that is inside the vacuum chamber. On the non-vacuum side of the baseplate, a gas tube could be welded/epoxied to a KF-16 half nipple which can be connected to the airlock.

I hope there is a simpler way.

The gas fed anode being positive, a separate insulated high voltage feedthrough for the cathode is necessary. I have a commercial feedthrough for this, probably will vac epoxy it to the baseplate.

Quote from Alan Smith

Hi again. There are no threads on the entry points where solid or tube connections pass through the 25mm thick polycarbonate (Lexan) base-plate, The polycarbonate is bored to make the vacuum-greased feed throughs a 'tap-in' fit then the externals are de-greased with isopropanol and sealed both sides with clear epoxy. The plain 'empty' hole in this photo is for one of the locating bolts outside the vacuum zone and the white ring is the main seal to the bell-jar which is 1mm thick approx silicone rubber. This took a long while to degas but got there in the end.. I used a polymer base-plate rather than a metal one to reduce complications with electrical insulation of feed-throughs - which in my experience can be a potent source of leaks.

So, your metal electrodes are attached to metal threaded rods, and those are threaded directly into female threaded holes in the acrylic walls? It sounds like it would be leaky. Do you use teflon tape with it? Any special choice of threads per inch (or mm...) for this application?

Quote from Alan Smith

Hi Arun.

It's not too difficult to make the 'plug and play' electrode system. I have a version of it in my own plasma rig which I suspect is similar to yours. The electrodes here are on threaded rods -if they were bored internally they would also act as a gas feed - the white things on the silver colour anode (stainless steel 6% Ni 2%Cr) are merely alumina insulation beads as used in pottery kilns. This rig is due an upgrade soon...new Pirani Gauge, new Vacuum pump and valves. The driver for this btw is a large 15kV Neon transformer fed via the red Auto transformer you can see in the picture. The Autotransformer gives up to 300V output btw, so I could in theory overdrive the Neon transformer to 20kV (unlikely) There's also a high voltage diode network for DC as required. 12kV high power Microwave diodes are very cheap on Ebay.

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Hello,

I'm working on a SAFIRE analog experiment. Components:

- Large glass bell jar with steel baseplate and gasket. Evacuated with backing pump, and turbomolecular pump as needed.

- There will be a gas tube to feed hydrogen to a hollow anode. Pressure: on the order of 1 atm. The simplest anode will be the gas tube capped by a nickel or nickel alloy flat plate. I will also use hollow sphere anodes.

- The electrode will be surrounded by a cathode.

- Voltage difference: up to 1000 V and 200 mA, or 600V and 4A.
- I hope to heat the anode to ~1000C or higher using trace plasma in the vacuum chamber to exponentially increase hydrogen diffusion through the anode shell. Is this likely to work?

Questions:

1) What metals should be used for different anodes? Pure nickel for sure, but I also want a nickel alloy. IIRC SAFIRE said to use at least 10% nickel content.

2) I want a "plug and play" type setup for plugging in different anodes. Each hollow anode will be welded to a metal gas tube. How would you suggest I connect this gas tube to the base plate and vacuum/H2 feed system? This is basically a vacuum/gas feed plumbing and connector question and it's the biggest question I have right now.

If I can get this system working and doing something interesting I will graduate to an all-metal chamber with additional instrumentation such as a langmuir probe.

Background info:

https://safireproject.com/ewEx…SAFIRE-Project-Report.pdf

With a 4 MOhm load, the MOT provides the expected ~20x voltage multiplication.

When I reduced to 10 kOhm, there is a buzzing noise and it becomes a useless 0.90x multiplier. I guess the transformers in the variac and MOT are fighting each other?

Next I will try wall voltage attached directly to the MOT once I have a suitable, safe arrangement for that.

Disclaimer: MOTs are deadly, use proper high voltage safety.

In other news I just tested feeding a microwave oven transformer with a variac. The test load was four, 1 megaohm resistors (total of 4 megaohm). I had a voltmeter across one of the 1 MOhm resistors. It seemed to be fine at 400V (total 1600V) where the load current should have been 0.4 mA, and 0.16W per resistor. The 10A fuse popped in the variac as I dialed up around 500 V per resistor.

I'm not sure what the problem was. Maybe there was some temporary short in the voltmeter (which is rated to 500V) or some issue with the variac transformer interfering with the MOT transformer. The voltmeter seems to working still. Perhaps the "absolute voltage" (rather than the voltage difference) inside the voltmeter which could be much higher than 500V was to blame.

Edit: I think the voltmeter screen went blank or at the moment of failure so perhaps it is to blame.

Also, there is a full bridge rectifier between the MOT and resistors.

I am probably content to stay below 1000V with this setup...

I'm not sure what failed. It is not providing voltage, and it is drawing the max current from the DC power supply, where I set the current limit to 4.6A. Seems like something is shorted out. I think I was driving it too hard trying to maintain a continuous plasma.

can

It's the same 490V supply you have (the one with negative, ground, and positive outputs). One of them just died supplying 350V to the anode, but I have a spare.

I will need to study Bazhutov's setup in order to get more light into my spectrometer.

Two tests I've done:

(1) Wall voltage -> variac -> full wave bridge rectifier -> tungsten cathode. I used a large anode similar to what can used. This was with sodium bicarbonate at saturation. I could generate a continuous plasma with this. The cathode was a tungsten welding rod. The rod is cylindrical (about 1/16" diameter).

(2) I also used the 490 V DC supply (fed by a DC power supply at 30 V). This was with just a few grams of sodium bicarbonate in 200 mL. In this case I tried to file down the tungsten rod, but it is a very hard metal and it ends up degrading the hardened steel file quite a bit. The point is not very sharp. At around 400 V (and also lower) it generates a plasma pulse upon touching the water, then it reverts to non-plasma electrolysis if I keep it in contact with the water and the voltage is reduced during continuous contact.

I would like to rig some DC motor or push-pull motor or otherwise to rapidly tap the cathode against the water surface at an ajustable rate.

I will either try to sharpen a steel paper clip or use a dremel on the tungsten to get a sharper tip.

In another test with the variac, I included a capacitor, at one point the capacitor popped and subsequently this also killed the 10A fuse in the variac. Next time I will use two, 100V / 10000 microFarad capacitors in series. This should have 200V total voltage ability but reduces to 5000 microFarad which is still enough to provide some DC smoothing.

Interesting. Deuterium does not match up.

Also Mondaini says 117 MHz is for hydroxy radical, but that doesn't match up with what I found.

Here is a very useful page:

https://www.craf.eu/iau-list-of-important-spectral-lines/

OH radicals are around 1.6 to 1.7 GHz.

Anyone care to speculate on why the deuterium 327 MHz peak would light up in a light water experiment?

My RF SDR is working so I will be able to measure in the next few days.

That blue ring of plasma sure is interesting. Best guess at a conventional explanation: The electrolyte fluid is spreading out across the glass in a thin film. You can see refraction occuring at the edge of the film. The conductive fluid sheet is at nearly the same potential, and the greatest potential difference is between the edge of the film and the glass, hence a micro plasma forms at the film boundary and light emission occurs. When there isn't enough fluid for the film to expand further, the plasma front becomes unstable and sharper points form on the film boundary. The sharper conductive locations concentrate the electric field to those locations (like a lightning rod), hence the glittering at the end.

Quote from can

...

Tomorrow I should get a ready-made, rather inexpensive DC-DC 70W boost converter that should be able to output up to +/- 390V @ 0.2A. Perhaps with a tiny cathode wire and a large anode I might be able to see small sparks if they're not the result of a circuit resonance as I speculated earlier.

Are you getting this one? https://www.ebay.com/itm/264407040034

Apparently it is impossible to use a variac as input to a MOT to get variable output voltage. Looking into other options (either the above ebay link or a used high voltage supply). Lab high voltage supplies tend to have just a few milliamps max amperage. That $7 option can do a lot better supposedly.

I tend to think the voltage is more important, and amps is less important. We can tune the current by tuning electrical conductivity through its known relationsip to electrolyte concentration: https://sites.chem.colostate.e…20aqueous%20solutions.pdf

I will be using a variac inputting to a microwave oven transformer, bridge rectifier, and capacitor filter, for high voltage.

I'm deciding on buying one or two optical spectrometer$$$ to measure some predicted wavelengths.

I will measure RF frequencies.

I ordered some heavy water, which I expect to trigger the bursty plasma at lower voltages. However it may be too expensive to spare for this particular experiment. Maybe after a lot of practice with light water.

Wouldn't it be interesting to add Borax to the solution? Ultra dense hydrogen could smuggle the proton into the Boron and release 8.7 MeV.

I will replicate the Mondaini experiment soon, I'm gathering supplies, with additional instrumentation.

What weight % of sodium bicarbonate and potassium bicarbonate should we use?

It would be very interesting to also measure it with heavy water and perhaps with different mixtures of heavy and light water. There is reason to believe deuterium triggers at a lower voltage.

We can do it with different antenna lengths to help ensure that a resonance or different wavelength sensitivities is not a factor.

Also interesting to test different cathode geometries. He uses what appears to be a cylindrical (welding) rod. We need to know why the plasma occurs near the surface of the solution, but not deeper. Electrons congregate on sharper points of conductors; a sharp pointed cathode might trigger plasma at greater depth. With the less-sharp cylindrical cathode, perhaps the electric field is being diluted over a larger volume when the rod is deeply submerged, which might be why the plasma does not trigger at depth. We need to exclude the effect of hydrogen+oxygen reacting near the surface, if it is actually possible to do so. One way to do that is to immediately start at high voltage, before the gases have time to transport through the solution, and try to obtain the plasma effect before the gases can transport. Can we use a membrane to prevent mixture of the gases?

Thoriated vs. non-thoriated tungsten rods. Thoriated rods are sold for welding, I think it's because the alpha particles make it easier for arc discharges to form. Ultra dense hydrogen may neutralize the radiactive thorium. We can measure the rod radioactivity before and after extended electrolysis, however this requires alpha particle measurement which is more difficult than gamma and beta.

Putting a radioactive element (uranium ore being cheapest, it emits alpha and gamma) in the solution and running it for a long time (like in the Ohmasa experiments) might be able to reduce the radioactivity of the solution. This would be more convincing with a granular or large grained powdered radiactive substance, because the substance won't transport out of the solution via vapors. It would be nice to observe visually that none of the granules is missing on the bottom of the solution, while the radioactivity has significantly decreased. I am not sure how we can sustain the electroloysis for many days without it evaporating. Ideally the solution would be hermetically sealed and chilled to prevent boil-off? According to some theories, we don't need electrolysis to take place, we simply need to fire electrons at hydrogen with the right energy.

We can repeat it in a faraday cage, as has been mentioned.

Schwartz mentioned software defined radios on ebay, I just ordered one (HackRF).

Calorimetry is another obvious measurement.

Also interesting: a bell jar under partial vacuum, with a pool of light or heavy water (possibly with electrolyte) acting as an anode, and a cathode to fire electrons at it.

I worked in Taleyarkhan's lab for a few months as an undergrad. Neutrons were temporally coincident with the small radius phase of the bubble oscillation. Neutrons were not generated with control fluids. The neutron generating fluid was deuterated acetone. AFAIK the hypothesis was conventional inertial confinement hot fusion but in light of Ryushin Omasa's work and other experiments, maybe it is something else, like ultra-dense deuterium.

Holmlid's Rydberg matter and UDD is a room temperature superconductor and exhibits the Meissner effect. There's evidence that the UDD builds up next to the emitter, which makes sense if it is pinned there by the Meissner effect. He has a high current wire right next to the emitter to heat up the platinum and KFeO2. Anyway, a magnetic field could be useful for keeping the UDD clustered together. The van der waals force between Rydberg atoms scales as n^11 (principal quantum number), so the clusters have highly coherent electron oscillations occuring.

Perhaps the difference between low COP and high COP Mizuno chambers is magnetization of the outer steel wall.

I think I will use both DC and AC current in my cartridge heater (not at the same time).

In my chamber, at least for initial experiments, the mesh will be wrapped around a silicon carbide tube which is around the cylindrical cartridge heater. The mesh is inside an alumina cylinder. So, all the action is within about 3/4" radius of the cartridge heater.

There might be some magnetic field from the cartridge heater. Otherwise, I would need to either put a high current low voltage solenoid around the alumina (primarily for the magnetic field, and only secondarily for heating), or a simple solution might be to put a rare earth magnetic in or near the central axis of the setup.

The thin ring solution (or better, the ring made of a helix) is stable electrostatically. The ratio of the torus radii needs to be the inverse of the fine structure constant. I don't think spindle toruses or any sphere shaped torii work. unless they have been proved to be static/force-free and stable.

Strictly speaking, it seems charge and current don't even need to be defined, except for convenience purposes in describing measurements and correspondence to the Maxwell equation. There ought to be some principle from a string theory analog or some other theory that fixes the compton wavelength to a huge multiple of the planck length.

Fun fact: the Zitterbewegung solution is similar/analagous (but different) from the stellarator hot plasma confinement geometry, for good reason.

Well, a few minutes before my post this was posted to facebook by MFMP: