I think we are splitting Hydrogen!
Hotter Platinum at the right Temperature and Pressures
Last week we finally saw a clear signal of the Platinum wrapped thermocouple exceeding the temperature of the Silver wrapped thermocouple. This is what we were looking for as evidence that the Celani wire, with its nano-structured surface, is splitting Hydrogen and generating free monatomic hydrogen.
The signal finally became clear as we swept the pressure from a high of 50 psi to 6 psi.
Power: 46 W
Gas: 100%H2
The range where the Platinum is hotter appears to be between 20 psi and 52 psi. (1.37 Bar to 3.65 bar) We see it as we increased the pressure and as we decreased the temperature.
Wire temps from roughly 242 C to 368 C.
There appears to be strong interplay where T_wire drops rapidly with more H2 pressure above 17.5 psi (1.2 Bar)
The Pt being hotter than the Ag effect was not apparent in 90%Ar gas, even though the active wire operated much hotter.
(NOTE: The T_Cu thermocouple is actually clad in Ag wire instead of Copper wire for these experimental runs)
The temperature drop at 23:40 is a notable event that is not correlated to anything else, as far as we can tell.
The wire temp increases as the pressure drops up to a maximum of 374C when the pressure is at 13.6 PSI.
90% Ar / 10%H
Next we tried to get a higher Wire temperature by running in 90% Ar, 10%H. The shape of the temperatures gave was similar in many ways, but the Pt temperature never exceeded the Ag temperature.
50% Ar/ 50% H
We see a choppy region at 20:00 UTC. Note that the thermocouples do not cross each other but get close at 20:20 UTC. The pressure drop was not as smooth a curve as the others, but the qualitative shape of the temperatures compared to the pressure is similar. Still, we do not see the Pt ever exceed the Ag temperature. We do not know what caused the bumpiness about 20:00.
Temperature Ranges:
Since we now had a pressure range where the effect happened, we started exploring the range of temperatures where this effect happens at various pressures. The results are not entirely clear, so far.
Is there Monatomic Hydrogen, or is this a different effect?
This experiment was conceived to test the hypothesis that Celani's wire was splitting Hydrogen at temperatures below where it would be expected. The idea is that the Platinum (with electroplated platinum on it's surface) would preferentially recombine any monatomic hydrogen compared to the silver. Our data seems to support that. We must ask ourselves what other effects may cause a difference in temperature between platinum and silver in this test cell configuration.
Some possibilities include:
- strange convective effects - can't be ruled out completely
- localized radiant heat sources if the wire is not heating perfectly evenly - with the same wire in the same cell, untouched between runs, with only gas composition changing, we see notable differences in wire behavior.
- Some other thermal path changes based on thermal conductivity of gas from reasons other than H2 splitting?
All the data and analysis is on our experiment notebook and the raw data is all available in the data viewer at data.hugnetlab.com
What else can you think of?
Comments
Thans you for your valuable contributions, Ryan has been hibernating in the warm southern states (who can blame him) and will take a look at your thoughts upon his return.
He now has a new bunch of Celani wires to test in this important part of our research.
You are correct in your assessment John of the issues with RGAs and small atoms. Platinized Platinum is the best catalyst for recombination accelleration.
Charles, we are thinking of best materials to preserve gas species (particularly H) - Teflon is a good candidate.
It is possible to measure the thermal conductivity of the gas in the tube. If you take a very small coil of extremely fine platinum wire covered with a thin layer of ceramic to isolate the platinum from the chemical environment- the final structure may be about 1-2 mm. When run with a constant current, this device will develop a voltage related to its temperature. The temperature is related to how much heat is carried away from the bead. By monitoring the rate of heat loss, an estimate of the thermal conductivity of the gas inside the calorimeter can be obtained. The platinum wire serves as a thermometer during this operation. As the wire temperature changes, the coil resistance changes . The change in power loss is readily measured. A microwatt or two is easy. If the system thermal conductivity increases beyond the original calibration molecular hydrogen values, then we can say that atomic hydrogen is now present. This will be dependent on attempting to keep the molecular H2 constant during the measurement.
This idea is presented as a starting point.
jdk
30jan2014
A gas lens or reflector with the thermocouples at the focal point may increase the effect significantly.
I can't think of a way to balance the distribution other then to isolate differences through systematic measurements and statistical analysis.
we see the catalysis metal role
should be looking for deuterium
we expanded our original frequency trigger hydrogen project
www.fractalfield.com/hydrogen
(based on
www.fractalfield.com/.../
now we are looking at langmuir / atomic hydrogen..
(jean paul biberian is working with us
we should chat
Skype
danwinter
(ref bill d.
Mathieu has some exciting news which we will expand on, he has been given a proven flow calorimeter and is this week taking delivery of a proper scientific chiller unit to couple to it. There are several other components he needs to gather up, but this will be a robust configuration that he shall use to run Celani wires in with a better response time and more resolution than the S&G. It remains to be seen if the S&G runs before this apparatus, but if either produces desirable results, we will be in a strong position.
The beauty of having strong results from apparatus such as these is that if they are of the same order as the simple glass calorimeter, then they verify that simpler apparatus as a valid approach for others to study the effect. We would still recommend the use of a flux sensor in 3rd party replications as this would remove the questions about IR transmission and provide an integrated area of a few cm^2 thus dealing with questions about variations in incident energy due to parallax offset from the wires under test, something that the point thermocouple sensors can be criticised about.
In addition, we intend to insert the thermocouple that is currently wrapped in platinated platinum in the US teams splitting experiment with a borosilicate capillary to test to see the capability of it to recombine mono atomic hydrogen. This will be a valuable data point on which to make fact based assertions.
The integrating calorimeters like the water bath experiment are much better at detecting true excess heat over long time frames. These will not be "fooled" by reversible chemical reactions occuring inside the cell because when integrated over time these reversable reactions always net out as heat sinks not heat sources.
I can appreciate that resources at HUG etc are scarce. That being the case why not focus those scarce resources on developing a work horse calorimeter capable of showing the LENR effect without question. Armed with this tool we can move to more interesting questions of how to trigger and control this LENR reaction.
The point of the tests proposed by Giorgio Vassallo and Celani carried out here buy the US team HUG is not to confirm that 4.5eV is put into and taken out of Hydrogen as it splits and re-combines.
The point is several
1. to see if it occurs at all as, theoretically it should not occur at these low [mean bulk material] temperatures.
2. to test the langmuir hypothesis that may explain all or part of the apparent excess heat
3. If H2 and D2 disassociation are critical to excess heat production, having a standardised experimental cell such as that developed in Minnesota for this test will help screen wires [that have undergone a variation in processing] for their potential LENR yield. Where rate of monoatomic production may be a proxy for capability of LENR activity.
With regards to the steel and glass cells, we have now secured the fund to re-run them, but Nicolas is very tied up with other work and, well it is the "silly season". He is taking delivery of some of the needed replacement components in this week and we have the needed wires - but some machining that needs to be done is delayed by a volunteer moving jobs and HUGs machinist is off on break till middle of January.
We have literally minutes ago finished discussing this as a group and the plan is we are going to post the solid works cad files and ask if anyone is able to machine the part sooner. Since the experiment may take 6 weeks to run, the more we have to wait to start it, the more frustrating things get.
A core issue here involves the calorimetry used in the glass-envelope cells. There is good evidence that glass can act as a recombination catalyst. If the temperature measured at the glass is skewed by the heat of recombination while the heat lost to splitting H2 occurs at the wire core, the calorimetry accuracy will be impaired. This experiment is an attempt to test that hypothesis. Water-bath calorimetry would eliminate this possible error but the response time is much slower than the glass differential T as used in the Celani type cell.
My point had to do with the thought that simple recombination of H into H2 could produce excess heat. It would certainly be an exotermic reaction but it can't produce more heat than was consumed by the dissociation reaction.
Are there any plans to rerun the water bucket test?
Many scientists say that it is necessary to have mono atomic hydrogen/deuter ium (ie chemically seperated) as a pre-requisite for the LENR nuclear reaction to take place, be that H - H, D - D fusion or transmutation, say H + Ni > Cu. The yield from the nuclear events is many orders of magnitude above the chemical.
Since Celani wire reactors have neither ionising radiation, lasers or electric discharge, it is great supporting evidence that the apparent excess could be coming from LENR if sound results can demonstrate that the wires can split Hydrogen. This may be a catalytic and or resonant / boundary thermal statistical variation driven process.
The S&G cell, which we are nearly in a position to run again, if it repeats the same kind of results as before, supports also that the excess is not merely a disparity between a cell that can't create mono atomic hydrogen and recombination at the glass surface and one that can. It addresses the Langmuir hypothesis for apparent excess heat.
Furthe experiments to establish the mean free path etc might point to experiment designs that would be resistant to the Langmuir question whilst being simpler than the S&G.
I do agree that these reactions could be separated in time and in space so unless integrating calorimetry is used (eg. Your water bucket test) you could get a false positive.
We are using a silver wire (Ag) instead of the Cu wire from earlier experiments.
Would be good to see if a borosilicate tube instead of platinum had a similar differential - since this is one of the main potential outstanding questions about apparent excess heat... that the Langmuir effect may be causing heating at the glass due to it catalysing the recombination of mono atomic hydrogen and the energy release that would yield. So if the Platinum findings are repeatable then doing it with the borosilicate would settle that debate one way or other.
The great thing about this work is that Celani does not have a plasma, laser or ionising radiation source to disassociate H2 - and if, as many researchers postulate, mono atomic hydrogen/deuter ium is critical to LENR, then being able o demonstrate that Celanis wire can split H2 might support the idea that apparent excess heat could come from LENR. It would be splitting by something that would appear to be catalytic but more likely an statistical energy variance or resonance brought about by the nano structures created in his metal preparation.
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