Moving Forward with the US Cells - Onto Loading
We have spent the last day and a half continuing to search for a good explanation as to why cell 1.0 is running 7 to 10 degrees cooler with the Celani wire installed and with a Helium environment than it did during the calibration.
The ideas we looked at included:
Is the instrumentation was faulty? - We examined every bit of the measurement process, swapped out thermocouples, read the same thermocouples with different instruments, and did not find anything that looked off.
Is the heat was distributed differently from variations in resistivity along the length of the wire? To help answer this, we took thermal images of the cells and did not see anything that looked like it might account for this. Interestingly, the camera told us a different story than the thermocouples were. According to the measured temperatures, Cell 1.0 with the quartz glass actually ran slightly warmer than the pyrex version in cell 1.1. The camera saw the opposite, though. I don't know whether this is an emissivity issue of the glass, or something else.
This image was taken on the 26th of December but at a higher power setting. (just happened to discover this on the camera and it makes a good comparison).
This was taken today
This is just showing the higher temps of cell 1.0 at a higher power on Dec 26.
And today.
And this is cell 1.1.
Any opinions?
Was the calibration run in helium the anomaly? Was the wire with the contamination causing a reaction and generating excess heat or was there some other bias at that time? To answer this one we decided to ask if there was a consistent relationship between the Helium calibration and the Hydrogen calibration for cell 1.0 and the same thing for cell 1.1. My hope was that either the calibration or the Helium test run in cell 1.0 would have a lot in common with the relationships seen in the other cell. Here are the plots. To my eyes, they did not give a clean comparison to say one set of lines was not where it was supposed to be.
Our Conclusion:
This experiment is a poor design and the apparatus is extremely touchy. Continued to try to nail this down may be futile. If we continue to explore we may, or may not, learn what is causing this temperature issue in this cell. If there is a resistance variation we may not be able to track it down short of pulling the cell apart and heating the wire and looking at it. In the process we may cause more issues, though. There are way better methods and apparati awaiting us that I am eager to explore, but instead, I am spending time looking for a meaningful, but relatively minor anomaly. The temperature offset looks like it will be about 3 watt handicap to our power out calculation.
Therefore, we are moving ahead with cell 1.0 and we will see what happens with that wire. Meanwhile cell 1.1 seems to be extremely well behaved.
We are commencing the loading phase where we heat the cell with the NiChrome wire and watch the Celani wire decrease in resistance as it is heated passively. We are loading the cells to 1.0 bar Hydrogen. Sometime tomorrow, after the resistances have stabilized we will run about 1.8 watts through the Celani wire to try to trigger some excess heat.
Let's see if either of these cells show us the New Fire.
Comments
clicked submit my comment didn't appear. Grrrr... well I'm not writing all that over again. Anyhow, just wanted
to say wonderful blog!
There are obvious limitations here. If the amount of purported endotherm exceeds what is possible to store chemically, then that is something to be dealt with itself. But neither should we assume a priori that LENR is an irreversible process; if we assume for the sake of argument that it exists, perhaps it can be reversed, and in periods of endotherm this is what is happening.
I do not propose this as anything that is necessarily the most plausible explanation. Just that possible endotherm is a detail that we should be staying on top of in order to rule out another possible artifact.
Forgive me, but I have not been following your work to this point. It is way outside my rather limited area of competence, but is quite exciting.
As the loading approaches saturation it's possible that some H1 escapes back into the cell. Glass is known to be a catalyst for H1 recombination (exothermic) and this might cause a rise in T_GlassOut while the other temps are stable.
Something unusual happened at the time stamp around 14:33 that I observed but soon thereafter the glass out temperature dropped below the expected curve. Initially, I calculated the power deficit to be 1.26 watts below my original calibration. After the unusual temperature climb the power rapidly dropped to 1.58 watts below calibration.
At the end of the 51.6 watt power step I calculate that an additional .317 watts is being absorbed by the cell. This is some form of endothermic behavior, or perhaps someone changed the test system at that time.
This post is regarding cell 1.0 behavior.
Maybe the next event will be what we seek.
For instance, Dr. Brian Ahern's work for EPRI found endotherm.
My suggestion is to contact Brian for details - as it is too complicated to put into a few words. The anomaly of endotherm with some materials - may be part of a complete understanding and we have a hypothesis explaining both.
Rgds
Data feed time reads:14:33, 1/12/2013
Hope this is not a false alarm!
This is for cell 1.0.
22passi.it/.../...
Excess power was recorded at above 175 degrees
I would tend to believe that pyrex glass is different because if the values for the two wires agree reasonably well it would indicate a poor ir-transmission which makes the thermal flow paths simpler and easier to control.
However, the insulated cell looks good. As a very critical observer the only thing I consider dubious is that the thermal sensors my not be attached as state of the art. The danger is that the wires act as heat sinks and lower the temperature at the measure points. The wires should therefore be firmly attached to the object for at least a distance of 20 mm. Dental plastics will do it but it needs an UV-pistol to cure. With great care other types of glues can also be used.
It looks like the resistances in both have now dropped down to a stable point. I am now sweeping the temperature range from roughly 200 C to 300+ C to see if we identify loading in another temperature range.
Cell 1.1 did have an interesting 2.5 C temperature rise for several hours that made P_xs rise from 0.75 to almost 2 Watts. On this cell that has been so well behaved, I got excited because it sure looks like that was above the confidence limits by over a watt! This is kind of a low temperature to trigger. Can anybody remember what Mastamateo saw at that temp on his wire?
The measurement current in the Celani wire is fixed with a resistor. At this time I do not want to change it and risk dealing with an offset or something. I guess we'll tolerate the noise.
As wires have different layer thicknesses and the absorption is only a surface/special layer capability, you can imaging that the thinner the layer the less hydrogen that can be absorbed. You effectively have two resistors in parallel - the core - which has not changed and the outer layer.
Now to calculate 2 resistors in parallel
Rt = (R1 X R2)/(R1 + R2)
So for a 300+ layer wire there is much more active material that can absorb Hydrogen. For 14 layers FAR less and for 2 less still. This will manifest itself in a less significant resistance change for the wire.
HOWEVER - a small resistance change in a wire with a VERY thin layer may mean that that layer itself has absorbed a large quantity of Hydrogen - just it can't effect the overall resistance that much. It might be equally as active on a per mass basis as the thicker layered wire.
We draw your attention to the "random coated" stock wire we bought whose resistance changed in the same way as Celani wire - just only 2.5% not around 20% (for the 350 Layer wire)
and we suspect it was very active in its own right but still outshone by the active Celani wire. Maybe the high layer Celani wire would run harder and longer with more total energy than a less layered wire. There may well be a sweet spot in the number of layers and the cost to produce. That may be 2 or 14 layers and not 300 or 700.
What the current loading is showing is a 14 layer loading a fair bit and the 2 layer wire loading a little bit but both less than a 350 layer wire. Overall the story is the same as the 300+ layer wires used in previous US and EU runs. We see less of the tell tale resistance change - but it might be just as effective for short runs.
When this is established (especially through passive heating) we will know the ideal layer numbers and thickness for optimum bang for buck - and this is the beauty of an active material on a wire - we can the see the optimum number of layers to process onto Nano particles or Nano open celled foam where the overall surface area will be maximised for the material bulk.
Then we are really cooking
i.imgur.com/VEODV.png
Try temporarily increasing input power to the active wire to a few milliwatts, it shouldn't increase temperatures significantly, but it should make resistance readings more stable.
EDIT: or were you referring to long period noise (slow oscillations) instead?
Both wires have a fairly noisy resistance signal. There have been some suggestions that this may be due to hydrogen gas convection currents inside the cell disturbing the temperature of the wire. I don't know.
The only way to find out is by increasing power to the heater wire or waiting for the active heating run (power directly applied to the active wire).
Wire on cell 1.1 is showing an increase of resistance while temp is going up. The Celani's magic is gone for this one. I'm pretty sure.
Wire on cell 1.0 has shown firstly an increase of R which inline with celanis claims. It is a good 1st step. Then when T° mica reached 160°C, a very slow but steady decrease of the R and still going down. But this is very very slow. After 2 hours, R/RO = 15.52/15.75 = 0985. Celanis showed a faster decrease of R/R0. This wire has a problem too, but still worth a try.
As I said before, I hope I'm wrong, but 1st signs aren't good.
Cell v1.1 has a 2-layer active wire, while cell v1.0 has a 14-layer active wire.
Perhaps in indirect heating conditions even more heat is needed for the 2-layer wire to show typical effects. The heater wire (and the glass tube) should be able to withstand up to 100 watts of power. I don't know if the USA team is going to ramp up power up to that level.
With H2, the reistance of celani wire should have dropped in both cells. But neithier one has shown any significant drop of resistance.
There are also glitches when power on NiChrome is applied . Is it possible to isolate the measurements of the 2 powers a little more ?
Did you fried de wires ?
Hope I'm wrong here
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