Hello,

I have been following MFMP replicating efforts with much interest since before they began and started getting known by the general public.

In the beginning I was very optimist that the team(s) would soon unequivocally demonstrate with large, easily obtainable/reproducible excess heat, that LENR is a valid phenomenon. Much of this trust came from Dr. Francesco Celani's reported results during ICCF17, NIWeek2012 and previous meetings where he showed preliminary results from his work, although like others, I couldn't put a finger on it but it somewhat seemed "too good to be true".

Over time however I've increasingly grown skeptic that this effort will succeed with a positive result, at least with Celani's constantan wires. The more measurements became accurate, free of external influences and random errors, the closer they got to a null result, or in other words, to proving that Celani wires do not perform any better than plain wire resistors.

So far, if we take inconclusive results (either because of too large error margins or inadequate testing conditions) as null, then no wire tested so far has been able to demonstrate actual LENR excess heat, quite the opposite in fact. The CTC cell (which isn't very apparent at a quick glance, but it's a quite neat testing apparatus) in particular shows this fact in an essentially conclusive way.

Now, it can be argued that the active wires might have got damaged, or that only Celani's glass tube setup, because of unknown reasons, is able to make them show excess heat. However I'm wondering how much more efforts will be put on this before the MFMP will realize that maybe (maybe!) Celani's case was the result of a measurement error/misunderstanding as some LENR researchers lamented during ICCF17.

From the prospect of positive feedback with heat, possibly self-sustaining operation, showing at least 25-30% excess heat relatively to the input power, it seems that chasing 4-5% excess seems to be the most hopeful goal at the moment, which is too close to the measurement error margin for these school lab-grade experiments.

So, I think it is time to think of the possible consequences of a conclusively null result and prepare for them.

- What will happen to MFMP?
- What will happen to HugLab?
- What will happen to the credibility of LENR research in general, considering that much hope and expectations were put on Celani's efforts?
- What will happen to Dr. Francesco Celani himself?


Ecco

(A bit disappointed that I'm not able to use this screen name here as I do on the blog section)

We are mindful of your concerns, the MFMP was set up to find the truth whatever that may be. I was preparing a discussion piece on just this matter.

I feel the CC and the S&G are very stable damped systems but I do not believe temperature alone is enough to trigger LENR. Celani's old cell might be simple and flawed - but it also allows EM, Light (from sun including EUV etc) and environmental thermal variation in, all of which could knock the loaded, thermally excited nano structures into life.

I feel that our advanced experiments are so protected from any external influence other than slow temperature / marginal current and pressure rises, we will never see anything now and that is a cause for thought about out apparatus design.

We have, quite commendably, built the a stable system now that may be capable of doing something - ie - right reaction environment structure, a good proportion of the right reactants - but no 'Spark'.

Think of liquid TNT, it can just sit there - in a range of temperatures and pressures with nothing interesting happening until it gets a physical or electrical shock.

No one else is claiming to see sensible LENR/excess without some form secondary stimulation

• Mitsubishi/Toyota - X-Ray laser
• Brillouin - some EM wave stimulation?
• Like spark plug in Defkalion (or in an Internal Combustion Engine for that matter)
• The "pressure" variation claimed by Piantelli, Rossi, Celani et al.
• The current pulse or sudden collapse of bubbles reported by yet more.
• Like the D loaded Palladium - it will just sit there doing nothing at a range of temperatures - can heat slowly or cool slowly and nothing... dunk it into Liquid Nitrogen and BAM!

Our experiments are increasingly well designed to control what can be accused of influencing them that nothing is available to get them going and we need means to trigger the stable excited 'fuel'.

I made a video on Sunday to get across the exact state we find ourselves in. It is an attempt at showing how a capable system that would just sit there in a wide range of conditions can be triggered or stimulated into showing its capability. It also shows how attenuation/damping will kill its capability when the bowl is grasped. This is a video that is trying to get over the concept in a very simple to grasp way.



Right now we have venues full of people primed and ready to laugh - but no one is telling jokes. We either need to tell a few big jokes, or regular little ones, but right now the curtain is down and someone painted it brown. If we start telling really excellent jokes and the venue is still silent, then we know the audience is dead.

The takeaway is that we are building the perfect Pin / Pout experiments, where the output can be trusted. What we need to do next is also consider how to introduce the many triggers and stimulation methods that are claimed to get these reactions to work. This journey is far from over but there are so many trigger variants to try it is now more important than ever that we find a way to scale up the projects ability to sweep all the identified parameters. That is why getting more people involved through the kickstarter should be enabling.

Bob

I'm getting what you mean. It's indeed possible that without any stimulation nothing is ever going to happen in the latest cells. A possible flaw in this reasoning is that it's assumed that something anomalous must be occurring in Celani's glass cells. This is not easy to demonstrate because the reported excess heat from his testing apparati is still too small and measurements not accurate and stable enough to draw any conclusion (in retrospect, given how much trouble they gave to MFMP, I find it was kind of irresponsible using them in public venues with uncontrolled testing conditions such as NIWeek or ICCF17). Also, I doubt that Celani's original intention was to design his cell around these, his experiment is closer to Focardi-Piantelli early '90s nickel bar ones, which weren't subject to active triggering as far as I know. They also didn't have a clear glass tube as a reactor container.

Putting all of this aside, and using that assumption as a starting base, one has to wonder what would the main differences from the latest MFMP experiments be. In my opinion it's mainly three things:

- Transparent glass tube -> possible influence from visible/invisible electromagnetic radiation
- Hydrogen gas tightness -> a relatively large constant (or less so) decrease in pressure might trigger the reaction, so a controlled and fast pressure drop triggering could be attempted
- Input power stability -> I doubt Celani's power supply was top notch. Instabilities in input power might be have been the trigger

2 and 3 should be relatively easy an inexpensive to test with the CTC and the S/G cells.

Ecco

My worry has always been about false positives from the glass tube experiments. Your newer experimental designs go a long way to eliminating this possibility from the mix.

The subject of triggers is an interesting one. If you look at all the credible LENR results out there, by far the majority use heavy hydrogen or deuterium. It would seem to me that one relatively easy (albeit not inexpensive) thing to try would be to swap out hydrogen for deuterium. The other thing you notice is that a common lattice is Pd not Ni. Once again it might be instructive to create Pd coated wire to add to the mix.

The key in my opinion is first to get a credible apparatus with minimal chance for false positives and then begin a systematic exploration of variables and triggers.

@bobicanprogram

We feel we are killing all chance of false positives - but we may have killed the thing that got it going at the same time. This is good however as we can now look to selectively introduce

- accelerants (like acetone)
- stimulation (like EM wave cycle)
- triggers (like pressure, current, light pulse, particle emission like from K40 decay)

The challenge is there are so many claimed ways to trigger the effect reported by scientists and commercial entities that we need to seriously upscale the participation of people doing coordinated open replication. That hopefully will come out of the Kickstarter... which whilst we would have loved to launched in October 2012, we just didn't have a proper grasp on the enormous task. We believe we now can, because we can provide a range of good foundation experiments and have the systems and tools in place to coordinate all the necessary parameter sweeps.

Bob

These experiments which measure the suface temperature of the test cell and compare to an eariler calibration have an assumption: the thermal conductivity stays constant; the enclosed chemical composition doesn't vary - of course except for the transmuted species!
Molecualr hydrogen is well known to undergo decomposition to atomic hydrogen in a wide range of conditions. If this happebs in our experiments, the resuting increase in thermal conductivity will cause the outer wall temperature to increase without any change in input power. The earlier calilbrations will indicate excess power, but it is only a change in the thermal conductivity of the device. More heat is being carried to the outer walls, and the inner joule heaters are getting a bit cooler. This is a because the callibrations were done at a lower thermal conductivity using molecular hydrogen while the "active" experiment has an additional atomic hydrogen contribution to the total thermal transport.
The suggested triggering modalities all appear to be ways of generating atomic hydrogen.
High energy bursts which can temporarily increase the surface temperature and catalyze the hydrogen disassociation will briefly increase the themal conductivity until the atomic hydrogen recombines to molecular hydrogen.
Electric arcs are potent atomic hydrogen generators. Langmuir blew hydrogen through a carbon arc to create his atomic hydrogen welder. The arc is really just a concentrated plasma - an ionized volume of energetic gas molecules.
Organic molecules make good sources of hydrogen. There are several patents describing using butane, propane,ethane or methane as a hydrogen source to generate atomic hydrogen as means to add the hydrogen to another molecule in the reactor. (I can't find them just now) The acetone is llikely to simply serve as a source of hydrogen.

Our calorimeter needs to measure the total energy flow of the system. This requires a good measure of input and a good measure of total output. ( LENRexcess = (total output)-input))


jdk

jdk: The heat flux balance equations at steady state only contain terms which deal with boundaries of the "black box": ie. electrical energy in, heat flux out to room. As such internal effects such as dissociated hydrogen atoms and changes in internal convection/conduction are enclosed in the "black box" and don't matter for the energy balance.

The bigger source of a false positive in my opinion is the ability of the glass apparatus to transfer a significant portion of the heat by IR radiation and the calibration can't easily account for this. If the hydrogen absorption on the active wire were to change the IR spectrum from the calibration then we might see a false positive. The solution to this is simply to make the apparatus IR opaque. The other source of problems surrounds the assumptions associated with calibrating heat flux leaving radially based solely on the outer glass temperature. This requires all kinds of unjustified assumptions and leads to to observed dependancies on the local convection currents in the room. The solution is to force all heat to leave via conduction across a thin layer. In this case the heat flux becomes proportional to the delta T across this layer and becomes readily calibratable and independent of the room convective currents and room temperature.

I believe that only dissociated hydrogen atoms enter the solid lattice.

Bob, that video is very well done. it makes the point that inspires me.
-Paul

Thanks Paul,

I have another one to do on a related matter but to demonstrate in an easy way how physical things reveal their atomic nature in a way that is very easy to understand and that may be useful as a thought exercise.

I am intrigued as to what you might be thinking!

Bob

I'm not always sure which set of hardware I'm responding to. Easily confused, perhaps. Somewhere I must have missed something. I think the optical losses should be exactly compenstated if the calibration temperature is anywhere near the experimental temperature. The walls of the contailner are exactly the same composition- their optical transmission will not greatly change over small temperature differences nor will the emissivity.. The radiating solid materials inside the device are at a very similar temperatures and compostions under both situations and will have similar optical emissivities under both calibration and experimental circumstances. The gaseous absorbtions of both hydrogen and atomic hydrogen are minimal over a very wide spectral range. Low absorbtivity means low emissivity and little energy lost by gaseous radiation regardless of changes in the hydrogen ratios or temperatures.
The variable glass energy loss contributions seem to be a red herring in the discussion. It is in a collection of disciplines where little understanding commonly exists and it is easy to point to unknown mechanisms as potentially causitive.
As usual, I'm just guessing here. But we need to work this out in order to move forward with some certainty.


jdk

Sunday May 12 11:00 pm CDST 2013