A very definitive measurement of heat flow over temperature can be made using differential scanning calorimetry DSC. See the wikipedia site for a brief introduction

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_scanning_calorimetry

A commercial instrument is described in the following:

us.mt.com/dam/Analytical/ThermalAnalysi/...06.11_DSC1_Bro_e.pdf

This DSC has thermal scanning ramps up to 700 C. It is available with a pressurized sample chamber that can handle 100 bar of reactive gases. It can detect heat flows of 0.02 microwatt with a total range of thermal flow of 140 milliwatts. Time constant on the most sensitive range is 3.1 seconds. Instrument baselines are stable and repeatable.

This would be perfect instrument for running LENR activity studies using 50 milligram samples. All the instrument design has been done and is already workiing and well understood. We could focus on the LENR effect rather than trying to discover how to interpret all of the artifacts from our new untested instrument.

I don't know the cost, but I would guess in the $50,000 range. The instrument would remove any doubt as the the reality of the LENR effect. It is a sturdy and reproducible instrument. DSC is not in the scope of this present project, but is a rapid and straight forward path to unambiguously demonstrate the the validity of the concept. Once some working materials have been discovered then scale-up efforts can begin.

jdk
I

I understand that this would be a great tool to analyze thermal capacity over temperature, but how do we use it to measure thermal output of a heat generating device?

The question is further muddled by the likelihood that a LENR device probably must be repeatedly triggered by changes in temperature or other forms of energy.

Any advice?

The "scanning" term covers the issue. A programmable oven is part of the instrument. The user can control the ramp rates over a wide range. The ramps can be both positive (heating) and negative (cooling). It is also possible to set the ramp to zero (static). The instrument under all these conditions measures temperature difference between an active sample in a small metal dish and an identical empty small dish in the reference location. The output variable is heat flow.


jdk

I think this is a really useless purchase while the project has so many more better ways to spend 50k. (That they most likely don't have)

It is really this simple.
You have a tube in a 20C room
You spend 100 watts on heating up a non reactive wire your get a tube that has X temperature
You spend the same 100 watts on a active wire and you measure the tube again

If the tube is significantly hotter with the active wire then there is no other possibility than some reaction. You run it for a while and you rule out all chemical reactions.

Is this really worth 50k to measure more accurately?

If i where them I would now try to get as much wire surface in that tube as possible and try to push that efficiency. Repeat some measurement, change some variables.

The output of a DSC is a signal proportional to the energy (temperature) difference between two small identical inert dishes. The "active" stuff is placed in one of the dishes and the other dish is left empty. The experiment usually starts at room temperature. Then the built-in oven is then told to generate a temperature ramp at a desired "speed" (degrees per minute) The ramp rate can be very slow (zero) or quite fast (100 degrees per minute). If liquid nitrogen or some other refrigerant is available, ramps can be negative. Temperature plateaus, or variable ramp rates are also sometimes included. The oven can also hold at a desired temeprture indefinately. Pressure cells are also available to examine gas reactions. The oven's thermal behavior is "programmable" in the local computer controller, so experiments are easy to repeat and automate.

There is not much quibbling over the results, but the testing is done at a very small scale. Samples are usually in the few hundreds of milligram size. Scale-up is a separate issue.

jdk

Hi JDK,

You are making some great contributions, can this be a part of the temperature measurement Collaborate project - or do you think we should launch a mini project for Calorimetry?

Would be great to have you working on some of the mini projects as they are posted.

Maybe we should make a forum section where members can propose mini-projects to go into Collaboration on - what do you think?

B