Minor Setbacks in Version 1.3 in US [UPDATE #1 - Rough Weekend]

Tick tock. Tick tock. The days wear on with no V 1.3 data to stream. We hear the clock, too! We've been tirelessly working to make up for some lost ground encountered recently. 

We fixed that insufferable leak in the vacuum line, but only too well. The line from vacuum to reactors is tight as a drum, and we realized there needed to be an atmospheric bleed in the line somewhere. This would allow us to finely tune the drawn vacuum and limit it to the prescribed 1mbar in our original protocol. Though the control knob is a bellows valve and not a needle valve we'd like to be using, it'll do the trick. 

The choke valve to throttle back our open-air bleeder, complete with two layers of filter cloth.

The vacuum line before choke alteration.

It looks a little more official now. . .

Thermocouple Trouble

We spent yesterday afternoon configuring the tests in HUGnet, resulting in the live data stream you may now all acquaint yourselves with before we set off to run calibrations (we'll let you know as soon as we start them ). However the US control cell gave null readings for the oxide wire current. 

This could not stand, and we departed for the lab to find the source of the issue. 

The oxide (red) wire was shorting to the cell chassis! You saw the passthrough construction pictures for V 1.3 - they're covered in fiberglass insulation, making it hard to believe that the red circuit was solely responsible for the short. And yet there was the problem with one of the interior thermocouples. 

What we see here is the lame interior thermocouple responsible for the delay in fully commissioning the US cells. Our clue came from the discoloration in the sheath metal, indicating there was a heat source present - most likely in the form of electrical resistance.

While doing some tooling on the macor supports, this little guy was nicked by the diamond blade. This little slip severed the delicate thermal connection inside and his days were over. He was a permanent installation in the flange and could not be replaced, so we let it be and continued with the assembly fully knowing the control cell would only have 1 interior thermocouple. 

I suppose we didn't give him a proper burial because his lifeless body caused the short in the cell due to its sheath connectivity with the flange and 1/4" support well. The passthrough junction had a washer that was also touching the support well. If we had not left the dead thermocouple plugged into the HUGnet board, we would not have completed the short to its chassis ground, and there we have our short. The bum interior TC was removed permanently in response to its fussiness. 

On the same subject of thermocouples, the exterior thermocouples have finally been installed as well. We needed a way to  make good thermal conductivity with the glass, a hangup we've experienced before. We liked the idea presented in the glass-hybrid cell concept figures and made our own fastening rings out of copper (thanks, Wayne!). The following is a timelapse of their fabrication. 

It was also necessary to add a few new input tables for the vacuum sensor in both US and EU tests to make the server more stable when pulling data for the streams (I really, really can't tell you why - I really, really don't know). However I'm told this will lessen the chance of any communication breakdown between the server and endpoints. 

And there you have it: the progress of the week. Things are taking shape for the calibration runs. No important data yet, but we do have live streams.

Sorry to throw a megablog post at you, but we didn't want you to get bored with us! 

Additionally, look forward to a little more site organization in the near future. We think we're on to something with metadata and tag words. What do you think? Any suggestions?

 Update #1 - Rough Weekend

Though we seem to have caught an uplifting draft of good publicity this weekend, not all was well in the US lab.

Shortly before leaving on Friday, we turned on power to the Oxide wire in the control cell (US-1.3B) to verify we had eliminated any further possibility of a short in the Red channel. Apparently within <1 min the wire gathered enough resistant heat to break at a weak point; none were there to witness the event, and we were largely unaware of the damage until our return today. We aren't totally used to working with the cells in vacuum, and the inexperience showed. 

This isn't the worst thing to happen, and something good can always come out of something bad. A comment on the blog clued us in to the varying resistance between the two cells' oxide wires, and we believed it may have been the varying lengths of wire between the cells. We weren't sure of the exact lengths because we didn't write it down .

Our EXACT effort is to eliminate doubts and publicity that LENR technicians do poor science, and yet we found ourselves supporting POOR SCIENCE! We PROMISE not to succumb to such irresponsible work, and thus have re-wrapped both the cells with new NiCr and oxide wires, taking exact measurement of their initial resistance and lengths. We are quick to catch mistakes like this and hold ourselves responsible in an effort to make them less often. Luckily for us, this mistake did not account for the differing resistance. 

The blown-out wire was the cause for our distress, embrittled to pieces as we disassembled cell 1.3B. 

This was discovered at ~0900 GMT-5, and disassembling/reassembling one of these reactors is no short order as we were unable to get the data running again until 1400. We wanted you to appreciate the process and attached a short video. 

The sublimated oxide wire ruined the quartz glass and micah supports, and thus needed to be replaced. The new supports must be entirely retooled from raw strips and baked out in a dentist's kiln. Following their acetone wipe-down, we need to dry off the entire core before inserting it back to the vacuum manifold and then delicately wrapping the new NiCr and Ox wires. We aren't slacking! However we've got our work cut out for us.