So far we have not seen any clear excess energy out of the cell during this Helium test.  Since our baseline was from a run with the exact wire being tested here, we did get a nice, close calibration curve, though.  More accurately, we did not see any significant deviation in temperatures from the base line run.  

One of the results from last night's run of the Loaded Celani Wire in Helium is that we got a glimpse into the impedance changes of the Celani wire pre-loading and post loading.  That's what I want to talk about now.

This is the results for the very first run with the Celani wire after installing it in the cell.  With every increase in power, the impedance went up in a nice step.  It looks like the first 6 steps maintain a positive slope, though.  The last 3 steps level out more at the top.

The second run was done at at 0.5 bar.  Notice a difference?

The step in the middle of the range displays a strong negative slope.  That occurred approx T_mica = 228C.

Then on this run, we saw the following curve.

A couple of interesting things here.  The downward slope appears again on the 4th and 5th step.  This was about 225 and 245C on T_mica, though the wire was probably higher temp.  On the highest step (T_mica=265) the slope continued positive, though.  Upon reducing the power back down to match the 225 T_mica, again, the impedance dropped well below the previous level at that temperature.

Questions these data raise:  

If impedance is a measure of loading, is the wire somehow gaining Hydrogen in this Helium environment?  It is possible there was some residual hydrogen available in the cell.  Perhaps it was dissolved in the NiChrome wire, or the copper wire, or the Mica wire supports.  

Or is it a migration of Hydrogen with the wire? Or is it some other metallurgical thing?  It's possible it has little to do with hydrogen and may be a function of cycling the wire temperatures.  Thoughts?

Why did we see some "loading" in the Run2He?  Again, maybe residual hydrogen from other things in the cell.  When we installed the Celani wire, we also replaced the Nichrome wire, so that probably was not a factor, but the other items may have been.

What is with the sudden drop as the power is turned on at the very beginning?  This I think we have an answer for.  At that time, the wire was powered by the power supply in automatic mode.  This new power supply (that replaced the one we damaged yesterday) has an improved control interface that actually goes all the way to zero when asked to.  That makes the impedance measurement very inaccurate.  Additionally, the sensor inputs that measure the current and voltage have an option for a zero offset calibration that we have never had to worry about.  Now calibrating that offset is on our to-do list.  All these little improvements add up after a while to some real good technique.

It'll be interesting to see how the impedance changes by morning.  Once again, I am up past my bedtime.  Good night.