Multi-Wire Test Heating Up

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After a long delay as we failed to troubleshoot the water flow calorimeter, the Multi-wire test has been installed in a concentric tube calorimeter. It is now heating up and the first of the 3 wires is starting to drop resistance.

This is the test with 3 lengths of different Celani wires in a LENR-stick test cell. All the details are in the protocol document here: Protocol: Multi-Wire Test

Previous blog post: Multi-wire test commencing -Update4

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You can follow the data on Test FC0405 LENR Stick: Multi-wire and FC0403 CTC #2: Air Jacket

From Malachi:

We are starting to see the 270L wire loading. The internal temperature is ~208C. The interesting thing is that neither of the other wires (350L and 400L) are dropping in resistance yet. Could lower numbers of layers correlate to a lower loading temperature? This test will be an interesting one in the coming weeks!

The other two wires (a 350 layer and a 400 layer) are actually increasing over time at this temperature.

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0 #114 Malachi Heder 2013-10-17 21:20

@ Ecco

I agree that more loading is needed. Currently the wires are set up only for resistance measurements. It would require another power supply and this is something I also want to see on the wires. This could happen very soon.

0 #113 Ecco 2013-10-17 19:28

What about trying to apply power directly to them (EDIT: corrected) to check out if they will load more? Or if it will trigger better loading? As for power output under direct power stimulation, I guess that won't give reliable results as some of the power will be also heating the wire length outside the LENR stick.

The limit here is that any physical change performed to the LENR stick will potentially invalidate the last calibration made. I think there's not much that can be done with the wires already in place if you want to avoid this.

0 #112 Malachi Heder 2013-10-17 14:53

@ All

What is next for the multi-wire test? Does anyone have an idea?

We've run it up and down through our temperature range, tried to deload the wires and we've tried to reload them.

They don't seem to be decreasing any more, in terms of resistance.

0 #111 Ecco 2013-10-08 23:44

Not too much surprisingly, it appears that decreasing temperatures to improve loading worked. However I think it's the first time this is clearly observed in one of these experiments.

It looks like each wire has its own optimal loading temperature range. That of the 270L wire appears to be rather wide (in one of the latest blogpost updates it was observed to decrease resistance at an internal temperature of 208°C while other ones didn't yet).

This also means that there's an optimal H2 desorption temperature range too, depending on wire characteristics , which might have some interesting practical implications.

0 #110 Ecco 2013-10-08 16:13

It doesn't look like the wires are loading much; the 400L wire didn't change resistance at all, especially. Either long exposure under vacuum at high temperature (although not directly powered) damaged them, or temperature is too high for loading to be efficiently occur. 350-400°C might be a more suitable temperature range to attempt..

It looks like the 270L wire is doing most of the loading job so far (the H2 pressure decrease is tracking its resistance decrease quite closely). It's the one which appeared to perform the best during the first loading phase too.

0 #109 Malachi Heder 2013-10-08 15:07

@ All

The calibrations look sound. We are going to increase the hydrogen pressure inside the cell. Then we will try to load the wires as far as we can.

0 #108 Ecco 2013-10-07 18:16

@Malachi: if you removed the cooling water hose there's a chance that at 35W the outer tube will get hotter than it's supposed to, causing output power will be negatively affected, which could possibly mask any calibration-ind uced positive bias.

But I guess we'll see in a while.

0 #107 Malachi Heder 2013-10-07 18:06

@ Ecco

I will set the input power to 35 watts and see if it still holds.

0 #106 Ecco 2013-10-07 17:27

It looks like the CTC with the new calibration is less biased I thought it would get, at least at 10W of input power. The calculated output power appears to still be within a +/- 30-60 mW margin as you calculated for the 95% CI in the previous calibration.

However, I think this time it will really be +/- 30-60 mW, if the previous apparently rather positive results were an artifact due to using a different stick or changing its position inside the CTC.

Still, it might be interesting to see if this still holds at a higher input power.

0 #105 Malachi Heder 2013-10-07 15:14

@ Ecco

y = a + bx + cx^2
Fitting target of lowest sum of squared absolute error = 8.8798690830743515E-03
a = 3.7115236254221067E+01
b = -3.2643234519158354E+03
c = 1.2266525881480571E+04

This is the new fit equation. We can plug it in and see how well it fits. If it does have a positive bias, then we will perform extra calibration cycles, in a decreasing fashion perhaps.

+1 #104 Ecco 2013-10-05 18:28

@MFMP: as for calibrations, are you sure that 1 hour of settling time is enough? When I was making excess power and temperature graphs I sure wished it was higher, something like 2-2.5 hours. An option could be to have, after these, 3 additional 1 hour per step calibrations where power is stepped down instead of stepped up. Then the average of all calibrations for each step could be used for the final calibration curve.

In order to have the additional calibrations to step down to the 38W step, you would have to set them to start from 40W. Of course the 40W step would have to be disregarded.

** It would really be better if all calibrations used a longer settling time, though.

EDIT 20131007: my point is that by using 1 hour upward steps you will be inducing a slight positive bias to the system once you will use a calibration based on this data. In other words, that if you will keep applying power for more than 1 hour, even without reloading H2, calculated output power will appear to show an excess, although it likely doesn't actually.

You could test this before reloading H2 by powering the cell at any given power step for more than an hour.

0 #103 Ecco 2013-10-04 21:19

I wouldn't have taken the latest results at high temperature seriously either, however during previous runs at an outer tube temperature of 46°C, at 26W (the highest input power level at which outer tube temperature never got affected) the calculated excess power was 0.75W, which means a 2.9% excess.

Hopefully, perhaps with the aid of the quicker power cycling, temperatures will keep decreasing during the next calibrations, showing that what was observed during the active runs under hydrogen and this prolonged vacuum run was actually real.

0 #102 Ryan Hunt 2013-10-04 21:05

My take is that our calibration is in question at these temperatures, so we can't really say for sure what we are seeing. I like being able to get up to 500C and higher because the outer tube temperature is higher. Therefore, the best course is to cycle it several times through the range and use that as a new calibration. Unless, of course, the various calibration cycles show big differences between them.

0 #101 Ecco 2013-10-04 20:32

@MFMP: I see from the Experiment Log you are going to perform a few calibration runs again (I guess under vacuum with the LENR stick already in place and the cooling hose for the outer tube installed). Is your conclusion that the cell is currently not producing any excess heat, or are you simply going to ignore it and see if you can trigger more of it with H2 reloading, which will hopefully be better than before after so much vacuum time?

0 #100 Ecco 2013-10-04 19:02

@MFMP: by the way, this is the output power curve resulting from this run at a 56°C outer tube temperature:

i.imgur.com/dPDL7vs.png

Weird, isn'it? I tried adjusting data to the previous runs at a lower outer tube temperature, with a second order polynomial curve, and this is the result:

i.imgur.com/GBbTK4M.png

I wouldn't take this too much seriously... but it's interesting data nevertheless.

0 #99 Ecco 2013-10-04 16:46

@Malachi: yes, that could be. I tried adding the second internal thermocouple on my chart and it sorts of "averages out" the apparently weird/anomalous behavior of T_Int1:

i.imgur.com/4VBPjF4.png

As a side note, it appears that wire resistance is increasing over time noticeably faster than before, after increasing temperatures (besides the immediate increase due to higher temperatures / PTC behavior of the wires at this stage).

0 #98 Malachi Heder 2013-10-04 16:03

@ Ecco

The inside thermocouples are free floating. They could be shifting when the wires (separated by fiberglass sheathing) get hot and deform. Just a thought, but it could explain the difference in temperature rises between runs or power levels.

0 #97 Ecco 2013-10-04 15:47

It looks like my exponentially rising temperatures scenario was at least partially unfounded. The rise in temperature from 32W to 34W is lower than that from 30W to 32W. I find weird that there was such a bump at 32W, though, which was there even after taking into account that T_Int1 readings slightly decreased over the previous couple days. I guess that internal temperatures can't be trusted too much.

Outer tube temperatures haven't budged yet though, which is a good thing.

0 #96 Malachi Heder 2013-10-04 14:14

@ Ecco

There is no rational, it must have slipped my mind. I will make a better effort today! Thanks.

0 #95 Ecco 2013-10-04 02:59

@Paul: for comparison purposes I tried modeling the temperature the inner core would have without [apparent?] excess heat (and the same ideal conditions I previously mentioned):

i.imgur.com/lbpI3gR.png

With the point being: once input power is high enough, if there really is exponentially increasing excess heat, it will be very noticeable. It shouldn't be visible only through internal temperatures.

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