Improved dual differential experiment in EU [UPDATE#2 - Extension of the protocol]
Mathieu in France has been preparing the latest and greatest EU Celani experiment over the past few weeks whilst keeping a keen eye on the data coming out of the US. This is another big step forward in learning and is part of our commitment to learn from the crowd and from our successes and failures.
For those that just want the main points, here they are!
A type of differential comparative experiment was proposed that had its first outing in the EU just before ICCF18, then the US team started their run on August 16th.
We are now on the verge of a second run of this type of experiment in the EU.
A number of improvements have been made gradually during the last 6 months to ensure more robust potential excess heat determination.
- Choice of NiChrome wire resistance to be in the middle of the typical resistance range of the Celani wire
- Deep attention to resolve thermocouple placement parallax issues.
- New borosilicate glass tubes used to ensure no hydrogen diffusion or metal deposition challenges to differential results.
- Thermal characterisation of the cells performed in order to provide a baseline reference for maximum error determination.
- Test for potential LENR activity of NiChrome wire
- Uninterruptible Power Supply incorporated to ensure no downtime
- Better arrangement and shielding of ambient sensor to remove chance of thermal talk from cells.
- No chance of “thermal bounce” between cells as cells arranged in a straight line in large air volume
- More stable environment, only one experiment will be run in the lab with few visits.
These aspect are further discussed below for those that want to know the details. Mathieu also discusses his thoughts on the V2.0 protocol and how the new experiment came about. If anything is lost in translation in the document below, let us know and we'll attempt to re-word it to make it clearer.
To see the log book for the experiment, click on the "EURO" link in the top box and then click on "Logbook - EU Cells"
Protocol (from September 11th 2013)
After loading the cells with hydrogen (around 3.5 bars @ 24°C), the same way Celani did at ICCF and NI week last year, I will adjust power upwards in steps of 2.5W from 15W up to 40W until optimal “loading” is achieved before going to the next one. Then I will decide on what to do and how fast we should increase the power input. We’ll see if we get anything that might confirm the results from Malachi during the last weeks in the US.
UPDATE#1 - Need assistance to get a gamma detector
We need to get a gamma detector next to the EU cells cells in France. Having spoken to Celani, he has given us the heads up on the type required.
We need as a minimum 3"x3"long with a 25keV to 3MeV detection range - ideally with the ability to hook it up to the live data feed.
If anyone can loan one for a period of time, or finance the purchase of one it would be really appreciated.
UPDATE#2 - Extension of the protocol
Following around 6 days of loading we have now had around 3 weeks of apparent excess heat. We have now reached the maximum current limit of the 306L wire (with a little safety margin), given that the experiment is working so well, we do not want to mess with it. The protocol will now explore some new avenues and below are some of the questions ripe for exploration:
Questions
- Can we directly assess the apparent excess power generated by the system in its current state?
- If we de-stabilise the temperature regulation inside the room in order to have comparable environment to what happened in NIWeek, Texas and ICCF17, Daejeon, 2012, will we see a higher average apparent excess heat?
- If we decrease the power input, do we fall-back to the same apparent excess energy reading?
- To overcome the single active wire current limitation, we will put power in both wires in both cells and increase the global temperature inside the cells. Will this increase loading on the second wire and then later the apparent excess heat?
Answers?
- The excess power can be derived in many ways, Bob Greenyer suggested keeping a steady power input to the control cell, then slowly decrease the power supplied to the active cell to see at what point the mean external cell temperature differential between the active and control drops to zero. This is similar to the isothermal bath experiment with the Steel and Glass cells, we should get a reasonable idea how many watts the active cell is effectively producing.
- It is easier to destabilise a system rather than stabilise it. I will open and shut the window, the doors between the lab room and do an “open-visit day” for some people to come around and have close up and personal with the cells for few hours. We will see if it tends to increase the system entropy, resulting in a larger apparent excess energy signal.
- By stepping down from 45W to 35W by decrement of 5W, we would like to show if the excess heat value is similar to what has been shown earlier.
- After reaching 35W, I will, as quickly as possible, put the 306L under the TTi PSU with 30W then step up the 280L with power regulation from 20W to maximum current by steps of 5W. I want to see if we can rise the temperature of the cell at higher level without damaging the wires and see if the combined effects of 2 loaded wires can give better results.
Got your tickets? Sit back and watch ;)
Comments
There will be a teaser blog - to allow for another video upload. Then the blog will go live.
It'll be a biggie. Bit of recording hardware failure and more additions, but we are getting there with it.
Don't worry, we are working on something very interesting - hopefully blog today.
What changed is that both wires are hot!
Previously only one wire was.
Hence you see how much gradient of temperature we have between 2 wounding in both case... 1 wire heated or 2 wires heated.
This is also why it is necessary to calibrate those cells before starting up this experiment.
In order to put fixed power on the 306L we had to swap the lines over so the 260L live data is now the 306L and vice-versa, we are looking for an elegant way to resolve this.
This means the R/R0 are wrong as they are based off the original resistance of the opposite wire.
sorry for any confusion
So after looking at the historical data, we decided to lower the input power of the active cell by one step, it is around 2.5W lower but showing similar output average temperature. Rough calculation assuming that only the actively powered wire is producing apparent excess - which given that the 280L looks like it is still loading, is a fair assumption.
(2.5W / 42.5W) * 100 = 5.9% apparent excess
2.5W *(1 / 0.275g [approximate weight of wire]) = 9.1W/g
Celani says the wires he is supplying us should show excess of between 5W/g and 50W/g. This is in that range.
Putting this in context, in theory 1kg of this wire would yield approximately 910W.
Mathieu intends to put the TTi PSU at a fixed level on the current wire, and ramp up the second wire.
Even if we only see around the same 5.9% apparent excess, will we see the spread move to approximately 5W?
We did consider that, the rational behind the lowering of the active cells power was that the last two steps seemed to be producing a "choppy output" and we need to take it back a little, then switch power supplies on the active wire to the TTi (fixed at the lower level) and put the remote controlled power onto the second active wire and start ramping that up. This allows us a little thermal headroom in the first wire as the second goes from practically 0W to 40W or so.
Also lowering the active wire lowers the denominator.
But, there are good arguments for doing it the other way also - like - higher temperature is better.
It seems this was done in March 2011 and the power out was less than power in, but the calculated energy was shown to be above the maximum possible by chemical reaction alone. Its not too exciting, but useful anyway.
Perhaps you can also do such analysis on current results.
Excellent! Hopefully a constant pressure will allow us to understand the dynamics of the other parameters more easily!
Bob, That's good news! Any plans to try to replicate that experiment at MFMP? I think any noble gas should work, it's my understanding that noble gases won't pass through metal.
This will slow down the leaking rate.
Celani is doing similar experiments to the one you suggest, but in Argon.
Thanks again for the details on the resistance changes.
I wonder if the teams have had a chance to discuss the idea of putting a saturated wire under Helium pressure.
Might be interesting to do that with a wire in both conditions (loaded and unloaded) and compare the differences. If done in the same cell, serially, there would be a minimum of changes in the environment. (only the initial resistance of the wires would be different). Hopefully the pressure would remain more constant since the Helium has less opportunity to leak out.
ps .. Very interesting report by Celani et al
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