EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: IanMacdonald on March 05, 2018, 09:29:53 pm
-
I'd like to do some experiments with LENR reactions. In fact, I've been thinking along these lines for a while. Maybe the Nanor, E-Cat or similar devices.
Also might try the original Pons and Fleischmann experiment, though I understand there are some safety issues in doing that - one or two researchers have had explosions. :scared: You need a safety shield at least.
Anyone have thoughts on this?
-
If you are not already aware of Lookingforheat (http://www.lookingforheat.com/), that is a place where you can find some "DIY" parts for start experimenting.
That field can easily trigger a sort of "immune response" to many who are convinced that is a nothing more then pseudo- or bad science. Mentioned ECat, I think, is unfortunately one that will give them a good excuse to hold such belief.
Instead of wasting time with Rossi "revolution", I'd rather spend some time trying to find out what e.g. Arie Melis DeGeus wanted to say. He didn't succeed to deliver what he started, but possibly he left enough clues where to go.
My stance is that LENR/CANR is doomed to failure as long as one insist to stay within Einstein "frame of reference" (e.g. everything is relative, therefore nothing is absolute, therefore vacuum is just vacuum, etc.). Regarding other frames of references one should study Sagnac work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagnac_effect) and perhaps Roland De Witte work. Fran De Aquino have also some interesting theory and experimental work.
-
Do your calorimetry well. That is the area where everyone "fails" (its hard to call it failure when it often seems so deliberate).
Calorimetery is hard, but it is not hard like "nobody is quite sure how to do it, this is an area of active research". Rather, it is hard like "this stuff has been known for over 300 years, but it still takes a lot of effort and careful design". That is, it is exactly the kind of "hard" that many people attracted to cold fusion are really bad at, or at least disinterested in. People doing good calorimetry are much less likely to have positive results and tend not to get the level of attention that the sloppier colleagues get. Conventional techniques in the LENR field are to measure power in to 5 significant figures and power out to -1 significant digits. Do better than that.
Do control experiments. Whatever secret sauce is supposed to make it all work, try the experiment without that to validate the measurement apparatus. Keep as much as possible the same. Understand the results of the control experiment before paying attention to the experimental data. And when the control shows net power generation, that means fix your apparatus, don't claim "we don't understand the mechanism, it must be happening even when we didn't expect it."
-
Yes, think one of the key problems in this area is poor measurement techniques. When you're trying to convince people of something the textbook says is impossible, even more so. Otherwise, reaction will be :blah: :bullshit:
That said, I'm not sure the textbook does say it's impossible. Regular 'hot' fusion relies on quantum tunnelling to return a sufficient yield of fusion events, the thermal/kinetic effect being insufficient alone to bring the strongly repelling nuclei together. There is in principle no reason why the same effect could not apply to nuclei tightly constrained inside a crystalline matrix. I'm not too well up on the math but that would seem intuitively to be the case anyway.
The best proof would be a self sustaining unit. For example, use thermocouples to power the control electronics. That would be the game changer. No need for any complex calculations then, the mere fact that it's still running a few hours or days later is enough. :-+
-
If you can get past to 95% efficiency then you have something to look at. Getting to 99% would be a major achievement. Getting past 100% would be a Nobel prize. Like others have already pointed out, the failures and shortcomings in the measurement setups have given false hope and false results.
-
Another recommending to get the measurement correct, When something has already been looked into before its not hard to see where people are pointing at shortcomings of other experiments.
-
The best proof would be a self sustaining unit.
Yup, "closing a loop" is something that many propose as minimal (and optimal) proof that something is going on for real.
Regarding scientific coverage of the topic one can find now a pile of articles on http://lenr-canr.org/ (http://lenr-canr.org/)
-
The best proof would be a self sustaining unit. For example, use thermocouples to power the control electronics. That would be the game changer. No need for any complex calculations then, the mere fact that it's still running a few hours or days later is enough. :-+
A self sustaining reaction is obviously a very clear and nice demonstration but I don't think it is required or even that important at this stage. It also adds a whole new level of complexity in terms of designing a good heat engine to extract the heat and convert it back into electrical energy. It also turns this into a go/no-go experiment, which leaves no signal to optimize on.
You should focus on good and careful measurement. In the (exceedingly unlikely) effect that you get a clear signature of net energy production, then you can worry about harnessing it to generate electricity and close the loop. But if you do your measurement well, this part isn't an experiment -- it will be quite clear how much thermal output you have available and whether that is sufficient.
Also, keep in mind when I talk about careful measurement I don't mean that the measurement has to be super accurate. You don't need 0.1% accuracy for instance, or even 1%. What you need is to avoid gross errors, make sure you aren't systematically over- or under- measuring the power in/out, and also have correctly done error analysis so that you can put error bars on your final output.
An example of a classic problem in calorimetry is in Rossi's group's first self-published manuscript (the only one I have read) made the unforgivable mistake of trying to calculate energy production by the mass of water turned into steam. That mass can be measured to very high accuracy, and the latent heat of vaporization of water is also known quite accurately. So they claimed very tight error bars on their calculation of the heat output. The problem with this is that they didn't account for liquid water leaving the apparatus! Steam from a tea kettle is completely filled with droplets of water. Since steam is several hundred times less dense than liquid water, a substantial fraction of the mass loss is likely liquid. More importantly, unvaporized water is a completely uncharacterized, and almost impossible to characterize error term in the experiment.
A much better way to measure heat from a steam source is to recondense the steam into a liquid with a heat exchanger. Put the steam into a counterflow heat exchanger. Then you just measure the coolant flow rate, inlet temperature, and outlet temperature. From that you can directly calculate the heat transfer. With an inexpensive flow meter and thermometer you will have a few percent error, but you eliminated an uncontrolled variable.
-
Somewhat related, I recently listened to a fascinating lecture on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiNDqaFPO4A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiNDqaFPO4A)
There seems to be a conversion between nuclear energy and terahertz phonons.