Looks like LENR may have been replicated in Europe. Something seems to be going on here.
11 thoughts on ““Anomolous Heat Energy Production””
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Looks like LENR may have been replicated in Europe. Something seems to be going on here.
Comments are closed.
Interesting. The primary driver will probably be whether these guys are part of the usual suspects related to LENR. If they’re from outside the ranch, it’ll get more traction.
I remember the excitement about cold fusion in 1989. This would be a big deal if further validated.
The main thing that would convince me is a non-black box that would avoid this critique: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the-nuclear-physics-of-why-we/
If (Iff) there’s anything anywhere in here, it’s a new field IMNSHO. Combine it with a second set of “Unexplained Phenomena” – Solar-influenced radioactive decay
Physics: Still not dead. 😀
What I see in the paper is a discrepancy between calculated temperature rise in the ECAT device and measured rise for some value for input power. AC power is notoriously difficult to measure accurately.
The obvious test would be to have an identical ECAT cylinder filled with inert gas instead of hydrogen and to measure the temperature rise. Since AC power measurements are so notoriously difficult and misleading, so a test of relative temperature rise between nominally active and inert versions of identical structures would be much more convincing that something is really happening.
Furthermore, what I propose is so obvious I wonder why it wasn’t performed. Makes me suspicious of the agenda of the researchers.
This would be the definitive experiment:
Obtain two of the ecat devices. These need to be provably identical. Fill both with nickle particles, the magic pixie unicorn dust or banana peel or whatever the secret ingredient is. Pressurize one with hydrogen and the other with argon. Connect the heaters in both in series so whatever is coming out of the controller is going through both. This makes the AC power measurement irrelevant. Mount both near each other in the frame (see the paper). Monitor the heat. If the hydrogen is significantly hotter than the argon unit then something is really happening. That still isn’t proof that it’s fusion, but it’s very suggestive.
I’ll be a lot more excited about this if the more rigorous experiments recommended above are carried out with the heat measurements done by enclosing the test and control reactors in good quality calorimeters instead of just looking at them with thermal imaging cameras.
I agree. All the experiments in the paper seem to be designed to distance the result from direct measurements. The heat was measured with an IR camera, the power input was measured with some sort of AC power meter of unknown accuracy (from a purposely secret AC source) the radiative and convective loss was calculated from unsupported assumptions and so on. And there is no control. It looks more like a marketing document than a scientific paper. If I were peer-reviewing this I would reject it.
If the effect is initiated by heating a catalyst and hydrogen and is exothermic, shouldn’t it be possible to start the reaction then turn off the electric input and have the reaction keep it hot?
I see a couple of Italian names in there. It is probably the usual suspects. I remember a couple of places in the US, Japan, and Italy continued working on this in some low level way. This is probably one of those places.