Reply #11: Article on CF [View All]

[nebula]

Don't know how significant the information presented in the following article will turn out to be, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Years after Physics profesors Pons and flesihmann were dismissed as quacks after announcing their discovery of Cold fusion in 1988, research into Cold fusion continues...


Data Versus Dogma: The Continuing Battle Over Cold Fusion

"...In the spring of 1991, two years after the controversial 1989 announcement, Professor Wilford Hansen of Utah State University showed that several of the cells from the original Fleischmann Pons experiment really did produce excess heat. According to Professor Hansen, one cell had an excess heat output of 45 electron volts per palladium atom, another had an excess heat output of 1,700 electron volts per palladium atom, and a third had an excess heat output of 6,000 electron volts per atom of palladium. Beaudette noted that the amount of energy released from the conventional electrochemical reaction, by contrast, is merely four electron volts. Between August 1990 and February 1991, Michael McKubre of SRI International performed experiments in which they observed anomalous power in three out of four cells. At Osaka University in Japan between 1991 and 1994, Professors Yoshiaki Arata and Yue-Chang Zhang performed successive experiments until they were able to achieve an excess heat output of 250 watts for 125 watts of input, a generation rate of 100 percent. Professor Arata had received numerous awards for scientific achievement over the years, and has had the honor of having a major building on the Osaka University campus named after him.

The United States Navy, through its Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), undertook one of the more comprehensive studies of cold fusion. NRL decided to “investigate the anomalous effects associated with the prolonged charging of the palladium / deuterium system.” One of the labs undertook a study of the conditions under which excess heat could be generated. In another lab, scientists demonstrated the connection between excess heat and the production of helium gas, which was an indicator of the nuclear reactions generated by the cold fusion phenomenon. Using refined techniques, the NRL team was able to demonstrate that the cold fusion effect was reproducible. They found that, as the current passed through the cell and the temperature of the electrolyte solution increased, so too did excess heat production, and the heat sources were located close to the electrode/electrolyte contact surface. Melvin H. Miles, one member of the team, described results from experiments conducted in Japan from December 5, 1997 to February 12, 1998 . Dr. Miles reported that excess power had been generated over a period of seventy days. In another experiment that ran from February 17 to February 26, 1998 , excess power was observed in three different cells, particularly during the last two days. Data from this experiment indicate that up to 400 milliwatts of anomalous heat was present in two of the cells.

Some of the world’s largest energy companies had also conducted experiments based on Fleischmann’s and Pons’s work. Krivit and Winocur reported that scientists at Amoco Oil Corporation had found indications of excess heat being generated at rates up to 1,000 times beyond what could be accounted for by normal experimental error. Scientists working on a report for Shell Research indicated that they had confirmed the presence of up to several watts of excess heat in what they termed the “simple Fleischmann-Pons system.”

Not only is there a large body of data, generated by numerous replications, there are at least two working models being put forward by which manifestations of anomalous power could be predicted. During a presentation given at the Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion, McKubre described those hypotheses. The first identified loading as the significant variable. McKubre posited that in deuterium-palladium systems, excess heat will be observed if a sufficient quantity of deuterium is loaded into the palladium lattice through the electrochemical process. This hypothesis finds substantial support in the evidence, according to McKubre, in that in 51 percent of the experiments where maximum loading was achieved, excess heat was present. That percentage drops significantly when loading is reduced, even if the reduction is slight. If between 95 and 99 percent of maximum loading is achieved, excess power was observed only 38 percent of the time. With loading less than 95 percent of maximum, excess heat is observed only 17 percent of the time. The second hypothesis has to do with the observed correlation between excess heat and the presence of nuclear residues. McKubre opined that excess heat originates in a nuclear effect exhibited by crystalline metals heavily loaded with deuterium. He pointed to repeated experiments showing a correlation between heat and the presence of helium 4, a bi-product of nuclear fusion. This hypothesis predicts that where there is a strong output of helium-4, excess heat will be present in amounts up to 24 megavolts per palladium atom. What was actually observed, according to McKubre, was the presence of excess heat in amounts ranging from 19 and 45 megavolts per atom of palladium. Cold fusion has thus the achieved a hallmark of a true science - predictability..."

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