New in-depth test results confirm 'Cold Fusion' is real - COP 3.2-3.6 in Rossi 'E-Cat' device

[sgominator]

Re: New in-depth test results confirm 'Cold Fusion' is real - COP 3.2-3.6 in Rossi 'E-Cat' device

The long-awaited report of the scientists testing Andrea Rossi's 'E-Cat' device has been released today.

"Italian Philosopher makes breakthrough in physics"
We Italians are really the geniuses that history calls us.
Along the lines with:
"Italian Psychologist finds cure for ALS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s diseases"

[aaron]

Re: New in-depth test results confirm 'Cold Fusion' is real - COP 3.2-3.6 in Rossi 'E-Cat' device

PD.PNG

Buy the metal?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: New in-depth test results confirm 'Cold Fusion' is real - COP 3.2-3.6 in Rossi 'E-Cat' device

I thought I would bump this thread up again.
Was searching for the latest status on the Lockheed-Martin small fusion reactor project (it's gone silent) when I stumbled upon this report http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MosierBossinvestigat.pdf

Seems the Department of Defense takes cold fusion pretty seriously.
When it comes to cold fusion in general I remain skeptical. As for Mr. Rossi in particular, I still consider him a fraud.

Regardless, I have become less skeptical about cold fusion.
I hope our Chris Coles can forgive the dismissive attitude I offered before.

Here's the new understandings that soften my skepticism.

The original 1989 public claims of cold fusion were made by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons.
When I checked in to Fleischmann, I find he was perhaps the world's leading electrochemist during his career.
He headed international technical societies and was award the most prestigious scientific honors, including occupying the Faraday Chair of Chemistry at Southhampton, and being a Fellow in the Royal Society.
He was more than legitimate or respected, he was renowned in the established scientific world.
To me, that counts for something. I should not have dismissed his opinions about his central field of study.

The most damning problem with the work of Fleischmann and Pons was that that it could not be reproduced in other labs.
To me that's a deal-breaker for big scientific claims.
In the last few years, that situation has changed, at least a little.

The report from DoD includes these passages, bolding is mine:

...there had been no reports of any replications of the effect, there was no mention of the generation of any nuclear ash, and that the reported results did not match theory. Despite these perceived irregularities scientists, worldwide, went into their laboratories to replicate the Fleischmann–Pons results. A few scientists succeeded but a great many more failed. It is now known that those failures were due to the fact that the experimental conditions necessary to achieve the effect, i.e., high D loading and high D flux inside the Pd lattice, had not been achieved. Ultimately, the lack of replication by others and the fact that Fleischmann and Pons were not able to defend their original claims caused most scientists to lose interest...

.....By using the Pd/D co-deposition technique and co-depositional variants6 (based on flux control7,8), solid evidence (i.e., excess heat generation,7,9,10, hot spots,11 mini-explosions, ionizing radiation,12 near- IR emission,13 tritium production,14 transmutation,15 and neutrons16) has been obtained that indicate that lattice assisted nuclear reactions can and do occur within the Pd lattice. The results to date indicate that some of the reactions occur very near the surface of the electrode (within a few atomic layers). Also, the reactions may be enhanced in the presence of either an external electric or magnetic field, or by optically irradiating the cathode of cells driven at their optimal operating point (OOP). Optimal operating points appear when heat, power gain, or helium or tritium production, are presented as a function of the input electrical power.17,18 They allow standardization, and driving with electrical input power beyond the OOP yields a falloff of the production rates...

I'm a simple mechanical engineer and not qualified to understand this report or any other in the fields of chemistry or physics.
But it sure seems to me that the whole idea of cold fusion might have more merit than I admitted before.

[astonas]

Re: New in-depth test results confirm 'Cold Fusion' is real - COP 3.2-3.6 in Rossi 'E-Cat' device

I thought I would bump this thread up again.
Was searching for the latest status on the Lockheed-Martin small fusion reactor project (it's gone silent) when I stumbled upon this report http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MosierBossinvestigat.pdf

Seems the Department of Defense takes cold fusion pretty seriously.
When it comes to cold fusion in general I remain skeptical. As for Mr. Rossi in particular, I still consider him a fraud.

Regardless, I have become less skeptical about cold fusion.
I hope our Chris Coles can forgive the dismissive attitude I offered before.

Here's the new understandings that soften my skepticism.

The original 1989 public claims of cold fusion were made by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons.
When I checked in to Fleischmann, I find he was perhaps the world's leading electrochemist during his career.
He headed international technical societies and was award the most prestigious scientific honors, including occupying the Faraday Chair of Chemistry at Southhampton, and being a Fellow in the Royal Society.
He was more than legitimate or respected, he was renowned in the established scientific world.
To me, that counts for something. I should not have dismissed his opinions about his central field of study.

The most damning problem with the work of Fleischmann and Pons was that that it could not be reproduced in other labs.
To me that's a deal-breaker for big scientific claims.
In the last few years, that situation has changed, at least a little.

The report from DoD includes these passages, bolding is mine:



I'm a simple mechanical engineer and not qualified to understand this report or any other in the fields of chemistry or physics.
But it sure seems to me that the whole idea of cold fusion might have more merit than I admitted before.

No need to change your original view, Thrifty.

The passage you've excerpted does not support the idea that cold fusion was treated too skeptically at all. Instead it describes experimental validation that the skeptic's arguments were in fact correct. The boldface I've added below shows the key emphasis of your excerpt:

Also, the reactions may be enhanced in the presence of either an external electric or magnetic field, or by optically irradiating the cathode of cells driven at their optimal operating point (OOP). Optimal operating points appear when heat, power gain, or helium or tritium production, are presented as a function of the input electrical power.17,18 They allow standardization, and driving with electrical input power beyond the OOP yields a falloff of the production rates..

Nuclear reactions occur spontaneously all around us, all the time, just in extremely tiny numbers, due to extremely high activation energies, and thus correspondingly low probabilities. No scientist would doubt that these tiny probabilities might be shifted (though only by the most minute fraction) through the application of additional forces. ANY forces can contribute to the lowering of ANY activation energy.

Instead, skeptics' arguments center on the fact that this effect could never reach a point that maintained self-sustaining, continuous, reactions through such mechanisms. Now this report has looked at the actual mechanisms that are in play, and essentially conceded this fact.

The experiments described in this paper are NOT a vindication for cold fusion (though the authors do their best to take that tone), they are an indictment of it. There is still no way that Fleishman and Pons could have seen what they did without fakery, since that would have required the self-perpetuating reaction that the authors of this paper reluctantly admit could not have happened. The authors are conceding that production rates fall off before the event "observed" by Fleishman and Pons could occur.

I can certainly see why it was hard to tease this out, though. The paper is terribly written, with the authors bending over backward to try to obscure the only relevant point in it, instead rambling on about many others that are at best tangential.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: New in-depth test results confirm 'Cold Fusion' is real - COP 3.2-3.6 in Rossi 'E-Cat' device

Thanks Astonas.

I just love iTulip. Throw out a spitball on any topic, and one of our local experts jumps in with an answer.
The authors had me hoodwinked.