Foreword: I gave Ric Werme permission to do this essay. I don’t have any doubt that the original Cold Fusion research was seriously flawed. That said, this recent new development using a different process is getting some interest, so let’s approach it skeptically to see what merit it has, if any. – Anthony
Cold fusion isn’t usual fare for WUWT, at best it’s not a focus here, at worst it’s sorry science, and we talk about that enough already. However, it never has died, and this week there’s news about it going commercial. Well, it won’t be available for a couple years or so, but the excitement comes from a device that takes 400 watts of electrical power in and produces 12,000 watts of heat out.
Most people regard cold fusion as a black eye on science. It’s credited with the advent of science by press release and its extraordinary claims were hard to reproduce. Yet, unlike the polywater fiasco of the 1970s, cold fusion has never been explained away and several experiments have been successfully reproduced. Neutrons, tritium, and other products kept some researchers working long after others had given up. Even muons (from Svensmark’s Chilling Stars) have been suggested as a catalyst. Everyone agrees that theoretical help would provide a lot of guidance, but for something that flies in the face of accepted theory, little help has come from that.
Grandiose claims of changing the world have been lowered to “show me something that replaces my water heater.” Attempts at scaling up the experiments that could be reproduced all failed. Even had they worked, a lot of systems used palladium. There’s not enough of that to change the world.
As media attention waned, the field stayed alive and new avenues explored. Some people active in the early days of Pons & Fleishman’s press conference are still tracking research, and research has continued around the world. There are publications and journals, and conferences and research by the US Navy. And controversy about a decision to not publish the proceedings of a recent conference.
The term “Cold Fusion” has been deprecated, as focus remains on generating heat, and heat to run a steam turbine efficiently is definitely not cold. Nor is it the 30 million degrees that “Hot Fusion” needs. The preferred terms now are LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) and CANR (Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions). I’ll call it cold fusion.
I keep a Google alert for news, and check in from time to time, and last week came across notice of a press conference about a cold fusion system that is going commercial. The reports beforehand and the reports afterward said little useful, but some details are making it out. Whatever is going on is interesting enough to pay attention to, and since WUWT has developed a good record for breaking news, it’s worth a post.
The bottom line is that Italian scientists Sergio Focardi and Andrea Rossi have a unit they claim takes in 400 watts of electricity and, with the assistance of nickel-hydrogen fusion, puts out 12 kilowatts of heat. Okay, that’s interesting and the power amplification doesn’t require some of the extremely careful calorimetry early experiments needed. The elements involved are affordable and if it works, things become interesting. (There are undisclosed “additives” to consider too.) The reactor is going commercial in the next few years, which may or may not mean it’s ready.
Several details have not been disclosed, but there will be a paper out on Monday. Dr. Rossi reports:
Yes, I confirm that Monday Jan 24 the Bologna University Report will be published on the Journal Of Nuclear Physics. I repeat that everybody will be allowed to use it in every kind of publication, online, paper, written, spoken, without need of any permission. It will be not put on it the copyright.
Major caveat – the Journal Of Nuclear Physics is Rossi’s blog. Peer review is:
All the articles published on the Journal Of Nuclear Physics are Peer Reviewed. The Peer Review of every paper is made by at least one University Physics Professor.
So it’s not like they’re getting published in Nature, Scientific American, or even a reputable journal. Still, it ought to be a welcome addition.
The mechanism involved is claimed to be fusion between nickel and hydrogen. This is a bit unusual, as the typical claims are for reactions involving deuterium (proton + one neutron) and tritium (proton + two neutrons) with the gas filtering into a palladium lattice. In this case, it’s reacting with the substrate.
Nickel has several isotopes that naturally occur, the belief is that all participate in the reactions. In http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/files/Rossi-Focardi_paper.pdf discusses finding copper, which has one more proton than nickel, and various isotopes that do not occur in natural nickel. It also observes that gamma radiation is not observed while the reactor was running. Comments in other articles make suggestions about why that is. Apparently they see a short burst of gamma waves when the apparatus is shutdown.
Rossi leaves several hints in his comments, e.g. instability when the pressure of the hydrogen is increased, including explosions. (The commercial unit is designed to need enough electrical power so it can be shut down reliably.)
The best summary of the calorimetry involved is by Jed Rothwell who has been involved since the early days. He notes:
The test run on January 14 lasted for 1 hour. After the first 30 minutes the outlet flow became dry steam. The outlet temperature reached 101°C. The enthalpy during the last 30 minutes can be computed very simply, based on the heat capacity of water (4.2 kJ/kgK) and heat of vaporization of water (2260 kJ/kg):
Mass of water 8.8 kg
Temperature change 87°C
Energy to bring water to 100°C: 87°C*4.2*8.8 kg = 3,216 kJ
Energy to vaporize 8.8 kg of water: 2260*8.8 = 19,888 kJ
Total: 23,107 kJ
Duration 30 minutes = 1800 seconds
Power 12,837 W, minus auxiliary power ~12 kW
There were two potential ways in which input power might have been measured incorrectly: heater power, and the hydrogen, which might have burned if air had been present in the cell.
The heater power was measured at 400 W. It could not have been much higher that this, because it is plugged into an ordinary wall socket, which cannot supply 12 kW. Even if a wall socket could supply 12 kW, the heater electric wire would burn.
During the test runs less than 0.1 g of hydrogen was consumed. 0.1 g of hydrogen is 0.1 mole, which makes 0.05 mole of water. The heat of formation of water is 286 kJ/mole, so if the hydrogen had been burned it would have produced less than 14.3 kJ.
What should we make of all this? In a skeptical group like this, some healthy skepticism is warranted. On the other hand, the energy release is impressive and very hard to explain chemically or as physical storage in a crystal lattice. It will be interesting to see how things develop.
It would be cool if it worked, but like Leif Svalgaard said above, have it run for a week and then let us know how it went.
The commercial unit is designed to need enough electrical power so it can be shut down reliably.
Shutting down an experiment (commercial product?) of this sort should not be a big deal, but I’m a little bit troubled that it doesn’t have a simple on/off switch.
Just a few comments…
For those who keep on pointing to the laws of thermodynamics…
First of all, the laws of thermodynamics are not laws at all. They are artificial constructs describing the nature of a closed system. Period.
They are quite handy in creating ‘machines’ and other ‘artistic’ endeavors, so I am not denigrating their construct or use.
However, it is impossible to prove that the universe is a closed system. Physicists have been trying to do so for a few centuries, and the actual measured data from the universe keeps humbling them and thwarting all their efforts to do so.
Actual measured data by astrophysicists keeps pointing to an expanding, continuously creating universe. They seem to try and hide it because they don’t believe it. But the data is really implying there is a source of energy that is ‘outside’ the physical universe feeding it additional energy in some fashion.
This will one day have to be accepted, in my opinion. Science cannot keep trying to refute data that keeps slapping it back in the face.
And the implications will be staggering when it is accepted and put to practical use.
Chemical reactions creating ‘energy’ are more than just ‘chemical reactions’. In Einstein terms, even a chemical reaction is at it’s heart a nuclear reaction. In ANY chemical reaction, matter IS being converted into energy. So, there are many things that are not understood about even a ‘chemical reaction’. So, there can be no hiding behind ‘supposed’ ordinary chemical reactions to try and dispute the possibility of ‘cold fusion’.
Now, if someone does not believe something is possible, they will not look for it. And they will subconsciously ignore all data that can point to it. I applaud those who are looking. They are not letting ideas of a ‘closed universe’, hence a ‘closed mind’ get in their way.
Einstein, and others, didn’t. Einstein saw that matter and energy were NOT two different things. He saw that they were simply the same thing, ONE thing, in two different forms. And that expanded our understanding. That led the way to showing how we could dramatically increase our practical creation of energy.
And there is even more than just matter and energy being interchangeable in the universe, because if one only assumes that, then it is still a ‘closed universe’.
Looking beyond the “closed universe” idea, there is something else converting itself into either more matter or energy, or both.
To me, that is where all the data is pointing.
I’m impressed – I knew the the mine field my post had to traverse, but I’m very pleased with the decorum in the replies. I posted the article around 0130, and just got up today, I was worried about any flame fests that might break out overnight.
There were none, thank you and thank you Anthony.
Just one comment before breakfast. The one hour test that Jed Rothwell analyzed was the first public demonstration. Testing of the device in general has been going on for many months, and there have been a number long runs. I’ll try to fish out some references, trying to find data on Rossi’s blog is nigh on impossible. A lot of his posts are fairly vague, but the comments are between him and several other scientists and there’s a lot of meat there and even more when read between the lines.
Okay, another – a fellow New Hampshire Mensan and LENR researcher (he didn’t like me using “cold fusion”), now deceased of natural causes, mentioned to me a year ago to pay attention to an upcoming announcement. That was when I created the Google alert. He did some interesting replicable work with similar to Rossi’s. There are some mentions of New Hampshire in Rossi’s notes, that’s a direction I’ll investigate more.
There are a lot of loose threads in my post. Had I tied them all up I’d still be writing.
Just heard I’ve been volunteered to help someone move after breakfast. Won’t be back for a bit.
A couple of dozen university physics departments attempted to replicate the F&P experiment and its results in the month or so after F&P released enough information to do so. Results were mixed. The most highly regarded physics departments could not replicate the effect. Some second or third rate departments could. The better departments did a better job of controlling for confounding variables. Cold fusion buffs, of course, cherry pick the results of the many attempts at replication.
When people talk about the oil industry they think of gasoline and diesel for the production of power. Think about the other products produced by the industry ( “I want to say one word to you. Just one word.: Plastics”). If we stop burning it for power there is probably going to be an explosion (maybe a bad choice of words) of uses for the substance.
The Greens are going to go nuts since deep down they hate civilization. Cheap energy and even cheaper consumer goods are two of their worst nightmares.
So….. They have themselves a fuel cell?
David L said
Quote
Bottom line is you’re going to have to work for it, Nothing is for free.
Unquote
Thats a religious diktat not science, try telling that to the universe that works.
Looking for the extension cord. Been here before. There will have to be much more before I’m ok with the whole thing. I understand fission quite well. Fusion, not so much. It is another animal and I have doubts about doing it “cold”.
David says:
January 23, 2011 at 3:03 am
“Since nobody else has mentioned it yet, I thought people might be interested to see the patent application Rossi has made, which provides some details about the experimental setup used. This is available here. The written opinion of the international searching authority (the European patent office) is particularly interesting. It seems unlikely that the application will be granted, at least by the EPO.”
Thanks for the link. Part of my job at Dell was a member of the patent committee which consisted of a dozen key senior engineers in mechanical, electrical, and software R&D plus a patent attorney and paralegal. We met once a week to evaluate patent abstracts submitted by employees all over the world, the inventor(s) would appear before us if they wished to explain and answer questions, then we’d evaluate for novelty, obviousness to experts, applicability to corporate operations, and overall value. The committee would then vote on whether or not to pursue an application for a patent. If a majority approved it went forward. The lawyer would usually chime in when anyone objected that the invention was obvious to experts as we experts would tend to view stuff as obvious that would easily pass through the patent office as not obvious.
In all I reviewed about a thousand patent abstracts about 300 of which were approved by majority vote and to the best of my knowledge all 300 were eventually granted by the patent office. I am the named inventor on four patents myself and none of them had any substantial objections from the patent office. We contracted with IP law firms so each approved invention and inventor had a patent attorney who would generate the claims and so forth and insure that the scope of the invention was as broad as possible which is very important so that competitors can’t make small changes and thus avoid infringement.
I objected a lot of the time on grounds of the invention not being novel but plenty of patents were eventually granted that I voted down. Getting a patent granted IMO has more to do with the skill of the attorney, the experience of the patent law firm, and the size of the company submitting the invention than the substance of the invention. A cynical but, in my mind, well proven thing. Patent applications I believe get rubber-stamp approval when the source is a multi-billion dollar corporation and the intellectual property law firm is well recognized by the patent examiner.
In the case of Rossi he doesn’t have behind him what it takes for rubber-stamp approval. If that invention was coming from General Electric or Exon and the application written up by a recognized IP law firm I believe it would be approved without substantial objection and without much technical modification. It’s not the duty of the patent examiner to physically examine the invention to see that it really works. His job is to search the prior art for novelty, determine if it is obvious to an expert, and evaluate the claims for scope that does not exceed the novel aspects of the invention.
The problem with novelty, in my experience in computer hardware software design, is that I know of a great many inventive things that were employed in early personal computers dating back to the 1970s which were never patented but rather just held as trade secrets by the companies who produced the products. At just barely over 40 years of age at the time I was one of the oldest members of the patent committee and really only had one peer on the committee who had been in the business since the 1970’s. The two of us were notorious for objecting that inventions were not novel. We were outvoted much of the time because everyone, including us, knew the patent examiners would have no knowledge of the prior art and no means of finding it. Patent examiners are not world class experts. World class experts are gainfully employed in much more lucrative positions inside their respective industries. The patent examiners are pretty much limited to searching through the patent database looking for prior art and for things that were never patented in the past they just don’t find any disqualifying prior art. I’m pretty convinced they don’t even spend much time searching for prior art when they recognize the corporation and name of the IP law firm submitting the application – in that case they just rubber stamp it for approval and move on to the next application in their inbox or take a long lunch with the time they saved.
If true, this is dreadful news to us skeptics. As this drives the oil, gas, and coal companies out of business, our massive checks for casting doubt AGW will be at risk. 🙂
I will be very happy to buy electricity from the inventors at $0.05 per kw-hr. However, I don’t believe I’ll be be changing my retirement investment from the much more secure MN state lottery. Just today I took the plunge and put the whole lot, my entire retirement fund into Wednesdays drawing. If it pays off, I’ll be set for life. If it doesn’t, I’ll be the fool, and I sure will miss that dollar.
Since I haven’t seen it posted here I will make this one comment. The first law of thermodynamics is about the conservation of energy not the conservation of power. Energy can be stored over a long period of time (low power) and then released over a short period of time (high power). This is how a capacitor based camera flash works. My guess is that the solution to the conundrum lies in this direction, and that we have not been given all the pertinent data.
My papers on cold fusion.
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/7519801.aspx
enjoy
Frank Znidarsic
I have an issue with two comments made in the article.
1.Most people regard cold fusion as a black eye on science.
Global Warming, Climate Change or any other name you choose to use and the shoddy, corrupt science behind it has made the Cold Fusion debacle a tempest in a teapot. When I think of scientific scams cold fusion doesn’t even make my radar.
2.So it’s not like they’re getting published in Nature, Scientific American, or even a reputable journal. Still, it ought to be a welcome addition.
Given the Global Warming [snip] Nature and Scientific American have published I wouldn’t be so quick to call either of them reputable.
Other then that, a very interesting article !
The old adage is, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Faster than light travel (through worm holes or warping space), travelling backwards in time, anti-gravity and, on a more mundane level, so-called zero point energy devices that always seem to have a string of current patents open, but never yet achieved anything.
And yet. . . it is equally true that mainstream science is often blinkered, funneled as it must, through mainstream theory. It was mainstream theory that you need huge amounts of energy to get 2 protons to fuse. This is so reasonable as to count as the bleeding obvious. But the processes are not so clear cut as many dogmatists would have us believe. Quantum tunneling allows particles to overcome energy barriers apparently on their own volition. So LENR may well be possible in the end, and so may polywell fusion -but to conform to the old adage, I suspect it won’t come without a struggle.
Say, what ever happened to the real and truly amazing aluminum-gallium alloy that easily splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. When I first heard about that I thought it would cause a revolution! That was in 2007. I haven’t heard anything about it since. Very disappointing. Did big oil buy the patent and burry it?
Anyway,
I think I can make a box with an aluminum-gallium bottom that with a bit of added electricity would burn the hydrogen, add a little more electricity to regenerate the eventual oxidation of the aluminum and it could produce quite a bit of energy. Add a lump of nickel and a little deuterium to act as a distraction… and… voila… A great magic trick! No?
Domenic says:
January 23, 2011 at 6:29 am
“Chemical reactions creating ‘energy’ are more than just ‘chemical reactions’. In Einstein terms, even a chemical reaction is at it’s heart a nuclear reaction. In ANY chemical reaction, matter IS being converted into energy. So, there are many things that are not understood about even a ‘chemical reaction’. So, there can be no hiding behind ‘supposed’ ordinary chemical reactions to try and dispute the possibility of ‘cold fusion’.”
No. Endothermic and exothermic chemical reactions deal with atomic bond energy not nuclear (sub-atomic) bond energy. It’s well known however that chemical reactions alter the mass of the molecules involved. When energy is added or removed to form or break atomic bonds that energy has a mass defined by E=MC^2. The problem is that in chemical reactions the mass of energy involved is immeasurably small. In nuclear reactions where the bond energy is many orders of magnitude greater it opened up the possibility of actually measuring it via experiment rather than just calculate it via theory. As I posted earlier the mass of the energy released by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a mere 1 gram. The byproducts of the fission reaction, if they could somehow be collected and weighed, would be just 1 gram less than the weight of the fissioned atoms. About 1 kilogram of the plutonium in Fat Man actually fissioned and the byproducts would have weighed 999 grams. The missing mass left the scene as energy.
On Sky Discovery Science today a programme about this on Weird Connection: Great Balls of Fire – from experiments in a bathtub to create ball lightning through making the area of water small, teacup or something to JET to French and American money in France on project where they’re looking to produce ten to one. They’re just calling it Fusion. Have set to record.
Those interested in possible exotic – esoteric energy sources should check out http://www.aias.us/ . Is there a mathematical physicist with a moderated blog out there who would seriously review and post his opinions on the hundreds of papers, posts ,books etc on unified field theory linked on this site for the benefit of the blogosphere? The WUWT site is not the plave for it.
From the physorg.com article that Roger Knights linked to above (which quotes the patent application David also cited)
If only Dr. Mann had actually filed a patent for his “proprietary” technique.
Care to extend or amend?
.
Perhaps the Sun is a massive LENR/CANR reactor that is “switched on” via the electrical field of the Universe?…
(that’s for the Electrical Universe folks to ponder on…;-)…. I’m well read on every theory around….. I’m an ex commercial fisherman…. So I’m allowed….:-)
…. Final note before I get back to watching the tennis… I hope these Italians are really onto something and not just excitable people on the wrong track…. Anyway, we will wait and watch this space I ‘spose.
If I can’t mail order my “PowerHouse in a Box” for household use next year, we’ll know it’s been a bust….;-)
There is or is not something here. Every advance was ridiculed at first. Yet look at the
attempts at Fission reaction finally Fermi got it. Look at Edison a non-scientist who kept trying and trying to get the evil incandescent bulb to work. The world changed at that moment. Not immediately, but it changed, y Cowboy Pop grew up on a ranch with
no electric lights and a wind charged dry cell radio. then in 1933-Electricity. The day the world changed. Pop was 22.
This is of course total bunkum. Also the attempt to explain it (read the pdf article) is
junk science. The binding energy per nucleon is at its highest for the elements Fe, Cobalt Nickel. The reaction Ni+p -> Cu is therefore endothermic. Sorry folks, but this paper is clearly due for publication on April 1st.
Anyone caring to disprove LENR must be prepared to explain satisfactorily:
1) The generation of excess heat 2) and the creation of elements/isotopes not present within the confines of the original ‘experiment’ …
(Notwithstanding issues with calorimetry, cross-contamination of materials etc)
.
I think it’s fun to hope that an unconventional idea will pan out in the face of extreme skepticism. Then on the other hand, fools and their ideas are not soon parted.