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The HUG quest for gammas and more

Written by Ryan Hunt on .

The HUG team has made many unglorious accomplishments in the last few weeks.

We have been making progress on the test to see if Celani wire splits hydrogen.  

And, lately we have been trying to see gamma rays while we re-pressurize our V1.3 cells.  Here are the highlights:

Gamma Detection

First, we moved the V1.3 cells - with active wires still loaded - into the big pink boxes that will maintain a very constant ambient temperature around them.  The cells are also now surrounded by the Helmholtz coils so we can define a magnetic field associated with it.

The coils are positioned to make a relatively consistent field along the entire center section of the test cell where the wire is contained.

This is how both boxes relate to eachother and to the large room in which they reside.

Then we added the Geiger counter and the NaI gamma detector into the big pink box as close to the cells as we could feasibly mount them.

 

 

Then we played.  We pressurized, we pulled vacuums, and we powered up and powered down.  Then, we saw this:

Try as we may, though, we have not seen that again in several more tests.  We have seen that the base level of the the Geiger Counter output shifts up when the detector gets warmer.

There are many more details written up in our lab notebook.

 

H2 Splitting Experiment

In the last couple weeks we have run tests in Vacuum, Argon, Helium, and Hydrogen with no significant temeprature difference found between thermocouples clad in Platinum, copper, or glass.  We got feedback that the platinum may not be active enough and the copper may be more active than thought.  To make the platinum a better catalyst for recombining H2 were advised to plate platinum on it.  We did.  The results is a lovely, black, nano textured surface that should have a lot more surface area.  Then we wrapped the other thermocouple with silver wire, because silver is supposed to be less catalytic than copper.  Over the weekend we will test in Ar, which achieves temperatures that are close to temperatures in a vacuum and Helium, which gives closer values to operating in Hydrogen.

All the details are in a newly spun off notebook just for this experiment

Other Experiments:

The LENR Stick experiments are on hold at the moment for lack of brain time (and the fact that we have never seen anything particularly interesting from them).  We will get back to them as time permits - possibly to help characterize absorption vs resistance for more homemade wires.

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0 #23 Mathieu Valat 2013-11-18 12:36
@Robert,

I have the driver for it ;) I just need "something" to calibrate it... :-*
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0 #22 Robert Greenyer 2013-11-18 12:24
@Ron B

Please, no Neutrons... although, we have acquired a Neutron detector in France! Just need something to drive it.
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0 #21 Ron B 2013-11-18 04:50
Happy belated birthday Ryan! May you have gamma rays and neutrons for desert!
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0 #20 Robert Greenyer 2013-11-18 00:28
@Ecco

After failing to acquire some Deuterium, Ryan bought some Deuterated water and has produced around 4g of deuterium for experiment enrichments. We have been told however, that it really isn't as simple as this.

It was Ryan's birthday on Friday, so I would not have expected too much from him over the weekend.
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+2 #19 Ecco 2013-11-17 09:57
@HUGteam: do you plan using Deuterium instead of Hydrogen anytime soon? Celani did detect gamma emissions with it, as you might now. Also, from a different discussion venue (in Italian) where an extremely interesting debate about Rossi's effect with the guy who leaked the "Hot Cat" photo last year is going on (you might remember that), it seems that Rossi did use Deuterium at varying concentrations and tried to hide this fact, although I'm not sure how much of this is just speculation. I'm taking most of what I'm reading with a pinch of salt, but one can't just ignore information which seems to be consistent with experimental evidence from other researchers.

Could it be that Mathieu is getting better results because his H2 container has a higher Deuterium percentage? Or, rather than this being just a coincidence, since it occurred to JP Biberian as well, could it be that you are not getting good results because *your* H2 source is too pure?
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0 #18 Dieter Seeliger 2013-11-16 06:52
@Charlie Tapp,
I dont think, that only the temperature inside a kiln is useful to create a surface useable for LENR.
You must be able to change pressure and composition of the athmosphere inside the kiln also.
Celani uses a closed pipe with connection to a turbo pump to prepare his wires and the wires are heated by DC current. The heating of the wires is cycled several hundred times to achieve the wanted surface composition and layers which are proposed to be active for LENR reactions.

BR Dieter
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0 #17 charlie tapp 2013-11-15 17:24
i was board and reading what hard drive disks are made of NiP coated aluminum. curious for some reason i put it to a torch it bubbled into a very rough surface. i had a science teacher put a piece of obsidian rock in a kiln once and it turned into a big bubbly glass ball, i wonder if a high temp kiln at the right temp could make the perfect nickel surface texture for reactions. anyone got a kiln?
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0 #16 Ryan Hunt 2013-11-14 19:53
@ Martin - As far as looking for excess energy from wires in the CTC, yeah, we have not seen anything to get excited about, so far. They are great for studying loading of Hydrogen vs resistance, though.
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0 #15 Martin 2013-11-14 18:44
"...and the fact that we have never seen anything particularly interesting from them..."

It seems that you have drawn a solid conclusion :D
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0 #14 Malachi Heder 2013-11-13 20:37
@ All

We are behind a few hours in the data. We are limited in our upload speed and are working on getting things fixed.

Now we have a fix in place but the data will take a few hours to catch up. Thanks for your patience.

The history is up to date, but the averages are still a little ways behind.

Everything should be up to date.
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0 #13 Ecco 2013-11-12 12:18
Here's a sort-of-tempera ture compensated (with the average of outer glass tube temperature) graph of gamma count voltage of the past 18 hours or so:


i.imgur.com/jHveyVl.png

I'm not sure I'm still seeing a pattern here. Peak values do have been decreasing over time, though.
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0 #12 Ecco 2013-11-12 02:18
A couple graphs. Geiger counter voltage and gas pressure.

Full scale for Geiger counter (V)

i.imgur.com/EK2YFbO.png

High pass filtered

i.imgur.com/RajNGwe.png


There seems to be a pattern. But there's not enough data both before and after this time range, to be really sure that there really is a correlation with pressure.
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0 #11 Ecco 2013-11-11 21:59
@Ryan Hunt: I'm trying to play with different methods of converting the signal into sound, to see if there are discernible audible patterns in it. For the current signal type and range it seems that the point map representation of gamma counter readings from data.hugnetlab. com works the best. Of course, I'm using history data. Averaged data doesn't really work well with these readings.

I'm using this program to convert the resulting graphs in my spreadsheet into sound: photosounder.com/

So far, besides the increase of the background reading with detector temperature, which is like noise (and could be filtered out), it appears that the spikes or isolated events have some loose correlation with pressure. I was about to ask if it was possible to increase it further but then I realized that since you're using a glass tube it might not be safe to push it above 65-70 PSI.

By the way, what is the output rate of the gamma counter? I wonder if interesting spikes might not be lost because they get averaged out or decimated in the data. It might be useful to have a test on data.hugnetlab. com set up to contain just gamma counter readings, but at a higher sample rate than other data (in order to save bandwidth / decrease download times. An idea: what about compressing data before sending it to the public?).
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0 #10 Ryan Hunt 2013-11-11 21:40
@ Ecco - Nice visualization. I will see if our graphing component allows that.
The signal from the detector comes in brief 5V pulses. Those are filtered through an R/C time constant and the voltage from that is what we read.
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0 #9 Ecco 2013-11-11 21:22
@HUGteam: regardless of how they are displayed on the website, are output values from the gamma counter field in the US Cell B test to be intended as individual units/"counts", or as a waveform as a whole?

Would it make more sense if they were displayed like this?

i.imgur.com/HWiuNtv.png

(orange line: internal pressure)
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-1 #8 Paul 2013-11-11 20:46
"Then we played...Try as we may, though, we have not seen that again in several more tests."

Could this be in any way related to the dificulties repeating the original F-P experiments?
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+2 #7 Robert Greenyer 2013-11-09 22:01
@Peter Mobberley

Thanks for the tip. Please can you use the contact form (accessible from the green "+") to send us more information on what the parameters were for your experiments where you saw gammas.

Please could you let us know what we can share with the community and it would be REALLY great if you can share the gamma energies, counts and incident profiles.

Also, I'm in the UK for a few weeks, would be great if I could pop over and grab some footage.
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+2 #6 Mathieu Valat 2013-11-09 20:30
This is indeed a very good news!
Thank you Peter for pointing me at this software, that will be very much useful.
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+5 #5 Peter Mobberley 2013-11-09 18:34
G-M tubes and photomultiplyer s ARE sensitive to
electromagnetic interference in the radiofrequency range,
so if you have sparking or any high voltage discharge
producing RF then expect errors. But Celani cells run @
low voltage and have no reason to produce RF.
A mild magnetic field produced by a solenoid coil will not effect
them . Heat, no the detectors are well away from hot surfaces.

Yes I see increased gamma count in my Ni-H replication
given in my poster@ ICCF17 in Korea.

Pete.
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0 #4 Ecco 2013-11-09 17:26
> where else can they come from?

If the gamma counters used are sensitive to electromagnetic interference (in addition to heat, to some extent), then the coil wound, actively powered constantan wires might be causing them to give false readings. This could be happening more under conditions where the wires are acting more like a proper electromagnetic coil/solenoid.

@HUG team: by the way, have you observed an increase in gamma counts from the NaI gamma detector as well?
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