General Update from HUG Lab

Schematics, explanatory prose, three-dimension al renderings, formalized mission statements, quotes on new reactor vessels made from various materials and configurations, these things and much, much more are all in the works RIGHT NOW. This includes announcements about MASSIVE expansions to the number of people who will be working directly with us in coordinated fashion to achieve all of our objective in GLORIOUS DETAIL! All in the open! Live!
But first, there is the matter of due diligence. Lots of it. I could tell you that we have recruited a huge scientific advisory board consisting of nearly every one of the foremost researchers in the field who we were able to directly approach at ICCF18, but I would rather do it once I can name those advisors. Doing this requires a rather careful and deliberate process that I do not wish to undertake hastily, given the sensitivity of their employment considerations. We are at the beginning steps of the process still, owing to other, even more exciting preconditions that must be legally structured before we can proceed further into those steps. Meanwhile, science has been progressing at HUG and in Europe. We have been meeting and communicating with people across every level of society who are seeking to help us accomplish our goals, but we need to complete our carefully-delib erated, formal preparatory work before we can proceed to structuring many of these future relationships. We are also preparing the finishing work on a huge backlog of posts that we have been working up to, which you all will get to read shortly. In fact, other people might beat us to some of these posts, so keep your eye on the international press for a while....

@ robert greenyer on the subject of coated tubes why not use the one that got accidentaly coated in copper. also i have showed other people this websight and it is hard for them to understand can you guys post a simple schematic along with voltages, amperages,numbe r of thermocouples and what they represent might be helpfull for people to get on board. i have seen lots of other blogs were people do not realy understand what is going on with mfmp. but they want to really bad

I love the graphics, Ecco. I like the potential for sharp gradient in the last ones. We need to decide almost immediately if we want to try wrapping two separate heating coils onto the existing LENR stick because we are otherwise ready to start loading immediately and begin that experiment as it sits. The process of wrapping the heaters will involve a great deal of dis-assembly and require testing to make sure the calibration of the calorimeter holds after the modification. The risk is that we still won't achieve a gradient comparable to the original Celani cell. On our V1.3 cells, I know we have observed greater than 100C/cm gradient between the mica support and the middle of the span.
Right now I am leaning towards going ahead the way it is and getting dynamic gradients by powering up and down in small steps. The advantage is we know what temperature the chamber is.
Any thoughts?

@Robert Greenyer: yes, that sounds the simplest/best idea, but watch out for thermal expansion.

By the way, speaking of improvements, would it be possible to use a RTD sensor on the steel converted Celani cells to measure the average outer temperature of the steel tube (or the average temperature of sections of it), like on the inner/outer tube on US CTC cells? This would allow to calculate the power emitted (even with the Stefan-Boltzman n law) much more accurately than with spot measurements using standard thermocouples.

@Robert Greenyer Why not go for tri-layer? From inside to out: metal - insulator (eg. Ceramic, fibre glass) - metal. That way the outer metal jacket will be at a low enough temperature to retain its structural properties (eg. H2 pressure). The inner 2 layers can extend the full length but be "floating". Ie. not participating in pressure seals. The bonus with this tri-layer is that with 2 thermocouples you get a conduction calorimeter to explore.

@Ecco #22

Mathieu and I were discussing options last night and we came up with inner side gold coated quartz or even steel/copper. We recognise that getting above the curie temperature of nickel may be important.

@Ecco It makes sense that if LENR is some kind of lattice phonon coupling that an elevated temperature would enhance the effect. In any case what we have been debating is the requirement for a thermal gradient layered onto the elevated temperature.

What I was questioning in my last post was the suggestion that a gas phase thermal gradient is required to bring more H2 molecules to the "party". I believe that at the gas pressures we are talking about there are already lots of H2 molecules per sec colliding with the active wire. Any convective enhancement provided by a thermal gradient in the gas phase would be minimal.

@all According to gas theory the collision frequency of gas molecules with a solid surface is proportional to pressure and inversely proportional to square root of temperature. ie. higher pressures = higher collisions per sec; higher temperatures = lower collisions per sec (but at higher energy). At the pressures we are talking about the rate at which molecules are hitting our active surface is very large.

Does this argue against thermal gradients in gas phase as means to bring more H2 molecules to the active site? ie. the rate determining step in the chain is not the rate at which H2 can be brought to the surface but rather the rate at which absorbed H2 can be replenished at the LENR reaction site.

@Ecco I'm trying to understand why a thermal gradient along the length of the active wire would be a requirement for sustainable LENR. I can almost convince myself that a radial gradient in the wire could make sense but can't come up with a reason for a longitudinal one.

Having said that since presumably most of the LENR reaction takes place in the thin active layers deposited on the outer surface of the wire, one way to achieve a radial gradient is in fact to generate a longitudinal gradient. ie. bulk wire has relatively high thermal conductivity so core under a hotter section will infact be cooler than surface.

At some future junction it might be nice to try depositing the active layer directly onto those small tubes and running "coolant" inside rather than heater wire. ie. thermal gradient from hot gas to cooler tube.

In your proposed design the central quad tube heaters are designed to heat the wire by conduction. What if the purpose of those heaters was switched to becoming efficient H2 gas heaters? would one want to increase the surface area in contact with the gas even more?

The Lenr-stick test cells in the water flow calorimeter has a water jacket at the input side. This means there might be a significant thermal gradient in at least part of the cell. Perhaps optimizing for thermal gradient with water cooling on one part could be part of a new design. Anyone wanna hazard a sketch or two? If it fits in a 1/2 inch (12 mm) tube, then we can use the same CTCs.