Mathieu is absolutely foaming at the mouth to hit the script for the first part of the live run ... should we let him?
Here was his worrisome state a few moments ago...
UPDATE#1 - Cells turned on
Cells are go in France.
UPDATE#2 - What a difference a day makes
Well, pretty much 24 hours after we loaded the wires passively, the wire is de-loaded with just the application of passive heat and a vacuum.
The plan therefore is to re-load, taking onboard the experience of the first loading where we saw it was not really vital to cycle it. Also we will use the US teams experience and go strait for 35-40W in the passive wire. After loading, we will complete the next segment of what was going to be the first run, that of powering the active wire. We will not do it is two hour steps like before (which was to allow the US team to catch up) but 1 hour steps and start from 10W.
Interestingly, Mathieu noticed just before he turned the power off, the wires had become darker. See here:
Also, Nicolas pointed out something that is interesting to note. the resistance plots of the wires in both cells. First the A and B NiCr passive heating wires.
Pretty much the same...
... the Celani wires however acted very differently.
Comments
An alternative approach to using high hydrogen pressure or powerful external heating appears to be making the gas (pre-heated?) actively and continuously come in contact with the heated active element(s).
This could be achieved by a constant gas flow directed toward the active element as described in Piantelli's patent (and as Rossi appeared to do in his earlier experiments, according to expert analysis of the available photographic evidence), through gas pressure pulses, or with well controlled gas ionization through electrical sparks as Defkalion does (the process was broadly described in their ICCF17/NIWeek presentations).
It looks that H2 has to "move around" and heating it directly promotes this process but might not be enough depending on how the cell and the active elements are made.
This is of course in the speculation realm, but I'm relatively confident it might be one of the keys for excess heat generation.
a 1994 video of Focardi speaking about Nickel - Hidrogen studies he was conducting with other experimenters. Interesting part begin at 8:00. After a while, it says that they found that Nickel will adsorb an important amount of H after 400C. This behaviour was not found in literature.
So yes, temperature is definetely a good point to investigate.
(maybe in steel glass cell? )
So H2 loading/deloadi ng is almost totally reversible in both ways. I think this is a very important confirmation for Celani's work (some skeptics speculated that the resistance drop was due to surface microstructure sintering).
I wonder if making the wire absorb more by increasing temperature would increase its H2 storage capacity permanently like it seemingly did with the first loading.
I don't think the outer layers are conductive. The exact composition is proprietary to Celani but probably oxides of various other metals. They're applied as a coating, looks like about 20 um thick in the micrograph. There's probably some reaction with the CuNi at the interface that creates nano structures of some kind. Or maybe the coating itself provides the NAE. Do we know? SEM images recently posted show some craters in the coating of the wire after treating with acetone. But these could be chemical in origin and the text doesn't say whether the treated wire was heated in the presence of hydrogen.
isabellenhuette.de/.../...
(see page 3)
It appears that resistance (under standard conditions ie unloaded) decreases slightly in the temperature range used by this experiment, so maybe it's not an anomalous effect after all.
@MFMP: I don't think there's much benefit in keeping the cell loading at this temperature for 36 more hours. The loading rate after being extremely fast during the first minutes of loading, has noticeably slowed down and is not likely to bring wire resistance significantly below 14 Ohm. I would either try increasing heater power to the level of US Cell A or begin now the second part of step 7 which was supposed to be peformed immediately after testing the cell under vacuum with the passive wire.
Germanium is a metalloid that does and not many others do. I think some oxides might as well.
The non linear response in resistance as it's increasing is of interest too.
It looks like it also very quickly hit a plateau at about 14.08 Ohm. I wonder if increasing passive heating further (45W like with US Cell A for example) will help it decreasing or if resistance will start increasing as if a loading limit has been reached.
- Which other alloys decrease in electrical resistance as their temperature increases like unloaded Celani wire in Cell B? (Negative temperature coefficient of resistance). I haven't been able to find any. Are measurements correct or is this a very strange real anomaly?
- At what time will hydrogen reloading start?
- It appears that EU live data is lagging a bit.
Do you think that since its resistance increased from its starting value of 17.31 Ohm, the wire is now more damaged/cracked /able to load more hydrogen than it previously could?
The treatment Celani performs to plain constantan wires (ISOTAN44) increases their electrical resistance somewhat. A 1 m long untreated wire should have a resistance of about 15.6 Ohm.
As I've written several times, I think the glass tube is complicating things by introducing [originally] unexpected, mostly uncontrollable variables. The ideal scenario would be to eliminate them rather than attempting to factor them in by making the testing setup more complex by introducing even more variables.
There also is the "the glass tube slowly becomes more opaque over time with use in hydrogen atmosphere with heated wires and mica" hypothesis for the reported excess heat, with which, again, a control cell can't help much. EDIT: the vacuum protocol should mostly prevent this from happening, though, as most volatile residues from heated component are vacuumed away and the cell does not run for a very long amount of time under a pressurized H2 atmosphere.
This is a valid hypothesis, but if we are lucky enough to see data points in line with our Dec, Jan & Feb standard cell experiments and the recent Steel and Glass experiment then we are building a strong evidence base that would help to dispel this notion.
Just did a manual calculation based on 07:20 time and there is no excess at the moment which is what we would expect at this notional wire temperature.
It is no big deal, the experiment is meant to Cycle. Celani reported that it only produced excess for 6 days and the lifetime might have been due to out-gassing. STM reported that their experiments did not do anything until the 3rd cycle. So a little cycling will give good data and understanding.
We always new there would be some loss of hydrogen, but given all the criticisms of previous experiments this protocol adresses, if we do see excess, then the certainty is far higher.
Still early days, but we are already learning fast. We know now that we don't really have to cycle it during loading, we know a higher temperature can help accelerate loading and are currently exploring the upper bounds in the US loading process. Right now we are discovering the practicality of passive heating. We have yet to explore loading with power in the active wire which Celani has said improves loading. We are trying to be cautious given the time and expense to set these experiments up.
Without the comparative test set LIVE yet, we would have to manually crunch the numbers today to see if there is any excess.
I'd bet you have to reload the wire. I have the feeling at reduced pressure it will lose the hydrogen. :( I hope not though. I wonder just how good the proxy is for the wire temp in the vacuum. It might be much less than the actual wire temp.
I was reading about annealing metals today (Nickle and Copper)
and ran across this discussion from an old timer.
rugerforum.net/reloading/17335-how-anneal-nickel-plated-cases.html
He talks about brass which contains copper and how they are annealed at different temperatures and cooled differently.
Also, you anneal nickle under hydrogen pressure to make mu-metal which has interesting permeability characteristics.
I bet when we figure this all out, everything will make sense. .
We are only at 17.5W in which is just past half way, so lots more to see. Mathieu put the hold time at 2 hours rather than 1 to give more settle time and to allow the US team to catch up.
I look forward to the team in the US enabling the new test data graph that does the comparative between the cells and the estimated excess power.
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