Multi-Wire Test Heating Up

Welcome

The Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project is a group dedicated to researching Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (often referred to as LENR) while sharing all procedures, data, and results openly online. We rely on comments from online contributors to aid us in developing our experiments and contemplating the results. We invite everyone to participate in our discussions, which take place in the comments of our experiment posts. These links can be seen along the right-hand side of this page. Please browse around and give us your feedback. We look forward to seeing you around Quantum Heat.

Join us and become part of the project. Become one of the active commenters, who question our work and suggest next steps.

Or, if you are an experimenter, talk to us about becoming an affiliated lab and doing your work in a Live Open Science manner.

After a long delay as we failed to troubleshoot the water flow calorimeter, the Multi-wire test has been installed in a concentric tube calorimeter. It is now heating up and the first of the 3 wires is starting to drop resistance.

This is the test with 3 lengths of different Celani wires in a LENR-stick test cell. All the details are in the protocol document here: Protocol: Multi-Wire Test

Previous blog post: Multi-wire test commencing -Update4

View/Edit this document in full screen (depending on permission)

You can follow the data on Test FC0405 LENR Stick: Multi-wire and FC0403 CTC #2: Air Jacket

From Malachi:

We are starting to see the 270L wire loading. The internal temperature is ~208C. The interesting thing is that neither of the other wires (350L and 400L) are dropping in resistance yet. Could lower numbers of layers correlate to a lower loading temperature? This test will be an interesting one in the coming weeks!

The other two wires (a 350 layer and a 400 layer) are actually increasing over time at this temperature.

< Prev Next >

Add comment

Comments

1234

0 #66 Malachi Heder 2013-10-17 21:20

@ Ecco

I agree that more loading is needed. Currently the wires are set up only for resistance measurements. It would require another power supply and this is something I also want to see on the wires. This could happen very soon.

0 #65 Malachi Heder 2013-10-17 14:53

@ All

What is next for the multi-wire test? Does anyone have an idea?

We've run it up and down through our temperature range, tried to deload the wires and we've tried to reload them.

They don't seem to be decreasing any more, in terms of resistance.

0 #64 Ecco 2013-10-08 23:44

Not too much surprisingly, it appears that decreasing temperatures to improve loading worked. However I think it's the first time this is clearly observed in one of these experiments.

It looks like each wire has its own optimal loading temperature range. That of the 270L wire appears to be rather wide (in one of the latest blogpost updates it was observed to decrease resistance at an internal temperature of 208°C while other ones didn't yet).

This also means that there's an optimal H2 desorption temperature range too, depending on wire characteristics , which might have some interesting practical implications.

0 #63 Malachi Heder 2013-10-08 15:07

@ All

The calibrations look sound. We are going to increase the hydrogen pressure inside the cell. Then we will try to load the wires as far as we can.

0 #62 Ecco 2013-10-07 18:16

@Malachi: if you removed the cooling water hose there's a chance that at 35W the outer tube will get hotter than it's supposed to, causing output power will be negatively affected, which could possibly mask any calibration-ind uced positive bias.

But I guess we'll see in a while.

0 #61 Malachi Heder 2013-10-07 18:06

@ Ecco

I will set the input power to 35 watts and see if it still holds.

0 #60 Malachi Heder 2013-10-07 15:14

@ Ecco

y = a + bx + cx^2
Fitting target of lowest sum of squared absolute error = 8.8798690830743515E-03
a = 3.7115236254221067E+01
b = -3.2643234519158354E+03
c = 1.2266525881480571E+04

This is the new fit equation. We can plug it in and see how well it fits. If it does have a positive bias, then we will perform extra calibration cycles, in a decreasing fashion perhaps.

0 #59 Ecco 2013-10-04 21:19

I wouldn't have taken the latest results at high temperature seriously either, however during previous runs at an outer tube temperature of 46°C, at 26W (the highest input power level at which outer tube temperature never got affected) the calculated excess power was 0.75W, which means a 2.9% excess.

Hopefully, perhaps with the aid of the quicker power cycling, temperatures will keep decreasing during the next calibrations, showing that what was observed during the active runs under hydrogen and this prolonged vacuum run was actually real.

0 #58 Ryan Hunt 2013-10-04 21:05

My take is that our calibration is in question at these temperatures, so we can't really say for sure what we are seeing. I like being able to get up to 500C and higher because the outer tube temperature is higher. Therefore, the best course is to cycle it several times through the range and use that as a new calibration. Unless, of course, the various calibration cycles show big differences between them.

0 #57 Ecco 2013-10-04 19:02

@MFMP: by the way, this is the output power curve resulting from this run at a 56°C outer tube temperature:

i.imgur.com/dPDL7vs.png

Weird, isn'it? I tried adjusting data to the previous runs at a lower outer tube temperature, with a second order polynomial curve, and this is the result:

i.imgur.com/GBbTK4M.png

I wouldn't take this too much seriously... but it's interesting data nevertheless.

0 #56 Ecco 2013-10-04 16:46

@Malachi: yes, that could be. I tried adding the second internal thermocouple on my chart and it sorts of "averages out" the apparently weird/anomalous behavior of T_Int1:

i.imgur.com/4VBPjF4.png

As a side note, it appears that wire resistance is increasing over time noticeably faster than before, after increasing temperatures (besides the immediate increase due to higher temperatures / PTC behavior of the wires at this stage).

0 #55 Malachi Heder 2013-10-04 16:03

@ Ecco

The inside thermocouples are free floating. They could be shifting when the wires (separated by fiberglass sheathing) get hot and deform. Just a thought, but it could explain the difference in temperature rises between runs or power levels.

0 #54 Ecco 2013-10-04 15:47

It looks like my exponentially rising temperatures scenario was at least partially unfounded. The rise in temperature from 32W to 34W is lower than that from 30W to 32W. I find weird that there was such a bump at 32W, though, which was there even after taking into account that T_Int1 readings slightly decreased over the previous couple days. I guess that internal temperatures can't be trusted too much.

Outer tube temperatures haven't budged yet though, which is a good thing.

0 #53 Ecco 2013-10-04 02:59

@Paul: for comparison purposes I tried modeling the temperature the inner core would have without [apparent?] excess heat (and the same ideal conditions I previously mentioned):

i.imgur.com/lbpI3gR.png

With the point being: once input power is high enough, if there really is exponentially increasing excess heat, it will be very noticeable. It shouldn't be visible only through internal temperatures.

0 #52 Paul 2013-10-04 02:29

Nonlinear hopeful anomalous energy!

0 #51 Paul 2013-10-03 22:21

@Ecco: Yes indeed. The 2nd graph is hopeful. However, does the first one show, or hint at a non-linear response to input power? Or, am I being too hopeful there as well.

0 #50 Ecco 2013-10-03 19:00

@Paul: keep in mind that my very rough estimates are based on a few assumptions and some hope that there will indeed be large amounts of excess power.

Don't take them too much seriously, they are a moving target and will get adjusted as new data comes in :)

By the way, it was so fun toying with the idea that I tried further imagining / figuring out how temperature would progress after 44W, with the hope and assumptions I mentioned. Under that scenario, at 58W of input power the cell would exceed 1000°C of internal temperature, although I haven't taken into account that it would likely go into thermal runaway somewhere before that.

Here's the full data set if you really want to play with it:

Pin [W] T_Int1 [°C]
34.000 486.30
36.000 509.00
38.000 534.00
40.000 562.00
42.000 593.00
44.000 627.10
46.000 665.00
48.000 707.50
50.000 755.00
52.000 808.25
54.000 868.00
56.000 935.00
58.000 1010.00

0 #49 Ecco 2013-10-01 21:05

@MFMP: something strange (not anomalous/relat ed to LENR effects) going on with the cell:

i.imgur.com/PHF1efJ.png

At low power it takes more effort for the cell to increase the temperature of the inner tube relatively to the outer tube. Normally, the lower the temperature is, the lower the effort required should be.

This was the same graph during the first sweep under vacuum and no cooling hose added:

i.imgur.com/lmZacu9.png

Another, likely related strange thing is that at 0W of input power (+ a few milliwatts applied to the wires) the outer tube has a slightly higher temperature than the inner tube. This caused calculated output power to be negative (around -0.5W).

0 #48 Ecco 2013-09-30 22:07

Computed excess power graph with an outer tube temperature of 56°C and original output power adjusted upward by 6.9% (in order to match the 22W data point with that of previous runs):

i.imgur.com/Vugp8J2.png

More data points needed, especially at lower input power, in order to make sure that a single percentage is enough to adjust data to the new outer tube temperature. I feel it isn't because I would have expected the calculated excess power at 30W to be more than that.

0 #47 Ecco 2013-09-28 16:40

@MFMP: if you were to do again a sweep run from 2W to 34-38W with the outer tube set to a higher temperature (let's say 55 °C) but using the existing calibrations for a 46°C outer tube temperature, calculated output power values would be lower than intended.

However, I wonder if adjusting them with a fixed value to the average output power curve of the previous three active runs at 46°C, would work. If it will, the resulting output power curve at a higher outer tube temperature shouldn't diverge significantly or at all from them (at least for the input power range where outer tube temperature wasn't affected).

I think this would be an interesting test to try, if you don't have anything else planned for this cell for the time being. I think it's a good trade-off between turning the temperature compensation algorithm off and using only at mid and low input power.

1234

Refresh comments list
RSS feed for comments to this post

Here is your generous contributions so far towards our $500,000 target, thanks everyone! : $45,020 Please Donate
See the current state of our booked costs here