Home General UpdatesQuirky data in H2 Splitting Cell

Quirky data in H2 Splitting Cell

on 14 March 2014.

From Ryan Hunt:

After a couple months of near zero blog entries from the HUG labs, it probably seemed like we weren't doing any experiments. ... And, we weren't. We shifted our focus for a while on building some domestic water reprocessing equipment for Paul's house. But, we took advantage of a lull in that project this week, and fired up the H2 Splitting cell. This morning we noticed a fairly regular tick in the resistance, the temperatures, and the pressures. Check it out below:

Data available at: data.hugnetlab.com under test FC0408 - LENR Cam: Hydrogen Splitting

Full lab notes in our Evernote lab notebook.

The key feature is a very stable, periodic tick where the resistance rises, the wire temp rises and the pressure rises, while the thermocouples wrapped in platinum and silver both fall.

Over the last 3 days, the oscillations have stopped for a while and then restarted. The pressure, though, is more noisy when the oscillations in the temperature are not present.

Meanwhile, there is minor oscillation in the resistance that looks like a sawtooth wave if you zoom in close during the early part of this test where the resistance is generally falling.

We are not sure what to make of all this. What is going on in there? Eyeballs and ideas would be welcome on this mystery.

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+1 #20 Ryan Hunt 2014-05-01 14:49

Ecco, we have been completely ignoring it while we work on the new powder cells. We were in that room, so we might have inadvertently affected it, but we did nothing intentional or noticeable to it.
We still have the possibility of writing a script to time sample the gamma file, but other than that long shot, we ran out of ideas about how to test to see if it was something convection related vs something else.

+1 #19 Ecco 2014-03-29 13:34

Due to the usual problems with the Evernote app stopping receiving notebook updates after a while and fooling me into thinking that nothing was going on, I switched to the clunky Evernote web interface.

I see you're currently attempting a 1W step down experiment. Interestingly, it seems that temperatures are getting noisier as power gets decreased. I would have expected the opposite happening.

It's still hard to figure out what's going on exactly, though. I didn't initially realize there's a cooling water jacket in this cell, so it might be an idea to switch it off and empty it completely from water for a few hours to make sure it's not causing side effects (since temporarily stopping the water flow alone seems to affect significantly cell behavior as you tested yesterday).

+1 #18 Ryan Hunt 2014-03-18 19:23

Fixed the evernote image.

+1 #17 Ecco 2014-03-18 19:13

I see a related update in the Evernote logbook, but the attached image isn't loading either from the Evernote web interface or from the official application.

+1 #16 Malachi Heder 2014-03-18 16:34

@ All

I did some more playing with the cell this morning. I detached the power supply from the cell and used a power resistor to test our control software. It works fine on a resistor. We may have a loose connection or short somewhere in the cell.

Currently the cell is not powered and we will decide what to do.

We are going to open up the cell to rule out any shorts or loose connections. The test will not be collecting while the cell is unhooked.

+1 #15 Ryan Hunt 2014-03-17 22:33

It appears that the cell has 3 modes it has operated under during the last week. The write up is int he lab notebook entry for today.

+1 #14 Malachi Heder 2014-03-17 21:06

@ Ecco

They should be now every 1-2 seconds. I found that the system was trying to read a board that was no longer attached, that was slowing everything down.

+1 #13 Ecco 2014-03-17 20:50

@Malachi: thanks, it looks like high resolution data points are slowly coming in; still not quite every second, though.

+1 #12 Ecco 2014-03-16 19:06

It looks like there is an inverse correlation between T_Board (ambient temperature?) and Active Wire resistance:

i.imgur.com/PJ92yW4.png

This could imply that the strange repeating signals/cell behavior were due to a hardware fault somewhere.

+1 #11 Giorgio 2014-03-15 16:16

@Ecco

point [0011]:
data.epo.org/.../document.pdf

It's possible that monoatomic hydrogen is a pre-condition for "ultradense hydrogen"

www2.chem.gu.se/~holmlid/

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Francesco Celani says that a prolonged permanence in air may damage his wires, while keeping them in hydrogen atmosphere for long time may be useful.

+1 #10 Ecco 2014-03-15 16:01

world.std.com/.../...
This is the only official source I could readily find. There are video lectures on Youtube and Powerpoint slides available elsewhere but I don't remember reading very detailed descriptions about these devices.

What I am aware of is that NANORs use "pre-loaded" active materials. They do contain deuterium, but not in gaseous form. This is how they look like: e-catworld.com/.../...

+1 #9 Giorgio 2014-03-15 15:50

@Ecco
Where can I find a detailed description of NANOR ?
Are you sure that it does not use hydrogen or deuterium ?

+1 #8 Ecco 2014-03-15 15:41

@Giorgio: what about non-gaseous, "solid-state" systems, like Swartz's NANOR? If it does work, it implies that active catalytic hydrogen/deuter ium splitting is not actually needed for LENR to occur. It would be more like a trigger to achieve the proper conditions for it.

+1 #7 Giorgio 2014-03-15 14:13

@Ecco
" might have a positive energy balance?"
I don't know, but prof. Sergio Focardi clearly stated the importance of H2 splitting in the E-cat reactor:

22passi.blogspot.it/2011/07/intervista-di-focardi-energylab.html

"Attraverso il catalizzatore l’idrogeno si trasforma da molecolare ad atomico..."
"Could long-term exposure to H2 be the key?"
I'll forward the question to Francesco Celani

+1 #6 Ecco 2014-03-15 13:40

@Giorgio: do you think the entire process in this specific case, assuming no artifact is occurring (which might not be the case), might have a positive energy balance? If yes, then the cell's exterior surface should also be slightly hotter than normal for the given input power. It's a bummer that it's not being monitored, although I understand that assessing the cell's thermal output wasn't the original purpose of this experiment.

The only question would be why is it acting like this way only now? Could long-term exposure to H2 be the key?

+1 #5 Giorgio 2014-03-15 12:49

@Ecco
I mean that, if this is not a bug of the experimental setup, the endothermic H2 splitting at active wire and successive exothermic recombination in Pt wire may explain the anticorrelation of temperatures.
This may also explain the significative difference beetween Pt and Cu wire temperatures.

+1 #4 Ecco 2014-03-15 12:02

@Giorgio: if H2 is getting split at the active wire, wouldn't it too decrease in temperature? What we have instead is that since the onset of this repeating signal its temperature has always been higher than prior it.

I would really want to make sure there isn't some fault somewhere, though. Not just physically (cabling, cell integrity, power supply, etc), but also on the software part.

+1 #3 Giorgio 2014-03-15 11:05

H2 splitting is an endothermic process, this may explain the anticorrelation between the active wire temperature and Cu and Pt wires temperature.

+2 #2 Ecco 2014-03-14 21:32

When T_Wire suddenly increases, T_Pt and T_Cu decrease. I wonder if pressure spikes caused by the very quick rise in T_Wire temperature cause them to act the opposite. It would be interesting to see what happens with more or less gas inside the cell.

i.imgur.com/YiJvPeB.png

I've managed to plot this with "history" data. Are you able to run data polling at a higher rate, even just temporarily? It's possible that spikes might be actually higher than what can be seen here, but are getting averaged out by the 0.1 Hz data rate.

+1 #1 Ecco 2014-03-14 20:35

What instead about physically bothering the cell with a hard tool? Without of course damaging it by hitting too hard. If the effect stops, then there likely is something loose inside.

---

I tried downloading the past three days of data to attempt different kinds of visualization than what the live data page provides, to hunt for patterns. Have a look at this for active wire temperature:

i.imgur.com/Cb1cxTg.png

Standard one, with connected data points:

i.imgur.com/LvbzbgO.png

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