Encouraging Results [UPDATE#1 - More interesting data]

Good Data

While both cells in the dual cell test have been very slowly increasing their P_xs indicators over the last several days, last night's test was particularly encouraging.

We decided to give the cell tiny little power pertubations to see what would happen as we changed current in the wire.  In the graph below we can see the power in (stepped blue line) and the power out.  Those are 45 minutes steps, which we know isn't quite enough time to let it come to equilibrium, so the rising difference between them might be explainable by that.  But once the power in holds constant, the temperatures in the cell increase.  That is VERY interesting.  Then when we tweaked the power down another step, whatever was holding the temperature up seemed to stop. 

The resistance over that time was like this for this cell:

Note the slight change of slope concurrent with the power_out rising between 07:00 and 09:00.  And then it drops off again as the current is decreased.

In cell 1.1 we had a similar story, only more dramatic.

Ont he second step down, the temperatures in the cell all rose.  The P_xs hit a new high of almost 4 W.  Then, again, when the power was held constant, the power_out rose again.  I'm open to suggestions on how to interpret this, but I'm seriously leaning towards it being the first sparks of the New Fire ever seen in this part of the world.  The resistance for this wire had a similar feature to the other wire's resistance.  Notice the resistance rise after 17:00 just when the power output rose?  Then, notice the change of slope from 06:00 to 09:00?  Curious, huh?  And, of course, the obvious fact that the resistance continues to generally decrease means the wire must still be changing dynamically somehow.  Celani believes that the wires absorb other gasses including Helium.  Perhaps Helium was absorbed and Hydrogen is slowly displacing it.

Is It Real Excess Energy?

I'm pretty encouraged.  Here's why:

• The confidence limits for each cell at these powers are nice and tight as explained in this blog entry.  
• Cell 1.0@105W has a confidence limit of 0.65W (5 min average)
• Cell 1.1@103W has a confidence limit of 1.2W (5 min average)
• Nothing in the environment was changing that we could see in the data.  
• The pressure measurements corroborated an overall cell temperature rise.

Of course, I still have to be cautious, and here's why:

• We are running both wires when we calibrated with only one.  But the lower powew performance with both wires fell reassuringly close to the calibration line.  
• We are running at total power beyond the calibration. But not by many watts.  The shape of the curve is pretty smooth and predictable, though.
• The pressure is still changing.  But the fast temperature rise events and then falls cannot be explained by this.  Additionally, many of our calibration runs were done over many days and had similar pressure drops.  When we did 0.5 bar starting runs, the results were also extremely close to the 1.0 bar runs, so the slight drift here shouldn't be ignored, but still doesn't seem to answer much.

So good progress!  We'll see how the data looks in the coming days.  I implore everyone to help scour the data, the assumptions, and the calculations for any flaws.  When we do declare that the Age of the New Fire is here, I want to do so with confidence.

In other news, we have rebuilt are doing a first heating on the insulated stainless cell, again, tonight.  This time it has a 2 amp fuse and full instrumentation on it.  We know, so far, that the thing has a very long time constant of four or 5 hours.  That'll be fun to calibrate.  It'll give is great averages, but not so great info on fast events.

UPDATE#1 - More interesting data

The last 34 hours pressure vs PXs on Cell 1.1 (Indian time on graph)