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Hydrocarbons in with the Celani Wire?? SEM Images

Written by Ryan Hunt on .

Celani announced this week in an email that got around well  that one of his associates was seeing positive results by adding a few cc's of hydrocarbons like Acetone to the test cell. Another fellow named Peter Mobberley corroborated the possibility by citing the poster he had presented at ICCF 17 on using propane as a source of hydrogen in a Ni-H system.  

The result is a fuzzy, black, carbonaceous deposit on the wire that look astonishingly like what our team had in January.  (see this blog post: Weird Black Goo?)  After we saw his note, we decided to put our gunked up wire under the SEM.  Below is a gallery of resulting images.  I don't have the specific scales on those images, for some reason, but the wire is 200 microns across.  Perhaps we will be able to try this with a treated wire in a calorimeter real soon.

Another large view with less-defined craters. 

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0 #8 James Bryant 2013-04-29 19:23
The SEM photos remind me of cloud cover seem from high above. If this does indeed add to the positive results, perhaps this cotton like blanket is insulating the active wire allowing for more activity to take place on the surface of the wire. Like cloud cover keeps surface thermal activity bouncing around here on earth. Just a thought.

Love you guys.
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0 #7 Ged 2013-04-27 15:27
It's all just a matter of signal to noise. As long as the noise keeps dropping, we can make more confident conclusions. Especially with the new, non standing air, types of calorimeters.
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0 #6 123star 2013-04-27 06:21
For the record, I fully agree with Ecco's last two comments #1 and #3.
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0 #5 Paul Hunt 2013-04-27 02:06
@Ecco,
I agree with you. We learned the hard way that a glass cell in air will never be conclusively accurate unless we are seeing HUGE excess power. That is why we are always designing and building new versions of test cells.

Several new versions are in the pipeline, each designed to tell us something a little more sophisticated than the last. The glass cells are currently producing the most data, so that is what you hear the most about. I hope it won't be too many weeks and the bulk of the data stream will be coming from other cells.
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0 #4 Ged 2013-04-27 01:30
Huh, those SEM images are fascinating. Looks like an entire sheath of material built up in places. It also looks low density, or "fuzzy", and non metallic. Organic material (i.e. carbon containing compounds) would give us such an appearance. Wonder if we have any experts around who can tell us more based on the images.

Cool stuff guys!
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+5 #3 Ecco 2013-04-26 23:01
To clarify, what I meant is that with a well designed 'mass flow calorimetry' setup where the temperature of a heated medium is measured (instead that of localized device areas) there wouldn't be as much need to worry about [only] apparently small details such as changing wire emissivity (or of the glass tube), or things like temperature uniformity, interference from external air flows, and so on.

By now it should have been clear that this kind of set up opens up experimentation s to far too many variables that can affect significantly end results in non-linear and non-intuitive ways and which are difficult and time-consuming to 'debug'.

If Celani, by the photos, is still using a glass tube (and a simplified S-B formula for calculations), he is open to such flaws as well, I'm afraid. He might have taken into account everything, but skeptics (there are a few core ones who seldom write here) won't miss the opportunity to accuse him (and you) of sloppiness elsewhere.
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0 #2 Ryan Hunt 2013-04-26 22:16
The glass tube in air, even with borosilicate, will always be a poor calorimeter. Even the new V1.3 test cells will not be any better than 0.5 to 1 Watts precision with care and maybe plus or minus 5 watts without much care. Celani saw a signal much larger than that and were hoping to, also. Then, some small portion of extra heat radiating away would not be a concern.

With the exception of phase change calorimetry, I don't know of any calorimetry that is not differential temperature based.
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+1 #1 Ecco 2013-04-26 22:06
The wire blackening seriously worries me about the possible effects of changing emissivity over temperature readings. As I often suggested, only a 100% IR-opaque tube with temperature sensors placed on the outside can guarantee that this isn't a factor - assuming that by 'calorimeter' you actually generically mean device for differential temperature measurements, as most others designed by you so far.
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