ICCF-21 Presentation Index
Monday, June 4
Tuesday, June 5
Wednesday, June 6
Thursday, June 7
Thursday evening Awards Banquet
Friday, June 8 Presentations and Summary
Photo: Steve Katinsky of LENRIA (Right) and friend relax during break between big waves of LENR science.
David J. Nagel began Monday’s lectures by introducing the keynote speaker Thomas Darden. Darden spoke about “group-think” and urged scientists to keep open minds and reject conformity thinking, going through examples of “cultural group-think” in American society, and referenced the last US election. He wants to see the mainstream open up to scientific papers and he is seeking to engage the whole of science in this important field. “Humanity needs for us to succeed,” he ended.
[Video links coming soon!]
Michael McKubre followed up making a plea that “condensed matter nuclear science is anomalous no more!” He echoes Tom Darden’s sentiment that CMNS must be integrated into the mainstream of science.
“I needed to see it with my own eyes to believe that it was true”, says McKubre. “At the same time, cold fusion is reproduced somewhere on the planet every day. Verification has already happened. But self-censorship is a problem in the CMNS field. Are we guarding our secrets for fear that someone else might take credit? Yes.”
Michael McKubre with The Fleischmann Pons Heat and Ancillary Effects: What Do We Know, and Why? How Might We Proceed?
Download Presentation .pdf The Fleischmann Pons Heat and Ancillary Effects: Technical Perspective
But energy is a primary problem and you must “collaborate, cooperate, and communicate”, McKubre says to the scientists in the room.
McKubre thanked Jed Rothwell and Jean-Paul Biberian for all the work on lenr.org and the Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, respectively. Beyond that, the communication in the CMNS field is very poor and needs to be remedied.
He also supports a multi-laboratory approach where reproductions are conducted. Verification of this science has already occurred in the 90s, with the confirmation of tritium, and the heat-helium correlation. He believes that all the many variables must be correlated to move forward. Unfortunately, he believes the same thing he said in 1996, according to a Jed Rothwell article, that “acceptance of this field will only come about when a viable technology is achieved.”
To make progress, a procedure for replication must be codified, and a set of papers should be packaged for newbies to the field. A demonstration cell is third important effort to pursue.
Electrochemical PdD/LiOD is already proven, despite the problem with “electrochemisty”, and has not been demonstrated for >10 years. Energetics Technologies cell 64 a few years back gave 40 kJ input 1.14 MJ output, gain= 27.5 Sadly, the magic materials issue prevented replication.
“1 watt excess power is too small to convince a skeptic, and 100 Watts too hard (at least for electrochemistry)”, said McKubre. The goal is to create the heat effect at the lowest input power possible.
According to McKubre, Verification, Correlation, Replication, Denomstration, utilization are the five marks of exploring and exploiting the FPHE.
Afterwards, Edmund Storms of Kiva Labs commented about an important replication in 1990 when he used a piece of palladium from Akito Takahashi that had given excess heat, and Storms got excess heat, too. More material was manufactured using the same exact process, and again that material gave excess heat.
Bob Greenyer of MFMP also gave an example of a replication with Mathieu Valat and published by CMNS.
After a short break, Mahadeva Srinivasan introduced the next speaker for the session on Heat Measurements.
Dennis Letts and Dennis Cravens presenting Building & Testing a High Temperature Seebeck Calorimeter
First, Dennis Letts reported excess heat of 5-7 Watts from their current system and gave detailed specifics on its construction, justifying each design element with experimental need. He finds the Seebeck performance is very slow, but stable. Experimental results were then presented by Dennis Cravens.
These guys have control; on-and-off excess heat regulated by adding light-hydrogen to the deuterium fuel, which quenches their excess. 5-7 Watts can be achieved for weeks on end, however, 3-5 Watts is their average. They saw a max of 10 Watts. On the longest run, they achieve 1.58 MJ of energy, “definitely not chemistry”, says Cravens.
Tadahiko Mizuno with Excess Heat Generation by Simple Treatment of Reaction Metal in Hydrogen Gas. Mizuno was not able to attend; co-author Jed Rothwell presents the paper
Presentation paper: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTexcessheat.pdf
[Video links coming soon!]
Mizuno is reporting 20-40 Watts excess from a glow discharge set-up which uses air-flow calorimetry as other calorimetry types interfered with the experiment. Rothwell said although calorimetry is based on the input and output temps, it is important to measure temperature everywhere; inside the cell, on the reactor, etc. Mizuno’s reactor design allows visual inspection of the plasma when operational. Two cells with palladium rods are used simultaneously with one used as an active cell, the other as the control.
Experimental steps were detailed where 99% input power was accounted for, with one experiment giving 6% excess heat and another 12% excess. Rothwell ended the talk by saying anyone who wants to replicate Mizuno’s results will find him to be very helpful, though a translator may be needed.
The last paper for the Excess Heat session was from George H. Miley of University of Illinois and LENUCO, who presented Progress in Cluster Enabled LENR, by himself and the IH C-U Lab Team, which included a group of students that accompanied Miley at the conference, and who presented further research at Poster Session.
Miley began his talk by describing his original 12-nanometer thin-film work which he says created dislocation loop clusters. Through this research, he found that high-loading and de-loading of the reactor creates defects and clusters which will be reactive.
Now he’s working on PdZrO2 nano-particles (30% Palladium/70% Zirconium) which produce the defects needed for reaction, where a particular milling process produces more defects as measured by an NMR spectrum. The experiment utilizeses a pulsed pressurization/depressurization process. He showed results of the system runs over six months, which he carefully noted did not included some runs where errors or equipment problems occurred.
All the studies were focused on the effect of changing parameter, as opposed to reproducibility. Cryo-milled particles produced higher energies on the order of 600-1200 MJ. Also, CR-39 images showed a direct relationship between particle object detection and pressure cycling; more pressure cycles created substantially more particles.
Further study on transmutation by-products were hampered by the possibility of contamination.
Assuming results remain encouraging in added experiments, a prototype pulse reactor of 1-20W level is possible, if desired. A small 29 grams can produce 30-some Watts power, though there is a scaled up design as well.
After a lunch break, Robert Duncan begin the session on Heat from Nanomaterials by introducing Akito Takahashi from Technova, Inc with Research Status of Nano-Metal Hydrogen Energy.
Presentation .pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325646168_Research_Status_of_Nano-Metal_Hydrogen_Energy
[Video links coming soon.]
Results from the Metal Hydrogen Energy MHE reactor was presented. 2-8 Watts of Anomalous Heat Effect lasted for over a week at elevated temperature using light-hydrogen.
The largest excess heat level was 10-20 Watts of excess power for one week. In one run, a big heat burst occurred during the desorption of hydrogen. About 15cc (100g) PNZ5r powder and D2 produced heat well beyond chemical energies. He found the optimum ratio of Pd/N for the PNZ series at 450 degree to be around 7.
Yasuhiro Iwamura from Research Center for Electron Photon Science at Tohoku University with Anomalous Heat Effects Induced by Metal Nanocomposites and Hydrogen Gas.
Iwamura began with a description of a collaborative research Project including Kobe University, Tohoku University, Kyushu University, Ngoya University, Technova, and Nissan from 2015-2017 with the objective to verify the existence of the Anomalous Heat Effect AHE through nano-metal and hydrogen gas interaction and to seek control-ability of the effect.
A table showing 16 experiments using different materials showed multiple instances of high energy with one run creating 200 MJ/mole Deuterium. Released Energy per fuel unit (J/g) was shown to be significantly larger than chemical energy.
His experimental setup uses oil flow calorimetry at High Temperature, uses lots of meaurement points, and is resistant to exterior (outside) temperature changes. Sample preparation uses melt spinning. The reactor consists of 1 mm Zirconia beads (about 1300 grams) in the chamber and then the nano material is added after.
Experimental results at Tohoku were reproduced at Kobe University with positive results using the very same samples. Temperatures for these runs ranged from 140 degrees C – 350 degrees C. For the first CNA5S sample with H2, 67.8 eV/H was produced. The two further runs had increased power. Iwamura showed photos of broken ZrO2 beads after the excess heat release “which suggests very large local heat stress” in the vicinity of those beads.
Excess heat at Kobe and Tohoku had similar output values, with the same level of power and energy were obtained in their reproduction.
In summary, anomalous heat (more than several MJ/mol-H(D)). was observed for all the samples at elevated temperature, except for the Pd-only nanoparticles.
Tatsumi Hioki then presented XRD and XAFS Analyses for Metal Nanocomposites Used in Anomalous Heat Effect Experiments
[Video links coming soon!]
He also presented results on the 16 collaborative experiments performed: the three samples that did not show excess heat, he said were manufactured at a different location than the other 13 samples that did show excess heat. One of the samples provided 25x excess power at 250-350 degrees.
Hioki says the Pd single element nano-particle “are not good, and did not provide excess”. Nickel-based alloy nano-particles fared much better. “Matrix oxide” – either ZrO2 or SiO2 – was good to use at temperatures of 150-400 degrees C.
He described success in loading nano-palladium into zeolite pores. For one sample, excess heat was over 10 Watts thermal, and maxed at 65 Watts thermal, lasting for 45 days.
For the ZPZ6 sample the nickel to palladium ratio was 10:1. He showed how temperature makes the various phase changes of PNZ6. “Abundant vacancy formation and a high flux hydrogen migration on the surface of Ni based alloy nano particle may enhance the probability of the 4-body H or D fusion reaction as proposed by Akito Takahashi”, said Hioki.
A short break for coffee and Sunwon Park led the first Theory session by introducing Peter Hagelstein presenting Phonon-Mediated Excitation Transfer Involving Nuclear Excitation.
“Is there anything happening in the phonon space that you can actually see?”, asks Hagelstein. “Yes”, he responds, “with excitation transitions.”
He can interpret of energetic nuclear products in low-level nuclear emission from F&P experiments as due to excitation transfer. Also, many excitation transfers maintaining coherence lead to energy exchange.
Vladimir Vysotskii presents Using the Method of Coherent Correlated States for Realization of Nuclear Interaction of Slow with Crystals and Molecules
These theories are highly-mathematical and contain ideas from quantum mechanics such as superposition states and tunneling. Coherent correlated states are thought to allow the tunneling effect to occur, and a reaction to take place.
Check out the Cold Fusion Now! podcast where Dr. Vysotskii explains the basics. https://coldfusionnow.org/cfnpodcast/
Anthony Zuppero and Thomas Dolan with Electron Quasiparticle Catalysis of Nuclear Reactions
He predicated his presentation by saying “this is work done outside of LENR, but contains information of interest to the LENR community”.
Taking two particles, each has a potential. At some point when they are a particular distance, they begin to “couple”, and an “big” electron is ejected out of the system, leaving the reactant in a low-energy state. This is mainstream research published in 2011.
The final paper on theory was given by Norman Cook with The “Renaissance” in Nuclear Physics: Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions and Transmutations.
He started with his Conclusion and worked backwards saying “a new level of spatial detail concerning nuclear structure has become possible”; it’s called NLEFT. This is based on work done by Ulf Meissner, et al, though conventional Lattice QCD is not the same as NLEFT by Meissner, who was awarded the Lise Metner Prize in Nuclear Physics for theoretical work in 2016. The new discoveries are incompatible with the Bohr interpretation of QM.
And so concluded the first day of Presentations at ICCF-21.
Here’s a few snapshots from Monday’s break:
Though instrumentation details are discussed in detail, the role played by the power supply, if at all it is so, for heating the fuel, has not been debated.