Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Successful Cold Fusion?

ssdd - 24-5-2008 at 06:36

Saw this on slashdot this morning, thought I'd share.
Quote:

The italian economic journal "Il sole 24 ore" published an article about a successful cold fusion experiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Elium-4 in the matrix ( as sign of the fusion ). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available.


http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/24/0345245


Any thoughts anyone?

-ssdd

[Edited on 24-5-2008 by vulture]

Lets wait and see

franklyn - 24-5-2008 at 08:44

It would be poetic justice for the work of Fleischmanm and Pons to be confirmed
at last. It is the height of obstinacy that the orthodox view is that this does not
appear in textbooks therefore it must be wrong. It is also most telling that this
has gone unreported by north american news media.

http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm
scroll down this page
http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/05/coldfusion_demonstratio...

.

Blind Angel - 24-5-2008 at 10:49

Can anybody get those paper?
Observation of Anomalous Heat Release and Helium-4 Production from Highly Deuterated Palladium Fine Particles
Yoshiaki Arata and Yue-Chang Zhang
Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 38 (1999) pp. L774-L776
DOI: 10.1143/JJAP.38.L774

I'm still trying to find the other one they speak that was published in May 2008.
I'm pretty sure it's in japanese and I don't care.

JohnWW - 24-5-2008 at 14:00

Fusion of deuterium to produce He-4 is supposed to be very difficult, and this is not the approach used in H-bombs, or in "conventional" attempts to obtain fusion by magnetically "squeezing" a charged plasma to a very high temperature and pressure in a cyclotron. H-bombs use mostly lithium deuteride detonated by a small enriched U-235 or Pu-239 trigger, while plasma fusion schemes involve mostly He-3, tritium, or Li-6, with some neutrons being "left over". That being the case, it is hard to see how "cold fusion" of deuterium absorbed by Pd could be successful, because of the particle velocity needed to overcome the coulombic barrier.

Fusing two He-4 (alpha particles) is even more difficult, because of the electrostatic repulsion of the doubly-charged nuclei, and because the immediate product of Be-8 is extremely unstable with a half-life of 10^-16 seconds back to two alpha-particles. There are no stable nuclei with mass numbers 5 or 8. However, although deuterium is only a small percentage of naturally-occurring H2 from water, it is still much more abundant on Earth than any of the other candidate nuclear species mentioned above, which makes research into ways of fusing it important.

IrC - 25-5-2008 at 08:42

They work on the theory that not all things need brute force (slamming particles together) to happen. In effect, quantum tunneling very similar to the way a tunnel diode works allows the repulsive barriers to be overcome in a slow steady way, rather than a crapload of a big bang all at once. Makes sense but I have not found Mr Fusions for sale yet. The way I see it, if it will work someone should have already put it up for sale. Since I have actually studied the quantum tunneling approach to cold fusion in much depth, I do not understand why it is still such a dead end. It really does have logical validity yet no one seems able to put it in the marketplace. I guess this means we should always keep alive the thought that just because a thing seems to be workable does not mean it actually ever will be?

If we stick a deuteron into a defect space in a molecule, the screening effect of the electron clouds from the surrounding atoms should help reduce the repulsion felt by an outside deuteron making it's way into the defect space just enough to allow quantum tunneling to occur. This is the reason the Pd (or W) has to be charged for so long, to fully saturate the defect spaces inside the metal electrode. I think possibly there is just enough neutron production in a large enough number of labs to keep the dream alive. Still, this does not alter the fact that there may never be found a method which would allow anything useful to ever be constructed (other than interesting effects on the scale of a useless toy).

I would point out that I for one still think there must be a way to make it work, if only I had the money and time.

I forgot to mention: just because we see heat and helium does not prove fusion! A process in the hydrogen (deuterium) saturated metal much like Wigner energy buildup could be causing the heat (and even cell explosions from H2 or D2 ignition due to runaway heat buildup). Bear in mind that I am not talking about actual lattice displacement from neutron radiation, but rather a lattice displacement from the supercharging deuterium into the spaces inside the lattice structure creating a heating effect.

If you look into D2O production you will see that helium can actually already be in the cell (and possibly in the metals as well?). Therefore in my mind neutron production is the ONLY possible test which could once and for all prove if cold fusion is a real effect.

I do not think running tests with H2O or D2O alone and making comparisons to prove fusion is useful as far as heat or helium is concerned since the heat could be a chemical thing and the helium could have already been in there to begin with. As I said, only neutron production can prove fusion in my mind. One final problem here is the one fusion reaction which would produce helium and heat but no neutrons, making the whole idea of proving anything very hard to do. Only the future can tell I suppose.



[Edited on 5-25-2008 by IrC]

12AX7 - 25-5-2008 at 09:14

Ah, but quantum tunneling -- and the high-energy tail of thermal energy -- are already used as operating principles in tokamak (not cyclotrons FWIW, JohnWW) and inertial confinement sorts of reactors -- any of them dealing with thermal plasma in essence. You can run the numbers, the barrier is something like 1.4MeV, so you need a thermal temperature (K*T) around 140keV for some smaller fraction interacting, and some smaller fraction still by using the high energy tail in the Maxwell distribution of energies, for a temperature of say, at least 14keV ~= 160MK, that's megakelvin. Even for low probabilities, the thermalized temperature is obscene. A cyclotron starts looking good, except that efficiency (current efficiency and fusion efficiency) is terrible.

The quantum barrier is physically much smaller than any electronic interaction's scope; you would need an electron pretty well in the middle of the nucleus to have such an effect, and it would have to have quite high energy to be confined or at least localized to such a small space. Even the most robust lattices (e.g., WC, SiC, diamond, etc.) break down over just a few eV.

So as you see, known physics is pretty well against anything of the sort. Repeated testing and verification of this experiment is definitely required.

Tim