Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Testing a Brillouin Boiler

morganism - 10-12-2012 at 17:29

So, even if crackpottery, am wondering how to do this at home.

http://pesn.com/2012/04/19/9602078_Brillouin--Understanding_...

Prob every university lab in the country already has the eqpt for this on hand. They were using the exact setup for hydrogen sequestration experiments for vehicle use. They just weren't looking for excess heat , or anomalous helium production.
Have read of two of the labs that got explosive results tho....

To test whether a home setup is actually working correctly, without a full calorimeter, it seemed like i could set up an el-cheapo spectrophotometer to look for a helium signature in any steam or gas produced.

I found some links to home spectro's on Hack a Day, and it looks like i can't use a cd, but could probably use a diffraction grating, a white LED, and an old camera chip to set it up.
The white led looks like it has a much more even spectra then i expected, but do you think i would have to use a full on recorder to get the info onto a laptop to check for transients, or do you think there would be enough helium to pick it up by eyeball ?

here are some of the links for the spectro

http://topologicoceans.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/diy-spectro-...

http://hackaday.com/2010/12/13/building-a-spectrophotometer/...

http://www.asdlib.org/onlineArticles/elabware/Scheeline_Kell...

there is a basic software setup in the last article.

Any ideas or anyone played with a setup like this before?
How strong and easy to pick out is the helium line/s


[Edited on 11-12-2012 by morganism]

watson.fawkes - 10-12-2012 at 18:15

Quote: Originally posted by morganism  
To test whether a home setup is actually working correctly, without a full calorimeter, it seemed like i could set up an el-cheapo spectrophotometer to look for a helium signature in any steam or gas produced.
Bowdlerizing Pauli, this isn't even a bad idea.

And your link at the top is broken.

morganism - 10-12-2012 at 20:14

Thanks, tried to fix link.

I saw in another thread there is a possibility that there is some helium sequesterd in metal lattice, or maybe even some hiding in the water.

Is it just a bad idea because the density would never be high enough to spot with a cheapo spectro, or because the lines would be to weak to pick out easily ?

watson.fawkes - 11-12-2012 at 06:14

Quote: Originally posted by morganism  
Is it just a bad idea because the density would never be high enough to spot with a cheapo spectro, or because the lines would be to weak to pick out easily ?
Both of these. What would be worth doing, however, would be to do the estimate about why it's a bad idea. First thing is to estimate the amount of He product. Nuclear heat reactions have this tendency to need very little mass to make lots of energy, that whole c2 factor. Then you need to know how you're exciting the He atoms to get a spectroscopic line. Thermal emissions are present, but very weak. You could excite generally, say with plasma, in which case you need to compute what the relative emissions look like (He vs. everything else). Alternately, you could excite differentially, say with a highly monochromatic laser, in which case you need to estimate the amount of binding to the target atom, the size of the resultant signal. In both cases you need to estimate the degree of discrimination you'll need to pick out a signal. Finally, you match that degree of discrimination to the accuracy of the proposed instrument.

morganism - 16-12-2012 at 01:05

Lots of thermal, supposed to be a dry steam system.
Not reaching plasma levels, i think all the ionization is dumped into the grating for electron excitation.

Still don't know how much He supposed to be present, but since all the heat supposed to be generated by the isotopic steps, and the cascade from helium, it looks like there should be measurable amounts for a basic gas spectro.

Guess that means a glass window, instead of plastic grating too.

seems pretty bright and distinctive. i wish i could use emission instead of absorption. would be much more distinctive.

[img] [\img]


Too bad i cant use el cheapo filters and that white led...

http://www.nezumi.demon.co.uk/nonad/spectra.htm


maybe try and find an optimized diffraction grating for it, since they make lamps expressly for testing ? new cheap violet laser since He spectra is extra strong in violet ?

hespect.jpg - 7kB

watson.fawkes - 16-12-2012 at 08:19

Quote: Originally posted by morganism  
Still don't know how much He supposed to be present, but since all the heat supposed to be generated by the isotopic steps, and the cascade from helium, it looks like there should be measurable amounts for a basic gas spectro.
Show your work. This is a straightforward E=mc2 calculation. You know the heat output, which gives you the energy output per unit time. Given Δm, you should be able to calculate the He output per unit time.

EDIT: Specific exercise: Compute the energy released with one nanomole of product in the following nuclear reaction (neutrinos omitted).
     4 1H+ + 2 e- --> 2He2+
All this takes is looking up rest energies, subtracting, and multiplying by c2.

[Edited on 2012-12-16 by watson.fawkes]

morganism - 22-1-2013 at 02:52

Got a 50 cup stainless coffee pot for a boiler chamber. Its the standard , group style one, but has the liquid level sight glass, so should make it easier to run bulkhead fittings in.

Also looks to be double walled, which should help keep temps more stable and reduce the amount of variables gotta track to see if i get temp rise.

Looking for a basic electrolysis cell materials to dump some hydrogen into it.

Found a nice nickel alloy, by a Japanese sounding researcher, but can't find the alloy name again.
Am tempted to do pipe instead of grid, saw a nice design at the Evil Mad Scientist supplier.

http://www.amazing1.com/hydrogen_fuel.htm

They were using water glass to transfer heat out, and the tube would be nice for transferring heat to the carrier. Don't know if the reduced surface area affects the step reaction.

Gonna have to figure out a PWM power supply for the boiler, got a couple around that can work for the cell.

Have been trying to figure out the freq i should be shooting for. How come i keep ending up in the seismic range? The sonoluminescence stuff seems to be apt ....
Or all the way to Thz.