Apparently some bright person in Germany thought it might be possible to get Cold Fusion effects with Hydroxy/HHO/Brown’s Gas (I’ll stick with Hydroxy). Once you think about it this is not too far fetched; there have been several people who have claimed anomalous energy from Hydroxy reactions, usually in combination with metal, so Cold Fusion might be an explanation. This person realised that we already have access to cheap fine-grained metals known for their catalytic ability and relation to Cold Fusion in the form of catalytic converters – those found in the exhaust pipe of moderately modern cars, between the engine and the muffler, whose primary job is to combined carbon monoxide (CO) with unburned hydrocarbons (HC) to produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O), and also reduce oxides of nitrogen (NOx) into nitrogen and oxygen. You can get these on eBay for between $100 and $200 as per http://www.ebay.com.au/sch/?_nkw=catalytic%20converter, or from a second-hand car parts place for a lot less.

I’m unsure if the idea was to burn Hydroxy & pass it through the catalytic converter, but apparently someone noticed that merely passing Hydroxy through the catalytic converted caused it to heat up fairly quickly to quite high temperatures, which could quite possibly be the result of Cold Fusion reactions if true.

The great thing about this, if true, is that the mechanically minded amongst you with a Hydroxy generator could test this out pretty quickly, and a few people have already done this and reported that yes, there is heat generated, which is a very interesting result regardless of anything else. The next question is whether this reaction can produce more heat than the energy required to produce the Hydroxy in the first place, in which case we could have Cold Fusion at Home – literally, for purposes of heating, and, if suitably efficient (over unity by at least a factor of 3, which you can get with a good heat pump, but preferably 10) then possibly also electrical generation as well (e.g. via a Tesla Turbine, or moderately efficient modern steam engine).

Sterling Allen, of Peswiki fame, has got into this a fair bit with a project called H-Cat which is being run in conjunction with Justin Church and Neal Ward. Initial tests aren’t indicating over-unity, but are pretty high efficiency (90-95%). There has also been a bit of a stoush between Sterling and Mark Dansie over this (and each other’s methods in general), which is unfortunate. Anyway, let’s ignore the clash and focus instead of the technology and results – you can find out more about what is happening (experiments still progressing) at these sites:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Justin_Church%27s_H-Cat
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Sterling_Allan%27s_H-Cat_Heater_Design
http://pesn.com/2014/03/21/9602462_H-Cat-heater-project_fundraiser/
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:H-Cat_Calorimetry
http://revolution-green.com/h-cat-real-justin-church/
with the results of the latest experiments at:
http://pesn.com/2014/03/31/9602464_Sterlings-first_H-Cat_calorimetric-test/

I would like our members to get in on the act, bearing in mind the experimental setup should be relatively simple and inexpensive. You would require:
1) Catalytic Converter
2) High temperature HDPE (or metal) piping to attach to either end of the catalytic converter
3) Hydroxy generator that can be powered (directly or indirectly) via AC
4) Small tank full of water
5) Meter that can measure total and instantaneous power, like the Power Meter, Kill-A-Watt or https://shop.ata.org.au/shop/low-cost-mains-power-meter
or something similar.

You attach the Hydroxy generator to the power meter which is then attached to mains power, so you can record the amount of watt-hours required to generate the Hydroxy. The output of the generator is attached to a pipe which then goes into the catalytic converter. The catalytic converted is placed into the water tank, and another pipe on the other side of the catalytic converter to allow the gas (or what’s left after the gas goes through the reaction) to come out.

Ideally you’d have the gas go through the water as well, but that would allow water to get into the catalytic converter which I’m pretty sure would cancel any exotic reactions, so we’ll just have to live with heat loss of the gas. Alternatively you may wish to pass this through a second tank of water & do measurements on it as well. This would probably be a good idea in any event, as it seems that there’s a fair chance that Tritium will be produced from this reaction, which is a radioactive isotope – not a terribly dangerous one, but something that you’d probably want to avoid if you can. Tritium can be absorbed by breathing and drinking, and although the amounts being produced would be barely measurable, it’s still probably best to be on the safe side – pipe the output through water, and use gloves when disposing of the water.

So, we put a fixed amount of water into the tank (preferably the smallest amount we can get away with that will cover and surround the catalytic converter, as the smaller the amount the bigger the change due to any reaction and the easier to get an accurate measurement). Put a thermometer in it & ensure the water has time to come to room temperature, and then start the Hydroxy generator. Run for a number of minutes, and measure the temperature increase in the water – preferably leave it running long enough to bump the temperature up by a noticeable amount, say 10 degrees, and also measure the number of watt-hours of energy used to get to this point. Turn off the Hydroxy generator & make another few measurements over the next 5-10 minutes, as there may be some more time required to get the heat out of the reaction – once the temperature of the water starts dropping you can stop measuring, but make sure you record the maximum temperature the water got to. If you have another tank of water and pass the gas through this, you should preferably use one with the same volume of water as the first to make calculations easier. Then if you had e.g. a 10 degree rise in the first tank, and a 1 degree rise in the second tank, you can treat that as an 11 degree rise all up for determining efficiency. If the volumes of water are different you’ll need to adjust the calculations accordingly (e.g. 10L in tank 1, 10 degree rise, 5L in tank 2, 1 degree rise is equivalent to a rise of 12 degrees in 10L of water).

Now, for some calculations. The Specific Heat of water is 4.184 J/g-C, which means for a litre of water = 1kg = 1000g that’s 4.184 kJ of heat required for each Celsius/Kelvin degree rise in temperature. So if you had 10L of water in the tank (would be nice if you had a round figure like this) and a 10 degree temperature rise, that is equivalent to 418.4 kJ of heat energy being added. With any luck your meter will tell you how many Joules of energy you expended in electricity during the experiment; if not you will need to convert the Wh (or kWh) to J; a Wh is a watt-hour, which means 1 Joule of energy per second over the course of an hour. An hour is 60*60=3600 seconds, so a Wh is equivalent to 3600 J, i.e. 3.6 kJ. So if you used up 1 kWh during the experiment, that would be 3600 kJ, which means you would have an overall efficiency of 418.4/3600 or 11.6%, which is pretty poor. If you used only 116 Wh (0.116 kWh) then you’d be at 100% efficiency, and if you used any less you’ve over-unity production, which would be great. If you used up under 20 Wh then you have a serious contender for something that could power your home with both heat and electricity, with a bit of scaling up.

So, hopefully we can get several of our members to try out some experiments like this, and with any luck get some good results. It’s quite possible that different catalytic converters will give different results; the best ones will probably be those with the finest grained metal particles, although short of cutting one opening & examining it with a high-powered microscope it would be hard to tell. The best system would probably have to combine several catalytic converters in series – assuming this is a Cold Fusion effect it’s highly likely that only a very small amount of Hydroxy is reacting in any one converter, say only 10% (probably a lot less). Then you’re wasting 90% of the original energy if you only use once catalytic converter – if you use 2 then you’ll still be losing 81% of the energy, 3 would be 73%, 4 for 66%, 5 for 59%, 6 for 53.1%, etc. So, if you’d really like to get into this in a big way, I would recommend you do at least 3 measurements with a single catalytic converter, then another three with 2 catalytic converters, and if there’s a noticeable improvement another three with 3 catalytic converters (all catalytic converters to be the same type and age, or else you also need to do individual measurements on each of them separately before combining them.). If we see an improvement in efficiency like the series I just gave then that would show not only that only a small amount of Hydroxy is being used in each catalytic converter, but also allow us to work out what the amount is, and figure out what the best bang-for-buck would be for that particular catalytic converter.

So, do we have any takers?