Yet more apologies for delay in news; Real Life (TM) keeps on getting in the way. Anyway, bit of a brief update on what’s happening in the land of Cold Fusion/LENR since the last posting until March 2014, in which there are still three main players that looks like they could be bringing something commercial products to the market this year.
http://www.extremetech.com/
Rossi was in discussions originally with a company called Defkalion, and although it didn’t work out they determined enough of what he was doing to copy it (although there’s been no suing yet there might be); they’re a Greek company who spent some time trying to get the Greek government on board, but what with the GFC and the poor economy eventually ended up asking other governments what they could offer them. They ended up going to Canada after being offered various tax breaks & access to some of the best Universities and academics to help develop the theories underlying the technology and prove that it works. They’re keeping the proprietary stuff to themselves (how to make the nickel powder mainly) & franchising the tech out to big players in different areas, which is probably a smart idea, apart from one area – Greece is very big in the shipping arena (30-50% of all merchant vessels hail from Greece), so they’re in the process of stripping out the diesel generators of a decent sized ship & replacing it (and the fuel oil bunker) with their technology in combination with what are effectively steam engines; they’ve said they believe they can cut the cost of shipping by 90-95%, which is good news for lots of areas – also helps reduce pollution from burning nasty bunker oil in international waters. Not so good for jobs in Australia et al with cheap imports becoming even cheaper, however.
Defkalion have stripped nearly all the info off their web site at
http://www.defkalion-energy.
but you can still find a fair bit from
http://www.forbes.com/sites/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.infinite-energy.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/
with some of the underlying phenomena discussed in a paper at
http://www.physics.purdue.edu/
and they have quite a bit of interesting info on their web site, although they’ve not made any major updates for a few months. There’s a nice explanation of one of their experiments at
http://coldfusionnow.org/a-
and a bit at
http://peswiki.com/index.php/
as well. Of most interest in the last link is the image in the top right displaying the 4-step electron capture reaction that they say is the fundamental way the reaction is occurring, with a video of this at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Basically a pulse through a lattice in which hydrogen nuclei are “trapped” allows electrons to get close enough to the protons such that they form a neutron via an electroweak interaction. Then another pulse pushes together protons and neutrons (or a deuterium nucleus and neutrons) to form quadium (3 neutrons, 1 proton) which very quickly goes through beta decay to form a helium nucleus (well; alpha particle – 2 neutrons, 2 protons, with the electron ejected) with a LOT of energy generated in the process. The alpha particle is too large to be held in the lattice so is also ejected, and becomes helium. So, net result is hydrogen into a nickel lattice which effectively acts as a catalyst, pulse of energy added & helium comes out plus high net energy production (virtually equivalent to mass difference between a helium and 2 deuterium atoms as per nuclear fusion).
This now looks like the scientific explanation with the most legs; should be Nobel Prize material, really.
Anyway, what that really boils down to is you extract hydrogen from water, pump it into a metal lattice (possibly something as cheap as high grade nickel powder), send a few electric pulses through it and you end up with helium and a huge amount of energy (in the form of heat, which you can then convert to electricity et al). So basically the metal is just a catalyst that doesn’t need to be consumed at all; you’re really turning water in to helium, oxygen and heat. So this could also potentially explain some of the “water car” technologies over the years – if something like this was happening (with the metal in the engine body acting as the catalyst) then it is possible that someone could power a car with water.
That’s it for now; hopefully I’ll get time to add something else interesting in the near future.
