Cold Fusion now a reality?

[Thor.]

Hmm westinghouse, my last tube tv was a westinghouse, not a bad make :tongue: Edited November 5, 2011 by Thor.

[Marxist ßastard]

it must not be distilled water because it can't boil (it explodes when the water temperature exceedes aproximately 150 degrees celsius, pretty cool)

Okay. Cold fusion I can let slide; this I cannot.

 

So, background: There is actually no law saying that you can't have a liquid above its boiling point. Thermodynamics says that it must boil eventually, but it doesn't say how or when. Boiling is actually a painfully slow process when it proceeds by homogeneous nucleation, so in that case it's pretty easy to apply heat faster than boiling dissipates it – which raises the liquid's temperature above boiling. (For almost the exact same reason, it's possible to hold liquids at negative pressures.) As the temperature goes further above boiling, the rate of homogeneous nucleation increases. If you can heat it to the spinodal limit – 307.6 °C for water – it will explosively vaporize, no matter what. But more likely, heterogeneous nucleation will eventually kick in and it will explosively vaporize at a much lower temperature.

 

When does boiling proceed by homogeneous nucleation? Your liquid can't have anything floating in it: Distilled water works, but so does tap water, gasoline, and tea. It has to be perfectly still. And any surface it comes into contact with must be completely smooth, with no imperfections. (The classic example is water in a very clean glass flask, heated in a microwave or over a Bunsen burner.) In any other case, boiling proceeds by heterogeneous nucleation, which is much faster. The usual temperature encountered in that case is maybe 103 °C for water; anything beyond that and it's really more vapor bubbles than liquid.

 

All this to say: Water flowing through a brushed metal turbine will have no trouble boiling. At all.

[Werne]

@Marxist Bastard Yeah, I forgot the water is in motion, sorry about that. But still, distilled water can explode. If it's perfectly still, when it exceedes the boiling point it will detonate when disturbed (actually it will have a very quick boiling process, strong enough to be called an explosion). I tried, blew up my glass and I had a spoon stuck in my wall.

[HeyYou]

@HeyYou But they are not used in zero gravity where water floats in mid-air.

 

What does gravity matter? Water under pressure is water under pressure. Nothing changes for the lack of gravity.

[Werne]

@HeyYou Yes, I agree, however in zero gravity the system changes. In navy ships and standard nuclear reactors the water lies on the bottom of the container (before it gets to the reactor) . The pump pumps it through the reactor to turn it into steam, after it passes through the turbine it cools down, condensates, and is pumped back to the container. The system has valves to release the extra pressure created by water expansion.

 

In space, the water does not lie on the bottom of the container. It must be pressured towards the pump in order to keep it's shape, so the pump won't run into an air bubble and overheat. Now, how would you put water under pressure in another water under pressure without putting more pressure on the pump that pumps the water into the reactor? Valves cannot be used because the entire system is under pressure in order to operate properly.

Edited November 5, 2011 by Werne

[HeyYou]

Use the same method that has been used just this side of forever in home plumbing pressure tanks. Have bladder inside the pressure vessel that prevents air bubbles from forming in the working fluid. You would have to get a bit creative on some parts of it, but, it is eminently doable.

[Werne]

@HeyYou Why didn't I remember that :wallbash:. It seems I really need to get some coffee, my brain stopped working.

[HeyYou]

@HeyYou Why didn't I remember that :wallbash:. It seems I really need to get some coffee, my brain stopped working.

 

Probably suffering from the same affliction I am. "I haven't used my brain yet today. Just leave me alone." :D

[Werne]

@HeyYou Haha, yeah, something like that.

[WizardOfAtlantis]

Here is some up close footage of the catalyzer at work. And the media.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Ru1eAymvE&feature=player_embedded#!

 

If you can make out any of it be my guest to translate it :thumbsup:

And to think that this is coming from Italy!!! (if you lived in Italy, you would know what that means....very behind technologically, leading politicians that outright lie publicly about the "inefficiency and impracticality of solar power", the Brain Drain as leading scientists and researchers abandoned the country, and I could go on and on).

 

Okay! Here's a shot at the sense of it.

 

There's a lot of general talk in that video in the beginning that you might expect ("many say it was impossible", etc, a bit about the simple mechanics of it, i.e. "hydrogen gets absorbed by the nickel" or something like that, but it cuts off....and I'm sure you interested guys know the mechanics anyway.

 

The graph at about 3 min's shows the rising temperature of the water as things start going (the yellow line going up across time). Right before that he says he wants to field jornalists' questions first, and then get into scientist questions later as they'll probably get heavy and bore the journalists with their depth. : )

 

At about 4 to 5 min's he's talking about how they measured the rise in temperature of the water and how the yellow line got unattached ( in reference to the other lines at the beginning which were parallel) and how the real problem is to understand why they went over 100 degrees and evaporated the water. He says calculating the vaporizing heat (or heat of vaporization) and the specific heat of the water, they obtained about 12 to 13 kilowatt hours per hour of exiting energy flow. He said they had 600 to 700 watts coming in.

 

Then he explained the graph more: red was ambient temp, blue was water temp coming in, and yellow was the water after the reactor (which was then, of course, 101 and no longer water but vapor). He also said it was measured as dry vapor without water mixed in, and that they could confer the six hundred watts of vaporization to the produced energy (? because it matches the energy needed to vaporize every kilo of water?)...*sorry, I don't understand everything he says...I understand the language with no problem, just the subject matter is hard to follow because he speaks fast because he's excited and for him these things are obvious and he's talking to journalists so it's kinda rushed*

 

At about six and a half minutes he states the people that effectuated the tests were were professors of the University of Bologna and extraneous to his project , not under their pay, etc. They are the ones who took all the readings and "will give all the numbers", he says.

 

At about 7 minutes he says that the word reactor is somewhat misleading and they prefer the phrase energy catalyzer.

 

At about seven and a half minutes he says there are big questions as to how it works, upon which they have theorized but that there is much to study because an exact theory on the why of this will require much more study. He says there are big matters at hand...at times they arrived at 15 times the input energy but according to him they could arrive much higher but which they don't push for reasons of safety. He says that they're at the Model T and that they have to arrive at the Formula 1. http://www.thenexusforums.com/public/style_emoticons/dark/biggrin.gif

 

He says if you want to raise the voltage, you put them together in series like batteries at about 9 min's. If you want to increase the amperage, you put them in parallel.

 

He says just after 9 min's that they had in the room international partners that were getting ready for the mass production of these apparatuses.

 

At about 10 min's that other guy says that he registered a slight raise in local gamma radiation that was unstable, which the guy said was a great sign because a constant gamma signal would have led him to believe that there was another source, if I understood correctly, of the radiation and that it wasn't coming from the machine. He seemed very happy about that.

 

Just after 11 min's, the other guy laughingly complained that he wanted to "really use" his machine to register inside the energy catalyzer but wasn't allowed to because of it seems patent reasons, business deals, because he would have understood some of the secrets of the energy catalyzer (so they didn't let him do it). His second point about 12 mins' was about some gamma flash (?) at startup and shutdown of the energy catalyzer that he didn't understand and said maybe one of his colleagues might better. The original scientist then said something about the internal geometry of the device being very complex but didn't elaborate beyond that he worked on energy peaks.

 

The last guy only wanted confirmation on the gamma thing, saying that it only made sense that through the transmutation that go on copper and then on nickel, it makes the elements of the nuclidi (?) table to the right, and on the right the decays (? decadimenti in italian) are beta minus, so it makes sense according to the theory of the energy catalyzer that there shouldn't be emissions of positrons, and the original scientist says that what he says is totally plausible.

 

*please pardon my rambling incoherence, that is also how they were talking at times, plus I don't understand the technicalities of this and had to translate terminology as best as I could*