Historical research guide · 0554 · 2024
Scaling up the Lattice Energy Converter
F. E. Gordon · H. J. Whitehouse
In one minute
The Lattice Energy Converter is about as simple as a power source gets: two electrodes in a sealed gas, one of them a palladium or iron surface loaded with hydrogen. Frank Gordon and Harper Whitehouse report that such a cell starts itself and keeps itself going — it ionises the gas around it and delivers a voltage and a current into a load, with no radioactive material inside and nothing plugged in. A voltmeter and a resistance box are all you need to see it. Five independent groups have reproduced it. The honest problem is size: a working cell puts out a few millionths of a watt per square centimetre, and this paper is about the gap between that and something useful. The authors name five levers — cleaner metallurgy, better gas chemistry, cell geometry, running warmer, and simply more electrode area — put a target on each, and argue the six to nine orders of magnitude needed are reachable by multiplying them together.
Connection
Chapter 12 holds that a loaded metal lattice does real nuclear-scale work at ordinary temperatures, and the LEC is the most stripped-down claim on that list: no input power, no radioactive source, an output you can read with a hand meter. Chapter 6 needs devices that turn a field into electricity directly rather than through heat, and this is one.
From the source
Multiple Lattice Energy Converter devices and configurations self-initiate and self-sustain the production of a voltage and current through an external load impedance without the use of naturally radioactive materials, a result the authors have published and which independent researchers have replicated in five separate reports.Abstract; Section 1, second paragraph, citing references 5 to 9
Present experimental power densities are typically a few microwatts per square centimetre of working electrode, so the output must be scaled up by six orders of magnitude to reach a few watts and by nine to reach a few kilowatts.Abstract, final third; Section 2, opening
Following Darrow’s 1932 derivation, the terms for ion recombination and diffusion make the gas conduction non-ohmic: there can be a short-circuit current through the gas at zero electrode voltage, and an open-circuit voltage between the electrodes at zero current — which the authors identify as a major characteristic of self-initiating, self-sustaining LEC performance.Section 1, the Darrow paragraph, citing reference 17; Appendix
Comparing normal running against a run with an applied sweeping field, the authors estimate that without a strong electric field the cell harvests about one thousandth of the ions it produces, the rest recombining — which they read as one to two orders of magnitude of available headroom.Section 2.3
Output rises steeply with temperature: roughly two to three orders of magnitude between about 22 and 80 degrees Celsius, and about four orders of magnitude at 100 degrees, measured on the data set plotted in Figure 3.Section 2.4 and Figure 3 caption
The scale-up path is five interconnected focus areas with a target for each — metallurgy, gas dynamics, cell configuration, temperature and electrode area — and four experiments that would settle it: identify the source and type of ionizing radiation from the working electrode, identify the counter electrode’s role, identify the gases and mixtures that optimise ion production, and solve the fourth-order nonlinear gas-ion physics inside the cell.Section 2, the numbered list; Sections 2.1 to 2.5; the four numbered requirements closing Section 2
The way in
https://doi.org/10.70923/001c.124959How to cite it
F. E. Gordon, H. J. Whitehouse (2024) Scaling up the Lattice Energy Converter doi:10.70923/001c.124959