Cold Fusion
Jean-Paul Biberian
Abstract and summary · read the original at the source
In one page
Jean-Paul Biberian, a surface physicist at Aix-Marseille University, uses this review to lay out twenty years of his own cold fusion experiments — specifically the ones that produced heat. He begins in 1993 with solid-state electrolytes: lanthanum aluminate crystals grown with lanthanum missing from the lattice, which take up deuterium and visibly change colour as the gaps fill. Driven with short pulses averaging two milliwatts, those crystals returned about 150 milliwatts of heat, and went on producing it for nearly two hours after the power was switched off. He then walks through a Patterson-style bead cell, a Fleischmann and Pons boiling cell rebuilt in Grenoble that reached 29 percent excess, deuterium diffusing outward through a palladium tube for a steady four watts, and a flow calorimeter comparing heavy water against ordinary water. The pattern he draws is a trade-off: solid electrolytes give an enormous ratio of heat out to power in but very little heat, while diffusion gives real watts at a modest ratio. He also reports an unexplained cell explosion, and says plainly that many other attempts gave nothing.
Why it matters hereThis is chapter 12’s evidence base written by one experimenter across many methods at once — electrolysis, gas diffusion and solid-state electrolytes — which is exactly the kind of cross-technique consistency chapter 1’s evidence ladder asks for. It also names the engineering problem the field still has to solve: high ratio and high power have so far come from different apparatus.
What it claims
01Lanthanum aluminate single crystals grown with lanthanum vacancies take up hydrogen or deuterium into those vacancies, and announce it by changing colour — red with vacancies, white once filled, blue on the cathode side when overloaded — which turns the loading state of the lattice into something the experimenter can see.Section 2, Figure 2
Published and peer-reviewed02In the Grenoble calorimeter, two lanthanum aluminate crystals driven in pulsed mode — a 120 milliwatt pulse lasting one second once a minute, an average input of 2 milliwatts — produced 150 milliwatts of excess heat, a coefficient of performance of 75, and heat continued for almost two hours after the power supply was switched off.Section 2, Figure 5
Published and peer-reviewed03A Patterson-type flow cell with nickel, palladium and nickel layers about a micrometre thick each on copper-coated polystyrene beads produced excess heat during electrolysis and none in a blank run without it, with the yield highest at low input power — close to 100 percent excess there.Section 3, Figure 7
Published and peer-reviewed04Rebuilding the Fleischmann and Pons boiling cell in Grenoble gave excess heat up to 29 percent at boiling temperature, and the runs with lithium sulphate in ordinary water were the surprise: palladium was more active there, and even platinum cathodes showed excess.Section 4, Table 1
Published and peer-reviewed05Deuterium introduced into a closed palladium tube and allowed to diffuse out through its walls gave an average of 4 watts of excess power against 48 watts of heater input over a twelve-day run in a mass flow calorimeter, while the same apparatus with no deuterium returned less power than it drew.Section 5, Figure 11
Published and peer-reviewed06After 701 hours a palladium-tube electrolysis cell exploded and scattered glass metres away; because the cell was open, Biberian deliberately detonated stoichiometric hydrogen and oxygen mixtures in the same cell and did it no damage, and he raises the possibility that the origin was nuclear — some kind of chain reaction — as the question that experiment leaves open.Section 7, Figures 14 to 16
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.70923/001c.72238Published as Journal of Condensed Matter Nuclear Science 13 (2014) 44 to 55. The paper carries the line ‘© 2014 ISCMNS. All rights reserved’ and the journal’s own article metadata records no open licence, so this page carries the summary, the claims and the author’s own abstract, and sends the reader to the full text at the source.
How to cite it
Jean-Paul Biberian (2014) Cold Fusion. doi:10.70923/001c.72238
Where it sits in the curriculum