Study of deuterium charging in palladium by the electrolysis of heavy water: Heat excess production
L. Bertalot · F. De Marco · A. De Ninno · A. La Barbera · F. Scaramuzzi · V. Violante · P. Zeppa
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An ENEA team at Frascati — Bertalot, De Marco, De Ninno, La Barbera, Scaramuzzi, Violante and Zeppa — set out to measure whether an electrolytic cell with a palladium cathode in heavy water really returns more heat than it draws, and to watch the deuterium while it did it. Two features make this cell unusual. The anode is palladium rather than platinum, so palladium is slowly dissolved and re-plated onto the cathode, continuously refreshing the surface that normally fouls and shuts the effect down. And the cathode is built as a membrane: one face sits in the electrolyte, the other faces a sealed gas volume whose pressure is logged, so deuterium moving into and out of the metal is measured live while the run continues. Four runs, each longer than ten days. All three heavy-water runs produced excess power, peaking near 3 watts; the light-water control produced none. The excess appeared when, and only when, deuterium was flowing into the cathode.
Why it matters hereChapter 12 asks what state a metal lattice has to be driven into before its nuclei do work, and this paper answers with a live instrument rather than a post-mortem: the excess heat tracks deuterium entering the palladium, in real time. For chapter 1 it is a careful entry on the ladder — flow calorimetry with a stated error budget, an in-run calibration check, and a light-water control that stayed flat.
What it claims
01The experiment consisted of four runs, each lasting more than ten days: three with heavy water and one control with ordinary light water. All three heavy-water runs produced measurable excess power. The light-water control produced none.Section 4, Results, opening paragraph
Published and peer-reviewed02The maximum excess power measured was about 3 watts, which for the cathode volume used is roughly 60 watts per cubic centimetre, and it lasted about twenty hours. At low current that is around ten times the electrical power going in; at high current it is about a doubling of the input.Section 4, Results; Fig. 3
Published and peer-reviewed03The measurement is a flow calorimeter: water at 25.0 degrees Celsius, held to a tenth of a degree and flowing at under one cubic centimetre per second, carries heat out of the cell, and one watt corresponds to about 0.15 degrees of temperature difference between inlet and outlet. Calibration was linear up to 25 watts, far above anything reached in the runs, and the power error was plus or minus 50 milliwatts. Input power was computed as the current times the cell voltage reduced by 1.54 volts, to account for the work of dissociating the heavy-water molecule, and a heater inside the cell was used during the runs to re-check the calorimeter both when excess power was present and when it was absent.Section 3, Calorimetry; Fig. 2
Published and peer-reviewed04The cell uses a palladium anode in place of the usual platinum one. The anode dissolves slowly and palladium re-deposits on the cathode, regenerating its surface and creating new active sites for deuterium absorption — a direct answer to the surface poisoning that gradually prevents high loading and shuts these experiments down. Only Pyrex and Teflon contact the electrolyte, and the electrodes were heated to 900 degrees, quenched at liquid-nitrogen temperature and mounted under argon in a glove box.Section 2, The electrolysis; Fig. 1
Published and peer-reviewed05Because the cathode is a membrane with a sealed gas volume behind it, the group could convert the pressure record into a count of deuterium atoms crossing the cathode surface per second. The correlation is clear and it runs in one direction: when excess power is produced, there is a measurable flow of deuterium into the cathode, and where that inward flow is absent, so is the excess power.Section 4c, Dependence on pressure variation in the gas; Fig. 5
Published and peer-reviewed06Two further correlations emerge and one expected one does not. When excess power was present, the cell voltage at a given current stood 10 to 50 percent above the voltage measured at the same current with no excess power — an overpotential that tracks the effect. Shorter periods in the alternating high-current and low-current cycle, over a range of 5000 to 20000 seconds, were more effective at producing it. No correlation was found between current density and excess power.Section 4a and Section 4b; Fig. 4
Published and peer-reviewed
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02451688Published as Il Nuovo Cimento D, volume 15 D, number 11, November 1993, pages 1435 to 1443; received 6 August 1993, approved 13 September 1993. The article is closed at the publisher and the only licence deposited for the DOI is Springer’s text-and-data-mining user licence, which is not a licence to readers, so no text of the paper is reproduced here. SOURCE REACHED. A scan of the published article is free to read in the LENR-CANR library and was read in full for this sheet; the summary, the claims and the locators come from that reading and use the paper’s own numbered sections and figures. The authors write from ENEA — the Frascati and Casaccia research centres and the EURATOM-ENEA fusion association — with Bertalot, De Marco and Violante at Associazione EURATOM-ENEA sulla Fusione, De Ninno and Scaramuzzi at the Frascati electro-optics and laser division, and La Barbera and Zeppa at Casaccia. A companion conference paper by the same group, on the search for heat excess and nuclear ashes, was given at the Third International Conference on Cold Fusion, Nagoya, October 1992.
How to cite it
L. Bertalot, F. De Marco, A. De Ninno, A. La Barbera, F. Scaramuzzi, V. Violante, P. Zeppa (1993) Study of deuterium charging in palladium by the electrolysis of heavy water: Heat excess production. doi:10.1007/bf02451688
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