Historical research guide · 0686 · 2025
Progress in Understanding and Scaling Up the Lattice Energy Converter (LEC)
F. E. Gordon · H. J. Whitehouse
In one minute
Frank Gordon and Harper Whitehouse have spent a decade on a device that looks too simple to work: two electrodes of different metals in a sealed gas, one of them a palladium or iron surface loaded with hydrogen, and nothing else inside. The loaded metal ionises the gas around it continuously, the difference in the two metals’ work functions sets up a voltage, and a current flows into whatever you attach — no radioactive source, no power supply. This paper is their progress report. Cell output climbed about a hundredfold between the 2022 and 2023 conferences, from roughly 300 nanowatts to 30 microwatts, and the authors set out the physics that governs the rest of the climb: gas conduction with the diffusion terms put back in, which makes the cell non-ohmic, so the current does not vanish when the voltage does. They also report that the gas can be replaced altogether — epoxies, gels and de-ionised water carry the same effect — which widens the LEC into a family they call electrophysical direct energy converters.
Connection
Chapter 12 holds that a hydrogen-loaded metal lattice does real work at ordinary temperatures, and the LEC is the most stripped-down form of that claim: nothing plugged in, nothing radioactive inside, an output a hand meter reads. Chapter 6 needs converters that turn a field directly into electricity rather than through heat and a turbine, and this paper is the engineering account of how far that one has been pushed and what governs the next factor of ten. The authors’ 2024 scale-up paper is on this site at /library/stm-0577272226 — read that one for the five focus areas, and this one for the conduction physics and the move beyond gas.
From the source
Hydrogen occluded in a hydrogen-host-material such as palladium or iron, in fluidic contact with a gas, makes that gas spontaneously and continuously ionised without any naturally radioactive material present; placed against a second electrode of a different work function, the cell self-initiates and self-sustains an open-circuit voltage and delivers a current into an external load. The authors have published the result in peer-reviewed journals and other researchers have independently replicated it in five separate reports.Abstract; Section 1, Introduction, citing references 6 to 8 and 9 to 13
Measured cell output rose about two orders of magnitude in one year of development: approximately 300 nanowatts and 4 microamps per square centimetre reported at ICCF-24 in July 2022, and 30 microwatts with 138 microamps per square centimetre at ICCF-25 in August 2023. Five further orders of magnitude would give 3 watts and eight would give 3 kilowatts.Section 3, opening paragraph; Figures 2a and 2b
The cell conducts non-ohmically. Writing the charge-conservation equations of Riecke as rewritten by Darrow, the current density keeps a diffusion term that survives when the electric field goes to zero, so voltage and current do not vanish together — measured as the cube root of cell current falling linearly with cell voltage to a non-zero intercept, with a slope of 0.0241 microamps to the one-third per volt and an intercept of 1.3 microamps to the one-third.Section 4; Figures 4a and 4b; the current-density equation attributed to Darrow, reference 28
Peak power appears where the average ion drift lifetime and the average ion diffusion lifetime are equal, which at room temperature puts the optimum cell voltage near 250 millivolts; output rises with cell temperature, which the authors attribute partly to ion physics and partly to increased lattice activity.Section 3, the drift-lifetime and diffusion-lifetime relations and the paragraph following them
The gas is not essential. High-temperature epoxies, electrode gel, de-ionised water and other self-ionising materials placed between electrodes of different work function also produced a sustained voltage and current, and mixing palladium-hydrogen particulate into the gel or epoxy raised the output further — which the authors present as a broader class of contact-potential-difference electrophysical direct energy converter devices.Section 5, the tests using liquids, gels and epoxy electrolytes, and the tests using palladium-hydrogen particulate
The physical process producing the ionisation is not yet identified, and the authors name the experiment that would discriminate: run a cell inside a well-instrumented Dewar while drawing electrical energy from it. Conservation of energy says the cell should cool; if it does not cool, a heat-producing reaction in the lattice is offsetting the energy removed.Abstract, second sentence; Section 5, the paragraph on non-gaseous electrolytes and the Dewar test
The way in
https://doi.org/10.70923/001c.134029How to cite it
F. E. Gordon, H. J. Whitehouse (2025) Progress in Understanding and Scaling Up the Lattice Energy Converter (LEC) doi:10.70923/001c.134029