Historical research guide · 0483 · 2019
Excess Heat from Palladium Deposited on Nickel
Tadahiko Mizuno · Jed Rothwell
In one minute
Tadahiko Mizuno has spent years coaxing anomalous heat out of a very simple object: a nickel mesh lining the wall of a steel reactor, coated with palladium, filled with deuterium gas and warmed by an ordinary heater. With Jed Rothwell he reports two ways of preparing that mesh and what each one costs. The old way is to run a glow discharge for weeks or months until palladium sputters off a central rod and settles on the nickel as nanoparticles. When it works it works well — 480 watts out for 248 watts in, an excess of 232 watts, nearly double the input — but it can tie up a reactor for months before anything happens. The new way is to put the palladium on directly, by rubbing a rod over the mesh or by electroless plating. That takes about a day and turns on reliably, but the excess falls to ten to thirty watts, with forty watts in one run. Heat is measured by air flow, against an identical control reactor.
Connection
Chapter 12 is about getting nuclei to react inside a metal lattice rather than inside a plasma, and this paper is the engineering end of it: which surface preparation turns the effect on, how long it takes, and what you give up for speed. For chapter 1 it is a calorimetry lesson — a matched control reactor swapped periodically with the active one, and a measured heat-recovery curve rather than an assumed one.
From the source
With the older preparation — weeks or months of glow discharge sputtering palladium from a central rod onto a nickel mesh — the reactor reached 480 watts of output for 248 watts of input, an excess of 232 watts and nearly twice the input power, and the reaction continued as long as heating continued.Section 1.1, Old method; Fig. 4
The heat appears to come from the nickel mesh thinly covered with palladium nanoparticles rather than from the central palladium rod electrode. The authors give two reasons: the reaction increases when the reactor vessel is heated from outside, which affects the mesh more than any other component, and the reaction can be triggered reliably by depositing palladium on the mesh directly.Section 1.3, Heat apparently produced by mesh
The newer preparation applies palladium to the nickel mesh directly, either by rubbing a palladium rod across it or by electroless plating from a 10 grams per litre palladium solution at 40 to 60 degrees Celsius. It takes about a day rather than weeks, and it makes excess heat more likely to occur — but the excess is usually only 5 to 6 per cent of input, 10 to 30 watts, with 40 watts in a single instance.Sections 2.1 and 2.3; Tables 1 and 2; Section 3, Summary
Heat is measured by air flow calorimetry: an active reactor and an identical control reactor sit side by side in an insulated box, held at the same pressure and input power and periodically swapped, with output energy computed from air flow rate, air density, heat capacity and the inlet-to-outlet temperature difference. The heat recovery rate is measured against reactor temperature — 0.93 at 100 degrees Celsius, 0.82 at 300, 0.78 at 360 — and applied as a linear correction, after which calibration runs return output over input of essentially one.Section 2.2, Eqs. 1 and 2; Figs. 10 and 11
Two kinds of control test — heating the control reactor at its outer wall, and running a glow discharge with ordinary electrodes in hydrogen — both showed no excess heat.Section 2.2, opening paragraph
At a power density of 10 watts per gram the reactant might in principle reach around 1000 degrees Celsius depending on the reactor’s heat resistance and losses, and a temperature as high as 850 degrees has already been reached; the final temperature is set by the amount of reactant and the rate at which heat is removed, so more insulation raises it. The authors name higher-temperature excess heat and new reactants as the next thing to investigate.Section 1.3, final paragraphs; Section 3, Summary
The way in
https://doi.org/10.70923/001c.72489How to cite it
Tadahiko Mizuno, Jed Rothwell (2019) Excess Heat from Palladium Deposited on Nickel doi:10.70923/001c.72489