Historical research guide · 0880 · 2006
Progress in Excess of Power Experiments with Electrochemical Loading of Deuterium in Palladium
Vittorio Violante · S. Moretti · Mario Bertolotti · E. Castagna · Concita Sibilia · F. Sarto · Michael McKubre · Francis Tanzella · Irving Dardik · S. Lesin · T. Zilov
In one minute
Vittorio Violante’s team takes on the hardest problem in this field: making the effect happen on purpose. The experiment loads a palladium cathode with deuterium by electrolysis, then shines a laser on the cathode surface to trigger it. Much of this ICCF-12 report is about the engineering that makes such a claim checkable. The group rebuilt the calorimeter — the instrument that compares heat going in with heat coming out — as a double-structure cell, and modelled it as a full three-dimensional heat-transfer problem including the stirring caused by electrolysis bubbles. Only the model that includes that stirring reproduces the calibration curve. With that instrument in hand, excess power appeared in four of five laser-triggered runs. The largest, called Laser-5, records 49 kilojoules of excess energy across roughly three hundred hours. Helium-4 in the cell gas is measured and compared with the amount the excess heat would imply. Their own verdict is honest: the trigger gives real reproducibility, but the size of the effect is not yet under control.
Connection
Chapter 12 turns on one question — whether a metal lattice loaded with deuterium can be made to release nuclear-scale energy on demand — and this is the multi-laboratory attempt to answer it with calorimetry good enough to argue about, with ENEA, the University of Rome La Sapienza, SRI International and Energetics running the same cells, the same laser trigger and the same measurement.
From the source
Laser triggering of an electrochemically loaded palladium cathode produced excess power in four out of five experiments — the reproducibility figure the collaboration puts forward as its main result.Conclusions, second bullet
In the run designated Laser-5, 49 kilojoules of excess energy were recorded over a campaign of roughly three hundred hours, with the laser on and the cathode resistance ratio at or below 1.74, the electrical signature the group uses to track deuterium loading.Section ‘Laser 5 Experiment: Calorimetric Results’
Helium-4 was measured by mass spectrometry in the laser-triggered cells and compared against the amount expected from the measured excess energy, against the instrument background, and against the helium that palladium anodic erosion could release.Section ‘4-He Mass Spectrometry for Laser Triggered Experiments’, with the Laser-4 energy chart
The redesigned double-structure isoperibolic cell was modelled as a three-dimensional transient heat-transfer problem that includes the electrolyte motion driven by electrolysis gas bubbles, with the bubble velocity derived from the current density; only the model carrying that fluid dynamics reproduces the measured calibration curve.Sections ‘Thermal Analysis’, ‘Hydrogen Bubbles at the Cathode’ and ‘Comparison between Experimental Data and Model’
The amplitude of the excess power is not yet under control, even though high deuterium loading is almost always achieved; material studies are in progress to identify and control the state of the cathode that produces the larger signals.Conclusions, third and fourth bullets
The work is a joint programme across five laboratories — ENEA Frascati, ENEA Casaccia, the Department of Energetics at the University of Rome La Sapienza, SRI International at Menlo Park, and Energetics — running the same protocol on the same class of cells.Title page affiliations
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812772985_0005How to cite it
Vittorio Violante, S. Moretti, Mario Bertolotti, E. Castagna, Concita Sibilia, F. Sarto, Michael McKubre, Francis Tanzella, Irving Dardik, S. Lesin, T. Zilov (2006) Progress in Excess of Power Experiments with Electrochemical Loading of Deuterium in Palladium doi:10.1142/9789812772985_0005