Dr Martin Fleischmann - Cold Fusion: Past, Present and Future - Lecture

Transcript

uh martin fleischmann thought this was at nine o'clock so he just barely arrived uh it was nine o'clock originally but the talk is is really scheduled now for 8 30. so i'm very pleased to have martin fleischmann here 10 years ago martin fleischman the stan ponds announced the the coaches and they'd worked on a number of years before so last march was the 10th anniversary 10 years since this uh since the subject developed whether you want to call it cold fusion or something else that's up to different people i'd like to call it the fleischmann ponds effect because that's not my life that's good and you don't get in trouble with that but anyway it's my honor you know you can't even file a patent in the u.s patent office that has the word cold fusion in it right yeah what did i do but martin fleischman has won many honors one i think that i was impressed by the electrochemical side he's one of the top awards is the plaguing medal award in the in the later chemical society and in this talk this morning is confusion past present and future well i must tell you first of all that the later medal is still intact and we did at one stage think we do a big experiment on it rather than decide against it well i think you'll see that uh the other speakers will tell you quite a lot about what is going on and i've got this vast sweeping title but i'm actually going to take a very narrow focus because there's only time focus and i probably won't have time to do all to tell you about all the uh parts which i should tell you now uh i i said cold fusion past president future because i think it is quite interesting to see why we why i didn't do it why we didn't do it for such a long time what was behind that and how with the evolution of time it became clear that there was perhaps an effect there and that there was some sense in studying it because really this phenomenon is part of a much much wider group of phenomena and people have looked at it in a very brilliant way i think called fusion which i hate this word these two words this is a standalone topic it isn't it's it's about very much right topic well for me the whole thing starts so i know it starts with perspective it's not supposed to be a good idea but i will use a historical perspective for me the whole thing starts with a paper which i found in 19 at the end of 1947 i'm a very old man and brilliant experiment by alfred kuhn in the university of gerdingen who took a very thin palladium wire and loaded the wires down electrolytically down here and then apply the potential plus and minus to this wire and measure then at different times the times of arrival of the diffusion wave at the different zigzags down the wire now if it was purely diffusion of course you'd get a diffusion controlled wave running this way and that way but if and this was the problem because deuterium hasn't been discovered at that time yet but if it is charged then of course it will faster to the negative end and slower to the positive end and this is indeed and this this experiment is actually very important as regards the future of the coal fusion and what we found in that was precisely this that if this is the line for diffusion then the protons moved faster to the negative end and so to the positive end and if the polarity was reversed then you could make them go back to the negative end and these go to the back back to the positive energies to the negative end now this was an extremely uncomfortable experiment because what it showed percentage mobility of the protons fitted in that's the ancient equation which you can get from this so the hydrogen in the lattice exists as bare protons this subject matter became totally confused later this this was just suppressed people didn't think about this for about 20 to 30 years because it was such an uncomfortable result and subsequently it has been more work was done which is quite wrong we can discuss this if you wish now why is this so uncomfortable the easiest way to see this is to do a born harbour cycle on the high tree like this and what we see in fact that the absorption of hydrogen in the lattice is exothermic and in fact the solvation energy of the ions in the lattice is enormous it's about the order of 12 bb so the i the ions are extremely strongly bound in the lattice and that alone tells you that you can really only interpret this experiment if hydrogen is part of a very large quantum system so that it can be unharmonically excited i should have realized that at that time but i didn't and in fact setting down the usual way you would talk about it at that time about the quantum mechanics or ions in practices or anything else for that matter we would see this oscillatory potential energy curve and of course you could not apply obtain a sufficient change in your potential energy to compensate for the nuclear repulsion except under very you might in fact get some nuclear reaction under very extreme conditions and extreme conditions i was thinking about there now would not be described as inertial confinement but i was not aware whether inertial confinement had discovered that i still don't know but this is what i was thinking about and that was obviously impossible in the university of germany to carry that out now so i left this whole thing alone and then in the mid-1960s i came to realize that you really have to discuss the behavior of condensed matter in terms of quantum electrodynamics not in terms of classical mechanics and not influenced by quantum mechanics but in terms of quantum electrodynamics now this is an illustration i didn't arrive at this conclusion this one by the way this is a specific section of the fact and here's our good old friend in the biblical theory which calculates the self-energy of this arm in an ionic atmosphere which is static we have a static classical model of ions in solution but of course we know that that is wrong that it is not so in fact there was a lecture here which i couldn't go to on brownian motion and it has been known for a long time that irons were i shined in this way back beginning of the century that irons move back in motion the motion of and we also know from the 19th century the work of coal rush that they move independently of each other at infinite dilution that all sounds all right until you say well what about maxwell's equation they accelerate and decelerate they have this accelerating and accelerating so they have to radiate so the only point at which the divisible theory can be true is at absolute zero it's an absolute zero series at any finite temperature it is not acceptable we accept it but it's not acceptable and in fact you have to discuss the behavior of ions in solution and everything else for that matter in terms of quantum electrodynamics the motion is vigorously quantized there is no cusp of the motion of ions and solutions i still didn't do anything about it but we did start work on thinking about thinking about the general problem of how we could get a handle on quantum electrodynamics really i should say this you know the interpretation based on this type of model is kinematic the dynamic the consequences of thinking about dynamics remain hidden now um you can say well why should we bother about thinking about dynamics we are perfectly happy with kinematics well that's a lie but you know science moves on and you come to a new frontier you have to say i do want to understand the dynamic properties of species in liquids so i left this thing alone i needed a little bit more information and we got that at the end of the 60s when we did some work on isotopic separation and this work on the separation factor we were interested in finding better ways of separating hydrogen and deuterium this work on separation factors used later in cathodes and you could only explain the separation factor that is the yield the fraction of highly in the gas phase compared to that in the solution you could only interpret that if the the deuterons and protons in the lattice were part of a large quantum system now if you take the results of kern and say that really the thing is part of a very large quantum system then um you come to the conclusion that it might be possible to observe nuclear reactions at low temperature now these sites which i've prepared i have time to use unless at the end remind you that discussion we might use it and the question we posed was simply to say which paradigm shall we use you know in if we we understand the world in terms of models which are based on paradigms and we have a classical classical mechanics that this question is not relevant we have quantum mechanics and on the basis of quantum mechanics of course this was the conclusion i reached in 1947 there would be no effect on the basis of quantum field theory there could be an effect it doesn't mean to say that there will be an effect but there could be an effect and incidentally what is very interesting the questions which we're composing from classical mechanics should really be posed in the framework of quantum field theory and then a whole lot of new questions become answered okay so the two questions which we posed were uh would the nuclear reactions would the nuclear would the nuclear reactions of d-plus compressed into the lattice be different to the reactions of d-plus in the platinum plasma and could such effects be observed now we said that would be yes that would be no nevertheless although we thought that we wouldn't be able to see the effect we started a program of work science and i started the program on this topic now when you decide to launch yourself on the topic like this it's worthwhile always to check the literature see if there's any evidence in the literature about that and i some of you have heard me talk this out before this is the discovery of hot fusion by elephant heartache and elephant it's just over half a page in nature and i say this paper would never have seen the light of day in the tail end of the century but this was 1934 and i think from 1933 and it did say that see the light of day and here you have two neutrons reacting to form one is a tritone and a proton or helium-3 and the neutron now it doesn't matter that this paper was forgotten but what was serious about it was that deuterium was not called the perimeter because divorcing and the deuteron was called diplom and once you were aware of this fact that the germans called something else you can search for other papers and this brought tonight some work by philip d using the wilson cloud chamber those of you who are as always i remember what the wilson cloud chamber is and this was where work was of course extremely boring he published a paper on this also in nature in 94 but this is a more extended paper on the proceedings of theory because this is a paper in 1934 in the proceedings of the royal society and what you see the tracks here of the proton and attack of the title and what is so remarkable about that photograph is that the cracks are at 108 degrees now they should not be at 180 degrees because uh the neutron impinged on the target which has per due to any old thing but due to 80 compounds it should be at 106 centigrades and lots of attacks where 160 days whether we're quite a lot of taxed 180 degrees and what is rutherford's work this is philip d oh okay and they said uh these uh the evidence these reactions have to be due to deuterons of the accelerated neutron which has lost its energy in the target eureka so it was there it's been there since 1933 only people haven't really responded to it okay so we post ourselves a series of questions how to carry it out how to carry this out and because there was obviously something wrong with uh with hot fusion i don't know perhaps we can have time to discuss that later there must obviously be other reactions and reactions which are known from plasma world are two different is going to go from 32 python and proton or helium-3 and neutron about equal cross-sections there must obviously be other reactions and interestingly enough since the advent of this horrible topic these reactions are now being found you'll hear a lot about helium 4. so we posed ourselves a series of questions how should we carry out this reaction our favorite technique was electro diffusion that was the work of curtin but we started on charging cathodes electrochemically largely i think this was because we made a mistake quite frankly we were working on this statement hypothesis but the other ways you could do it you could charge electrodes in a highly reducing medium in a super basic medium obviously you should have a look at highly oxidizing media super acid media this is because really the impact of a deuteron on the lattice is an extreme example of a super acid reaction and then that composite system so there are all sorts of ways you could set this thing up and because we were trying to keep this whole thing secret fortunately for us we did not put neutron counters in the lab that would not be the tritium monitor into the lab because we didn't want to draw attention to it we measured the heat release and actually the state of knowledge in 1982 was that american measurements by calorimeter was certainly about the schools making any other any nuclear measurement and what we use those of you who are familiar with it with this field you use isoparabolic calorimeter just that you not initially it wasn't silver the top eventually we silvered it at the top to give us a flatter baseline for the heat transfer coefficient and uh in fact this thing is a long narrow tube uh chemical engineering it would be called the well skirt attack it's an ideal reactor there are many sorts of calorimeters which are non-ideal this is really an ideal system with a very high accuracy and a very high decision if you do the analysis correctly you can get a position of about 10 to 4 if you the accuracy is comparable but for a long time practices about one part and then three but in fact it is about one point ten to four also so if you do that then the sensible thing is to do some black experiments i found it extremely difficult to persuade people to do blank experiments because you have to of course find the instrument function of this device if you make a measurement you must muscle the instrument function the easiest way to get instrument function is to do a black experiment and blank experiments this is a platinum electrode in heavy water polarized these intervals are actually 300 units of 300 seconds this is a this is the temperature time curve this is the cell potential time curve at this point we impose uh external heating pulse the joule heater so we can get a calibration and these responses in rank systems are entirely normal now just draw your attention to the fact that this does in fact reach a flat part it relaxes completely and the baseline relaxes to where it should have been those are sort of very simple eyeballing methods for checking that the system is reliable but it's reliability can be checked a bit more by just seeing what the thermal excess is in fact the results follow a normal distribution and for a blank experiment the mean rate the mean excess rate heat released for this particular experiment where the input was about 2 watts was less than 100 micro watts so the thing is absolutely reliable people say it isn't that this is a lot of nonsense so if you know if you know now the mean rate and the standard deviation you can look at what you get if you do the experiment with palladium in heavy water not platinum in the water later in any water and here is some data i pulled off some japanese results i like using other things without spending on our own because then at least you have some security that we haven't filled with the results and this this european initially you get an excess heat which is due to the absorption it's exothermic absorption and then you go close to zero and then you get a build up of excess heat and if you do the analysis accurately you find that this is actually 300 sigma in terms of the performance of the installation there's no question about it that is a build up a low level build up of excess heat but of course you've got to be able to measure 30 millivolts accurately in order to be sure that this is correct now this being so one has to ask himself why has there been such difficulty for people to reproduce the results what what what's really bugging them i mean lots of people wanted to see it and didn't see it too much of a hurry no no no no it's much more sophisticated than that it is true that is certainly true but it is more sophisticated and one of the things which is which is difficult about the system is that it is subject to positive feedback now here is some more japanese results with in the initial states of the experiment you see everything is normal it comes to a flat bob after you apply the calibration it relaxes back okay can everybody see that it's quite relaxed and then you go along and you say well maybe there's a buildup of heat and then you find that it doesn't behave all the way behaves extremely abnormally the system does not relax in the same time scale and after you've removed the calibration pulse it doesn't relax to the baseline what in fact you see is that the application of the calibration pulse the increase of temperature increases the rate of excess energy regeneration now if you have a source of heat in the system which is subject to positive feedback you cannot calibrate the system you have to do the calibration separately and that's because people haven't understood this alert rounded down their throats forever they say the system's not accurate i cannot calculate the system from hacker no that's not true you haven't taken the feedback now what is uh that there's something more to this story of positive feedback why do you get positive feedback why should you suddenly when you introduce this is actually extremely fortunate because if there were no positive feedback we will not be able to get if the absorption of deuterium in the matter is remained exothermic we will not be able to get an energy release at high temperature right because it switches from exothermic to endothermic we can actually get heated in such high temperatures and this uh perhaps microcrew we will say something about this this switch over from exothermic absorption to endothermic absorption takes place at a certain cathode loading and of course if you have this move across from exothermic endothermic absorption you get instability and that that is the secondary reason therefore why we have to the fact that we get instability means that the experiment becomes sensitive to the way you carry it out it doesn't follow that you will always get a heat release at high temperature because if you stay for any length of time in the region in which there is a switch over from exo to endothermic absorption you will get oscillations and these oscillations eventually destroy the system so you have nothing so you have to be aware you have to when you have a new problem like this you have to cycle through the data over and over and over again and this is one reason why it's been so slow you have to discover this go back take it into account put it into your experiment protocol and see what happens i must go faster too fast well by let me just tell you that by october 1989 we've got a specific energy release of the order of 100 watts per cubic centimeter at currents of the order of one ampere square centimeter that is quite heroic electrochemistry but we were this is about comparable of what you get in the pressurized water reactor so we felt justifying carrying on and what we find this comes after 1992 although we were ahead of this in 1990 we find that if you go this now is on a much smaller scale so you can't see the fine detail you find that it's if you go through the positive variation of positive feedback eventually the cell is given up to boiling and at the boiling point we have had heat release in this region here of the order of four kilowatts per cubic centimeter so remember you have about a few hundred watts at the top you have about kilowatts and now of course the cell ball is there it doesn't you can't contain such an energy release in an isoparabolic calorimeter the cell volts die but there is more to this story because when it has all dry you find that it stays hot the cell stays hot which might mike mcgruden called heat after life we called him after death and julian mengele in italy who i think has done the best work on this calls after effect during this virginia so here the cell is dry here it's half time here it's dry and the self here in our experiments remain hot for three hours now this experiment you know we're not very proud of this experiment it's just the fact that it stayed hot and let me just tell you about juliana mengele juliana mengele said quite brightly well sam and martian say it goes much better if you keep it hot so i'll have to do that color event today at year yeah so the way he does this is he surrounds this cell by a thermostat set up 90 80 80 90 degrees and he cools it with a stream of gas it uses evaporative cooling to control the system and he has a reflux to return this to the cell and the important point about jimmy on the main of this experiment is that it's a very well controlled situation and when he's got to that point he switches the cell account off he disconnected from the power supply and he has actually this is published information has had the system staying apart for seven days this is the this is the excess enthalpy there's no msop input so this is all this shaded column it's all excess enthalpy and it's also all the five watts per cubic centimeter so that what we know now is that if you do this you can get this heat after death effect of the over 5 watts per cubic centimeter which is tolerably uninteresting as far as some sources concerned it would already be interested in certain niche applications we know that the way we do it we did it we could get kilowatts per cubic centimeter incidentally i i should tell you that you can mel miles has a system which are 50 watts per cubic centimeter we've added up to 200 watts per cubic centimeter which would give a much wider range of applications but we were interested in trying to see whether we could maintain these boiling conditions and to do that you of course need to use a much more sophistic much more elaborate not sophisticated much more elaborate category which will allows you to maintain the conditions up here i'll just show you one result from that that worked round to a halt i'm sorry to say what you do is you use a calorimeter a dual covering the bottom half of which simulates the calorimeter which i have shown you it's an acid parabolic aloe vera and the top half is basically a distillation column now that is not a system with which you can do experiments with any great accuracy but you don't need to because you get a very high energy so what you see here's an experiment carried out in 1994 the bottom section you see there is an excess this is the calibration curve but of course when it starts to boil you have no calibration on the bottom section you can see an excess enthalpy release in the section it needs a little imagination to see it uh but i think it's okay and the much more clear in the top section where you have a calibration curve inputs of the order this is the input and the temperature difference seen that we measure the diff you can measure the simplifications in one section of the order of 70 80 watts input the excess of the order of 70 to 18 watts which for this system was about a kilowatt per cubic centimeter and this particular experiment in an excess of generation of about a kilowatt cubic centimeter the actual value of about 80 watts kilowatt per cubic centimeter for 50 days so we were interested in answering trying to begin to answer the question can this phenomenon be maintained so now you have now you have certainly an indication that you can get a kilowatt cubic centimeter and if you are interested in the social aspects at a kilowatt per cubic centimeter you would be able to make a significant impact on the world's energy needs if you increase the parade production but that production is about a hundred pounds per year it could certainly move based on a thousand times per year so that would be an acceptable strategy however having got to that point it certainly is not sensible to continue with this particular approach because there are two such classes of scientists in the world but the ones who think electrochemistry is really are interesting they are usually non-electionists and electrochemists who say we're not clutch electrochemistry if i can do it some other way i won't touch it and the trick of course is to go to our first love the lack of diffusion to say we'll do all this in a while we'll compress the detail of director diffusion and see what we get out and this is the part of the core program in italy my friends thank goodness we have some friends i will leave neutrons out inspiration and just say well what juliana that it did you you don't have this sinusoidal thing which you would get in the beta phase you would eventually get a coherent system of neutrons in the lattice it would extend he calls this the gamma phase okay that's called the gamma phase which heat release is much higher when probably when the deuterium goes into the tetrahedral as well as with this type of wire approach they have had pretty regularly the heat releases of 10 kilowatts per cubic centimeter you have of course the users in one to do or you have to have some structure where one dimension is much smaller than other dimensions and on occasion they've had 100 kilowatts per cubic centimeter and what is interesting about those magnitudes is that they would allow one to start if this can be done reliably this would allow one to construct systems which would satisfy a large proportion of energy leads and with existing production now this is all low grade heat but a lot of the world's energy is used as low rating of increasing the quality of the heat will not be a particularly difficult problem you could use this compassion without a compressor system or you could use compressed system use turbo compressors so that is about the status of as far as the thermal is the the terminal effects are concerned but of course there's a great deal more on particle detection the nuclear ash and i'll answer that and refer to that if you wish if you have any questions on that thank you time for questions if anybody has some questions we have about 10 minutes sir can you say a few moments about what's been going on and detection of the primary products the primary products um well uh a lot we we saw helium 4 quite early on we had no quantitative combination but i think other people will talk to you about the relationship of police we had seen a little tritium you can see tertium pretty regularly i mean you can see enough radio but what we had done originally we would have had to have an isotopic separation factor of b to t of about 13.5 which is quite impossible so there is no question we have generated video and there are a few new terms usually as you build it up and many people have done neutron detection uh thermofly gluten spectroscopy and you know this sort of position sensitive neutron detection to show that the neutrons come from the sample area and i like also takahashi's work with an a213 simulator which showed quite clearly that there are some neutrons of the expected energy 2.45 med but there's also a great watch of stuff out there so you know it's not the usual thing the neutron state is not the usual thing and takahashi has gone on with this and i think he's one of his most interesting results to date is that he has found a new channel d plus d plus d going to tritium plus mu3 d plus the the three body reaction there's not much doubt this the nuclear measurements have been done very carefully there's not much doubt that it's a three-body reaction now of course three body reactions you know to take several physics and so on it only happens you only have two body reactions even the beryllium what you will repeat the is but that is one hey there's a lifetime of about 10 minutes 16 seconds so you can get a sequential reaction but this is a three body reaction deep muscles knee going to three plus three h e and this is now these are about four point seven five med the particles which are about the same and this um has about the cross section of that channel is about one hundredth of the cross section of the heliocas neutron or the plus proton so i think that will be all sorts of these this is done with 150 kev acceleration voltage so it's sort of warm future and i think there is not much doubt that if people if people continue to look at the products and really cover the whole energy spectrum they will find all sorts of other outgoing channels but these are not really primary products are they of color fusion because these cap rates are pretty negligible compared to these no they are not they don't account for the heat but the thing which you constantly need to see them for and that's what really needs to do more and more and more you have to really correlate seek whether you can get a sufficient correlation between helium 4 and heat unfortunately this is a very difficult expression and people have seen lots of people have seen before in the lattice and in in the gas so that the status is about that there's always there's always some tribute there are some neutrons the neutrons are obviously peculiar some high energy new ones there's some high-energy attractions there are some other channels which we should understand i mean we have to understand the totality of the science here but the primary thing is healing for uh incidentally mel if i can just say that one thing i should make clear is you don't always get these effects the materials problems are severe the experiment is very strange it lasts after over 30 to 90 days under extreme conditions and very often the experiment simply doesn't survive that experiences the electors integrated so that's the one of the questions behind this can you make this a state system going back to your original paper published in 1989 you had in one of the columns a statement beware of the ignition that was associated with a one cubic centimeter sample which apparently was a laboratory accident but questions yes is there evidence for or against the melting and the accident being due to excess heat production well look this was a rather large calibrator and all the water this overhead water disappeared unfortunately it happened at night that wasn't observed so i don't like to talk too much about it but the water disappeared so it had all got to be boiled off and then i felt melted it did worse than that it sort of disappeared as well it was a myth and it was a great mess and i think uh you have to say that this was exorcist production what happened after that is we were working on big samples as you would gather you know and i said no we under the extreme positions and said well we've got to stop this we have to work those large sheets on the amount of conditions and just see what we get so we're in the program of work on martial and central map conditions up to march 1988 when i also there's a long distance but i also said network had to stop uh because i could see it getting out of hand and then we switched to using cinders to be scaled down see at that stage we started to scale down so it would never get out of control um but i don't think rods are necessarily investing in the studios uh this all goes back actually in the literature pieces and parcels ever since humphrey davy 200 years ago and uh i've done a lot of this literature compilation and putting all these little pieces together uh the you had uh and a laboratory over in england that you were affiliated with was it harwell yeah what they went into experiments on this did they ever announce anything i've never been able to find it in the literature i thought this question would come up so i bought some slides but harwell said that they couldn't find any excess enthalpy categories harvard said they couldn't find anything oh they had about six or eight people working on it but they can do whatever hurry to six hundred more man however when we were working in utah we insisted that our experiments be independently evaluated so that evaluation was not done by the original female eventually it was done by wilford hansen at the utah state university logo and published which prompted me to ask hubble to release their data and it's to their great credit that they released their data so i will show you some of howell's results it's where they compare these are l stands for addition of liquid and these are all experiment cycles okay these are in cycles this is a blank in light water this is a calibration pulse here is heavy water so if you look at this you see suddenly very strange phenomena which which you've also seen ourselves which was one of the things which was on attack was that something that said temperature will decrease but the cell temperature doesn't increase if there's the source of heat in the system so here the thing is that cell temperature is increasing and here the cell capability gets increasing and it goes on and on and on now in fact harvard could never have detected the normal exercise because their system wasn't accurate enough but they did see these bursts here here is a burst here isn't it oh they had all these heat pests all over this and when you analyze if you say there is no excess heat production there is no excess heat production at the minima you know you can sort of say okay i don't know what your heat transfer coefficient is but i'll say it's not here and then i'll see how much heat is released there in the first you get uh you get full of blanks uh it's only only cooling which means we've made a very conservative estimate of the transfer coefficient because it only gets cooling and for the uh thing when there is an actual they let it die on the bar you know yeah when you're ready when you look at them really but you see these pictures of the order of 200 milligrams which is about what we had in 1989 so they actually had a balance in this week yeah but they didn't have the guts to come out and say well they had decided they published that they their system was very good and then see nothing you know people never attack negative statements the history of science is that people sometimes retract positive statements if they then they feel feel they are erroneous but i have one have you ever seen anybody retract to make a big statement you just let it send that you gotta have a lot of bravery yeah so did you or anyone else replicate that one cubic centimeter ignition i have never gots to do it you know you just don't do that sort of thing dude we're done you have done it good well i'm glad i'm sure the various people in nepal well we did we did it the cheap way my uh laboratory and it makes a beautiful laboratory is an old rv recreation vehicle yeah you've got electricity sink and water needs happening step in the shower it's beautiful but i think to stay on schedule it's now 9 20 so i think martin fleischman for his property