Reports from the 17th International Conference on Cold Fusion

Ecat World – Tyler van Houwelingen provides a report from the 17th International Conference on Cold Fusion

After seeing the DGT (Defkalion) presentation, speaking with them and speaking with people who have been onsite to see the hyperion in Greece, my take is that they are farther away from having a commercial ready device than we had hoped. Based on what people are telling me here with first hand knowledge, as recently as 3 weeks ago they were still unable to obtain stable demos of their technology (problems with the spark plugs failing), thus I suspect no chance of any 3rd party results soon as we had hoped and they had promised.

DGT does appear to be pretty sound both with the science and engineering, however I believe they will need more resources and a bit of luck to get this to market in the next 6-12 months. IMHO

Brillouin is also very solid, as we knew, but still probably at least 1 year from commercial readiness as well. IMHO

That just leaves Rossi in the short term and there are lots of mixed messages about him. Some things people with first hand knowledge are telling me makes me more confident, some things less.

Defkalion released a paper (3.8 MB word document, 6 pages) with technical descriptions.

Ecat World – Defkalion reports that their reactors are manually fired around 10 times per hour to create the reactions, and that the COP ratio (energy in/energy out) ranges from 1:8 – 1:22, with maximum temperatures of 849 C. The maximum heat energy produced “per reaction cycle” is 92Wh. The longest test run reported lasted for six weeks and no degradation in performance was reported over that time.

DGT state that their path towards industrialization involves expanding lab facilities in Canada and Switzerland during the latter part of this year, carrying out industrial prototype tests and securing certification ‘within the next months’, and setting up production lines and support networks ‘within the next year’

Jed Rothwell reports on the Celani Demo and plans to make it self sustaining

Celani has set up his demonstration cell. The people from TI reworked the instruments and the LabView code that collects data. They did a beautiful job. Celani just told me that he inputs 48 W constantly. This morning it did not work. They ran it and let it cool to clean it. They tried again about an hour ago and it began to produce ~4 W excess fairly soon. It climbs gradually up to ~20 W gradually and stays stable after that.

Very impressive. Peter Hagelstein considers this an important experiment . . .

Celani’s spoken English is hard to understand. Many details of his presentation escaped me. I will ask him for copies of the slides. He is usually happy to share them.

He concluded by saying he plans to improve the insulation and put it in self-sustaining mode, soon. That is to say, trigger the reaction with external power much less than 48 W, and then when it heats up anomalously, cut the external power and let it run in heat after death mode indefinitely. The current does stimulate wire activity, I guess with electromigration, but it is not essential once the reaction can begin.

That will put to rest any concerns about the calorimetry, needless to say. That is a good idea. Celani is no fool.

He says he thinks the wire acts mainly as a proton conductor.

Pure, clean, as-received constantan does not work. The stuff is very cheap, by the way. Available in unlimited amounts.

I think he said the longest run with this device in Italy was 2 months continuous. The biggest technical hurdle with this and the other wires he has been working on is that the wire breaks. Hydrogen embrittlement, I suppose.

Celani uses a constantan alloy wire, which is 55% copper and 44% nickel. One of the main reasons for the choice of constantan according to Celani was the fact that it has extremely large catalytic power in respect to dissociation of hydrogen (more than pure nickel, much more than palladium).

Celani is showing a COP (co-efficient of power of 1.2 to 1.4).

He is using a wire that weighs about one tenth of an ounce.

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