Eric #66, I have read maybe 30-50 articles on cold fusion, including those by P&F and some in the last few years. I am an experimentalist, and so I know a lot about doing heat balances and instrumenting apparatus to measure heat production and heat transfer coefficients.
Every well done experiment has been negative, the only “positive” experiments have been poorly done and poorly instrumented. To me, that suggests a pattern that is consistent with the positive experiments being due to error and artifact.
There has not been a continuous improvement in a specific type of cold fusion device where initial prototypes produce low levels of heat and later experiments measure the same levels but with greater precision. Every time positive heat has been measured, it is at the edge of what is measurable. Often they try to make the numbers sound big by converting them from energy into power, but if you look at the actual measurements, all of them are consistent with error.
It would be straightforward to have redundant measurements, to used two different sets of instruments to measure the same thing. If this was a real effect, the two sets of measurements would measure the same thing and would measure the same real effect.
Instrumentation is now trivially inexpensive and has been for a decade. You can buy a 6 1/2 digit data logger for less than $3k which can measure 60 points simultaneously every few seconds. That is 60 thermocouples at 0.001 C precision. There is no excuse for not measuring at least 20-40 temperatures in a system where temperature and temperature gradients (i.e. heat flow) is important.
It would be trivial to look at heat flow between two reservoirs by insulating them except where they are coupled, measure the temperature across the thermal coupling point and from the temperature and the thermal conductivity calculate a heat flux.
When a specific technique is trivial in cost to implement, is well known, is known to be necessary, and has already been suggested numerous times to these researchers, why are there no publications with such equipment exhibiting positive effects?
The observation that all researchers in the cold fusion field continue to use poor instrumentation when excellent instrumentation is trivially inexpensive is to me very good evidence that they are all crackpots.
This is the data logger that I like to use.
http://www.home.agilent.com/agilent/pro ... =US&lc=eng
It is cheap, easy to use and has 6 1/2 digits of precision/accuracy. What is it about good instrumentation that causes these effect to go away? I am pretty sure that I know why, but am prepared to be shown to be wrong with good data. No one who is doing this type of research is prepared to use the kind of apparatus that would deliver the kind of data that would be halfway decent.
Could someone explain why that is?
Posted by: daedalus2u | December 8, 2011 4:19 PM
