NASA’s LENR Technology Video Clip Uploaded

Jan 122012
 

A two-minute non-technical video clip on LENRs has been uploaded to the NASA technology gateway website featuring Joseph Zawodny.

References:
Widom-Larsen Theory Simplified

Lattice Energy LLC United States Patent: 7,893,414

Zawodny, Joseph. M. and Krivit, S.B., “Widom-Larsen Theory: Possible Explanation of LENR,” Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia, Steven B. Krivit, Editor-in-Chief, Jay H. Lehr, Series Editor, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-89439-2 (Aug. 2011)

NASA United States Patent Application 20110255645

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2012/20110112NASAs-LENR-Tech-VideoStill.jpg

More Slides From Sept. 22 NASA LENR Innovation Forum

Dec 162011
 

On Dec. 4, we published several sets of Slides From Sept. 22 NASA LENR Innovation Forum Workshop.

Today, New Energy Times reader W.H found one more set on the NASA Glenn Web site from Gustave C. Fralick and colleagues.

On Dec. 12, we uploaded a fresh copy of the Nelson slides. He provided us with a copy that included source attributions and that also corrected the spelling of Piantelli’s name.

Here is our full index of the NASA slides:
Zawodny Slides
Nelson Slides
Bushnell Slides
Fralick Slides

The NASA Glenn Web site provides a brief summary of its LENR research:

“Tests conducted at NASA Glenn Research Center in 1989 and elsewhere consistently show evidence of anomalous heat during gaseous loading and unloading of deuterium into and out of bulk palladium. At one time called “cold fusion,” now called “low-energy nuclear reactions” (LENR), such effects are now published in peer-reviewed journals and are gaining attention and mainstream respectability. The instrumentation expertise of NASA GRC is applied to improve the diagnostics for investigating the anomalous heat in LENR.”

Slides From Sept. 22 NASA LENR Innovation Forum Workshop

Dec 042011
 

[Ed: See follow-up story here: More Slides From Sept. 22 NASA LENR Innovation Forum. See Rossi Story Index here.]

On Sept. 22, NASA conducted a LENR Innovation Forum workshop at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Speakers included NASA scientists Joseph Zawodny, Gustave Fralick, Michael Nelson, Jim Dunn and Dennis Bushnell and retired University of Illinois professor George Miley.

New Energy Times obtained three of the slide presentations under a FOIA request.

Zawodny Slides
Nelson Slides
Bushnell Slides

At the meeting, Bushnell, the chief scientist at NASA Langley, said that LENR has a strong potential for a new source of energy. He was optimistic about nickel powder LENR solutions.

“The temperature you can get out of [LENR] is interesting,” Bushnell said. “We’ve had to be careful [in our research in] terms of the energetics. I don’t think there is a power [limitation] problem.

“I think the problem now is of raw courage to look into something that is new. We’ve been fortunate to have a center director at Langley that has the courage to support us to do this. We’ve been at it for three or four years.

“The U.S. efforts on this, for reasons I don’t understand, haven’t gone to the Widom-Larsen theory. They also haven’t gone to try to understand the 18 years of hydrogen-nickel [work] with really superb intellectual content. We need to get off of the Pons-Fleischmann electrochemistry and get into flow systems.”

At the meeting, Bushnell also spoke about Andrea Rossi, the inventor of the Energy Catalyzer.

“We intend to core down on the Rossi stuff and find out what’s real and what’s not,” Bushnell said. “But Rossi’s business is hard to explain other than with some kind of LENR. The Rossi stuff is probably wholly Edisonian and not totally understood, which is an understatement. But we can probably understand it at some point.”

Bushnell failed to mention that NASA had already made attempts to perform due diligence on the Rossi device. Some of the people involved in those attempts were in attendance at this workshop.

In the timeline shown in Nelson’s slides, Nelson omitted the Sept. 5 and 6, 2011 Rossi device tests performed in Bologna for engineers representing Quantum Energy Technologies. NASA representatives were present both days.

One of the eye-witnesses, a former NASA staff member, saw problems from the moment they arrived there.

“Rossi changed the game totally.” the witness said. “From the test plan, the device, everything. There was nothing there that we had agreed on. He had a 30 liter reservoir in there and he wouldn’t even let us see what was in the box or weigh the box.”

The Sept. 5 demonstration was inconclusive; Rossi’s device sprang a leak. The Sept. 6 demonstration was inconclusive; there was no outflow of steam or water.

On the second day, when the former NASA staff member asked Rossi if his device had an internal reservoir, Rossi became enraged.  Quantum’s engineers left but NASA engineers offered to come back in a few days to give Rossi time to fix the flow. Rossi declined their offer. He said he was “too busy.”

NASA Advances Evaluation of Piantelli’s LENR Research

Sep 282011
 

Multiple sources have confirmed to New Energy Times that a team comprising NASA engineers and an investment group from the U.S. is expanding its interest in the low-energy nuclear reaction research of Italian biophysicist Francesco Piantelli. A meeting with the group and representatives of Piantelli will take place in the next few days.

According to Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, NASA was working months ago on experiments based on Piantelli’s research.

Piantelli’s work with LENR goes back two decades and includes two dozen scientific publications and conference presentations. Piantelli and his colleagues’ only significant challenge came from a group at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, but Piantelli’s group published an effective rebuttal.

The Piantelli group’s nickel-hydrogen LENR work remains the most promising demonstration of LENR technology. New Energy Times wrote two feature articles on Piantelli’s work in 2008. We also wrote a summary of the work in the Wiley and Sons Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia, excerpted as follows:

************************************
Whereas electrolytic D/Pd experiments have typically produced scientifically meaningful levels of excess heat, such effects were generally observed only in the milliwatt range. The Piantelli group’s Ni-H gas experiments produced excess heat in the tens of watts.

The researchers explain that an anomalous heating effect in the Ni-H cell takes place “when a cell containing a nickel rod is maintained at temperatures above a critical value and is filled with gaseous hydrogen at subatmospheric pressures.” The critical value is obtained by a heater in the cell that provides constant input power to initially raise and keep the cell temperature at its working value, about 700K. When the heat production rises above the equilibrium condition, the authors identify this as the excited state. Because the experiment can run in the excited state for months a time, the researchers were also able to observe sporadic evidence of both neutrons and gamma rays, which are generally hard to detect in LENR systems because those experiment run for much shorter periods.

Whereas excess-heat-producing electrolytic D/Pd experiments typically ran for days before the electrode corroded or the researcher stopped replenishing electrolyte, the Piantelli group’s hydrogen gas experiments ran continuously in a stable state for months at a time. In November 1998, the group reported two experiments in Il Nuovo Cimento.

Cell “A” produced 38.9 +/-1.5 watts of heat, and cell “B” produced 23.0 +/-1.3 watts of heat. The cells produced excess power continuously at a slowly increasing rate during that period: cell “A” for 278 days; cell “B” for 319 days. The integrated excess energy was 900 MJ for cell “A” and 600 MJ for cell “B.”
************************************

New Energy Times has published a bibliography of papers (and download links where available) from the Piantelli group here. The list includes Piantelli’s patent applications. Among other things, the Piantelli work requires very specific surface preparation performed under an ultra-high vacuum.

A few related events happened in September.

On Sept. 2, Samantha McRoskey, an analyst with Diligence Global Business Intelligence, representing an anonymous investor, contacted New Energy Times to learn more about Ni-H LENR research. We directed her to our published reports and analysis.

On Sept. 5 and 6, a team comprising representatives from an investment group and NASA visited Andrea Rossi’s showroom in Bologna. The team went there with an explicit agreement about test parameters and opportunities to observe and evaluate Rossi’s claims. They did not observe any positive results.

On Sept. 22, NASA conducted a LENR Innovation Forum workshop at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Speakers included NASA scientists Joseph Zawodny, Gustave Fralick, Michael Nelson, Jim Dunn and Dennis Bushnell and retired University of Illinois professor George Miley.

At the meeting, Bushnell said that LENR has a strong potential for a new source of energy. He was optimistic about nickel powder LENR solutions.

“The temperature you can get out of [LENR] is interesting,” Bushnell said. “We’ve had to be careful [in our research in] terms of the energetics. I don’t think there is a power [limitation] problem.

“I think the problem now is of raw courage to look into something that is new. We’ve been fortunate to have a center director at Langley that has the courage to support us to do this. We’ve been at it for three or four years.

“The U.S. efforts on this, for reasons I don’t understand, haven’t gone to the Widom-Larsen theory. They also haven’t gone to try to understand the 18 years of hydrogen-nickel [work] with really superb intellectual content. We need to get off of the Pons-Fleischmann electrochemistry and get into flow systems.”

NASA’s Bushnell: LENR Most Promising Energy Alternative, and It’s Not Fusion

Jun 012011
 

(Italian Translation)

Source: EV World
EV World Podcast
Broadcast Date: April 23, 2011
Interview of: Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist of NASA Langley
Host: J. William Moore
Transcribed by: Steven B. Krivit

[Partial Transcript of Podcast, Excerpts on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions]

[This transcript is Copyleft 2011 New Energy Times. Permission is granted to reproduce this text as long as the text, this notice and the publication information are included in their entirety and no changes are made to this text.]

J. William Moore: I’d like to [look at] some of the [energy alternatives] that you think look most promising from your perspective.

Dennis Bushnell: The most interesting, and promising, at this point, in the farther term, but maybe not so far, is low-energy nuclear reactions. This has come out of [22] years of people producing energy but not knowing what it is — and we think we have a theory on it. It’s producing beta decay and heat without radiation. The research on this is very promising and it alone, if it comes to pass, would literally solve both [the] climate and energy [problems.]

MOORE: I find it extremely exciting that there might be something here, so what is it that you think is going on at the atomic level here?

BUSHNELL: Let me back up a little. [Stanley] Pons and [Martin] Fleischmann came out with an experiment that they labeled “cold fusion” about 22 years ago which had replication issues at the time. Also, all of the fusion theorists came out and said absolutely “This is not fusion.” And, of course, they were exactly correct, this is not fusion.

They’ve gone through 20 years of massive experimentation worldwide, in almost every country, where they’ve been able to produce this effect. But all of the energy produced by these “cold fusion” experiments over the last 22 years didn’t produce enough heat to boil water for tea. So people didn’t get too interested in it and nobody knew what it was.

Back in 2005, 2006, [Allen] Widom [and Lewis] Larsen came out with a theory that said, no it’s not “cold fusion,” it’s weak interactions using the Standard Model of quantum mechanics, only the weak interaction part. It says that if you set up one of the cells, and you don’t have to use deuterium, hydrogen works fine, nickel works fine and you don’t need palladium.

If you set this up you produce an electron – proton connection producing ultra-weak neutrons and if you have the right targets out there you produce beta-decay which produces heat.

At that point, in 2006, 2007 we became interested and started setting up a set of experiments that we’re just about ready to start finally, where we’re trying to experimentally validate this Widom-Larsen theory to find out whether or not it explains what’s going on. And in the process, we used quantum theory to optimize the particular surface morphologies to do this.

Then, as you mentioned, in January of this year [Andrea] Rossi, backed by [Sergio] Focardi, who had been working on this for many years, and in fact doing some of the best work worldwide, came out and did a demonstration first in January, they re-did it in February, re-did it in March, where for days they had one of these cells, a small cell, producing in the 10 to 15 kW range which is far more than enough to boil water for tea. And they say this is weak interaction, it’s not fusion.

So I think were almost over the “We don’t understanding it” problem. I think we’re almost over the “This doesn’t produce anything useful” problem. And so I think this will go forward fairly rapidly now. And if it does, this is capable of, by itself, completely changing geo-economics, geopolitics of solving quite a bit of [the] energy [problem.]

MOORE: I think this was either last week or the week before last, I ran a story on this. I went and took a look at it – they were using hydrogen and nickel, I believe, using hydrogen gas and putting that into this device. In looking at the video and photographs, it looks to be about the size of a fist and that thing was running from about 10:45 in the morning till about 4:30 when they finally turned it off — and generating, I forget exactly what it was — but it was a significant amount of energy in the form of steam.

BUSHNELL: It produces heat and did so for days and was in the 12 or 14 kW range and they [will be] producing, with a large number of these devices, a 1 MW power plant.

MOORE: That’s a pretty exciting thing. Do you think that this theory that was developed — are these NASA scientists that were working on that theory?

BUSHNELL: No, the theory was developed by Widom and Larsen. Widom is a faculty member and teacher at Northeastern and Larsen has a company in Chicago.

MOORE: So that looks promising and so you can take and generate steam, and of course, that’s what a nuclear reactor or coal-fired power plant is all about. They’re just there to produce steam and turn a turbine and produce power.

BUSHNELL: Once you’ve got heat, you can do everything. We looked at using LENR to power a space-access rocket and it had better performance conceptually than a conventional nuclear thermal rocket.

MOORE: Wow! Exciting.

Recommended Reading: Distinction Between LENR and “Cold Fusion”

“On the Reality of LENR and the Mythology of Cold Fusion”
New Energy Times, March 10, 2010
“On the Reality of LENR and the Mythology of Cold Fusion” (Video)
New Energy Times, March 10, 2010
“On the Reality of LENR and the Mythology of Cold Fusion” (PDF)
New Energy Times, March 10, 2010
“Cold Fusion is Neither” 
New Energy Times #35, July 30, 2010
“Cold Fusion Versus LENR: Competing Ideologies”
New Energy Times #36, January 31, 2011

Krivit, S.B., “Development of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Research,” Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia, Steven B. Krivit, Editor-in-Chief, Jay H. Lehr, Series Editor, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-89439-2 (Aug. 2011)

Krivit, S.B, “Cold Fusion – Precursor to Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions,” Elsevier Encyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources, Vol. 2, Juergen Garche, Chris Dyer, Patrick Moseley, Zempachi Ogumi, David Rand and Bruno Scrosati, eds., Amsterdam: Elsevier; Dec. 2009. p. 255–270, ISBN 9780444520937

Recommended Reading: Widom-Larsen Theory of LENRs

“Widom-Larsen Theory Simplified”
New Energy Times #35, July 30, 2010
The Widom-Larsen Theory Portal

Zawodny, Joseph. M. and Krivit, S.B., “Widom-Larsen Theory: Possible Explanation of LENR,” Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia, Steven B. Krivit, Editor-in-Chief, Jay H. Lehr, Series Editor, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-89439-2 (Aug. 2011)

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