sbkrivit

Feb 262013
 

LENR Research Scientific Mystery
Feb. 22, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

[This is Part 2 of a Four-Part Series. Part 1 published on Feb. 20.]

This is the continuation of a review of selected papers from the first decade of LENR research. This article continues with research from 1996.

ICCF-6 Conference (1996)

Tadahiko Mizuno, Tadayoshi Ohmori, Tadashi Akimoto, Kazuya Kurokawa, Masatoshi Kitaichi, Koichi Inoda, Kazuhisa Azumi, Shigezo Simokawa and Michio Enyo, “Isotopic Distribution for the Elements Evolved in Palladium Cathode After Electrolysis in D2O Solution

In this paper, Tadahiko Mizuno, now the director of Hydrogen Engineering Application and Development Co. in Sapporo, reported one of the most distinctive before-and-after elemental analyses of LENR transmutations in the field.

LENR Transmutation by Tadahiko Mizuno

LENR Transmutation by Tadahiko Mizuno

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Feb 222013
 
NASA's Video Announcing LENR Method Based on the Widom and Larsen LENR Method

Images from NASA’s Video Announcing LENR Method Based on Widom-Larsen LENR Method

Feb. 22, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

The Feb. 19 PhysOrg article “The Nuclear Reactor in Your Basement” has come to the attention of many New Energy Times readers. A few points about the article are worth mentioning.

The first point is that this article was not written by PhysOrg. It’s a public relations piece written by and for NASA. New Energy Times spoke with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory media relations department on Tuesday and learned that it hired Bob Silberg, a former NASA science writer and now freelance writer, to write the original article, which NASA published on Feb. 13 on its Climate Web site.

PhysOrg says at the bottom of the article that it was “Provided by JPL/NASA.” But PhysOrg failed to clearly state that it was republishing NASA’s story, as it did, for example, with another story, “provided by” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology news office.

New Energy Times readers would be well-advised to note carefully when they are reading a PhysOrg article to see whether it is an original news article written by a PhysOrg staff member or independent freelancer versus an article written by a government agency, academic institution or private corporation.

Moving on to the actual NASA article: Two NASA staff members, both from NASA’s Langley Research Center, in Hampton, Virginia, have been public about their LENR interest and activity. The first is Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist of NASA Langley and a mechanical engineer by training. The second is Joseph. M. Zawodny, a senior research scientist in the Climate Science Branch at Langley and a physicist by training.

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Feb 202013
 

LENR Research Scientific Mystery
Feb. 20, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

[This is Part 1 of a Four-Part Series]

On Jan. 14, I reported that New Energy Times had completed an update of our low-energy nuclear reactions conference proceedings pages. This update included the upload of our digitized copies of the front matter and table of contents of all the International Conference on Cold Fusion series proceedings. As far as I know, this is the first time that these indexes have been placed in the public domain.

A lot of significant work happened in the first decade of LENR research. Some of this research appears to have been forgotten, and it is surprisingly applicable, especially today. Much of it is just as significant as the more recent work. The digital indexes of the conference papers will help researchers be aware of the full body of information available in this field. I hope we will also digitize the remaining proceedings.

As I was digitizing the table of contents from ICCF-6 (1996), ICCF-7 (1998) and ICCF-8 (2000), I glanced through them for papers that caught my attention. I looked at two dozen papers. Only two of them were available to download from the LENR-CANR.org site, and most of the others were not listed there.

I found interesting things in 14 of these papers. Some of the remaining papers from the group I selected may have had notable findings; however, some of them were so poorly written that I was not able to draw out clear meaning or conclusions.

I hope that these papers will shed more light on the past and the present and illuminate the future, as well. In this four-part series of articles, I present a listing of the 14 papers along with the highlights from each of them.

1996 was a particularly rich time for creative research and occasionally stunning results in LENRs. In many ways, the LENR research community in 1996 was far truer to the scientific method, unencumbered by ideology or commercial interests, than in the years that followed. These researchers were doing their best to observe something new and unexpected, yet they were constrained by their limited abilities of observation and experience of something science had never seen. The parable of blind men each examining a unique part of an elephant, with each man (and, occasionally, woman) concluding with absolute certainty that he or she knew the precise characteristics of the elephant is parallel to what happened with LENR in the early days.

 

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Feb 122013
 

LENR Dendrite
Feb. 12, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner lithium-ion battery fire mystery remains unsolved. But the remote yet possible cause – that a low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) triggered the failure – just got more likely.

On Feb. 11, the Wall Street Journal reported that “investigators are examining whether the formation of microscopic structures known as dendrites inside the Boeing Co 787’s lithium-ion batteries played a role in twin incidents that prompted the fleet to be grounded nearly a month ago.”

In a July 16, 2010, document, Lewis Larsen, co-developer of the Widom-Larsen LENR theory, explained the possible relationship between lithium-ion battery fires, LENRs, and dendrites:

About 18 months ago, based on the W-L theory, [Allen Widom and I] conjectured that (a) LENRs might occur in high electric fields created by nanoscale lightning rod effects in discharge arcs (that is, electrical shorts) emanating from nm-to micron-scale lithium metal dendrites that grow inside Li-ion batteries and that (b) rapid (~10 -200 nanoseconds) multi-Watt heat-energy releases from nm to micron-scale LENR-active patches could provide a triggering mechanism for some subset of lithium-ion battery failures and fires. (Source document)

On Jan. 17, 2013, New Energy Times wrote “Are Nuclear Reactions Causing Boeing Dreamliner Battery Fires?” in which we explained the striking similarities between lithium-ion batteries and a conventional LENR experiment.

On Jan. 23, 2013, Larsen released another document on the potential relationship between LENRs and the recent lithium-ion battery fires.

On Feb. 7, Deborah A.P. Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, released a slide presentation that gave an update on the Jan 7, 2013, battery fire in the Japan Airlines B-787.

NTSB determined that the fire started in cell No. 6 of this unit within the JAL Boeing 787.


On Feb. 11, Larsen released a document with more details about LENRs as a possible trigger. He wrote that these rare lithium-ion battery fires include the conditions in which a LENR nano-fireball mechanism could serve as a proximate cause for runaway thermal events in these batteries.

Larsen’s July 16, 2010, slide presentation gives the basic concepts:

Here is what may actually be happening inside some subset of failing Li-ion batteries:

High electric fields in the vicinity of nanoscale dendrites create heavy-mass e* electrons, which then react with nearby protons, creating ultra-low-momentum (ULM) neutrons. ULM neutrons then capture on nearby lithium atoms in a LENR-l ithium reaction, causing micron-scale and smaller hot spots to occur on the surface of a Li dendrite.

Importantly, 5,000+ K temperatures inside a tiny LENR hot spot can vaporize an immediately adjacent volume of battery material into a tiny ball of hot plasma. Among other things, conductive ions in the hot plasma would start shorting out nearby battery microstructures.

Worse yet, such intense heat can liberate free oxygen from any nearby oxides (that is, Li2FePO4 found in battery cathodes); the oxygen then reacts with any lithium metal present, starting an internal oxygen-fueled lithium fire. If too many L ENR hot-spot events were to occur nearly simultaneously, it could trigger an unstoppable cascading runaway of exothermic chemical reactions that could damage or ruin a battery or entire battery pack through severe overheating.

In worst-case events, where Li-ion batteries explode, they would NOT be LENR explosions per se. An intense nanoscale nuclear energy release simply superheats a tiny region inside a battery which, in turn, triggers an escalating cascade of prosaic chemical oxidation reactions.

This situation is analogous to what happens when the sharp sound (acoustic energy) of a single gunshot can trigger a huge avalanche of snow that engulfs an entire side of a mountain. In this fashion (which might occur episodically), large multi-cell Li-ion battery packs used in vehicles could ignite and be destroyed by thermal fratricide.

Larsen’s Feb. 11, 2013, document provides additional perspective:

In my view, depending heavily on their exact location inside a battery and composition of nearby materials, … LENRs could serve as an extraordinarily hot match with local temperatures that are high enough to be capable of directly initiating even more exothermic metal-oxidation reactions that burn much hotter than a flammable electrolyte fire.

Unfortunately, such thermite-like pyrotechnic chemical reactions with metals can be nearly impossible to extinguish because they can generate their own oxygen through dissociation while an advancing flame front combusts battery materials that are inside a casing.

In my opinion, that’s where the safety danger lies with possible LENR-triggered thermal runaways. LENRs may be a rare Black Swan battery event, but a rather deadly one. Hence, on-board battery systems installed on human-passenger-carrying vehicles such as aircraft and submersibles should be designed with mitigation of this newly recognized type of safety risk.

[Feb. 16 News Update: Wall Street Journal reports “Airbus to Drop Lithium-Ion Batteries From Newest Jet” ]

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Larsen’s Feb. 11, 2013, document provides additional perspective:

Feb 022013
 

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2013/Springer-Batteries-For-Sustainability.jpg
Feb. 2, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

Lewis Larsen, co-developer of the Widom-Larsen low-energy nuclear reaction theory has released another document on the potential relationship between LENRs and the recent lithium-ion battery fires. (See New Energy Times article “Are Nuclear Reactions Causing Boeing Dreamliner Battery Fires?

“LENRs are potentially another mechanism for producing so-called field failures that can trigger catastrophic thermal runaway fires in lithium-based batteries,” Larsen wrote.

He cites chapter 9 by B. Barnett et al., “Lithium-ion Batteries, Safety” in the 2012 Springer book, “Batteries for Sustainability – Selected Entries from the Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Science and Technology,” Ralph J. Brodd, Editor, ISBN 978-1-4614-5791-6

Read or download Larsen’s document here.

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