Well this is fun…
From E-Cat World:
Report: ‘Stable Excess Heat’, ‘100 Per Cent Reproducible’ in LENR Experiment at Tohoku University, Japan
Posted on September 19, 2016 by Frank Acland • 21 CommentsThanks to reader Bob (not Greenyer) for a comment today which cites a new report by Kenji Kaneko, Nikkei BP Clean Tech Institute, translated from the orginal Japanese by Jed Rothwell and posted on the LENR-CANR website here: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KanekoKcoldfusion.pdf It reports on work taking place at the Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (CMNS) Department at Tohoku University, Japan where researchers are reporting successful production of excess heat in experiments that are apparently still ongoing.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Clean Planet has invested in joint research with Dr. Mizuno’s company Hydrogen Engineering Application and Development Company (Sapporo). Research professor of Tohoku University Iwamura and his colleagues’ first efforts were to reproduce the experiment devised by Dr. Mizuno, and they have made steady progress in observing “excess heat.”
The technique works like this. There are two wire-like palladium electrodes arranged in a cylindrical chamber, with the periphery surrounded by a nickel mesh. [5] High voltage is applied to the electrodes, causing glow discharge. After this treatment the electrodes are heated (baked) at 100 ~ 200°C. As a result, the surface of the palladium wire is covered with a film made up of a
structure of nanoscale palladium and nickel particles.After processing in this way to activate the palladium surface, the chamber is evacuated, while being heating up to several hundred degrees with a resistance heater. Deuterium gas is then introduced at high pressure (300 ~ 170 Pa), enough to sufficiently ensure contact between the palladium and deuterium. Then, “excess heat” exceeding the heat from the resistance heater input power is observed. When researchers introduce deuterium gas in the same apparatus under the same conditions but without doing the activation treatment first, excess heat is not observed. The excess heat causes a temperature difference ranging from about 70 ~ 100°C.
This is an interesting site:
Home
This site features a library of papers on LENR, Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, also known as Cold Fusion. (CANR, Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions is another term for this phenomenon.) The library includes more than 1,000 original scientific papers reprinted with permission from the authors and publishers. The papers are linked to a bibliography of over 3,500 journal papers, news articles and books about LENR.Qualitatively, 100% reproducibility has been established. The future research target is
therefore: “how to increase heat generation, and how to use inexpensive materials such as nickel
with light hydrogen, instead of palladium and deuterium” says Hideki Yoshino, president of
Clean Planet.This website includes:
The Introduction to LENR-CANR, and a list of books, videos and links to other sites about LENR.
News about LENR.
A look at experiments: photographs of laboratories and equipment.
Special collections of papers, including papers from ICCF conferences, the 2004 DoE review, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and U.S. Navy authors.
The LIBRARY is a collection of full-text papers and books integrated with our bibliography. You can access the folder directly here. The most recent papers are listed here.
And a lot more…
The linked PDF is also interesting, even beyond the bits that quoted:
Kaneko, K.,
“Cold Fusion” in U.S. patent, successful replication, re-evaluation is accelerating (translation), in Nihon Keizai Shimbun. 2016.
This is a translation of an article published here:
http://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO06252800Z10C16A8000000/
“Cold fusion” in U.S. patent, successful replication, re-evaluation is accelerating
September 9, 2016 6:30 Nihon Keizai Shimbun electronic version
by Kenji Kaneko, Nikkei BP Clean Tech Institute
Translated by Jed Rothwell, LENR-CANR.org
[…]
The chamber (container) in which the nuclear reaction occurs is cylindrical. It is made of metal, so the inside is not visible, but the temperature is measured with a sensor. “The experimental project has only been underway for about a year, but it is going well and we already have excess heat.” said Yasuhiro Iwamura, research professor of the research department, while looking at the temperature log.In fact, in April 2015 a newly established condensed nuclear reaction joint research department in Tohoku University was launched with by Clean Planet Co. (Tokyo, Minato-ku), which invests in ventures and laboratories in the clean energy field. Tohoku University provided the facilities and human resources.
Hideki Yoshino, president of Clean Planet, invested funds in the Tohoku University project. He believes that: “Enormous energy has been generated in stable reactions. A path to safe, low cost energy generation has been opened. Competing development projects in Europe and the U.S. have begun. Japanese researchers have a track record of leading in this field. As the research turns toward practical applications, we should apply the accumulated wisdom of the Japanese researchers.”
[…]
Research professor Iwamura of the Tohoku University Condensed Matter Nuclear Science Department, and visiting associate professor Takehiko Ito were both formerly involved in the study of CMNS at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), and they moved to Tohoku University when the opportunity arose when this department was established. At MHI, they conducted low profile research with this as a technique to render harmless radioactive waste; research efforts under the name “new element conversion.” [3, 4] Their achievements in successful selective element conversion were cited worldwide.Observed “excess heat” after just one year When Professor Iwamura moved to Tohoku University, he took this as an opportunity to switch the target of their research from the detoxification of radioactive waste to “heat generation.” The field of application of CMNS has two main directions: energy generation, and transmutation. The latter includes the detoxification of radioactive waste and the production of rare elements. The market value of a practical application for energy generation would be orders of magnitude larger than the market for transmutation, so companies such as Clean Planet and venture capitalists are concentrating on research to develop an energy source. In fact, even with respect to “heat generation,” results from Japanese researchers have been cited worldwide. Pioneer researchers include Dr. Tadahiko Mizuno of Hokkaido University and Dr. Yoshiaki Arata, Professor Emeritus of Osaka University. Currently, in Japan, practical application research has been promoted based on the heat generation techniques of these two researchers.
[…]
After processing in this way to activate the palladium surface, the chamber is evacuated, while being heating up to several hundred degrees with a resistance heater. Deuterium gas is then introduced at high pressure (300 ~ 170 Pa), enough to sufficiently ensure contact between the palladium and deuterium. Then, “excess heat” exceeding the heat from the resistance heater input power is observed. When researchers introduce deuterium gas in the same apparatus under the same conditions but without doing the activation treatment first, excess heat is not observed. The excess heat causes a temperature difference ranging from about 70 ~ 100°C. Iwamura describes the project with enthusiasm. “The experimental project has only been underway for about a year, but it is going better than we expected and we already have stable excess heat. We are applying the knowledge accumulated in our research at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, demonstrating that highly reproducible element conversion techniques can also be applied to heat generation.”
[…]
In May 2008, Emeritus Professor Arata carried out a public experiment at Osaka University before news media. The technique he used at that time employed a zirconium oxide-palladium alloy in a nano-structure grid pattern, with deuterium gas forced into the structure under pressure. [6-8] He observed excess heat and helium production at room temperature. A Technova team forced light hydrogen into a nickel and copper-based nanoparticle structure based on Arata’s. They succeeded in generating excess heat after a long waiting period of more than a month, by heating the sample up to about 300°C.
[..]
Qualitatively, 100% reproducibility has been established. The future research target is therefore: “how to increase heat generation, and how to use inexpensive materials such as nickel with light hydrogen, instead of palladium and deuterium” says Hideki Yoshino, president of Clean Planet.
The amount of excess is not large ( 100 C out of 1100 C ) and they have a long way to go before something useful exists. Still, it’s claimed to be 100% reproducible. Once that is proven, the rest is “just” engineering…
One really hopes this isn’t just an error in the 10% range… I would be happier if it was ‘tested’ by mot just ‘activated’ surface vs not, but also by hydrogen vs deuterium which would tend to eliminate chemical interaction issues of gas and activated metal.
Musings from the Chiefio 
Small steps. If it is reproducible, it may look nothing like the one that actually goes commercial. But it is a hopeful sign.
Hmmm interesting — I wonder if you could “start” the reaction with deuterium and then shift to light hydrogen after it is running? Perhaps a mixed gas to cut the costs?
It also from the description looks like a device configuration which might be able to be scaled down to house or large structure size, rather than municipal utility size.
Anybody got a Blue Rhino deuterium station at the 7-11?
“The amount of excess is not large ( 100 C out of 1100 C )”
Do you mean that with no reactive materials they saw 1000°C and with reactive materials added they got 1100°C? That is not even useful. If it is real.
But if it leads to understanding of something real. Well maybe. If it is not a chemical reaction.
Reverse cycle heaters (heat pumps) can deliver 4Kw for every one Kw of electricity consumed. The target for LENR excess heat production has to be greater than a factor of four (or be very cheap to make) in order to be cost effective. Rossi, of eCat fame, claims around a 6 fold ‘excess’ (COP)
Will this reactor be called a Tohoku-Mak ? ;)
The initial 1000 deg C is the temperature they need to reach to “light off the reaction” as I interpret the information.
Usability depends on the scale, if you have a few ounces of stuff and a heat gain of 100 deg C, ho hum, if you can get a heat gain in a few metric tons of stuff of 100 deg C you can harvest that heat gain all day by flashing hot water to steam, or you can set up a hotwater heat system to supply heat to a small town. It would be much more helpful if they specified the sustained surplus heat output in watts and watt/hrs
The other question is how large were the heat losses that they were making up to get to that 100 deg C surplus. If you have a constant input of 1100 deg C into a large heat sink until it is equalized to that temperature and have enough heat energy to make up heat losses to the generation system at that temperature, you can create what amounts to a man made geothermal plant without all the problems with minerals dissolved in the primary feed water stream.
Or you can use two stage boiling liquid systems to harvest it at lower temps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_cycle
@Sandy:
Cute ;-)
@MSimon:
It means 1100 C from bias heater (warm up heat – input heat) when not “treated” and 1200 C when “treated” and the “excess” is supposedly from LENR.
The problem is I could see a chemical reaction adding the added 100 C as the rate increased from the surface treatment… I’ll need to see a COP of 5 or more, and / or some stellar calorimetry before I get too excited…
This one is interesting mostly due to the reputation of the Japanese for excellent work and not making big public screw ups very often…
@Phil:
My reaction exactly.
@Steven Frasier:
Well, I have a 1/2 ounce bottle of D2O somewhere in my trinkets box… Friend got if for me as a present after some conference.
While heavy water was very hard to make some decades back, now it is sort of an expensive OTC reagent…
@Larry:
Hmmmm…. I could see a case where DH would work best as it might fit in the space “snugly” when D2 was too big and H2 too loose (or maybe the other way around…)
Would be well worth a shot.
There is something wrong with the pressure units, which are less than 1 psi, i.e. not high pressure as stated.
Larry Ledwick says:
20 September 2016 at 12:48 am
You are leaving out Carnot. Under the best of circumstances that gives a 40% loss unless all you want is the steam. Uses for steam at that high a temperature are limited.Energy generation is one. And then you are back to Carnot.
In any case most steam turbines run in the 500°C to 700°C range.
An extra 100°C will not help much. Unless the reaction is self sustaining after start up. I see no mention of that. If they need to keep supplying the electrical power in that magnitude (1000°C) to keep the reaction running – well you have created a loss maker overall.
And all that does not even take into account the heat transfer losses.
The LENR folks keep giving promises. And then they fall flat. Odds are this is another one. Unless they have learned something.
In the mean time Polywell Fusion is being starved. And we understand the basic reactions for that very well. And direct conversion is possible. Or if you just want the thermal energy – rocketry. Earth to Mars in two weeks. The native energy gain is on the order of 14X. LENR at best promises 10% to 30% gain. So far.
@R. Shearer:
Good catch… Perhaps they left a Kilo of the KPa?…
Personally, I hate the Pascal unit and avoid it whenever possible. Kg force / area is much more intuitive… or the better PSi… or the best ‘bar’… (one Atm more or less)…
but, yeah, at roughly 100,000 Pa / bar or atmosphere they are off by quite a bit from “high pressure”…
Let me amend that. Top end steam turbine temperature is on the order of 585°C. (1085°F) I just checked I was getting C and F confused evidently. Or just misremembering.
Click to access Industrial_Steam_Turbines_en.pdf
@M. Simon:
Does anyone have a Polywell working self sustain?
E.M.Smith says:
20 September 2016 at 2:41 am
No. How about LENR self sustain?
Polywell like the rest of high temperature fusion is an engineering problem. For LENR we don’t even understand the physics. Nor are we certain it is a real phenomenon.
@M. Simon:
I wasn’t being catty, just curious of the present state of progress. I have no dog in the fight, just want one of them, any of them, to work…
“Researchers” attached to a prestigious university such as Tohoku can still be scammers.
Remember how Andrea Rossi slickered the University of Bologna (the world’s oldest university?) into his scam?
Alternatively the “Researchers” may be honest but wrong as in the case of Fleishman & Pons (Utah).
After reading the links in the above post carefully I was disappointed to find that specifics of the alleged nuclear reaction were lacking. Is nickel reacting with hydrogen or deuterium to form copper? If so is should be easy to show that transmutation is taking place.
Then there is a reference to helium being formed! That makes no sense at all.
This “Research” is about as credible as “Global Warming”. The idea is to find some sucker (preferably at a high level in government) who will fund a comfortable sinecure for people who don’t fancy real work.
To get the plasma and the sputtering effects, they’d need to have been working somewhere around 10Pa, so 170-300Pa is a relatively high pressure and the path length of sputtered ions in the plasma would be very short.
There’s a problem with the measurement of the heat produced, though. I can’t see a reference to 1000°C or 1100°C as the operating temperature, and it seems to me that the range is somewhere around 100-200°C instead (the temperature after baking) when the D2 is added. I’m not sure whether the thermocouples are reading the temperature of the enclosure, and from the diagram this looks to be what’s happening – there is no reading of the wires themselves. We know that there is a heat of absorption of H2 or D2 in Palladium and Nickel, so to be valid we’d need to know just how long that excess heat persisted, what the heat losses were (so a power could be calculated) and thus the total number of joules produced. If this is within the bounds of the absorption energy, then there’s nothing out of the ordinary here. Of course, a temperature differential of 70-100°C on a starting temperature of 100-200°C or thereabouts is more dramatic and harder to explain away, but if it doesn’t last that long then no explanation is needed. Does the surface treatment change the radiative properties of the wire and thus give a false reading? Celani tried something fairly similar and measured excess heat, but that turns out to have most likely been problems with the gas conductivity (Hydrogen conducts better than Helium).
I couldn’t find the reference to Helium being either formed or tested for in this experiment, either. Maybe that’s just the reference to Arata’s experiment. They could test for Helium by spectrometry and get a reasonable estimate of the rate of increase, but that doesn’t seem to have been done.
Overall, there’s not enough data here to back the claim up. Maybe that’s because they want to make money from it….
Pons and Fleischmann’s experiment was replicated by several people, and Miles used a set of these where those that didn’t produce heat were controls for those that did, which nicely gets over the non-reproducibility problem to get good data. The measured heat correlated with the amount of Helium produced, giving an energy per Helium atom of pretty close to the value if 2 D atoms had fused. This does not imply that 2 D atoms did indeed fuse, since in such energy calculations the path is unimportant and (as with Gibbs free energy in chemistry) it’s only what you have at the start and what you have at the end that is relevant. There could be several endothermic and exothermic reactions in between.
The technique used here may be valid, since it follows from things that seem to have worked. The data might also be good – it’s hard to tell.
Rossi’s big test has been in the news, but it seems that IH ran a thermal analysis of the building with an IR camera and could see only around 20kW emitted. There are a lot of other inconsistencies in the data, but the lack of emitted heat is the big one. You’d notice 1MW being emitted from a small warehouse even without instrumentation. Basically, then, Rossi’s claims are false and if we were charitable we could say he got the measurements wrong. On the other hand, if you expect to need to deal with 1MW you’d make preparations to be able to do so (sufficient cooling water or air etc.) and it also seems Rossi didn’t make such preparation. As such, although there is some chance that Rossi saw some excess heat sometime in the past, the current system is hogwash and there’s no point in trying to work out how he made it work (since it didn’t). This paragraph, by the way, is relevant only in the sense of GC’s comment about LENR being hogwash. I find some experiments credible though I’d agree with him on a lot of others. The “probably honest but misguided” tag would apply to others. It’s a difficult field, since there is currently no reasonable theory to explain it. I put some glimmering of ideas up at http://revolution-green.com/chucking-ideas-air/ if anyone wants to walk on the wild side. There’s enough evidence that LENR happens, and that things are weirder than we thought, but the mechanism of precisely how it happens needs a lot of thought.