No Input LENR? — Deuo Dynamics Paper

Thanks to those yesterday who brought attention to a paper posted on Cold Fusion Now written by Fabrice David and John Giles of the British company Deuo Dynamics which describes an experiment in which voltage is produced in diodes containing deuterium charged palladium in contact with a semiconductor.

Here’s the abstract from the article:

Conventionally, the cold fusion reaction produces heat. The authors have sought a different approach, wherein the device has no input energy, relying on the energy produced by cold fusion in the device. The device consists of diodes fabricated as powder, with a large surface junction made up of a semiconductor in contact with palladium charged with deuterium.

The apparent fusion reactions take place in the junction between the semiconductor and the Palladium powder, which produces an excitation which is transmitted to the electrons. This excitation increases their energy and allows them to cross the bandgap of the semiconductor and pass into the conduction band, as in a photovoltaic cell. This energy very quickly appears as a spontaneous potential difference which can reach over 0.5 volt per junction.

The potential drop concentrates on the junction region, and at a nano scale the electric field reaches considerable values, higher than the megavolt per meter, which constrains the deuterium nuclei and increases the probability of deuterium fusion.

With no energy input, the authors report that when they introduced deuterium into the device (after first trying to exclude environmental noise by successively charging it with argon and hydrogen) the voltage in the cell ‘quickly rises from zero to 0.5V.” They say that after several weeks the voltage diminishes because of deuterium leaking from the valves. They report no detection of significant levels of radioactivity or gamma rays.

They stress that they are not certain that the effect that they are seeing is fusion, but sate that “The apparent fusion reaction takes place in the junction between the semiconductor and the palladium powder. This produces an excitation which is transmitted to the electrons. This excitation increases their energy and allows them to cross the bandgap of the semiconductor and pass into the conduction band, as with a photovoltaic cell. The energy very quickly appears as a spontaneous potential difference, which can reach over 0.5 volt per junction.”

Unfortunately I am not sure when this paper was published. There’s no date on the paper, so it could be quite old. There is a live web site for Deuo Dynamics, and I will try to make contact with the authors to get some clarification on that.

Incidentally, Dennis Cravens demonstration of his brass sphere device at this year’s NIWeek conference was a purported LENR reaction with no energy input.