MFMP’s Project Dog Bone Thread — Update #8: [Powder Test in Sealed Alumina Tube Scheduled for Wed, Feb 4th]

UPDATE #8 (Feb 3, 2014)

Thanks to Ged for pointing out the timeline that the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project has posted on their quantumheat.org website. They have a schedule laid out for this week there. The main events are:

Monday, Feb 2 (yesterday): Team assembles, Test equipment set up, integrated, and prepared. Lots of reading the manuals!
Tuesday, Feb 3: Test 1: Calibration with Thermocouples, Optris camera, and Williamson Pyrometer; Test 2: Fat coil dog bone with internal heat source; Test 3: Assessment of Alan’s calibrated alumina temperature sources
Wednesday, Feb 4: Tests 4-: Powder Tests in sealed Alumina tube
Thursday, Feb 5: Test X: High Temp Inconel Heater Dogbone Calibration

The powder tests in the sealed tubes are the ones that are going to get most attention, I am sure. The MFMP team says that live YouTube video streams will be announced when they are ready.

I’m looking forward to following all this — best wishes to all at MFMP, and thanks for sharing your work with us all!

UPDATE #7 (Dec 29, 2014)

[Corrected Sentence based on a wrong assumption] The MFMP are making preparations to test one of their ‘dogbone’ reactors with fuel inside. According to a new post on their Facebook page, they hope to carry out a live online test on January December 30th.

Bob Greenyer posted this today: “Tomorrow – frank will correct the title. Dog bone cast last night and baking tonight in oven,Ryan is getting the glove box ready now to mix the powder”

Here’s the information from the post:

Given the encouraging fast response from Professor Alexander G. Parkhomov, Ryan is in the lab this evening preparing to cast up another Dog Bone.
It will be essentially the same as the first two so that we have data for comparison, it will be single phase and have the swappable core ( we have 3 core tubes in hand to make attempts with ).
Plan
– make new swappable core dog bone
– make ceramic plug from pass-through and cement
– bake both of the above in furnace
– mix 2.2-2.8um nickel powder with LiAlH4 under argon and seal in container all in the glove box.
– flush glove box with air (we want air because Argon could not be combine with the O2 and N2 in the reactor core)
– quickly transfer the powder mix in glovebox into the reactor core.
– plug open end
– seal with ceramic cement (only have water based at moment)
– allow to dry
– b and k type thermocouples placed

Live experiment (hopefully on 30th)
– Youtube / google live streamed experiment
– test conservatively with an empty core to characterise the reactor
– insert active core
– test even more conservatively and see if there is a significant departure from the characterisation.
– if see something positive, will look to do the water vaporisation test.
In the meantime, more cores, plugs and non-water based cements will be ordered in case of negative outcome so that we can follow up quickly with variations.

UPDATE #6

Yesterday there was a ‘first pass’ live test carried out by Ryan Hunt of the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project on the first dummy reactor that the group has prepared. Below is a video of the reactor, along with a chart showing the temperature measurements made.

dogbonedata

We must remember — the purpose of this test is to see if it could give us clues about the validity of the Lugano E-Cat test where a reactor of similar dimensions and composition was heated up to a maximum temperature around 1400 degrees C with an input of just over 900 Watts.

I asked Bob Greenyer if he could provide a brief summary of the significance of yesterdays testing, and he wrote:

1. It looks like it will be hard to reach 1400ºC average temperature on the outside of the Dog Bone and not with 900W
2. It supports the use of a thermal averaging technique (just look at the difference between fin and grove)
3. A dog bone at 1400ºC will be very hard to look at (will almost certainly need filter glass)
4. The windings were, as we suspected, unlikely to be Inconel.
5. it is quite a challenge to get something to run at these temperatures for 32 days
6. It has yet to be demonstrated that their method of measuring the surface temperature was valid – this can only be done when we have the Optris camera (in January).

UPDATE #5 (Dec 7, 2014)

The MFMP team has started to apply power to the resistor inside the dummy dogbone reactor. Here’s the latest from their Facebook page:

“It gets warm!

[]=Project Dog Bone=[]

Ok, so the phases need to be better connected as right now they are showing themselves to be high resistance contacts and getting too warm. There are also hot-spots visible in this test, hopefully that is just due to a few close windings.

Hopefully get live data running early next week.”

Bob Greenyer has posted here on ECW: “The first data point is 120W=>225C on the surface and 300 inside.we will hold off doing wider sweeps until we can get the data live publishing.”

hotdogobone
UPDATE #4 (Dec 1, 2014)

Here’s an interesting comment on the MFMP’s Facebook page from Alan Goldwater  who describes what has happend after the bare dummy core (See Update #1 below) has been coated with alumina.

“I coated a freshly calibrated core coil with two thin layers of high-alumina cement. The coated coil was then reinstalled in the jig and tested. The difference was startling!

Above 200 watts, the coated coil resulted in far higher thermocouple temperatures than the uncoated one did. The core was over 1300 degrees with just 732 watts input. At 1330 C (780 watts), the type K thermocouple failed. It’s now stuck to the inside of the core tube, probably by melted fiberglass insulation. The cement coating survived but is cracked in many places, probably from thermal expansion of the wire.

This is a good illustration of the thermal dynamics at work. As the temperature rises above 500 C, the radiation heat path is increasingly dominant, and the lower emissivity of the cement is evident in the steeper slope of the curve.”

UPDATE #3 (Nov 25, 2014)

More progress with Project Dog Bone, even on Thanksgiving day. The MFMP Facebook page reports they have created a three-phase winding for the resistor heating coil made out of Kanthal A1 on a ceramic tube, and put it inside the recently casted alumina casing. The whole thing has come in 20 grams (4 per cent) heavier than the E-Cat reactor core used in the Lugano test.

dogbone
winding

UPDATE #2 (Nov 25, 2014)

The picture below shows us that the MFMP team is setting up a system that tries to closely match the reactor and testing equipment used in the Lugano E-Cat Test. The reactor shown here is described as a ‘broken bone’ — the team is apparently making better molds and obtaining needed materials for making a reactor that more closely matches the E-Cat used by Levi et. al. in the recent test.

brokenbone
New photo: here’s Ryan Hunt of the MFMP with a better casting of an alumina casing:

ryanhuntaluminacase
More pictures can be seen on the MFMP Facebook page here.

Also mentioned on a Facebook post is that the MFMP is trying to purchase a thermal camera of the same model (Optris Pi160) used in the Lugano test, and finding out that they are in short supply. However, they hope to be able to get one from an Italian distributor for the hefty sum of 3000 Euros.

UPDATE #1 (Nov. 20, 2014) It’s good to see the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project get underway with testing in their Project Dog Bone. Today here is a post on the MFMP’s Facebook page about the first test that has been carried out on a bare dummy core.

Specifications are: 200 mm in length, 190 turns, 5.8 ohms resistance (before heating).

According to the Facebook post:

The dummy core is being built to try and represent LENR heat from the centre of the dog bone in the thermal assessment experiments.

This core maxed out at 80.1V RMS and 1119ºC as you can see in the photos.

Approximate resistance and peak power was 7.0 ohms, 914 watts, a calibration curve is given.

PDB1

PDB2

PDB3