The Progress Reports have revealed some important behaviors having a relationship to attempts at replication and to the various proposed theories. Its time to put these behaviors in context and suggest some conclusions.
If you are tempted to speculate on your own, please do read the reports first and make yourself knowledgeable about what has been observed in other studies published over the last 26 years. We now have enough information, when considered in its totality, to arrive at some very firm conclusions.
Progress will be made only when this understanding is accepted and used as a guide to support additional understanding.
As anyone who is familiar with the many observations will understand; the conclusions noted below are totally consistent with past observed behavior. The only conflict is with the past conclusions. Many of these past conclusions are now shown to be wrong.
1. The LENR process is not initiated when a sample of Pd is initially loaded to high composition. Additional treatment is required to cause the LENR process to start. Once this additional treatment is successful, LENR will take place over a very wide range of deuterium concentration, even after all D is removed and the sample is again reacted with D.
2. Only certain batches of Pd can be activated. One of the requirements for successful activation is lack of significant excess volume formation when the Pd is reacted with D.
3. Excess power produced by an activated sample is very reproducible once it is initiated as long as the surface is not removed. This behavior is consistent with the surface being the location of the nuclear reaction based on the behavior of helium release.
4. Once the LENR process starts, the amount of current applied as electrolytic current has no effect on the amount of excess power produced. Only the temperature of the active surface has any effect on excess power production, with higher temperatures producing greater excess power. We can assume that once a sample is activated, simply exposing it to D2 gas and heating it would cause excess power production. In other words once the sample of Pd is activated, use of electrolysis is no longer necessary.
5. The activation energy for excess power production based on the temperature effect is similar to the value for the activation energy for diffusion of D in PdD. We can assume excess power production is controlled by how fast the D can diffuse from the surrounding lattice to the NAE where the nuclear reaction occurs.
6. So called life-after-death will result in eventual destruction of the sample if the temperature is not controlled, as some people have observed. In other words, the system suffers from positive feedback as Rossi has also experienced using the Ni-H2 system. This positive feed back is generally not observed because the amount of power produced relative to the rate at which it can be lost is small.
7. Once the role of electrolytic current is understood, the F-P method can be seen to have the same basic behavior as all methods found to initiate LENR, including the Ni-H2 system. In other words, no reasons exists based on observed behavior to consider the Pd-D2 system different from the Ni-H2 system. Only the reacting isotopes are different which naturally would produce different nuclear products.
All of behaviors and conclusions resulting from this study are consistent with the Nano-crack theory I proposed. Most other proposed theories are not consistent with all the observations and conclusions. These conflicts need to be resolved for any progress to be made.
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