RUN 4

For the fourth run in this series we again emulated the calorimetry employed by Ohmori and Mizuno described in "Nuclear Transmutation reaction Caused by Light Water Electrolysis on Tungsten Cathode Under Incandescent Conditions", Infinite Energy #27, p. 34. This method involves integrating the total electrical energy input during the period in which the cell is boiling and comparing that to the sum of the heat loss values, one calculated from the quantity of water evaporated from the cell and the other calculated from an empirical heat loss rate determined by a separate cooling curve experiment.

As shown to the left, the cell (quartz for this run) was suspended in the open air of the laboratory on a ring stand clamp. A small fan was positioned 5 cm away from the cell to provide steady air cooling throughout the run. A magnetic stirrer was employed in this run, rotating at approximately 9 Hz.

We used a W cathode of our own TIG-welded fabrication in this run and 0.2 M K₂CO₃ electrolyte.

Obviously we did not use our water-flow calorimeter for the heat measurements but we did employ the computer data acquisition system to record the cell temperature and electrical input power as measured by our Clarke-Hess 2330 Power Analyzer.

On this run we gradually warmed the cell up nearly to the boiling point before making the transition to cathode incandescence. Therefore there was no significant warmup period included in the energy balance and only the boiling period is considered in the following analysis.

The cell boiled for 1350 seconds (22.5 minutes) at a steady voltage of 161.4 volts and an average current of 0.768 amps. The average electrical energy power was 123.96 watts and the total electrical input energy was 167,342 joules.

The cell lost 34 grams of weight during the run. Assuming all of that was due to water evaporation at 539 calories per gram, the heat lost to vaporization was 76,713 joules.

A new cooling curve conducted just prior to this run with the same fan-cell geometry pictured above yielded a cooling rate of 67.5 watts. Over the boiling period of this run, the total cooling loss was therefore 91,125 joules.

The sum of these heat losses is 167,838 joules, which is essentially EQUAL to the measured electrical input energy! Clearly there is no sign of the massive excess heat observed by Mizuno and Ohmori. Let's compare these results to theirs (from line 1 of the data table on p. 35 in Infinite Energy #27) to see where the differences lie.

Parameter description	O&M value	EarthTech value Run 4
electrical input power	76 watts	124 watts
heat lost thru walls of cell	99 watts	67.5 watts
heat lost via steam	74 watts	56.8 watts
cell voltage	160 volts	161.4 volts
average cell current	0.48 amperes	0.77 amperes
total cell volume	240 ml	210 ml
initial electrolyte volume	170 ml	146 ml
output/input	^*228%	100%

^* In the Infinite Energy article, this run is reported to have a 242% output/input ratio because they included some additional but minor heat losses in their calculations.

The big difference in our output/input ratios is a combination of three factors: (1) their current is lower than ours, (2) their heat loss thru the walls is higher than ours, and (3) their steam production rate is higher than ours. We are at a loss to explain these differences.

Why did we get 100% recovery on this run and only 93% recovery on Run 3? Probably because the total weight loss of the cell in this run includes some water that evaporated from the cell as we approached boiling, yet we only integrated the electrical input power during the actual boiling period. Despite these small variations observed in our measurements, we still appear to be seeing an energy balance in our experiments.