A workable Hydrogen Fuel Cell?

All that is missing is the physics experiments that show that the physics is real. When a person or company claims that they have something revolutionary to the public, but do not provide something revolutionary to the public, then they are less than ethical.

I cannot evaluate physics that is kept secret. I can evaluate poor or misleading claims.

 

Here is more information for your amusement/interest:

Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head | Environment | The Guardian

BlackLight Power Inc.

 

We do not have to know why something works. For millenium cavemen could not scientifically evaluate fire. They could produce it. They may even have sold it, ( traded use of thier fire for freshly caught game) therby commencing the first commerce. The proof will come when the product ouputs real current for a sustained period at cheaper cost. Faith, not shite makes the world go round.

 

Why is faith needed? Is this engineering and science or is this "marketing"? Any time "new physics" is invoked without any supporting evidence, how does one tell that it is not a con job? (Con jobs have been around longer than using fire.)

 

Not true in Barter Town.

I agree that if the product actually works then they've got something, even if they have no idea what they're doing. However, given the complexity of the physics that must be involved I'd be surprised if they had no clue and it worked. It seems more likely that it doesn't work and they know damn well why that's the case. More interesting would be the case where they were right and it worked, but like FL_Prius has pointed out, they're not sharing a whole lot. There have been several physicists who've criticized it, though apparently not for the usual reasons. The fact that an independent party has replicated some or all of the process is encouraging, but I can't remember if they ever identified who that was.

Since this lot isn't clamouring for investors or public money, I'm happy to let them keep doing what they're doing.

 

They did identify it somewhere, it was Rowan University. I just did a search and here's a page on it:
Rowan University Replicates BlackLight Power's Novel Energy Source

In this page is a link to the report by Rowan. I haven't had the time to go through the report yet.

 

Thanks mate. It's interesting. I'd like to see others confirm it. Esp on of the Nat'l Labs. If Sandia or ORNL were to come out and say "yeah, it works", then I'd be pretty excited about it.

 

I decided to get off my rear and check out Blacklight's "technology". Results so far:
1) I was 100% wrong about them keeping the physics secret. Right or wrong, it is fully published.
2) The new physics is just not for new power from Hydrogen. It also solves many other mysteries in physics. Note the extract below:

"Dr. Mills has advanced the field generally known as Quantum Mechanics by deriving a new atomic theory of Classical Physics (CP) from first principles, which unifies Maxwell’s Equations, Newton’s Laws, and Einstein’s General and Special Relativity. The central feature is that physical laws hold over all scales, from the scale of subatomic particles to that of the
cosmos......
Further, the Schwarzschild Metric is derived by applying Maxwell’s Equations to electromagnetic and gravitational fields at particle production. This modifies General Relativity to include the conservation of spacetime and gives the origin of gravity, the families and masses of fundamental particles, the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe (predicted by Dr. Mills in 1995 and since confirmed experimentally), and overturns the Big Bang model of the origin of the Universe."

No middle ground here. Either this is the biggest breakthrough in physics...or not. Just finished and available on the site is the 1771 page book (The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics) on this new physics. It's going to take me some time to home in on where he diverges from the present Standard Model of QM.

 

Exactly, no middle ground is right. Whew!

 

As I slog through unbelivable amounts of 'new' physics, I found out that Blacklight Power has been in the cold fusion business for a LONG time. Note the following quote:

Dr. Mills made a presentation at the May 5, 1993 Congressional hearing before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Mills's opening remarks concisely summarized what the important Lancaster, PA effort is all about:

"Hydrocatalysis Power Corporation (HPC) has an extensive and experimental research program of producing energy from light-water electrolytic cells. HPC and Thermacore, Inc., Lancaster, PA are cooperating in developing a commercial product. (Thermacore is a well-respected defense contractor and its expertise is in the field of heat transfer.). Presently, all of the demonstration cells of HPC and Thermacore produce excess power immediately and continuously. Cells producing 50 watts of excess power and greater have been in operation for more than one year. Some cells can produce 10 times more heat power than the total electrical power input to the cell. A steam-producing prototype cell has been successfully tested ... The [original] experiment has been scaled up by a factor of one-thousand, and the scaled-up heat cell results have been independently confirmed by Thermacore, Inc. Patents covering the composition of matter, structures, and methods of the HydroCatalysis process have been filed by HPC worldwide with a priority date of April 32, 1989. HPC and Thermacore are presently fabricating a steam-producing demonstration cell."

Strangely, after 15 years we are still observing energy cells in the test stage.

 

My snake oil meter is starting to quiver.

Tom

 

Tom

You should have upgraded your Snake Oil Meter by now. Mine has user settings for hysterisis, so no more annoying quiver

jay

 

Until their stuff can be widely replicated it remains in the "likely BS, but wouldn't it be great if it weren't" category.

 

A Scenario Just for Fun: Say major power utilities announced in December that they had a deal with Blacklight power, for several 400 kW trial facilities, what would happen to the price of oil?

Imediately, I think it would drop, making many fields uneconomical, making supply lower, eventually making the price rise, then drop, then rise, over a few years before dropping a lot as the ICE begins to die. All the while, blacklight power would become the most talked about company on the planet.

And any industry based on the increased use of electricity, like advanced batteries, ultracaps, vehicle to grid, smart grids, PHEVs, would get tremendous increases in investment.

New oil sands projects would be put on hold and eventually canceled - causing enormous upheaval in Alberta and the rest of Canada.

Tensions would rise in the middle east as the psychological impacts of these developments sink in.

Anybody who just bought a new gas guzzler in early 2009, that they intended to keep for 15 years, would be saying DOH! by year 3 when PHEVs and EVs started flooding the dealer lots.

That's it for now.... gotta run..

 

I should think about that upgrade. The hysteresis on mine has a negative coefficient, so it tends to oscillate wildly. I normally avoid that by keeping it pegged at the high limit.

Tom

 

OK, a little systems teach point here... for me. I looked up hysteresis and that makes perfect sense, but what do you mean by the negative coefficient? Does that indicate that as the system travels in on direction it's tendency towards changing directions increases (like the thermostat example I read about on wiki)?

 

Extrodinary claims require extradinary evidence. I guess we'll see where it goes.

From Wikipedia:
On October 27 2002, Bob Park, a professor at the University of Maryland, wrote a follow-up:

Mills has written a 1000 page tome, entitled The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics, that takes the reader all the way from hydrinos to antigravity (WN 9 May 97). Fortunately, Aaron Barth (not to be confused with Erik Baard, the Randy Mills apologist), has taken upon himself to look through it, checking for accuracy. Barth is a post doctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute, and holds a PhD in Astronomy, 1998, from UC, Berkeley. What he found initially were mathematical blunders and unjustified assumptions. To his surprise, however, portions of the book seemed well organized. These, it now turns out, were lifted verbatim from various texts. This has been the object of a great deal of discussion from Mills's Hydrino Study Group. Mills seems not to understand what the fuss is all about.[14]

​

 

I was being silly and implying that the dead band in my system is less than zero. Let me use my wife for an example. At any given time she is either too hot or too cold. One would assume that there would be some comfort zone for her between hot and cold, but one might also assume that pigs can fly. Starting with too cold and starting to warm up, she works like this: too cold, too cold, still too cold, too hot, too hot, too hot. I believe that her "too hot" and "too cold" setpoints are reversed. I haven't been able to prove it, but I'm pretty sure there is a magic temperature where she will be simultaneously too hot and too cold.

That's what I was driving at, even if my silly statement didn't make mathematical sense.

Tom

 

Easy there, Poindexter. To quote Stephen Maturin, "I haven't the slightest idea of what you're talking about."

Sorta like Schrodinger's cat? Your wife's not a thought experiment, I hope.

 

(Sound of Jay kissing the floor, ever so thankful he's happily single)