Blacklight Power and the "Hydrino"

Geo

Mostly Harmless
Legend
These guys seem to, at the very least, have moved from "just another perpetual motion scheme" (circa 1999) to "a perpetual motion scheme that has one university and one power company hoodwinked" (today).

Or maybe they've really found the holy grail. They don't seem to be looking for new investors at least.

http://www.blacklightpower.com/

http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/21/b...ible-claims-of-a-new-renewable-energy-source/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrino_theory

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/081211/3801936en_public.html?.v=1

I do find it somewhat interesting that this guy apparently first came up with this hydrino theory to explain what was really happening with "Cold Fusion".

Blacklight is providing the Rowan [University] researchers with a common industrial form of nickel called Raney nickel, which is then put through a reaction with water to produce energy. “We’ve been able to regularly reproduce these results and we believe any research lab could do the same,” Peter Jansson, the faculty member heading the experiments, told me.


There’s one odd factor in Jansson’s tests, which is that Blacklight supplies the Raney nickel, which it in turn obtains from an industrial supplier. When I asked, Jansson wasn’t sure what, if anything, Blacklight did to prepare the material, but Mills was happy to tell me in a separate interview that it’s doped with a very small amount of another common material, sodium hydroxide, in a process that others could replicate.

Jansson, for his part, said that the chemists on his team who analyzed the material couldn’t see any clear way that Blacklight might have rigged the tests by somehow storing energy in the Raney nickel. “It would be rather difficult to do this quantity of heat storage chemically in this material,” said Jansson. “We would have seen significant changes.”

It should be noted that Jansson has been aware of Blacklight for years, and even acted as an advisor for an energy company that ultimately made a strategic investment, but it appears to have no unethical ties, just an ongoing interest. Jansson also professes to be impartial to the existence of hydrinos, saying he’s interested in hearing any “alternative explanation” to the hydrino theory. Mills, for his part, says that he’d like for scientists to independently verify every step of the process, from obtaining the Raney nickel and doping it to the calorimeter tests to prove that the energy bursts really exist. The information needed to run those tests is free to the public, he says; the only thing required is a researcher willing to take the time to puzzle through the process.

Unfortunately, the reactions Jansson’s team is observing produce only a quick burst of intense heat. In a commercialized process, there needs to be a steady output. Mills says he has purposefully kept knowledge of how to loop the reaction within the company, so that his own researchers can remain a step ahead in their work on the 50KW reactor the company earlier announced.

According to Mills, it’s likely that a totally independent researcher will verify the whole process within a year. Meanwhile, the company will start licensing out its energy process, and do work with hydrinos in various chemical applications.
 
How about just throwing that stuff with the "secret sauce" added through a mass spectrometer?

There is no need for a secret process to change the Raney nickel, if it's on the up and up they can patent it and publish it. Since they don't it's clearly a scam. At a guess, they hide some Alkali metals in it.
 
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If it's that easy, then why didn't the Rowan researchers twig to it?

Tho that whole "loop" thing has an aroma to it, certainly. But then that *is* what you'd be looking to keep proprietary until you're ready to go commercial.
 
Thanks for the links, Geo. In this day and age, I can't think that it's easy to secure $60M in financing without something substantial behind it. His confidence that others will be reproducing his work soon is also rather unusual for free energy "inventors".

To be clear, I'm not convinced at all, but I think it's something I'd like to keep an eye on.
 
I'd also be wondering if there's enough R-Ni in the world to really go large scale with this even if it turns out to do exactly what he says it does. Is it consumed by the process? At what rate?

I find the Cold Fusion connection interesting, as it never was conclusively decided exactly what happened there. Perhaps he has stumbled on some previously unknown properties or principle (and may not even really understand correctly the theory behind it, just how it works functionally). . . . of course, even if he has that doesn't necessarily mean it is commercially viable on a large scale.

But yeah, $60M of venture capital isn't chicken feed. Then again, the Bernie Madoff story shows how even what should be sophisticated investors can be had by a skilled conman over a period of many years --and sometimes startlingly easily so.

But anyway, as you say, worth keeping an eye on.
 
It's not a perpetual motion machine. Mills claims that hydrogen has "fractional" states below the ground state as derived from Shrödinger's equation. These fractional states supposedly have a stronger binding energy so creating them would release energy.

Mills' theoretical framework isn't Lorence invariant, fails to reproduce the known energy levels of hydrogen, does not have any solutions that correspond to the claimed "fractional" hydrino states and his model of the electron contradicts direct observations of atomic orbitals. This does not bode well for the likelyhood of him having found what he claims to have found.
 
Looking for free energy seems like a fools errand. I think we are better looking for energy as a byproduct of something else.
Recently heard an article on Sequestering CO2, where they basically combine the CO2 with a magnesium silicate, to form Magnesium Carbonate and Silica. The reaction requires the CO2 be heated to about 30 degrees C before the reaction will take place, but once started the reaction is self sustaining as it produces quite a lot of heat (185 degrees C). Nothing was mentioned in the article about using this heat as a form of energy, but it seems a logical step to me....

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/news/news/1516/

CC
 
Bumping this thread with a new research report from Rowan University:

http://www.blacklightpower.com/Press Releases/BlackLightPowerPhysicsGrandSlamFINAL081209.htm

http://www.blacklightpower.com/pdf/RowanHydrinoReport2009.pdf

First one is PR, second is science-talk from Rowan.

The main difference this time is Rowan constructed all the materials themselves from "commercially available materials" instead of taking a "black box" handed over by BLP and testing that. Of course, that's a pretty significant difference --this time Rowan University has foreclosed their own retreat; they can no longer just claim to have been duped by unscrupulous BLP playing tricks on them.

Something very, very interesting is going on here. I'm still skeptical, but not dismissive. The Board of Directors is a pretty impressive group of guys too: http://www.blacklightpower.com/exec_summary.shtml Tho money-men, mostly. They'll look shocked and cry "we aren't scientists; we were duped!" if it all goes south.

Right now I call the odds of the final outcome: 45% scam; 30% something new and theoretically interesting in a nichey and limited usefullness and scalability way that the inventors themselves don't really grasp the details of yet; and 25% "the world will never be the same". But man, how often do you get even a 25% shot at that latter? Not often.

But hell, any of those turns into a very interesting story at the end!

And, shame on me, but I'm not particularly scared by the theorists who say it is impossible. That's what theorists bound by their own context do just before major theoretical inflection points. They can really do nothing else. Of course, they also do that when they're right. :)
 
So let me get this straight:
Reaction gives out a 'quick burst of intense heat' that is more than any known reactions between the reactants.
You 'just apply heat to regenerate'.
Sounds kind of like some sort of latent heat/phase change setup :?:

I have 2 questions that need enumerated answers for this to be legit:
How much heat energy comes out? (They say something about 30KW)
How much heat (or other forms of) energy goes in to regenerate?

I'll bet its more energy in required than what you get out.

The several hundred degrees for many hours that they use in manufacture could be a factor there too? Especially if its a similar scale of energy to what goes in for regeneration.
 
Right now I call the odds of the final outcome: 45% scam; 30% something new and theoretically interesting in a nichey and limited usefullness and scalability way that the inventors themselves don't really grasp the details of yet; and 25% "the world will never be the same". But man, how often do you get even a 25% shot at that latter? Not often.

I think your 25% chance of violating the second law of thermodynamics is a tad too high. As in 24.99999999999999% too high.

Cheers
 
Oh, if they do something cool you'll figure out how it didn't really violate the 2nd Law, chide me for ever suggesting that it did --and then having happily swallowed your own tail wander off shaking your head sadly about whatever would Geo do without you to explain these simple things.
 
I would be perfectly fine with a nice easy, clean & cheap way to tap into the Earth/Solar magnetic field, gravity well, rotational momentum, solar energy or similar non-2nd law violating technology :D

Just I don't like to see people try & bullshit about it being some sort of magic or something.
 
We tap gravity power already pretty much in hydroelectric dams... :) Not sure I would want us to leech off of the earth's magnetic field, since it protects us from cosmic radiation. Nor do I think it's that great an idea to somehow steal rotational momentum. :p

We're not THAT badly in need of energy, not when we have a gigantic ball of luminous plasma sitting just a couple light-minutes away from us. :)
 
Thanks for the links, Geo. In this day and age, I can't think that it's easy to secure $60M in financing without something substantial behind it.

Not really. A few years back a guy got double that for a "new efficient means for producing hydrogen" that was basic electrolysis in a fancy package.
 
Didn't realize this was thread resurrection, but there's no way this real. This guy has a "Grand Unified Theory" based on classical dynamics that's "completely determinant" (impossible) and he's a medical school grad using chemistry experiments to prove his complex physics claims. Cold fusion was more convincing. The only external verification was done by a collaborator using BlackLight's equipment.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/loser-hot-or-not/1

Utter garbage
 
And what about the inert hydrogen?
the only way i can figure it out would be 1positron + 1electron if thats possible
 
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