Device Update

New Energy Research Laboratory Device and Process Testing Update
Published in IE Volume 8, Issue #45, September/October 2002
by Eugene F. Mallove
As Ken Rauen related in this column in our last issue, proprietary projects (not within the cold fusion/LENR area) are now the central focus of NERL efforts. We are also performing consulting work now on a number of fronts— especially in advanced emerging conventional technologies that will be helpful to the environment and energy situation.

At present, we are taking a break from efforts to find and market cold fusion/LENR demonstration devices. We at NERL are reassessing the field. The cold fusion field itself has had, by and large, little interest or enthusiasm for the critical demonstration device goal, and it is not within our financial or time constraints to develop such devices "from scratch." The main focus of virtually all cold fusion researchers, it seems to us, is to conduct basic scientific research, publish papers, and attend cold fusion conferences. These researchers wish to wait for the day when the knowledge base and understanding of LENR is great enough to deal with technological devices. Moreover, cold fusion research is at present significantly empirically based and not especially amenable to predicting new physical systems in which the nuclear-scale excess heat phenomenon will emerge. (This is not so, for example, in the work on hydrino physics that is being carried out at BlackLight Power Corporation. A review of the technical papers posted on its website, www.blacklightpower.com, suffices to show that.)

Others are presently circulating business plans that would attempt to take some of the better cold fusion experiments and commercialize them as costly "workstation" test beds in an effort to ignite wider interest in cold fusion/LENR. That is a good idea and we wish them well, but it would be much better, I think, if smaller capital resources were sought such that these devices could be marketed immediately to industrial laboratories. These companies could be interested in entering the field if they saw clear, hands-on evidence of the nuclear-scale excess heat phenomenon.

This "bootstrap method" has its problems, of course: it requires basic capital to put together systems for sale that are costly relative to the typical cold fusion investigator's resources. And, success is not assured. The all-important power ratio-ratio of output to input power— may not be "sexy" enough in most cold fusion work to entice even some open-minded industrialists to embrace the field. Look at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, as an example. It has one of the world's best, repeatable LENR experiments in house, yet there is no evidence that it is about to charge off to develop LENR/cold fusion technologies. The Mitsubishi investigators have all they can do to convince their management to allow them to continue their present work.

There are severe limitations in a one to two person laboratory facility (NERL) to adequately address the variety of devices that should be looked into with the thoroughness that they deserve. We are proud that through a sometimes painful learning process we have so far explored territory that gives us a good idea of what is likely to be promising and what not. This is a good foundation for the future. From now on, our standard for hands-on examination of devices from the outside will be much higher. We will first have to be shown compelling evidence for over-unity conditions. We will not be in the business of finding the gross (or subtle) mistakes of others.

From now on we will concentrate our efforts on devices that already have predictable, quantifiable effects based on several lines of advanced physical theory. As special funding for these efforts allows, we will be working on proprietary device technologies in two areas:

1) What we call "advanced thermodynamics"— energy devices that are under the rubric of extensions and modifications of the "Second Law," and

2) Other devices that are not within the New Hydrogen Energy Physics (NHEP) paradigm (cold fusion, LENR, hydrino), which at first appearance are purely electrical in character. NERL has filed its first patent in the first of these areas.

Demonstration devices (based on ones that work robustly already) are already possible, but must be withheld for now until patent application issues are resolved and additional dedicated funding for this direction is acquired. Interested parties with significant interest in and knowledge of the boundaries of conventional thermodynamics may wish to learn about this work under a tight Non-Disclosure Agreement.