Monday, October 3, 2011

Fleischmann Pons, II

It appears that I was on the right track yesterday in one regard.  I put together this chart, which summarizes the reactions in a more succinct manner:

The reaction product is an unstable isotope of silver, it beta decays and transmutes back into palladium at 102, 104.  At 105, silver is stable, at higher masses, it transmutes into cadmium.


It appears that the reactions get more vigorous as you go down the chain.  That is to say, the energy produced per minute is higher because of the increasingly shorter half lives.

The calculation is derived by taking MeV per minute of the half life.   When less than a minute, it was converted to a fraction.  When greater than an hour, it was multiplied by 60 minutes to the hour.

As you can see, once we get to palladium 110, the energy production rapidly diminishes from the peak.  The peak is at 108, just before it.    You could still take out the 105 and 110 isotopes, and just use the rest.

It may well be that I was mistaken about the first isotope.  It it too slow and there isn't enough of it to make a difference.  However, if the best reaction at 108 is underrepresented, it could slow down the overall reaction (maybe).

This discussion leaves off the mechanism of how the fusion takes place, as well as many other details.  It is written as a thought experiment.  Perhaps a real one could be devised to test it.

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