Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 17:36:15 -0800 (PST)
Subject: PKF: New Energy, New Physics, part 2 of 3
Subject: New Energy, New Physics, part 2 of 3
Date: Feb 2, 1998
From: artr-AT-juno.com (Art B Rosenblum)
Part 2
Interview with Dr. Randdell Mills on New Energy, New Physics
AR: Right. Well, it sounds extremely interesting and has a lot
to do with the future of the planet as I see it, because a major
part of our planetary problems is fighting over oil.
RM: Yes, do you want to talk about a really interesting - we
hired this guy, Jim Kendall, who's working out - I mean in
terms of your audience, I think this is really a fascinating
concept that he's working on now for our system designs. We just
hired him, we're very lucky to get him.
AR: What's his name?
RM: Jim Kendall. He's a PhD Engineer type and the thing
that's really interesting is he's working on this concept - the
terms of the technology is already available. You know all the
cars are out there in the parking lot, I don't know where you are
now, but you know all these cars sitting around these parking
lots, sitting in driveways and all that. You know a car is a
very substantial power station. You could actually take an
internal combustion engine and put a generator on it and you can
run your car with electric motors, right? That's what these
hybrid vehicles.
AR: Yes, hybrid is so much more efficient than -
RM: Well, that's what they're talking about. They're actually
talking about using some internal combustion engine with a
generator and electric motors, right? Well, they have fuel
cells or people at Capstone for example out in Torrence, is
looking at like mini-turbine type of things.
Well, if you ran the internal combustion engine in that mode,
you'd have so much carbon monoxide and all kinds of pollutants
that you couldn't even breathe. Secondly, the gasoline would be
so phenomenally expensive and we'd run out of gasoline probably
in about ten years, or twenty years.
AR: You mean if everybody in the world lives like we do?
RM: No, I meant if everyone ran their electrical generation off
the automobile, too.
AR: Right.
RM: But, if you are using our process - and gasoline's
very expensive, relative to coal. The reason we have
centralised power plants is because you have economy of
scale for fuel. Because you could take these huge truckloads or
train loads of coal like the Brunner Island plant outside
Harrisburg uses 100 carloads a day at 100 tons per carload.
That's a lot of gasoline, you know, if you are going to look at
that equivalent. That's one power plant.
But the concept is you'd have one of these Blacklight Power
cells, making maybe 200 kW thermal and then you'd have a hybrid
vehicle, you'd put that into an external combustor gas turbine
with a generator on line, so you'd make electricity and you'd
run down the road with electric motors. Then you'd park it and
you'd plug your car into the grid and it would continue to run
and it would create about 40 kW electric that would go out on the
grid. And you would get a credit for it and then here at home
when you are drawing down juice you'd get a debit and the utility
company wouldn't even own a power plant. I mean, there's enough
cars put out on the road in the United States to more than match
the entire electrical generating capacity of the United States.
AR: I got your point. OK, that's very clear. So how close are
we to actually producing a fuel cell working with this system
that would -
RM: It's not a fuel cell; it's a gas power cell. A fuel cell
is actually a battery, you put hydrogen and oxygen in and then
you make the hydrogen. Now if you made hydrogen from electrolysis
of water, you'd actually use about four times more fossil fuel
that burning it directly.
AR: I know that but I don't care about the words - fuel cell -
that's right it's a gas cell.
RM: Yes, that's right, just call it a gas power cell, hydrogen
power cell. How close are we? Well, the theory's all worked out,
the validations are worked out, the lower energy hydrogen's
been identified, that is a product, and we have power
densities equivalent to many electrical power plants and
running at temperatures comparable to many electrical power
plants. And we're getting validated energy balance of a
thousand times the energy of burning hydrogen. So we know the
process works and now it's just the time it takes to
retro-fit that into existing technology. We don't have to invent
anything new, we're using vacuum furnaces and we're going to
use external combustor gas turbines, so it's just a matter
of retro-fitting it into existing technology.
So depending on how fast we are at executing that plan and
how fast we are getting partners to push that agenda forward it
could happen very quickly. And the thing is, right now we're
working on 100kW thermal unit up at Thermacore in Lancaster.
Once we got that then you can put that into cars, you can
put that into distributor power generation, that could
meet in developing countries where they don't have transmission
lines, that could meet an enormous percentage of the market.
AR: Right.
RM: We're probably about six months from having that built.
AR: Six months from having that built?
RM: Right.
AR: Wow! Well, that is extremely interesting and I will let
my brother know all about this and it's just fantastic.
RM: You'll be able to get some good stuff off the web.
There's some summary there that you could cut to put into an
article. We put up a couple of articles there, one that the
Lancaster paper - Sunday News' ran and I thought was a
really good job, that Reuters put out on the news wire.
AR: That's what I have.
RM: Yes, I think between all those, you'll probably get
some good information.
Interview with Dr Mills at Blacklight Power Company in Malvern:
( We now break into a personal interview)
AR: And if this is so then, in the next few years, systems
will be developed as you spoke of, that cars that can run on
practically nothing for energy. Energy will be the cheapest
thing in the world, not as cheap as water but that we won't have
a big problem with it.
RM: Fuel will be cheap. I wouldn't say energy would be, it's
going to cost something because of capital equipment to
create electricity or to create motive power from the fuel is
still going to - it will vary. We have to convert thermal
energy into either motor power or electrical power, and that
requires a piece of hardware and we're using existing
hardware, namely gas turbines and steam turbines which are
reasonably expensive. Compared to the fuel that the vehicle or
the fuel that a power plant would use, or the right kind of power
plant, the fuel outweighs the cost of the capital equipment,
but albeit capital equipment is still a major cost.
AR: Yeah, but that can come down. How would you say it compares
with solar energy?
RM: Oh solar energy is very expensive because the capital
equipment costs are so unbelievably high. So you understand the
basic process. We're taking hydrogen and making another chemical?
AR: Alright, now I don't know if anything is still secret if you
are applying for a patent, presumably you reveal the secret,
right?
RM: Yes.
AR: And so you've already got one in Australia, I understand?
RM: Yes.
AR: So the secret, there's no secret any more?
RM: No secret.
AR: How then do you convert the hydrogen at low pressure,
and I don't know what temperature, to hydrinos and you've got the
power. I know you have potassium as a catalyst but what exactly
do you feed into the chamber that makes this happen?
RM: Well we need atomic hydrogen.
AR: Which means separate from molecular hydrogen?
RM: You can make atomic hydrogen from molecular hydrogen by
dissociation, which is a commonly-known process.
AR: Using an electric arc?
RM: You can make atomic hydrogen using electric arc, you can
make it cheaper and more efficiently in terms of capital cost and
energy balance if you make atomic hydrogen by just dissociating
it on refractory metals at high temperature. For instance if you
take tungsten at elevated temperature, it will break,
automatically break molecular hydrogen into atomic hydrogen.
AR: Something like the tungsten filament in a bulb?
RM: Tungsten filament in a bulb will do it perfectly fine. The
tungsten filament in a bulb is in a vacuum and if you
introduce low pressure hydrogen in there, a certain fraction
of the hydrogen in that bulb will be atomic hydrogen.
AR: I got it. OK, and then what happens?
RM: Then we take the potassium and you have to have it run very
hot. So we run potassium ions, you need potassium plus ions -
AR: Hydrogen ions?
RM: Plus hydrogen atoms. And we vaporize the potassium ions.
They're actually heated up, everything has a vapor pressure -
like this desk, the varnish on this desk, if you had a mass
spectrometer in this room - everything in this room would have a
vapor pressure. We heat these metals up, they boil off and
eventually -
AR: That's what happens in a vacuum tube.
RM: Right, you boil off and you get the continuou - well
vacuum deposition is a commonly known process. So in the
vacuum, you heat up the potassium, it vaporizes,
contacts hydrogen atoms, and there is a resonant transfer of
energy, that is, there's a match in the energy level of the
hydrogen atom to the difference in energy of two potassium
ions for the reaction of electron being transferred from
one potassium ion to another. The potassium ions have other
electrons they can be ionised. If you take away the second
electron from the potassium ion, it causes an electron to
reduce the first potassium ion so one goes to K2 plus and the
other one goes to K0. The energy to do that is 27.2 eV. That is
the potential energy of a hydrogen atom when it's in its
first non-radiative state.
So the potential energy of the hydrogen atom is equal to the
energy for transferring electrons from one potassium plus ion to
another potassium plus ion. So that hydrogen atom forms that
potential energy state spontaneously by emitting light and you
can have it form other, stable, non-radiative states by
transferring, in this case, non-radiatively 27.2
eV to something else that will accept 27.2 eV.
In the process the electron of the hydrogen atom undergoes
a transition to another stable state and part of the energy
is transferred resonantly to this catalyst, the rest of it can
come out as radiation within the vacuum. In fact, you can see
those extreme uv lines in solar flares, in the solar corona, you
can see it in the dark interstellar media. There's quite a
lot of spectroscopy of unassigned lines in the extreme uv
in astrophysics, but those transitions match exactly. That is the
transitions of taking some of the energy out of hydrogen
and it becomes unstable and emits the rest as light. The
energy levels are given by the Rydberg formula. It describes the
principal energy levels of the hydrogen atom and the
transitions between these principal energy levels gives the
light frequencies that come off spontaneously. It turns
out, those states correspond to integers in that formula and the
states that we're talking about correspond to fractions in the
same formula.
It's not any fraction it's 1/I where I is an integer.
Those are the fractional states, we have one half, a third,
a fourth, a fifth.
AR: This is physics/math that I don't really understand,
so what I want to know is something I can understand, like what
then happens? Say you have a combustion chamber of a certain size?
RM: You can think of it as a combustion chamber when you think
of a gaseous reaction like inside the cylinder of a car, but this
would be much lower pressure, and be very hot right after the
ignition inside the cylinder, so you have vapourised catalyst then
hydrogen atoms that have formed because there's a refractory metal
like a tungsten film and it's very hot, breaks the molecules
into atoms, they contact the catalyst and by contacting the
atoms with the catalyst energy is transferred from the hydrogen
to the potassium just as when you contact hydrogen atoms and
oxygen atoms you get combustion. Here if you contact potassium
ions and hydrogen atoms you get hydrogen going to a lower
energy state -
AR: And the potassium getting hotter?
RM: The potassium takes away part of the energy - Oh, it gets
hotter in the sense that it goes to a higher energy state,
gives off that energy to the system and returns back to
potassium ions, so it serves as a catalyst.
AR: In the vacuum, how does the hydrino then go off, or does it
stay until you somehow take it out?
RM: Well, once you've formed fractional atomic hydrogen, it has
what they call binding energy', that is the energy it takes to
remove the electron to form a free electron and a proton. It
has a binding energy that's a multiple of 27.2 eV. So
when I told you we had to absorb 27.2 to cause the
catalysis of hydrogen to the lower states. Well, once you
have formed the hydrogen itself in that lower state it has
a binding energy of a multiple of 27.2, so it can become
its own catalyst, it's auto-catalytic.
AR: The hydrogen atoms gradually become, or quickly become
hydrinos?
RM: Yes and they become auto-catalytic to form lower and lower
states of hydrinos until one of two things happens. Either two
hydrinos react and form a di-hydrino, a molecule, which is stable
and doesn't burn and we haven't seen any chemical reactivity at
all from this new form of hydrogen, or it's so small it just
diffuses out of the system.
AR: Through the container?
RM: Right through the container as if it's much smaller than
helium and it'll go right through the container.
AR: Much smaller than hydrogen atoms too?
RM: Smaller than hydrogen atoms, smaller than helium.
AR: Through the spaces between the atoms -
RM: In the container, yes.
RM: Just as if you had a balloon and if you fill it with
helium after a while the gas will leak out of the balloon.
Because the helium is small and it's neutrally charged so
eventually it leaks out.
AR: But hydrogen is still smaller than helium?
CONTINUED IN PART 2
MILLS INTERVIEWS: PART 2 (Continued from Part 1)
AR: But hydrogen is still smaller than helium?
RM: No, hydrogen is bigger than helium. The one half hydrino is
about the size of a helium atom.
AR: The one half hydrino, meaning a hydrino that hasn't lost all
of its energy -
RM: No. You have normal hydrogen, so let's talk about the
fractional states, you have normal hydrogen. Normal hydrogen has
a principle quantum number of n is 1 and that has the size of
the radius of the hydrogen atom which is 5.29 times 10 (to
the minus 11) metres. And helium is about .56 that size. It's
about half the size. Now the hydrino, one half, is half the
size of normal hydrogen, or .5 the radius of the hydrogen atom.
AR: I see, so it's like a helium?
RM: Very close to the size of the helium atom.
AR: I never knew that heliums were smaller than the
hydrogen atoms.
RM: Helium atoms are smaller.
AR: OK, cause they have neutrons, I would assume -
RM: It does. Yes, but that's the nucleus. The nucleus has
neutrons but the electron is what determines the size.
AR: I get it, so the orbital size of a hydrino is much
smaller than that of a hydrogen atom?
RM: Half the size, yes. And then if you go to one third,
it's one third the size, one fourth, the lower and lower you go in
energy it gets to be a fractional size of normal hydrogen.
AR: I see. Now what gives a thousand times the power
burning hydrogen?
RM: On average we are going down to the 1 over 10 to the 1 over
20th level of hydrogen. So we'd have a hydrino say 1 over 15
would be the quantum level that goes in the Rydberg formula to
describe its binding energy. That is the energy it takes to
remove the electron. Actually there's this infinite formula that
goes back to the 1800s, 13.6 over n squared. All the energy
levels of hydrogen that are spontaneously radiative fit that
formula where the n is 1,2,3, an integer.
AR: Again, we're talking mathematics.
RM: But this is important to understand, because you are talking
about the size and I'm telling you that fractional quantum
numbers that go into the energy formula are the same fractional
numbers that describe its size relative to hydrogen.
AR: So the container that you have, the stainless steel container
-
RM: You can use stainless steel, yes. You can use
molybdenum, or tungsten or stainless steel. You have to run
this at very high temperatures, so you need something that will
run to high temperatures. Stainless steel is pretty good.
AR: That's what aircraft exhaust systems are made of.
RM: Oh, it would work for some of our cells, it would melt under
the conditions that other of our cells work at.
AR: Would you use a ceramic?
RM: No we'd use either molybdenum or tungsten.
AR: Tungsten, OK. Tungsten can stand very high temperatures.
RM: 3000 degrees centigrade.
AR: And so, does it happen that the container heats up to
temperatures like 3,000 degrees?
RM: The container runs at - the ones we have run - we had center
line of 2,000 degrees C and the outer stainless steel part of it
was 850 degrees centigrade. With the one we're designing now, the
container wall itself will be at 2,000 degrees.
AR: I see. and then, that heat is taken off by -
RM: Heat exchangers and then it can be used in a gas turbine.
And the gas turbine can be used to turn a generator, or generate
motor power. Standard conversion.
AR: OK, if you've got heat, there are ways to produce
electricity.
RM: Yes, this is a cheap way of making heat.
AR: You continue to feed in hydrogen and does all the
hydrogen you feed in at a controlled rate, no doubt, change to
hydrinos or just a fraction of it?
RM: A pretty large percentage of it.
AR: But the rest would tend to fill up the chamber, right?
RM: No. What we feed in there - we've done batch studies
where you put in hydrogen and leave it in there till the reaction
stops. So all the hydrogen in that cell is eventually
consumed to make hydrinos.
AR: I see. And you just let the hydrinos go ...
RM: They diffuse out eventually, yes.
AR: Eventually, can the process run continuously?
RM: It can run continuously, also. We've done that.
Where you feed in new hydrogen.
AR: Right. At a controlled rate, just as fast as it's needed?
RM: Yes. So you have very low mass because you get a tremendous
amount of energy per atom so you don't need very many atoms.
AR: Right, I understand. Then the next step is just efficient
use of the heat that's produced and engineers have worked at that
for a long, long time.
RM: That's correct, we are working on that now. And there's
are a lot of very interesting technologies to which this lends
itself. One of the things we're looking at, we're looking at a
couple of scenarios, of course, there is retro-fit of central
power plants where you just take an existing boiler and you justy
put in our gaseous reactor that converts hydrogen to lower
energy hydrogen and generates power on a large scale and either
turns a gas turbine or a steam turbine to make electricity.
The other scenario is that we would look at distributive
power, or we make maybe 1 megawatt units and we put the
little power generators out at the locations where you have
sub-stations today and they would generate power for, say,
200 homes or several businesses.
AR: Assuming, water is available, does the water have
to be specially pure?
RM: No, any kind of water will do. As long as it's
water that has hydrogen in it.
AR: I lived 12 years in Paraguay and I've been in other
countries, Cuba for instance,which is much much more advanced than
Paraguay.
RM: Yes, I'd say so, they're kind of having some economic
problems right now, but you'd know more about that.
AR: They had severe economic problems three or four years ago,
they are pretty well over that.
RM: That's good news.
AR: It's great and everybody is educated.
RM: That's a good point.
AR: Everybody can read and they would jump on this
energy system.
RM: They're probably in need of energy, especially
since the Russians kind of cut back on their supplies.
AR: Right, they've been thinking of finishing this
nuclear power plant that was started by the Russians -
RM: Probably don't have the technology.
AR: They found some oil, but it's not the best quality. They do
need energy and they have energy but where near what they need
and I don't know if you'd be, at what point, maybe not now, but at
some point, you would be willing to allow Cuban scientists to come
here and -
RM: Well, I'd have to look into that. I think there's
some export restrictions still.
AR: Oh yes, export you can't -
RM: On a scientific basis, I could talk to them.
Export I think there's still restrictions.
AR: I've got the Government restrictions here, I've got the
Treasury Department stuff and there's huge loopholes, you know you
could fly a Cessna through the loopholes. What's prohibited is
doing business. Every other country can do business with Cuba
but we can't.
RM: So you could probably do business through the other
companies in other countries.
AR: If you are established with any other country you have no
problem. But scientists, Cuban scientists can come here and
learn everything and do the work there, but maybe not be able
to pay you. That might be the problem.
RM: Yes, I don't think we have problems with Cuba anyhow, I
don't think they're PCT signatories. Have you got any more
questions?
AR: Yes, I have lots of questions. The thing that surprises
me greatly is that the military of this country hasn't come down
on you and said: "This is a military secret."
RM: Well, I think it's still controversial, I think in
time the military will see some applications, to it, but right
now we aren't working with the military or contemplate it at
any time in the near future, we're just working on developing
it as a new civilian type of energy source, From a
business perspective.
AR: I've heard rumors, I don't know the facts, I heard rumors
that some other inventions have been concealed in that way.
RM: No, this one hasn't.
AR: Right. And from what I understand, from what you've
already told me, when the patent is published here, presumably
anybody could do what you are doing?
RM: That's correct. Under licence they could.
AR: But to be legally doing it, you'd have to license them.
RM: That's correct.
AR: But the information would be out there and if they chose to
do it illegally you couldn't stop them except by suing them.
RM: That's correct.
AR: But, at the same time, it's clear that ultimately it will be
possible for the people to have it, whether big corporations do or
not?
RM: Well, we're working on these two distributive power schemes.
There'd be personal units. You'd have one for your home, you'd
have one for business and office and the other one is clustered,
what they call distributive power and that is when you have a
unit, say at the sub-station, which may feed 20 businesses or 200
homes, this is the megawatt unit which will feed up to 200 homes.
And then the other form of individualised power that I like the
best, for the long term, is that an automobile, if it had a
generator, it would generate about 100 kW electric and there are
10 million new vehicles made a year which would give you a
thousand billion watts. Now the total electrical generating
capacity of the United States is only 600 billion watts. So
every year you have new cars coming off the assembly line, and
when you park your vehicle you would plug the wire into the grid
and it would generate 100kW electricity and you'd be paid for
the electricity.
AR: And what that means to me, and it would me, having lived in
other countries is that one vehicle in a village could supply
power for the whole village.
RM: The whole village, that's correct. In fact, 100 kW is a
lot. 100kW could heat would be about 20 homes, American homes.
AR: Then it means that you'd have a mobile power station and one
could drive to every village in every country of the world.
RM: Well, if you look around at the parking lots, you go down to
Philadelphia, people have $20, $30,000 dollar investment in cars,
and they're not making them any money. They're using them 3
percent of the time , and they park in a garage or in a parking
lot. You'd have a strip going down the parking lot; people plug
their cars in and there's a system already that will recognise
which car it is and give you a credit, while you're selling
juice back to the power company and when you use this electricity
you'll get a debit.
So the electric utility in the future would be more or less like
a re-sell of power. You could generate more than $10,000 worth
of electricity with your car and you could do that today if you
put an electrical generator on your car, the problem is that the
gasoline would cost more than what the coal cost to make the
electricity. Plus the antendant pollution -
AR: We don't have to worry about that. That's not going to
happen.
RM: Well, this could make that technology happen. It's all in
place, I mean the power conversion equipment, you step up the
voltage, step down the voltage, change the frequency. All that's
in place.
AR: I know all that stuff.
RM: The computer technology can handle all the debiting
and crediting.
AR: My question is different. The two of us, if your secretary
could take a photo of us ?
RM: Oh, sure, Let her take a picture and I'll give you some
pictures of the live equipment.
AR: One other question. Say you have a power plant in a car. How
long will that power plant hold up, before the tungsten or the
other parts deteriorate from the heat and have to be replaced?
RM: Well, that's a good question. Those questions are things we
have to answer. There aren't any moving parts, so it should be
possible that that shouldn't be the weak link. Now, if you do
look at the next weak link, the turbine, turbines of the air
bearing kind, those mini-trubines, they will run a phenomenally
long time. At least for motor power applications. Capstone, for
example, is looking into putting turbines in to replace internal
combustion engines using fossil fuel. And, those turbines should
last a lifetime. Turbines are run for an extremely long time.
Your next question was about electric motors. Well,
electric motors are very, very resilient also.
AR: My question is your generating system for producing the heat,
how long will that hold up?
RM: We don't see any problems with it being a weak link in
the technology, so that's really good.
AR: That answers my question. Stainless steel, for instance
which is the cheapest that you've mentioned, could hold out
alifetime and not get burned out, corroded...
RM: Well, we're working on that but we don't see any problems
with that at the time being.
AR: OK, so that's a developed field that would hold up?
RM: And there's no moving parts in that.
AR: I understand, there's no moving parts.
RM: You have the heat exchanger, the vacuum vessel. Then we have
the electrolyser but for the amount of hydrogen that would have
to electrolyse for example a tank of water with a thousand times
the energy of burning hydrogen. Which we are seeing in the lab
now and we have that independently validated. A tank of water
for a 200 hp automobile going 60 mph., that tank would take you
100,000 miles.
So the electrolyser doesn't look like that's going to be a
weak link either, because it doesn't use very much hydrogen.
AR: I'm interested in how airplanes would work on this?
RM: Well, probably use a turbine engine, but you'd have to make a
very high powered and very compact heat exchanger and you'd pull
the air in, and the same way the gas turbine would work in the
automobile you'd have a gas turbine in the airplane.
AR: This is just a total revolution for the planet.
RM: It is, it represents an unbelievable - if you are going to
design an energy source, you couldn't design anything better.
AR: Exactly.
RM: Because the planet is essentially made out of water, and
the amount you would use up would take thousands and thousands of
years just to remove the water from the biosphere that burning
fossil fuels put the atmosphere in the first place.
AR: We wouldn't have to worry about the water situation.
RM: No there's billions and billions - inexhaustible.
AR: My operation is a shoestring operation. I just depend on the
lord somehow if I work for the universe, the universe works for
me. I have an income, presently from a trust my mother left of
about $12,000 a year
RM: OK.
AR: And we have a family of four; that supports us well enough -
and people ask how can you own an airplane on that income.
Well, people donate, you know we got a twelve hundred dollar
radio in the airplane just recently donated by Icom.
RM: How nice.
AR: And I'm looking forward to a donation of good GPS and there
are various things they hear what I'm doing, when they read about
this, they're gonna donate more.
RM: Could be.
AR: This is beyond everything.
RM: Yeah, a pile of information from us.
AR: I'm serving the planet in ways that they are not able to do
at this time; some are in some way and people appreciate it and
they help me.
[OK, that's about the end of the personal interview, we then went
and took some pictures and now here's another phone
call with Dr Mills]
Continued in part 3
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