🚀 go-pugleaf

Status #14 Cell 4A3

"Anomalous Cold" kept increasing.  When it got up to the 200 mw level I 
decided that it was time to do something about it.  I opened up the 
calorimeter and while everything was live and continuing to operate, smeared 
my favorite black rubber gunk over the likely leak.  No success.  So I pulled 
the cell out of the spool piece and examined it.  

There were two holes burned through the side.  Looks the like hot catalyst in 
one of the glass tubes got close enough to the side of the cell to burn a hole 
through it.  It is possible that one of the catalyst pieces has jumped out of 
the glass tube and burned its way into the cell wall, but I cannot see clearly 
enough through the semi-opaque polypropylene to say for sure.  

So out came the 5 - minute epoxy.  Not much inside the cell, but it is at 
least a fair patch.  

Now everything is sealed up and again the gas, catalyst temperature, cell 
temperature, and power measurements make sense.  Because some liquid had been 
lost during the long period of operation with the leak, we added 4 cc of the 
boric acid mix.  Accumulated -energy matched the electrolyte loss only to a 
factor of three.  This indicates some vapor loss too.  This addition should 
produce an electrolyte boron content of order 400 ppm.  Since the addition 
there has been a steady accumulation of gas in the cell.  

There is now a small "anomalous heat", 60 mw or so.  With the 35 mw one sigma 
claim, this is not significant, but the cell noise level has gone up to 30 mw 
from  15 mw.  This does seem to be significant, as I have hundreds of hours 
earlier in this run where it was 15 +/-2 mw.  There is a small increasing 
trend, but not possible yet to distinguish the trend from ambient temperature 
effects.  We are roughly at hour 820 of this experiment.   

Tom Droege