The Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project

At a conference this year, Francesco Celani, a cold fusion researcher, demonstrated a novel wire reactor apparatus.  The apparatus showed what Celani believes to be clear evidence of anomalous heat—more energy coming out of the device, over time, than has been put into it, a central claim of Fleischmann and Pons.

The Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project is a project that started up this year with the aim of assembling a kit that will replicate Celani's experiment.  Celani's device consists of a long glass tube with specially treated wire coiled around a rod of sorts contained within the tube (the composition of the wire is a secret).  The effect is seen when the glass chamber is filled with hydrogen and a current passed through the wire.  Once the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project have the design worked out for their kit, they will make the kit available to universities and third parties for study.

The project's intention is to be transparent in everything they do, and in this spirit they're keeping a regular blog of their progress and are making their data available.  In one of their blog entries, they show a graphic of impedance in the wire versus the temperature in one of the thermocouples over a number of calibration runs.  I downloaded their data and put together the same graphic:

One detail that stands out right away is that they are smoothing their graphs somewhat.

The following columns are available in the calibration data sets:  Date, T_Board, T_Mica, T_GlassIn, T_Well, T_GlassOut, Pressure, Current Blue, Voltage Blue, Power Blue, Impedance Blue, Current Red, Voltage Red, Power Red, Impedance Red, T_Ambient, Pressure, Total Power, T_Mica Rise, T_GlassIn Rise, T_Well Rise and T_GlassOut Rise.

The blog entry with the graphic mentions that an error of +/-3 percent has been calculated with a 95 percent confidence interval from three identical runs (which statistic is being analyzed is not yet clear).  This error level means that they will be looking for at least 3W excess power.  I would like to try to duplicate their calculation of the error.