Thanks to John Littlemist for this link on the Always Open thread (via AlainCo on the LENR Forum).

A paper has been posted on the Italian Cobraf forum which I have not seen before. It’s titled “Progress in Development of an LENR Power Cell for Space” and is written by George Miley and others at Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was presented in the Proceedings of Nuclear & Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS) 2015 which was held in Albuquerque, NM, February 23-26, 2015. George Miley is a long-time LENR researcher and has founded a company, Lenuco, where he focuses on space applications for LENR.

Link to the full paper is here: http://cobraf.com/forum/immagini/R_123597739_1.pdf

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

Anomalous heat, attributed to Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENRs), is obtained by pressurizing metal alloy nanoparticles with deuterium gas. The reactions are enhanced by creation of ultra high-density deuterium clusters in the nanoparticles. Experiments comparing various nanoparticles and plans for a proof-of-principle power unit are presented. Potential applications to space power are briefly discussed.

The experimenters used a small chamber filled with palladium-rich nanoparticles, which were then loaded with deuterium gas. In the experiments described in the paper there is no input energy in the form of heat or electricity applied to the chamber, only pressurization with deuterium gas, followed by depressurization. Below is a figure which shows the temperature readings from three thermocouples (side 1, side 2, and bottom) during the gas loading and unloading in one experiment:

Various experiments were carried out and here here is data presented about the results. The final column is the calculated energy gain.

Here’s the conclusion:

The primary result thus far is that the excess energies obtained in all experiments to date are all well above the maximum estimate of what could be attributed to chemical reactions. The external power/energy involved, such as deuterium gas compression and vacuum pumping, is minimal compared to the output, suggesting very large energy gain. This result then is extremely encouraging relative to this gas-loaded cell becoming a remarkable power unit.

It’s good to see some experimental data from George Miley’s team. There’s a lot to digest in this paper, and I look forward to reading analyses of others. This seems to be a very promising approach to LENR, however in these systems the run time for the experiments is relatively short, with the temperature rises being initially very dramatic, but diminishing over time. The authors state that they have done other work with hydrogen and nickel, but those experiments are not covered in this paper.