米国DARPAは常温核融合研究の予算を申請

Next Big Future誌に以下の記事が載りました。

JULY 12, 2012
DARPA Nanotech Projects -$34 million investigating cold fusion and excess heat was found
また、この記事を見て、E-Cat Worldにも論点を要約した記事が出ています。

US Military Collaborating With Italian Energy Dept. on Excess Heat Production | E-Cat World via kwout

参照されている元文書の表紙は以下のような感じです。

これは、米国のDARPA（Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency：国防高等研究計画局）のFiscal Year (FY) 2013 President's Budget Submission（２０１３年度予算申請書？）です。この中に、常温核融合研究を含むと思われる研究テーマがあり、予算額は2011年度から2013年度の３年間で約３０億円（約３４百万ドル）です。DARPAが既に２０１１年度から予算計上していたとは驚きです。

但し、このテーマの説明文には、Cold FusionやLENRといった言葉は一度も現れません。しかし、重水素をローディングしたパラジウムの微細構造とか、過剰熱の制御といった、常温核融合にお馴染みの言葉が現れているのです。よくこんな記述を発見したものだと感心します。

注目すべきは、「 excess heat generation and life expectancy of power cells in collaboration with the Italian Department of Energy」と、過剰熱を発生するセルの研究ではイタリアのエネルギー省と協力しているという記述です。関連は不明ですが、ロッシ氏のE-Catの最初の１MWプラントの最終テストがイタリアのボローニャで行われ、そこからどこか秘密の顧客に納品された事を思い出します。

以下、元の文書から該当部分を引用します（赤字は引用者によります）。

Title: 

Fundamentals of Nanoscale and Emergent Effects and Engineered Devices

Description: 

The Fundamentals of Nanoscale and Emergent Effects and Engineered Devices program seeks to understand and exploit physical phenomena for developing more efficient and powerful devices. This includes developing devices and structures to enable controllable photonic devices at multiple wavelengths, engineering palladium microstructures with large deuterium loadings to study absorption thermodynamics and effects, enabling real-time detection as well as analysis of signals and molecules and origin of emergent behavior in correlated electron devices, and developing stabilization and scale-up methods to fabricate high pressure crystal structures at low pressures. Arrays of engineered nanoscale devices will result in an order of magnitude (10 to 100 times) reduction in the time required for analysis and identification of known and unknown (engineered) molecules. This program will develop novel nanomaterials for exquisitely precise purification of materials, enabling such diverse applications as oxygen generation and desalination, ultra-high sensitivity magnetic sensors, and correlated electron effects such as superconductivity. This program will compare the phenomenology of various biological, physical and social systems and abstract the common features that are responsible for their properties of self-organization, emergent behavior, and physical intelligence.

FY 2011 Accomplishments:

• Demonstrated a 50 percent yield for the fabrication of the magnetic sensors based on multiferroic composites, in a lot size of 10 units which have outputs (volt/tesla values) within 10 percent of the specification.
• Demonstrated a 50 percent yield for the fabrication of the magnetic sensors based on atomic vapor cells, in a lot size of 10 units which have outputs (volt/tesla values) within 10 percent of the specification.
• Demonstrated a multiferroic magnetic sensor with an optical circuit read-out.
• Determined the  requirements for a unified theory for a non-biological system to demonstrate biological-like physical intelligence and showed how it is consistent with thermodynamic and other physical principles.
• Using a combination of simulation and real system hardware, conducted limited demonstrations of self-organizing electronic and chemical systems imbedded in environments of limited complexity and responding to environmental pressures.
• Formalized preliminary model systems and evaluated the initial physical intelligence theory's ability to describe the candidate electronic, physical, and chemical systems.
• Refined analytical tools to measure intelligence and demonstrate them on complex, real world systems and their associated data, such as human subject data and social networks.
• Developed more complex demonstrations with multiple stimuli and feedback considerations and extended the theoretical and analytical tools to more complex systems.
• Continued quantification of material parameters that control degree of increase in excess heat generation and life expectancy of power cells in collaboration with the Italian Department of Energy. Established ability to extend active heat generation time from minutes to 2.5 days for pressure-activated power cells.

FY 2012 Plans:

• Verify the initial unified physical intelligence theory and justify its underlying assumptions in the context of model systems that supports the emergence and evolution of novel structure.
• Expand the theoretical effort to include casual entropy and address correlated effects such as self-organized criticality, renormalization, scaling, and punctuated equilibrium.
• Demonstrate the spontaneous, abiotic evolution and complex spatial and temporal organization in electro-chemical-physical systems in response to structure and resources from the environment.
• Quantify the emergent hierarchical structures that evolve from the demonstrated electro-chemical-physical systems.
• Demonstrate the ability to design an evolving electro-chemical-physical system and direct its evolution toward specified objectives in the form of a challenge problem or application.
• Initiate development of computational tools to formulate processing pathways to stabilize and scale up high pressure crystal phases.
• Establish scalability and scaling parameters in excess heat generation processes in collaboration with the Italian Department of Energy.

FY 2013 Plans:

• Initiate efforts to identify and characterize metastable solid phases of gaseous materials that have superior mechanical/functional properties.
• Initiate development of synthesis techniques for producing extended solids at temperature and pressures amenable to scale up.

以上