Regards @mfmp
Several things happened:
- The tube is not high alumina and by heating it becomes an electrical conductor.
- The Kanthal A1 wire could come into contact with its neighboring winding producing greater heating in that area.
- The content of the quartz capsule could contain a high vapor pressure element that could explode its reactor, for example selenium or sulfur.
(1) The MFMP conducted a whole series of tests in past years on the conductivity of Alumina and other refractory oxides to test their conductivity changes. Of course the Nernst lamp worked on this principal.
A. The LION reactors are cycled to around 800ºC, though they may actually be a little hotter due to the offset position of the thermocouple and pitch variation on heater windings. We found that the resistance of alumina started to drop much more after 1000ºC
B. Due to the nature of the active agent being thwarted by impedance mis-matches, having a material that changes its resistance may actually be beneficial and allow for transport of the active nucleated core structures to other parts of the reactor in a controlled manner.
(2) The Kanthal was very sparsely spaced - yes there will be some thermal gradients and in much of LENR research that has proved to be a good thing and would be most relevant to the heater coils themselves. In the case of heating the LIONs core, the Kanthals output will be averaged by the fused Quartz, then the Cu and its oxides and then the Alumina core.
(3) The quartz is a cylinder and in analysis tested as quartz. The most interesting and relevant study we have found was this one where a heated quartz cylinder was exposed to Cu in oxygen at an even higher temperature for a long period.