Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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This is a calibration of the "Looking for Heat" little robot reactor, built by the late Alan Smith and used by the late Neil Creighton-Gould in his LION series of experiments.

It was established that the type of thermocouples being used are only practical for use between zero and 1000 degrees centigrade; however, they're only really useful long-term up to 800 degrees C, so we are going to manually control with the pulse width modulator to achieve 'active' internal temperatures from 400ºC in steps of 100°C to 900°C, and then see what the Dwyer temperature is for later programmatical control. From prior attempts at calibration, we have seen that the set point thermocouple used for the Dwyer runs well below 800°C even when the internal temperatures are exceeding 1000°C. This should be practical once done for actual experimentation.

There is no active fuel in this calibration, but two thermocouples in the core to determine the real core temperatures in comparison to the control and active monitoring thermocouples.

The fused quartz cylinders are bunged at either end by a ceramic felt, with the heater coil of 15 turns of Kantal or similar heater wire wound around the outside.

The setup includes an Optris PI 160 camera with two zones of 10 by 10 pixels on the top side of the foamed alumina insulation. There are two thermocouples at the back:
- One is connected to the PID controller and is the basis for the temperature target.
- The other is attached to a LabJack T7 Pro, and these are displayed in the bottom right-hand corner.
The power going into the system is captured by a PCE-830, and you can see that in the top right-hand corner as an overview of the layout. The experiment is in a video in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame.