Alienentity said:
This gets so confusing, because Harrit's chips look just the same as Millette and Couannier's, yet Millette's have zero elemental Aluminum, ruling out thermite.
Which are primer paint and which aren't?
If none of them are primer paint, then what are they?
What else would be painted onto carbon steel, forming a bilayer chip made of Epoxy, Iron Oxide and Kaolin bonded to the steel?
There are a number of assumptions on your part. Let's look at these two:
1. There isn't elemental Al
The fact is, one lab found it and another didn't. The fact that another lab didn't find it does NOT mean it doesn't exist. It's always an easier claim to say you didn't find something, because they don't have to be "liars" to not find it. But that doesn't mean it isn't there. And yet, the ONLY reason you can point lean on to say it's not there is that Millette's lab didn't find it. You don't have a real criticism with the Harrit group's methods, just their conclusions. And if you're leaning on Couannier for support, then you are hitching your wagon to unicorns. He's somewhere between "Death Rays" and "Vortex Bombs". Not exactly a reliable theorist.
2. The Gray layer is carbon steel.
The only lab who said anything like this was Millette's and they said it was "consistent with carbon steel." Not that it "was carbon steel." Huge difference. If you think those are identical claims, I have some property in Arizona that is "consistent with beachfront property" for sale.
The question of the provenance of the gray material is an important one, but it has not been settled. But the most definitive, easily-conducted test to confirm/disconfirm the red-gray chips as primer paint would be to
get some primer paint, light it up, and see if it produces iron microspheres.
Why neither you nor anyone else has been able to do this is the real mystery. Yet you say this without sarcasm:
Alienentity said:
It almost seems like they don't want to come to a scientific conclusion, but that wouldn't be very nice of them. I'm sure they wouldn't play games like that on such important matters.
What are they hiding? Clearly something has stopped them, but what is it?
What are they hiding, indeed? Why can't any of you who want so badly to dismiss the red-gray chips as primer find a single chip of paint that ignites at 430C and produces iron microspheres?
Not with a BLOWTORCH! If you heat rust and paint chips with a torch, and you find high-temp by-products, you haven't really demonstrated anything. And it's a shame I have to point that out at a site purporting to be about "debunking." And yet, here I am, having to clarify this.
We are looking for paint chips that produce molten iron from a relatively low ignition point. Firing a bunch of rust, iron flakes and paint chips with a blowtorch doesn't differentiate between between by-products of the torch and by-products of the chips themselves. Again, this is common sense. And yet.
The problem is that most paint chips aren't going to ignite at 430C, so it's no surprise not a single one of you who denies the strangeness of the red-gray chips wants to try this experiment properly. I say "most," but probably there aren't any paint chips that ignite at 430C. And if they produce iron microspheres by virtue of their own exotherm, you in fact have successfully dismissed the significance of the red-gray chips!
But no one has done this. And strangely, no one who doubts the significance of the red-gray chips seems interested in doing this. Why is that?
Alienentity said:
DSC can't tell you if thermite is present, it's very misleading to try to use it as a proof.
You're right that the DSC can't tell you if thermite is present. But it CAN tell you ignition point, and that a material is explosive or not. And it can tell you if paint chips have the same reaction. It CAN differentiate the red-gray chips from paint chips. So why are you so averse to using it (or even a conventional oven)? It's as definitive as it's going to get without high energy microscopy/spectroscopy.