10KW LENR demonstrator (new thread)

[Skipjack]

1) output (secondary) flow variability. Averaged over 50 min or so the flow rates are measures varring by 50% or more. We have no idea how they vary on shorter timescale. Clearly, since they vary, the secondary pump is no guarantee of fixed flow. Flow rate was not measured other than at these times. Similarly temp was highly varialbe but measured at only sparse time points.

Variable flow rate combined with variable temp can give larger apparent than actual power.

Alright, I get your thinking now. However, if not controled the effect could just as well got he other way as well and the flow could be higher than average, lowering the measured temp. So if you average everything out, the final result could still be in the same ballpark.
You are right however this does give room to a lot of error and it also makes room for intentional manipulation (e.g. lower the flowrate every time the temperature is measured and increase the floware every time the flowrate is measured). So you definitely have a point there. Didnt they monitor the temperature constantly? I thought they did that?
If so, then this should not matter that much, because at some point the waterflow had to increase for the total amount of water to again match the alleged flowrate.

(2) output thermocouple mounted in thermal contact with heat exchanger, which means output temperature will measure higher than real. This and the low deltaT makes for a very significant, and unknowable, error.

Is a good point, though I think that the max abberation due to this is low enough to be neglected, unless you assume fraud and deliberate manipulation.

(3) "Device producing waves" appears to affect output temp directly. RF can easily corrupt instrumentation due to partial rectification in low voltage sense lines, so we have here another potentially large unknowable error.

That I think is very far fetched. I think that you would really have to target the device deliberately to interact with the measurement results. Otherwise it could just as well cause things to look worse as they are. So again, I would only see it as a means to commit fraud, not as a source of unintentional error.

Of course, these are just the errors apparent from the limited information we have. We should expect other sources of error as well.

Unintentional errors can affect results both ways, though

I just don't see how axil/parallel/etc can see this test as adding to Rossi credibility...

I do. If you read my earlier posts in this and other threads, I was quite sceptical. I am a little less sceptical now.
There are several reasons for that.
It is seems to be a really bad way to commit fraud. Way to complex, to many independent observers involved, to much risk of discovery for to comparably little potential gain. That many scientists at the experiment, chances that one of them would have noticed a fraudulent manipulation would have been very high.
So if Rossi is a fraud, then he is not very good at it. But the fact hat he built such an elborate machine with so many parts and expenses involved and the fact that he can -if he is indeed a fraud- convince that many people speak against him being a bad fraud. It just does not add up.

It would have to be self delusion and the arguments as cited do not work very well with that.

As I said, I think it is now 50:50 chance. 50% that it is real, 25% that it is a fraud and 25% that it is self delusion.

Definitely looks better to me now than it did before the test.
The test was not perfect, but if you weight in the other tests, then the evidence is adding up.

[KitemanSA]

For the LENR hypothesis to be correct you need a combination of unlikely things:

Some mechanism to overcome Coulomb barrier

Four "theoretical" methods discussed already. Muon, ULMN, Polariton, BEC. Some better defined mathematically than others.

Said mechaism to have specific characteristics which prevent anomalous fusion products (high energy photons, electrons, transmutation products) from ever being seen.

Internal conversion can prevent "high energy" photons. The metal casing should prevent observation of IC electrons . There would be no beta decay so no electrons OTHER than IC electrons. And there are MANY statements about transmutation products.

Said mechanism to have charactesristics such that the heat output from its operation is never unambiuously detected.

This is nonsense. LENR could be real and NEVER be "unambigouously detected" if the receiver of the information refused to accept the data as unambiguous. This is a matter of human psycology, not LENR.

...
...
That says, to me, that the LENR collection of results is not a pointer towards a new nuclear reaction pathway.

Ok. So you have not been convinced yet. Well, neither have I. But I try not to let misunderstandings of the sciences delude me into thinking it CAN'T be.

[Axil]

This is a vort post from Akira Shirakawa which shows Rossi explaining the details of his reactor to the invited expert guests

If you zoom the page with your browser's zoom controls (usually CTRL + "+") you will see that the video has a larger resolution than it would seem.

Even better, you could inspect the HTML source and copy/paste the .swf video animation URL into your browser address bar
The same trick works for other videos too, just replace the filename accordingly.

http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0001.swf

Here are all other URLs for everybody's convenience:

http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0002.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0003.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0004.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0005.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0006.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0007.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0008.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0009.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0019.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0020.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0021.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0023.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_0024.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_9909.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_9916.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_9921.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_9981.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_9997.swf
http://www.focus.it/fileflash/energia/f ... I_9998.swf

[Gandalf]

He hasn't shown anything yet but a rusty water boiler. We simply won't know until he opens his reactor and either shows radiation or shows something else. This says nothing to whether he is producing excess heat, but simply that whatever he's doing is not known.

It would be quite possible to demonstrate net energy production if someone experienced in instrumentation and calorimetry were to actually conduct a _real_ demo and/or experiment.

Radiation, transmutation, or 'something else' would also be interesting. But the simplest of things - a sophomore level instrumentation and thermo/heat-mass transfer lab is all it takes. Apparently, this is beyond Mr. Rossi.

[Giorgio]

All these discussions are interesting but really will not help to clarify anything. On the 28th he should show the 1MW plant in operation with an input of 130KW. Let me express what I am thinking it will be the results:

1) The steam coming out from the pipeline resembles the one we saw on the previous videos and the machine does not blow up.
We know the Ecat does not work.

2) The Ecat works and you have a 1Mw thermal machine generating (say) 1100Kg/h steam.
All of these steam has to go out of 2" pipeline according Rossi design.
The machine will most probably blow up.
We now have the proof that the Ecat works and that Rossi, if not the Nobel, will get at least a Darwin Award.

[sparkyy0007]

I wonder if anyone at the demo in Rossi's lab thought to analyze the dust from the bottom of their shoes.

[bk78]

@Kiteman: Good luck collecting enough Karma to change the laws of the universe, but as long as there are asholes like me, I fear, you wont be successful. I find this so funny that I compensate at least 10 of your kind :p.

Which particular law needs to change? Be specific please. I keep asking but no-one has been able to tell me.

If you read your previous post, you will notice that I didn't talk about the ecat, but your funny idea that wishthinking will make something like this possible. The theoretical problems that come with cold fusion have already been discussed.

With all affection, I am pleased that you still operate under the delusion that any human knows how the universe works, even a little.

These useless humans have come far enough that you can type in a comment and millions of people around the world can read it.

People who think they have the universe figured out provoke this contrarian attitude in me.

Your esoterics, on the other hand, have not accomplished anything. Which gives this a quite ironic touch.

Skipjack wrote:
I thought they had a flowmeter attached ot the output, no?
Yes they have.

No, they have not. In all of the previous demonstrations, Rossi has never measured flow rate at the output.

The fact that they are measuring flow over a time of 54s means that they have no measurement of possible faster oscillation in speed, which could easily be induced by kettling effects, and which would make the average measured deltaT and average flow rate completely unreliable as an estimate of power out.

I get the idea for changes over minutes, but over seconds, this will not be an issue. The heat exchanger has quite some thermal capacity and will even that out. When the flow rate decreases, the cold water inside the HEX covers a bigger surface. (And there is no boiling in the secondary).

@Skipjack: If you have a flow of 1l/min and dT of 10K, and for the same time a flow of 10l/min and dT=1K, you have a constant power of 10 units. If you average this, you get a flow of 5.5l/min and a dT of 5.5K, calculating a power of about 30, which is 3 times too much.

Itis possible to do a definitive demo with low tech systems in a fairly scam proof manner. The fact thast he hasn't pushes my "nnah" button harder and harder.

YMMD
If the ecats works, you already have your "konjecture" and are a candidate for nobel prize. If he fails, you can point to this post. At the same time, you ask Josef to hang himself, if LENR is prooven.

[cg66]

We now have the proof that the Ecat works and that Rossi, if not the Nobel, will get at least a Darwin Award.

HA! I almost snorted coffee out my nose on that one.

[tomclarke]

For the LENR hypothesis to be correct you need a combination of unlikely things:

Some mechanism to overcome Coulomb barrier

Four "theoretical" methods discussed already. Muon, ULMN, Polariton, BEC. Some better defined mathematically than others.

Said mechaism to have specific characteristics which prevent anomalous fusion products (high energy photons, electrons, transmutation products) from ever being seen.

Internal conversion can prevent "high energy" photons. The metal casing should prevent observation of IC electrons . There would be no beta decay so no electrons OTHER than IC electrons. And there are MANY statements about transmutation products.

Said mechanism to have charactesristics such that the heat output from its operation is never unambiuously detected.

This is nonsense. LENR could be real and NEVER be "unambigouously detected" if the receiver of the information refused to accept the data as unambiguous. This is a matter of human psycology, not LENR.

...
...
That says, to me, that the LENR collection of results is not a pointer towards a new nuclear reaction pathway.

Ok. So you have not been convinced yet. Well, neither have I. But I try not to let misunderstandings of the sciences delude me into thinking it CAN'T be.

As you say, we won't agree.

Just a note on the "unambiguous detected" theme.

If you look at the LENR conference talks you find, in spite of many conscientious individuals, a distinct lack of experimental care.

What would happen if a competent mainstream scientist discovered something weird? Like the > c neutrinos?

Would they suppress or ignore the result? No, they would be excited. They would check and cross-check for possible errors, and perform more measurements to tie things down. Only then would they throw the experiment open to others to disprove, with enough data to make this worthwhile.

Because the data was so carefully analysed, the experiment carefully described, the obvious problems nailed, it would present a challenge for everyone else. (As the neutrinos do). Fairly quickly (I guess < 1 year for neutrinos) there would be a resolution.

That is the standard of work needed to make progress when experimentation is difficult, as is calorimetry.

I would call the neutrino measurements unambiguous. They are still probably wrong: but they are the quality that is needed to challenge expectations. And this has nothing to do with the receiver of the information.

Anything less, and the strong probability is that the experiment is wrong.

Let me qualify that. Suppose LENR is rubbish. We expect some fraction (say 10%) of experiments to give anomalous results which appear to support it. We expect that with great care the errors in these can be discovered - without great care they will remain question marks. We expect that since this care require lots of time, money and high quality people it will not often be applied. Of course good mainstream scientists will be excited, apply the necessary care, but not publish because they identify the errors

People like you & parallel etc look at the large number of experiments with anomalous results and think: Ahah! Any one of these experiments wrong is say 90% chance. But there are 50 experiments. Chances of them all being wrong are 0.9^50 = 0.5% So LENR is 99.5% proved!

Further, there will be an idea that because good mainstream scientists do not do this stuff somehow they are suppressing things.

I will leave it to you to identify the flaw in this reasoning, which is profoundly human and affects many.

Difficult experiments give anomalous results most of the time, until all the errors have been nailed. The LENR people (mostly) just don't bother to nail down all errors. When they do this, the results go away or become explicable chemically. And because calorimetry is specialised, and the errors can be weird and complex, popular presentations of their work appear convincing. Even decent scientists not specialising in calorimetry can fail to see sources of error, and (if they lack proper caution) be convinced.

[bk78]

(2) output thermocouple mounted in thermal contact with heat exchanger, which means output temperature will measure higher than real. This and the low deltaT makes for a very significant, and unknowable, error.

Is a good point, though I think that the max abberation due to this is low enough to be neglected, unless you assume fraud and deliberate manipulation.

No, it can NOT be neglected. Independent of that I think it is a fraud. Note that Giorgo and others pointed at the problem of low dT experiments before this demo.

(3) "Device producing waves" appears to affect output temp directly. RF can easily corrupt instrumentation due to partial rectification in low voltage sense lines, so we have here another potentially large unknowable error.

That I think is very far fetched.

Any electronics engineer will shake his head now. You say this because of pure wishthinking. Although I personly think, it was simply a remote control.

I just don't see how axil/parallel/etc can see this test as adding to Rossi credibility...

I do. If you read my earlier posts in this and other threads, I was quite sceptical. I am a little less sceptical now.
[...]
It is seems to be a really bad way to commit fraud.
[...]
So if Rossi is a fraud, then he is not very good at it.

It seems to be a perfect scam, adressed at people reasoning like you. It can't be a scam, because as a scam it would be too obvious. Very nice!
And all those observers were not able to do much, but watch Rossis poor show.

But the fact hat he built such an elborate machine with so many parts and expenses involved

LOL!

[Skipjack]

No, it can NOT be neglected. Independent of that I think it is a fraud. Note that Giorgo and others pointed at the problem of low dT experiments before this demo.

And he had high deltaT experiments before that. Each of the experiments is not very good by itself, I admit that, but if you do not assume fraud, then the evidence provided by them does accumulate.
Of course if you assume fraud, then you have to ask many other questions. For once, why bother with such a demo in the first place?

Any electronics engineer will shake his head now. You say this because of pure wishthinking. Although I personly think, it was simply a remote control.

Again, if you assume fraud, then we have a very different conversation, but then we have to ask a lot more questions and not just technical ones.
In fact, the technical aspect of such a fraud would be the minor part. There would have to be a huge framework of other factors.

It seems to be a perfect scam, adressed at people reasoning like you. It can't be a scam, because as a scam it would be too obvious. Very nice!
And all those observers were not able to do much, but watch Rossis poor show.

Did you read what I wrote earlier? Obviously not! I said that I give it a 50:50 chance of being real. Until this demo, I was a lot more sceptical, actually and was much more convinced that it is a fraud.
One reason why I not so convinced anymore is that there were quite obvious attempts made at adressing some of the concerns from earlier demos. The other one is that would be a very complex and elaborate fraud with many uncertainties and things that are very difficult to control, in a field that has basically no credibility. It is NOT a very good idea to commit a fraud with something like that. Now this can still mean that it is fraud, but it would make Rossi a very, very stupid con artist.

And all those observers were not able to do much, but watch Rossis poor show.

Were they? Most of them seem to think otherwise. I think that you are making deductions of off hearsay.

LOL!

Look, if you are a good con artist, then your con is simple and easy to control. This machine and con ( if it is one) is neither simple, nor easy to control. Inviting many sceptical scientists over for a demonstration and press and all at once, also is neither simple, nor easy to control. Any one of them could have asked a difficult question or demanded to inspect something, or spotted something that is not right. It is very high risk!
So either Rossi is a very bad con artist, or this is not a con. I say the chances of a con are 25%, not more. With every new demo, the chances go down, because the risk of discovery for Rossi goes up.
This still leaves self delusion as an option, though.

[Kahuna]

All these discussions are interesting but really will not help to clarify anything. On the 28th he should show the 1MW plant in operation with an input of 130KW. Let me express what I am thinking it will be the results:

1) The steam coming out from the pipeline resembles the one we saw on the previous videos and the machine does not blow up.
We know the Ecat does not work.

2) The Ecat works and you have a 1Mw thermal machine generating (say) 1100Kg/h steam.
All of these steam has to go out of 2" pipeline according Rossi design.
The machine will most probably blow up.
We now have the proof that the Ecat works and that Rossi, if not the Nobel, will get at least a Darwin Award.

I have not had the time to follow this saga as closely as I once did, but ran across this video from Professor Roland Petterson of U. of Uppsala (Sweden) who attended the Oct 6th Rossi Demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6nlHlW8VRc

In the clip, he clearly refers to testing at Uppsala and alludes to setup changes that hopefully would correct for the sloppy Rossi test designs (which he cannot seem to ever get right). It seems to me that these (U. of Uppsala) tests may be much more dispositive and important than the 1MW demo which will still be under Rossi control (and therefore bound to have holes in it).

Does anyone have any more information on the timing of the Uppsala tests referred to by Professor Petterson?

I have long thought that the real value of the E-Cat is not in its commercialization, as I suspect Rossi is being very naive as to the readiness and acceptability (especially from a health & safety perspective) of his device, but rather in validating the viability of H-Ni LENR in general with the resulting rush of funding and top minds to do further R&D. I suspect that the Uppsala tests (if conclusive) would go a long way toward unleshing those resources.

[tomclarke]

And he had high deltaT experiments before that. Each of the experiments is not very good by itself, I admit that, but if you do not assume fraud, then the evidence provided by them does accumulate.

LOL.

It does seem unlikely that continually having a new experimental loophole open when an old one is closed is carelessness, don't it?

But it could just be Rossi trying hard to get a plausible demo. And that does not have to be fraud (though it could be) just wishful thinking.

In fact the line between wishful thinking and fraud can be pretty thin.

You certainly don't need Rossi to be engineering these loopholes. I doubt he is clever enough. But try enough different setups and you eventually get one that works...

[polyill]

@Skipjack et al.

For once, why bother with such a demo in the first place?

The sole purpose of the demos and the rest of the activity around Ing. Rossi is to create publicity around the E-Cat and to create the impression that Rossi is on the verge of producing a working tech. Tomorrow, in a week, in a month...
As it goes on, another party (Defkalion) starts to claim having a working tech and resources to conduct proper R&D, as well as demonstrating a civil conduct and a "proper legal posture" - with Rossi being the background that constitutes an appeal for possible investors willing to support a VERY PROMISING technology.

It isn't feared that Rossi's demos would disclose any significant technical information, because there is NO significant technical information, the E-Cat does not work and never did. The whole thing ends with Defkalion having a big money invested in them.

[KitemanSA]

If you read your previous post, you will notice that I didn't talk about the ecat, but your funny idea that wishthinking will make something like this possible. The theoretical problems that come with cold fusion have already been discussed.

And yet none of the "discussions have revealed any valid reason why is cannot work. I do not state that it does work in that I have no evidence that it does. I merely object to claims that it cannot work when none of the claimnants can provide evidence that it does not (or cannot). Such statements are religion IMHO and really have no place in this forum.

Itis possible to do a definitive demo with low tech systems in a fairly scam proof manner. The fact thast he hasn't pushes my "nnah" button harder and harder.

YMMD
If the ecats works, you already have your "konjecture" and are a candidate for nobel prize. If he fails, you can point to this post. At the same time, you ask Josef to hang himself, if LENR is prooven.

Jo made a flat claim that the Rossi machine was a scam. I asked him to provide some unambigous statement as to his level of certainty. Seems you take acception to my method of searching for clarity.

I on the other hand have made NO claims. I have no certainty on the issue. This seems to be the logical state to be at this point in time. To me, lack of data in either direction should result in lack of certainty.

I seldom ask folks who are certain it is true for their reasons since for them it is generally a religeous belief. I don't argue religion except in "General". I have read snippets of the general mass of data in support of LENR and find it interesting but not QUITE convincing. Still a bit ambiguous for me.

When I ask people who are CERTAIN it is false for their reasons I usually get get statemens based on misunderstood physics, though I have had one case of misunderstood statistics. So far, no data in that direction either so I still can't make such a decision.