In his previous bomb calorimetry, only a COP of about 2 was reported. I have previously pointed out in detail the flaw in this calorimetry owing to the variable heat taken away by the large copper electrodes between the control and the actual experiment. Because of this flaw, the COP could be substantially over-estimated - easily by a factor of 2. Thus, even the COP of 2 was not "demonstrated".
I think it extremely unlikely that by controlling the gap you could tune the energy delivered down by even 50%. This type of welder has no separate means of initiating plasma - it requires the contact. It probably has a saturable core to limit the current flow. A special apparatus would be needed to deliver an ignition pulse and then a controlled energy in the plasma conduction. This would probably be a regulated capacitor discharge circuitry to get to the very high current, but short pulse needed to create a 5 joule ignition. I think there is no chance to verify a 5 joule ignition with this spot welder setup. Best case is to replicate what Mills has done with ~200 joule input and with better calorimetry (for example, doing it with the electrodes under water). Bob Higgins On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:49 AM, Jojo Iznart <jojoiznar...@gmail.com> wrote: > In his bomb calorimetry demo, he demonstrated an input of about 200+ J. > > Correct me if I'm wrong cause I'm working from memory here. In the bomb > calorimetry, they seems to have demonstrated a COP of 4+ > > I think the spot welder need to be modified to maintain a fix gap between > the electrodes where the fuel pellet needs to be slightly wedged in. This > way, as soon as the fuel pellet detonates, that automatically stops the > welder from delivering more power, since there would be a gap where no > further current can flow. The open voltage of the welder would not jump > the gap. If we did this, we can control how much input energy is being > delivered. From there, we can verify the 5J claim. >
