Tom wrote: <snip> > > But that's not what really bothers me about this. About two years > ago they had a picture of a three necked flask with a beautiful > purple glow in it.
Images of the thermal reactor are still available on the 'Cell' page of the website. >They said that is was producing so many watts per > CC, it was the equivalent of an internal combustion engine. No, not that reactor. The claim for energy density equivalent to an IC engine was made for the reactor using microwave ionization of a rarefied mixture of H and He gases. The volume of the reaction space was about 3 cc, and the claim based on estimates of the total energy output based on some rough calorimetry estimates. Variations on that rector have been used in an umber of experiments, including the water bath calorimetry by the BLP team and by Phillips & Chen at the University of New Mexico. For one particular run, the energy vield from the hydrogen fuel was calcuated to be 100X that of combustionof the same hydrogen. > If they > had a reactor that would produce that much energy, don't you think > that they would be marketing it? Maybe I'm being a cynic, but I smell > BS. And I smell a lack of careful study and understanding of the experiments, which were well described on the website. Every report is not a tutorial, and one has to have some background in physics to understand what is plainly written and its implications. I will try to summarize "why they are not marketing it" in the sense Tom wants, but I am quite certain they are earnestly promoting it to major corporations with the money to develop and market devices. The reaction took place in a 3cc volume of gas at about 1/1000 atmospheric pressure. The gas was a mixture of 95% He and 5% H2, flowing slowly through the reaction zone. The primary energy output from the reaction is deep ultraviolet light, which is not directly much use for energy production. The UV is absorbed by the quartx reactor tube, which gets hot --- inside the microwave cavity. It isn't easy to couple that heat to the outside world without redesigning the cavity, a separate engineering project. It isn't obvious that making it 10 times as big will help; scaleup has to be done in small steps. There was a lot of support equipment: a laboratory microwave generator, a vacuum pump, gas tanks, instruments, etc. Energy density is not power output. If you want kilowatts, you might need dozens of small reactors, microwave cavities, etc. That's not very marketable. Further, the catalyst is He, a gas in limited supply, which in the laboratory test is simply wasted, escaping back into the atmosphere. in a commercial system this could not be tolerated, so you have to a) collect the resultant hydrinos, a valuable chemical, and conserve the He catalysit, which is not simple at all. The microwave reactor has been shown to work with plain H2O as a source of H and O++, a catalyst, so in principle one could afford to let it flow out of the system. However, with tap or pond or ocean water, contaminants may kill the reaction, s you have to first purify or distill it, taking more energy. None of these problems are insoluble, but they have to be solved before any kind of a commercially viable system can be marketed. These are the jobs for a development team funded by an industrial partner. or, nay amateur with the necessary skills and money can start right now and follow Mills' path. Mike Carrell
