On 21/05/2016 11:13 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Once again people have claimed you can release 1 MW with no ill
effects in a small facility, without industrial scale ventilation.
People should apply some common sense metrics!
Rossi says the facility is 6,500 sq. feet. Conventional heating calls
for no more than 20 BTU/sq. ft. in Florida. That's 130,000 BTU. 1 MW
is 3,412,142 BTU/h. So that is 26 times more heat than normal heating
would supply. More to the point, it would not be thermostatically
controlled. It would be turned on continuously. If you turned on 26
times more room heating furnaces than normal, and left them on at full
blast, obviously the room would soon be too hot for a person to
survive in.
Your assumption that all the power used by the customer's plant must end
up in heat in the room is not valid. A quick search of J.M Products
Corp indicates that they are in the chemicals business - wholesale and
_manufacturing_. I am not a chemist but I would guess that there are
plenty of endothermic chemical reactions that would absorb heat energy
to change one set of chemicals into another. Much the same as a hectare
of crop absorbs radiant heat from the sun to change water and CO2 into
stored energy which is then trucked away to market.
My guess is that some process they are using to manufacture useful
chemicals not only converts heat energy into chemical energy (which then
exits the building by truck), but that this process also contains some
confidential know-how that the company does not want their competitors
to find out about. So this would be a perfectly good reason why they
would rather not have smart people getting a good look at exactly what
goes on in their chemical manufacturing process and so wrote that
condition into the contract. After all it _really should be possible_
to accurately determine energy transfer by measuring temperature and
flow rate at the single inlet (specially since Rossi discounts the lack
of heat in the return pipe).
Also the amount of heating or cooling that an area needs depends
entirely on the temperature in neighboring volumes and heat leak rate to
or from those volumes. Thus in a large-area multi-story building the
central zones _always need cooling_ even when outside air is cold and
the perimeter zones need strong heating to cope with the heat loss
through the outside walls. While it may be valid in very simple cases
to estimate heating or cooling requirement from _floor area_, in general
this must be useless because for a factory which runs 24/7 hardly any of
the heat is lost through the floor (once it reaches equilibrium), but
rather through the walls and ceiling - which must depend heavily on
their level of insulation and whether neighboring volumes are
temperature controlled or not.
