On 08/08/2016 09:30 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
If you assume there was actually some pressure, then there was only
hot water, not steam, where the temperature went from 60°C to 100°C.
I feel like this is where I came in.
Years ago, in early ecat tests, Rossi had a *fixed* flow rate of water
going in, and claimed 100% dry steam coming out, but the temperature of
the effluent was nailed hard to boiling: 100C (or perhaps a degree or
two higher, presumably due to some overpressure in the system). This,
despite the fact that the temperature rose with a fairly steep slope
until it hit 100C, and despite the fact that claimed power output went
from just enough to heat the input flow to 100C to enough to entirely
vaporize it in essentially zero time (which entailed a rather large
power jump), and despite the fact that there was /no/ feedback mechanism
in place to assure that the power produced was /exactly/ enough to
vaporize the *fixed* flow rate of water he was pumping into the system
-- with nothing left over.
The arbitrary, fixed input flow rate meant that the power needed to do
this was also a fixed amount, determined by the flow rate. Steam has a
low enough specific heat that any _excess_ of energy would have shown up
as superheated steam; that (clearly) never happened. And any _deficit_
would have meant it couldn't vaporize all the input water, but that
(supposedly) never happened either -- despite the apparent lack of
feedback in the system.
The only sensible explanation was that there /was/ a feedback mechanism
present, and unless Rossi was riding the gain on the electrical input to
provide enough energy to the heater to exactly vaporize the water, the
only mechanism in place to keep the effluent temperature at boiling and
no higher was if the effluent was actually a mixture of steam and water,
and in that case the power produced was certainly lower than claimed.
As I recall the mechanism used to prove the steam was dry was hotly
contested, claimed by some to be completely invalid for that
application. And no explanation was provided at all for how the power
could have been /exactly/ sufficient to evaporate all the input water
exactly as fast as it came in; that issue wasn't even hand-waved. The
problem of explaining the amazing coincidence between power produced and
power needed to vaporize the input flow was simply ignored.
