Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote: > You seem to be making a couple of questionable assumptions, not the least > of which is that the flow rate of tap water will remain stable over a long > time period - in fact it can vary significantly in many locales. > Not in my experience. I have tested this in many places. It is remarkably steady. Better than a good pump.
There are local disruptions when someone flushes a toilet or fills a tub, but they are small. In any case, they are bringing two flow meters and they will record the flow rate, so the data can be adjusted for variations in the flow rate. > We're talking about Eastern Europe, no? The plumbing may go back to the > kingdom of Bohemia. > The physical arrangement of a reservoir or water tower is the same everywhere. > Even though the setup seems fundamentally flawed as a precision > calorimeter, it can serve a purpose. > Why does anyone need a precision calorimeter for this purpose? The report is 1 kW input, 8 kW output. That does not call for precision. It calls for ordinary, industrial style calorimetry. The sort of thing people do during boiler tests, following regulations. Florida regs, which are based on ASME textbooks, specify that you confirm the flow rate with a bucket and stopwatch. That is low precision. The flow meters are usually the float type, and the thermometers are bimetallic dial thermometers. By law, that is what you have to use in the test. You can have more high tech instruments, but you must have those as well. Low tech, low precision, but high accuracy. They use lookup tables with 10 or 20 divisions; in other words, 5% precision. Basically, the regulations specify that you must use 19th century technology to confirm that a boiler is working. That works every time. It is certain you can detect the difference between 1 kW and 8 kW with these methods. Using more complicated methods or instruments that are 140 years more up to date would not improve the result, or bolster confidence. > Maybe Dewey Weaver will have a look. > I hope so. > If there really is an apparent COP near 8 for instance - a University or > large company can take more accurate thermal data without phase change. > Again, the phase change is a trivial thing. There are hundreds of thousands of qualified boiler engineers in the world and any one of them could do this in his sleep. They have been doing this since the late 18th century, and modern methods have been in use since the ASME was founded in 1880. (It was founded to stop boiler explosions, which it did.) There is simply no reason for you or anyone else to doubt a properly performed test of steam enthalpy, done by a professional. Unfortunately, the people from the MFMP are not professionals, but I am confident they can do a reasonably good job by sparging and using a heat exchanger, because this eliminates the phase change. It is not an issue at all. > The inventor could even close the loop with that kind of gain. In fact, > that is probably the only way to convince most doubter. The best advice is > to close the loop ASAP. > I think that is unnessary. People who are not convinced by conventional ASME industry standard calorimetry will not be convinced by closing the loop. They will say it is fake. If Rossi were to do it, I would say it is fake. Probably fake. > But if it gets down to judging steam quality to make a case for thermal > gain in the range of COP~1.5 - then it has been a waste of time IMHO. > That's absurd. Anyone can measure a COP of 1.5 with confidence. Rossi could not measure a COP of 5000 with his instruments, but any normal person would have no difficulty measuring 1.5. Granted, it would be a little more challenging than 1 kW to 8 kW. Conventional electric boiler tests show something like 90% to 95% efficiency. If they can measure that with confidence, knowing for sure it is 90% and not 80%, they could far more easily measure 150%. If they could not distinguish between 80% and 90%, boilers would explode. A mistake on that scale might be fatal. - Jed
