On 01/19/2011 05:37 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
> It is already clear that he [Rossi] had no means of faking the experiment.
Some time in the last couple days, you asked me for a scenario under
which Rossi could have faked it without the cooperation of anybody else
present, and I came up dry.... but later, I observed to a friend that
Rossi couldn't have faked it without help from the U of B staff, and tje
friend's response was, "Sure he could."
With the dual assumptions that
* Only Rossi ever got to look inside the reactor
* There have been no demonstrations lasting significantly longer
than half an hour (unsubstantiated rumors of extremely long runs
aside -- rumors are cheap)
the friend wrote the following:
> I don't see any need for an inside job. The main portion of the
> reactor is a horizontal cylinder that looks about 6" in diameter by
> 30" long. That's 10 or more liters of usable volume. Lots of
> chemical reactions give you about 2 kCal/cc of reactants. You'd like
> one without the inconvenience of gasses in or out, so the
> thermite-type come to mind. These react aluminum powder with a metal
> oxide to give aluminum oxide and the free metal. Magnesium powder
> also works if you don't need a neatly fluid product, which we
> certainly don't here. Screw feed the material into a cavity in an
> aluminum block, and pull the heat away with drilled channels that boil
> water to steam. The cavity might need a refractory liner, but I doubt
> it. The conductivity of solid Al is so high, and the amount of
> reactant at any time so small, that the products will go solid before
> they wreck the cylinder. Besides, shortly after you start, you're
> just dumping a little more wildly hot stuff on top of the previously
> solidified products. You'd need some kind of sensor looking at the
> block temperature or steam production, and use this to control either
> the reactant or water feed-rate, and you'd want something (electric
> arc?) to start the reaction. The easiest way to maintain control
> might be to keep delivering small, discrete quantities of reactant,
> each of which might need to be ignited (some of the 400W?)
>
> So, how far can you go with this? 12 kW net for 1/2 hour is 5.16
> MCal. Since thermites can give about 2 kCal/cc, this is about 2 1/2
> liters of reactants. If you need separate initial volume for the
> reactants and the products-to-be, then you need ~5 liters, plus space
> for the chamber/boiler and controller. So 1/2 hour may be getting
> near the easy-to-reach upper limit of chemical chicanery for 12 kW in
> a device this size. I'm sure there are other reactions, though, and
> cleverer constructions, so perhaps a few times longer might be achieved.
Take it for what it's worth, or leave it alone entirely ... it seems to
provide an existence proof for a means by which Rossi, acting alone,
could have faked the result.
/Unless the reactor is open to inspection, inside and out, before and
after the run, it's hard to rule out this sort of cheating -- short of
demonstrating a run lasting so long no chemicals could provide enough
energy for it.
/
