On 2011-04-06 22:06, Jed Rothwell wrote:
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I think ganging together many small
Rossi devices will call for some complicated engineering. Perhaps it
will slow down the development of the 1 MW reactor. I'm sure that 100
units can be coordinated but it may take a team of engineers some time
to design such a system.
According to Rossi's latest plans, the megawatt reactor is going to be
made of not 100, but 300 smaller units similar in size to those seen in
photos featured in today's technical report by Essen and Kullander.
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3144827.ece
"[...] According to Rossi, a total of 300 reactors connected in series
and parallel, will be used in the installation. Originally 100 reactors
of the version that delivered 10 kW of power during earlier trials, were
supposedly planned for the one-megawatt installation. Rossi still
expects the inauguration to take place in October 2011. [...]"
Personally I see this as a weak point and source of possible delays.
It's going to be a complex and expensive system. Maintenance is also
going to be a mess, assuming it's like that of an individual module,
scaled 300x. Can you imagine replacing the nickel charge to each modular
unit every 6 months?
Seeing that 10 kW modules have the potential for more than 100 kW of
thermal power as reported by Levi during the February 18 hours test,
personally I would have tried to sort out reliability problems in order
to limit their total number in the megawatt plant to 25-30. That would
be, in my opinion, much more compact and manageable in many ways.
But I'm not the inventor after all.
Cheers,
S.A.
