Horace Heffner <[email protected]> wrote:
> Estimating heat output is really very simple to achieve, as I have noted > here before. Simply direct the output into an insulated barrel and keep > track of the temperature. If the output is in the form of steam, pre-load > the barrel with cold water and run the steam trough a copper coil in the > barrel and sparge any steam output of the copper coil by releasing it at the > bottom of the barrel. I have mentioned this technique several times. This is what they do at Hydrodynamics, Inc. However, as I said recently, given the power levels Rossi demonstrated on Jan. 14, it would not be easy to do this test. There are practical problems. You need a very large barrel, or a smaller one that you allow to become very hot in about 10 minutes. You have to stop the test after that. It does not work once the water reaches boiling temperature. For example, suppose you use a barrel with 40 L capacity. You start with 33 L of tap water in the barrel. You run the machine for 10 minutes (600 s). This adds another 3 L of condensed effluent into the tank, filling it close to the top. During this time power is 16,000 W = 3,800 calories/s. The temperature of the water in the barrel rises from 20°C to 90°C. That is not a long test, so people will say it is not convincing. Gene Mallove and others have used hot water heater tanks for tests like this. You circulate water continuously from the device through the tank, the way we all wish they could do at the Fukushima nuclear plant. The Fukushima plant is presently being operated like a one-shot sparge-into-a-barrel test. Only instead of dumping the water into the parking lot, the way they do at Hydrodynamics, they are forced to dump the water and nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean and the food chain. My hot water heater has 50 gallons (189 L) and it heats at 12 kW. It is the biggest one for home use sold at Lowe's. It is large and unwieldy. It takes less than 30 minutes for tap water to reach scalding hot levels. It would be challenging and expensive to set up something like this for the Jan. 14 test. The skeptics would come up with a hundred reasons why this test is invalid. Alan Fletcher would dismiss the whole thing because you can easily fit enough chemical fuel and equipment in a 50-gallon tank to run a fake test like this for hours. (For once I would be completely in agreement with him.) The steam test was convincing, because it was followed a few weeks later with the hot water test which showed that the machine does produce the level of heat indicated by the steam test. The assertions about wet steam must be wrong. Either that, or the thing magically went from producing a few kilowatts to 16 kW and 130 kW. We should also bear in mind that the flowing hot water method used on Feb. 10 is the standard way to evaluate boiler performance. This test -- this * exact* test -- is done hundreds of thousands of times a day in buildings and factories all around the world, by HVAC engineers, safety inspectors and others. Their results are right to within ~10%, according to handbooks and regulations guiding these tests. The error is not ~20000%; it is ~10%. Here is an example of the paperwork used in one of these tests: STANDARD FUNCTIONAL TEST PROCEDURE FOR HEATING WATER SYSTEMS http://www.peci.org/ftguide/ftg/SystemModules/AirHandlers/AHU_ReferenceGuide/CxTestProtocolLib/Documents/hw10ml.doc From: http://www.peci.org/ftguide/ftg/SystemModules/Boilers/Functional_Testing_for_Boilers.htm#Test_Documents The flowing water calorimetry test is on p. 3. You can see that the boiler inspectors do many other, more complicated steps as well. - Jed
