From: Jed Rothwell Speaking of leaving it to experts, someone has written to me offlist that this very issue of heat transfer was covered at Chennai by NRL - and they may have had similar reservations that this was even possible.
Weren't you there, and did they? * I was there, but I do not recall they mentioned any problem with heat transfer.. OK. At least one other person who was there thinks he remembers this, but I checked and there is no record of it in the transcript, so it is probably a dead issue. * I will . ask them if they suspect the 130 kW may be impossible from a heat transfer point of view. We did not discuss that. We agreed, however, that the 16 kW is in line with a typical electric heater or teapot. There is no disputing that. Oh yes, there is a large dispute ! . and fact the two are far different in this one regard. I recommend that you and your expert both read up and incorporate "flash steam" into your model (my expert tells me this) BTW for purposes of comparison - a gas range with the tea pot on the biggest burner at highest setting puts out about 5 kW and an oven at its highest setting will put out about 10 kW. 16 kW could not be transferred to a teapot without risking structural damage. It would be the equivalent of using three burners on high, but that is irrelevant for the real issue, so we need to move on. Even if Rossi's reactor would be thermally stressed in the same way. With a teapot, bubbles form at the bottom and immediately rise through the colder water, heating it. Flash steam is impossible in this situation due to the confining weight of water above. The nucleation sites cannot hinder heat transfer from the flame to the metal, or metal to water - to any appreciable degree. In contrast, in a situation where a hot horizontal reactor tube contacts a flow of water for milliseconds in transit, nucleation sites are created around the tube in such a way that a "bubble sheath" forms around the tube and moves down the tube with the water - which serves to effectively insulate it. In addition flash steam forms and pushes water droplets along with it, giving the appearance of much more steam than is there. When you really screw up and use a meter to measure steam quality which is not capable of taking into account the flash steam effect (entraining water) - then you will be guaranteed to make a massive error. Best guess is the error is 300%. But the Rossi reactor could still be OU. This massive error is more likely than not to have happened, but we need to know how much excess power is really possible. This is the point where Rossi-proponents want to cloud the issue by next conflating this independent demo with the Feb 10 run, as if it solves the earlier problem. But no, this one has numerous problems of its own - and cannot be independent, since Levi was by then on Rossi's Advisory Board. Etc etc etc. In short, we need reliable calorimetry to prove the extent of OU, as it is not in the record. * You do realize, I hope, that Kullander et al. are experts. Experts in what? The taste of leather ? Isn't he the one who proclaimed that a nuclear reaction of nickel transmuting to copper was occurring - yet with the ash in a natural isotope balance? LOL. If you poll 1000 PhDs in physics 999 will tell you that this is beyond ludicrous. Jones
