At 11:27 AM 4/19/2011, Jones Beene wrote:
Stephen
To answer the first problem - I believe that the
specific heat goes up as the temperature rises,
and is a higher the closer you get to m.p.
Ø 130 KW for 15 minutes is actually 32.5 KWh.
Only if that heat suddenly comes to a dead stop
and you average over the hour ! Not likely - I
corrected the post to say if the rate of heating
continues for a full hour, it could melt over a
ton of steel, but that is not the point.
Somehow the reported facts got lost in this
massive thread, which I've not been following. So
I searched for "130 KW." I found the first
message here was Jed's, and that "power peaked briefly" at 130 kW.
I am commonly irritated by people who discuss and
confuse power and energy in CF discussions.
"Briefly" -- with 130 KW -- could be seconds. The
power would have been detected by a rise in coolant temperature.
The discussions comparing what the Rossi cell is
allegedly generating, and a nuclear reaction, as
to heat transfer, are highly misleading. Heat
transfer is limited by surface area, but the
"surface area" for a Rossi cell might be very
high. You cannot judge it by the gross volume.
What if the cell is constructed with many channels?
Really, the heat transfer will be limited by the
flow of the coolant, as long as the heat generator is well-designed.
I really don't care to put a lot of energy into
figuring out whether the Rossi cells are real or
fake, because I'm assuming that in a few months,
we will have much more evidence. I merely noted,
some time ago, that there is no short-term limit
to a sophisticated fraud, because "fraud" is
undefined, it could be anything, and
impossibility arguments based on "anything" are
rididulous. What rules out "anything" is independent replication and study.
But what would 130 kW do to the coolant water?
130 kW-h is 112,000 kcal, so the heat generation
rate would be 31 kcal/sec. What flow rate is
possible? Looking about, I see that a liter per
second through water mains might be possible. I
haven't looked to see what flow rate was actually
used, I just saw mention that it was high. At a
liter per second, the temperature rise of the water would be 31 degrees C.
The coolant water would not boil. The reports I
skimmed on the Rossi reactor with the peak power
of 130 kWh supposedly had a 5 degree temperature
rise in the coolant flow. If the coolant were
flowing at a liter per second, this would be a
steady power of 21 kW for the duration.
The error made in Beene's analysis -- if I
misunderstood it, by all means, correct me -- is
in assuming that the heat transfer to the coolant
would be limited to some specific value. There
is, however, little limit to the surface area
available for transfer, only a naive assumption
that the "heating element" is a solid, say a
cylinder, would lead to that limited assessment.
I don't know the temperature of Rothwell's brain,
but it's probably somewhere near 37 degrees (C),
not quite freezing, eh? Beene's brain, from the
subject header, might be hotter. Jones, may I
respectfully suggest that you get off it? You might think more clearly.
Turning to the idea that the coolant is actually
fuel, that's a clever suggestion, and it might
work, but a tad difficult to arrange. Some fuel,
supplied at a liter per second, could certainly
generate more than enough energy. Again, we are
faced with an "unknown." It is impossible to
disprove an unknown, that was the error that the
physics community made in 1989 with cold fusion.
But when the reactor is studied by others, when
it can be dismantled, etc., that's when we can
find certainty. Rossi has a perfectly good excuse
for keeping it mostly secret for now, courtesy of
the idiocy of the U.S. Patent Office, and others.
(By the way, they were correct to deny Rossi's
patent -- has that happened yet? -- because it
did not adequately disclose what would be needed
for someone else "skilled in the art" to build
the thing. Since I find it not useful to assume
stupidity, I conclude that Rossi did not intend
to get that patent, that it was a political or
publicity move, which is quite consistent with
what we know about Rossi, as an engineer and
businessman, not a "scientist." The skeptics are
running the usual mouth flapping about scientific
journals, peer-review, and they are right, but
off-base. The Rossi cell is not a "scientific
discovery." Not yet. We have some reports, that's
all. It is what it is. Yes, it's interesting.)
