Part 1D On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 5:35 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]>wrote:
cude>> But the best evidence that the thing doesn’t produce excess power is the fact that it can’t power itself. lomax> But, apparently, it can. You mean "allegedly". > The problem is that controlling it, fully self-powered, is very difficult, they have not engineered it for that yet. Excuses. Excuses. Rossi is an engineer. So engineer it for that. > There is only one access, at this point, to reaction control, which is controlling the temperature of the reactor. If you allow the thing to self-power, what controls the reactor temperature? The power obviously. If you really need power to control it, then use that 30x energy gain to generate some power. But really, this is excuse is extremely lame, for many reasons. 1. Using heat to prevent runaway seems completely crazy. It is implausible that cutting the power by 10% or less would stop a runaway condition, when the variation in claimed output levels is far greater than 10%. In the February experiment the claimed input was 80 W, less than 1 % of the output when it peaked briefly at 120 kW. Does he expect us to believe that that subtracting 80 W from 120 kW will shut down the reaction, even while they claim it operates perfectly well at 15 kW? 2. It makes much more sense to vary the flow rate of the coolant with a solenoid valve to control the reaction. Then you can actually remove heat to try to stop the reaction, rather than just stop adding heat. Of course a solenoid valve needs power too, but only a few watts, and could be controlled for several days with a suitable lithium battery. 3. But as I mentioned before, they could power a stirling engine between the inflowing and outflowing water and use it to run a generator to produce the electricity needed. The efficiency would be low of course, but he's claiming 30x gain, and keep in mind that the heat that's expelled by the engine could still be used to heat the coolant in the first stage, so the ability to generate steam would only be compromised by the energy that's actually converted to electricity. > (And if he's a fraud, this will all be over, I predict, by the end of the year. It won't be possible to maintain.) You have no faith. Have you not seen how long Mills has dragged it out. Even Dardik continues to get money with absolutely nothing to show for it since 2004. Like the others, Rossi will have technical problems -- explosions maybe -- and delays, and new promises will replace the old. It will always be real soon now. There may be some semi-commercial devices claimed, but it will never be possible for just anyone to buy a device for completely independent testing. And if it is, and the thing passes, I'll rejoice along with everyone else. But it won't happen. Too bad. >> When a salesman comes to your door selling a new source of energy, and the first thing he asks is where to plug it in, be very suspicious. > If a salesman comes to my door selling about anything, I'll be suspicious. But, Joshua, what about Fukashima? Do you think that the reactor there needed to be "plugged in" -- for safety -- meant that the energy produced was doubtful? First. Fission is past the stage of proof of principle. Second. Cold fusion is supposed to *not* be like big reactors. It's a desktop device after all. Third. Fukushima normally runs without external power. It needs power when the reactor fails. So sure, have a big knife switch ready to close in the event of a runaway condition. But again, how is *adding heat* going to shut down the reaction? Fourth. Fukushima uses external power to cool the system. Rossi uses it to heat the system. If he used his power to regulate the flow of the coolant, this argument might be more convincing. > If the salesman can demonstrate a volume of hot water heated, showing 12 kW of power being generated (repeated buckets of a certain volume at a certain temperature, fed with tap water at a certain temperature), and this thing doesn't blow fuses, I don't care if it's plugged in. Then you're a fool. Because if you can heat something with better efficiency than a heat pump, then you can run that heat pump backwards to produce the needed input power, and you require no input at all. (Practically, of course, you's have to exceed the COP of a heat pump by a factor of 2 or so for irreversible losses, but the Rossi ecat is allegedly well beyond that requirement. In short, if such a device as you describe exists, and it is better than a heat pump, then an infinitely better device can be made using well-established principles. That it doesn't exist should indicate to intelligent customers that they are victims of sleight of hand. > An analogy to Cude's objection. Someone comes to my door to sell me a portable gas stove, I can use it, he claims, to cook and heat water while I'm camping. To demonstrate it to me, he asks me for a match, he left his at home. I toss him out, since, if it needs a match, it must be a fraud. Not even close. And you know why. A match is a self-contained, finite, and small amount of energy. The amount of energy produced by a gas stove is quite evidently many times larger than that of the match. Hell, I'd be happy to give Rossi a 10 kg Li battery, if his device would keep going on it forever. But Rossi's device uses a continuous external power source, and the output he demonstrates is not convincingly more than ordinary mains can supply. And certainly not convincingly more than might be provided by a combination of chemical and electrical sources.
