On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 3:45 AM, Peter Gluck <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear Joshua, > > in case your approach to the New Energy is constructive > and not destructive would you contribute seriously to: > http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com/2011/05/call-for-perfect-e-cat-experiment.html > ? > > what experiment, what results will convince you that the device is > producing useful energy? > I'm glad you asked. *A. Demonstrating power:* To demonstrate thermal power, the simplest method is to heat water, and that is of course what Rossi does. But he doesn't do it in a transparent way that allows anyone to conclude, just by watching it, that yup, his device is producing power without an external supply of fuel. Here is an example of an experiment that would be visual and not require experts to tell you what's happening: 1. First and foremost, the device must be completely and obviously standalone. So, disconnect the hydrogen bottle, and the mains power input. - The hydrogen bottle should be easy because they claim so little hydrogen is consumed, and in some experiments they claim the valve was closed, and in at least one, it is disconnected. Given that, it is completely baffling that in the only somewhat public display they have had, the bottle was left connected, with the valve open. - The input electricity is probably more complicated. As it is explained, heat is needed to initiate the reaction, and that is provided by resistive heating. Fine. Use the mains for that, but then unplug it when the reaction starts. And make it obvious: wheel the whole contraption away to show no umbilical cords are attached. Rossi claims the thing has run without power, but that it's dangerous, although he doesn't explain why. The speculation is that an input control is needed to prevent some sort of runaway condition, but it seems counter-intuitive to use additional heat input to prevent runaway. In particular, 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 one 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? 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. Rossi claimed to shut down the reactor in the Dec demo (reported by Levi) using tap water at a high flow rate, so one could set up an emergency passive cooling tank above the ecat to cool it in a runaway condition. Alternatively, they could power a stirling engine between the inflowing and outflowing water and use it to run a generator to produce the electricity needed. Rossi's supposed to be an engineer, so this should be easy for him. 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. The importance of being standalone goes beyond obviating the measurement of input power. It has practical importance too. If you can't generate the electricity for the input because the efficiency is too low given the small temperature difference, then ideally, that means a heat pump can supply the same heat. And we know heat pumps will not solve our energy problems. Now practically, a heat pump will perform between 1/2 and 3/4 as well because of losses, but still, this is nothing at all exceptional. In my opinion, any energy device has to power itself to make a significant contribution above what heat pumps can already do, let alone convince the world that it's real. 2. With no inputs, if cold water goes in, and hot water comes out, then it is clear that the device itself is transferring energy to the water. But even that simple phenomena was not made obvious in Rossi's January demonstration. It was pretty clear that water was going in, but what came out? It was in a different room, and we had to take someone's word for it that the temperature was at the boiling point. Even if it was necessary to exhaust the output in another room, a very simple and visible method could have been designed to show that it was at or near the boiling point. Simply run the output fluid through a copper coil inside a clear container of water. If the fluid in the conduit is at the boiling point, it should maintain a gentle boil in the water in the container. 3. To establish that the amount of power is in the ballpark of the claimed 10 kW requires some mental arithmetic, but importantly requires no information the observer can't get on his own. We all know, or can easily learn, that a typical electric water kettle consumes about a kW, and can bring a liter of ice-water to its boiling point in less than 10 minutes. So 10 kW should be able to heat 1 liter of ice-water to boiling in under a minute. So using a 20 L input reservoir of ice water, running it through the system maintaining an output temperature at the boiling point, verified by a boiling pot of water, should take less than 20 minutes. That represents one example of how 10 kW of thermal power could be established in a completely visual demonstration without the need for thermometers, flow meters, or expert observation. It's no flying airplane, but it would be hard to find flaws. There are certainly other ways to do it, but Rossi has done nothing that comes anywhere close to achieving this. *B. Chemical or Nuclear* Producing 10 kW with a device the size of Rossi's ecat is of course nothing special. The important claim is that the origin of the heat is nuclear, which means the *energy* density is orders of magnitude higher than for chemical fuel. To demonstrate this requires patience and vigilance to run the instrument much longer than it could be run on chemical fuel. It could be done by running the system described above for a long enough period, but that would require a much larger input reservoir, or monitoring the flow rate, which would rob it of any sort of dramatic visual impact. And the time required to reach the energy contained in an equivalent volume (22 L) of gasoline (e.g.) would require about 18 hours. Of course, considerably less than that would already be pretty impressive, because a controlled burn of chemical fuel requires substantial infrastructure, so only a fraction of the device's apparent volume could actually store fuel. Still, he's claiming a nuclear reaction, and a factor of a million, so why settle for "pretty impressive", when you can exceed it easily by a factor of 10 or 100, by letting the thing run for a week or more? Mainly because independent observers can't devote 18 hours to watching water boil, let alone a week or more. And Rossi is evidently not prepared to release the device to the custody of independent observers. I don't think there's any obvious solution to this without increasing the power output of the device, or reducing its size with the same power output, but I can suggest one demonstration that is at least a big improvement: Hot tubs with 1000L capacity typically have 10 kW heaters in them, and anyone who has one will know (and anyone else can find out) that it takes about 2 hours to heat it from ambient temperature (20C) to operating temperature at about 40C. So that can be used as benchmark for the ecat. Instead of just expelling the energy into an abyss, if you store it in a huge tub of water, then the need to continuously monitor the flow rate and temperatures disappears, and the opportunities to cry foul are drastically reduced. The idea is to circulate the water in the hot tub through the ecat, in a method illustrated nicely in the second figure of the hot tub entry on wikipedia: You'd need a bigger tub for 1000L, but the idea is the same. This method doesn't even need power for a pump. You can even avoid the use of thermometers by starting with ice-water, and floating paraffin wax in it, which would melt at about 50C. That would extend the temperature change to about 50C (from 20C) and make the demonstration completely visual, and independent of expert consultation, albeit still very slow at about 5 or 6 hours. To compare the ecat with a chemical fuel, one could set up two identical tubs, and heat one with a suitable propane or kerosene heater, and the other with a *standalone* ecat, as described in section II. Heating 1000 L of water from 0 to 50C requires about 200 MJ plus losses. That would take about 7 L of kerosene, which could be verified by the second tub. Seven liters or more of chemical fuel would be pretty difficult to hide in an ecat, and I would be surprised if such a demonstration wouldn't attract much more attention from the media and scientists. To take it to the next level would only require a tub that can withstand boiling water, and a lot more time. Then you could heat the water to boiling in both tubs. In one tub you could measure how much chemical fuel is needed to boil away say half the water. This would require about 1500 MJ plus losses, or at least 50 L of fuel. (A well insulated, (mostly) covered hot tub loses about 10 W per degree temperature difference, so at boiling, it would lose about 800 W, which is still less than 10% of the input power.) The key here would be that only vapor, and not liquid, would be escape the tub. (This is not the case when the liquid is forced through a heated conduit, in which case it will escape regardless of its state.) If a standalone ecat could boil away half the water in a 1000 L hot tub in a transparent, publicly open and supervised demonstration, the royal wedding would look like a small media event by comparison. Rossi would have Bob Park, Steve Koonin, Oprah, and Tom Brokaw all breathing down his neck. But as long as he keeps them in a windowless trailer and gives them Levi's or Kalluder's notes, they will remain underwhelmed. All of this is of course a much more complicated setup, but come on, for a billion dollar idea, it's peanuts, and even compared to making 30 ecats strung together, this seems easier.
