On 11-06-23 11:23 PM, Joshua Cude wrote:
On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
It's flowing water, not a kettle. So the input power can only
heat it so much.
In the chart of temperature, a sudden change in rate of
temperature rise appears, at 60 degrees C. I assume that this
represents the time when the core reached turn-on temperature.
Something certainly happens there. It could be a reaction (chemical or
nuclear) initiated in the reactor. It is consistent with an increase
in the input electrical power. (It's not consistent with a sudden
reduction of flow rate, because that would produce a step change in
the temperature, not just a change in the gradient.)
Good point -- I had overlooked that. In fact, the flow rate must have
been more or less constant (or changed only slowly) during the warming
phase or there would be a temperature step where it changed. (This
argument is quite aside from any consideration of what kind of pump was
used or what else is known about the flow rate, of course.)
There are lots-o-mysteries here. The original point was that the
thing shows no sign of settling at 60 degrees without excess heat,
it was rising linearly to that point.
That's true. And that suggests that the power going to the reactor
(from wherever) was already greater than 300W (or there would be an
indication of saturation), or that the flow rate was lower than claimed.
Indeed. For whatever reason it hadn't occurred to me that a higher
input power could produce a curve that looked like that also -- I'd been
thinking solely in terms of the flow rate when I saw that piecewise
linear graph.
***
And now I've got to get my nose back out of Vortex and go do something
useful with the rest of the day...
