At 10:01 AM 8/1/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Something that has not been clarified here is that the flow rate is
rather slow; 120 ml/min. Before the water boils, when the liquid
overflows, It would take a long time to fill up the hose. There
would be a lot of water in there. Once it starts boiling the steam
sparges in the slow moving water. I suppose it would cool down and
condense by the time it reaches the end. In other words, the hose
would radiate a lot of heat next to the machine, and less further on.
There is a problem with this picture. If the water were overflowing
at lower than boiling, sure. This is what would happen. However,
steady state, we know that any water or steam entering the hose is
entering at the boiling point. It will be in equilibrium. Sure, if
the hose cools the water, steam will condense in it. But the water
will be hot enough to be in equilibrium with the steam, until and
unless there is enough cooling to use the water for sparging.
Basically, if any steam at all gets to the end, the temperature will
still be at 100 C. and so will the water.
If the claimed energy were being generated, the steam velocity would
be such as to totally blow away small amounts of water. My view of
this is that as the water spills over the edge of the opening for the
drain hose, and as significant steam begins to be generated, the
steam will atomize that water. Thus the device is designed to
generate extremely wet steam. That steam will be at 100 C, in
equilibrium with the suspended water. Some of that water may fall
inside the hose, or, depending on steam velocity, it may remain
suspended. However, the volume of the steam, if there is lots of
liquid water in it, will be much less than full vaporization would predict.
This rough analysis explains how, while most boilers don't generate
extremely wet steam, the E-cat seems designed to do it, by the way
that steam and water exit the device, and the fact that there is
constant flow of water, which is very unusual for a boiler, they
simply are not built that way. They are built so that they cannot
overflow like this.
We know from the temperature that water is boiling. We do not know
how much. Even a small percentage of the water being vaporized would
be enough to blow the water spilling over the hose outlet into
droplets. All of this would be at boiling temperature.
With this design, the assumption of full vaporization is highly
defective. It would have to be ruled out by definitive observation.
It's probably easier and more definitive to do what you'd have done,
Jed. Sparge all the steam and determine the heat released to the
sparging water. Do this close to the E-cat, so that you aren't
missing the heat radiated through the hose. If, however, there is
full vaporization, the velocity of that steam would be so high that
there would be little condensation, the hose would rapidly heat to
boiling temperature. Live steam transfers heat quickly.
It would have been easy to verify at least reasonably dry steam, just
put a valve in the hose so that hose flow can be shut down. When it
is believed that there is full vaporization (which could be verified
by a short length of transparent hose before the valve), open the
steam valve at the top, allowing steam to escape. Close the hose
valve. Stand back. If there is only a little wetness to the steam,
nothing will happen but a fat steam plume. But if there is a lot of
water, it might get wet near it. Don't like this? There are other
options. But if the matter is as claimed, easy enough to just open
the valve, only steam will come out.
My sense is that when the relief valve was opened for Kullander and
Essen to observe the steam, and water continued (possibly) to flow
out the hose, they saw good steam. What they didn't notice was, quite
possibly, that the volume was nowhere near what would be expected
from full vaporization. From interviews by email as reported by
Krivit, they really didn't realize how much volume was involved at
the water flow rates and full vaporization. They were probably alert
to various fraud modes, such as hidden wires, etc.
Anyway, the demonstration was unclear and there is not much point to
trying to analyze it in detail. I cannot understand why Rossi does
not do a more convincing test.
That's because you are not willing to hypothesize fraud. Our history
with cold fusion has led us to reject the fraud hypothesis, out of
hand. But there are various kinds of fraud. One that I suspected from
early on -- just as a theoretical possibility -- was that Rossi was
exaggerating his results. It's fraud if he knows he's doing it. He's
doing it. Does he know?
I'd say that if he doesn't know, he's utterly incompetent, blinded by
his desires.
Other possibilities remain and cannot be completely ruled out. But
I've finally settled on fraud. It's much simper than the
alternatives, and it matches the data quite well.
The kicker: Rossi's apparent manipulation of the input power during
the Lewan video. I've long puzzled over the analyses that assumed
constant input power. How was he controlling the thing if there was
constant input power?
Again, Occam's Razor: one or the other:
1. He's not controlling the input power. It's set and forget, though
he watches it. This leads to overflow water as practically a
necessity. Then the question becomes "how much?" Unanswered.
2. He is varying the input power, in which case the input power
calculations reduce to deceptive B.S. We could claim that the initial
input power is the maximum. Fine. How do we know this? Did anyone log
the input power? It's trivial to do, you know. You just need a power
meter with a data logger. Manually checking the power suffers from
the possibility that Rossi could bump the power when nobody is
looking. As it looks like he did with Lewan.
