These test results are indeed difficult to explain.
And (regrettably) incomplete. We know that the power to the resistor was being cycled on and off, but not the actual duty ratio!
Water came out -- but we don't know its temperature.
I have one
question to those who have some or partial expert knowledge on steam
engineering: Does they use superheated steam or steam that is at
boiling point of local pressure? My guess is latter of course.
However, I cannot explain 130°C temperature if assumed low pressure
inside E-Cat, because specific temperature of steam is just too low so
that it could produce such a smooth temperature graph. E.g. input
power cut off should cause huge bump into graph. Smooth temperature
graph should be only plausible, if steam temperature is regulated by
the boiling point at local pressure. But for 130°C/170 kPa pressure
requirements are quite high, higher than in autoclave, although it is
not out of question. Also 5 kg/h water collected from outlet, is
consistent that 60-80% of water was evaporated, just like previous
e-Cat experiments (excluding March experiment). This would support the
idea that steam temperature is regulated by boiling point temperature
at local pressure.
I plugged a couple of values into my calculator just to see the shape of things (I used the total input water flow, and a 100% power duty cycle).
First, presuming it boiled at atmospheric pressure, and was then superheated to 130
http://tinyurl.com/ecat-lewan-sep-superheated
This is what would happen if it boiled at 130 and produced steam quality of 0.5 (all the overflow water)
http://tinyurl.com/ecat-lewan-sep-boil130
The "chimney" could act as a pressure-reducer.
Could someone calculate the size of orifice for steam exit, to explain
130°C temperature corresponding 170 kPa over pressure? If it is
assumed that E-Cat produces steam in ca. 9 kW total power. Using
previous E-Cat demonstrations as reference, it should be quite small,
just few millimeters. Unlike what Mats Lewan estimated, I think that
it may be big enough to enable water to overflow, as pump pumps water
with sufficient pressure. Also I have not yet carefully studied the
data, but I would guess that 170 kPa over pressure could explain why
the water pumping rate was decreased after E-Cat started operating,
because pump pumps water only with 300 kPa pressure IIRC.
I estimated the pressure drop through the mini eCat (March/April) and hose -- it only came out to be (as I recall) about 3% -- assuming a 2cm internal diameter pipe in the reactor and a 1cm diameter hose. (I used an online calculator)
It's hard to explain a temperature increase by thermal storage.
