The following post seems to be utterly out of touch with reality, a
total fantasy. It is shocking to read. I don't know whether to
respond or not.
The claims made for months that all the water was being converted to
steam has been utterly crushed!
Krivit was clearly right on his seven points.
More importantly, the claim that all the water was being converted to
steam, the repeated, defended, and heralded basis for thinking
something practical has been created, the basis for the "calorimetry"
of the public demos, is now shown to be without basis in fact. The
hose was taken off. Water pulsed out of the outlet right at the exit
of the E-cat in large quantity. It obviously did not condense
there. The water trap was clearly undersized by more than two orders
of magnitude! It was less than useless! That I assume was because it
was never dreamed the flow of water would be so large. What an
embarrassment that must be.
The fact that the steam that comes out with the water is dryer than
the water that pulses out with it is irrelevant. It is a red herring
issue, a distraction from the glaring truth, a distraction from
attention on the months of wrong headed excuses for not doing
calorimetry on the output, and failure to *do* anything useful, other
than talk, to see if the claims being made were true. So is the
issue of the definition of steam quality. The important fact, that
all the water is clearly *not* being converted to steam, clearly
demonstrates just how bad the prior "calorimetry" claims were.
Now the new E-cat never reaches equilibrium. This is a far more
difficult regime in which to do accurate calorimetry, and a far
better regime for self deception. Further, the E-cat mass has been
greatly increased, and the max input power increased. The "heat
after death" from mundane causes will now obviously be much longer.
The thermal mass is larger, and the thermal resistance from the
outside of the lead to the water is much larger. It will make for a
dandy magic show, and much more discussion, but will make actual
evaluation of the value of the device much more difficult.
None of this indicates for sure whether Rossi has anything of value
or not. Maybe he does. The continued failure to obtain independent
high quality input and output energy measurements prevents the public
from knowing. Since the public is being kept in the dark, the months
of fluffy bluster does, however, tip the scales more strongly toward
a negative verdict. What a pity and waste of valuable time this is
for Rossi if there really is something extraordinary going on in the
E-cat. Hopefully the 1 MW unit test will provide economical steam for
a very long period.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
On Sep 14, 2011, at 6:35 PM, Jouni Valkonen wrote:
New self-sustaining test was far superior to previous E-Cat tests. It
gave us very good quality data and also the steam quality issue was
finally resolved hopefully even for the most hard headed critics. Test
clearly shows that steam quality was ca. 99-98% as it is the case with
all water boilers. There is no such thing as low quality steam
relevant with E-Cat, because it does not exist in close to normal
pressures. But steam and hot water are separate entities. This is
shown very clearly when the outlet hose was removed and hot water was
collected into bucket. High quality steam (ca. 99-98%) escaped, but
liquid water content was flown gently into bucket.
This was also very good reminder how easy it is to do calorimetry from
steam. Just separate hot water content and steam from each other.
Total enthalpy can be measured easily just by sparging steam/hot water
into cool water bucket and measure the temperature change. This gives
the enthalpy nice and cleanly. As steam temperature is directly
proportional with total enthalpy, we can then find out easily the
proper relationship of steam temperature and enthalpy, thus we see the
heating power of E-Cat directly from the temperature of steam. And
Rossi knows this this relationship exactly.
In the recent test, we can find out that water inflow rate was ca. 11
kg/h and there was hot water collected 5-6 kg/h. Too bad that we have
only one data point here and we have some uncertainty with water flow
rate, because it was not constant but was perhaps correlated with
internal steam pressure of E-Cat. However we can safely say that
approximately half of the water was evaporated and half was in liquid
form. This was only the case when the boiling temperature was ca.
118°C and pressure thus 190 kPa. Later steam temperature rose into
133.7°C and thus pressure exceeded 300 kPa. This indicates that more
than 80% of inlet water was evaporated.
This shows that Rossi can control and understands his reactor very
well, because he can push E-Cat to the limits of the cooling power of
water. If there had been any more heat production, it would have
vaporized all the water and that means that there is nothing that
cools down the reactor core.
We can say that almost all inlet water was evaporated, and peak
heating power was 6-7 kW, when the pressure was around 300 kPa. It is
difficult to establish good error margins because we do not have all
the details, especially inlet water flow rate might be problematic,
because it should not be constant. That is because the pump pumps
water with overpressure of 300 kPa (IIRC). If it needs to do work
against up to 200 kPa steam overpressure, then flow rate should
decrease inversely proportional to the heating power of E-Cat.
When the peristaltic pump was calibrated without backpressure, it
pumped water 15.8 kg/h. When there was not steam pressure inside
E-Cat, water was pumped ca. 13 kg/h and when steam pressure was rising
due to boiling, water pumping level was reduced to 11 kg/h. This
should be consistent with the fact that peristaltic pump pumps water
only with pressure of something like 300 kPa and if there is
significant overpressure inside E-Cat, pump is slowing down. We should
have a graph that shows the water inflow speed during the whole
experiment if we are to establish exact calorimetry. Therefore I would
estimate that errormargins are ±1kW. What means that they are quite
significant. I am somewhat disappointed, because I thought that we
could go even higher accuracy. But the uncertainty of inlet water flow
was too great to make any more accurate estimation. Also only one
datapoint at 118°C did not help with accuracy.
What must be noted from Mats Lewan’s report that it is gross mistake
to think that E-Cat operates in close to normal pressure. No, it is
not possible, because superheated steam and liquid water cannot
coexist. Also the specific heat of superheated steam is low, therefore
it cannot maintain smooth temperature graph. Also visual evidence from
the video of high pressure steam is more than clear. Indeed E-Cat does
operate in high pressure and I am surprised that he still sticks with
this false assumption. Lewan also did error with the idea that liquid
water overflowing would indicate that opening for exit hose is large.
No, it does not tell that, because pump pumps water with 300 kPa
(IIRC) pressure, therefore it can push liquid water through a hole
that is just few millimeters in diameter.
Overpressure seems to be hard peace for many, perhaps because
Galantini “measured the pressure inside E-Cat” to be same as room
pressure, although he misread his instrument and did not understand
that his instrument does indeed measure the room pressure, not the
pressure where humidity probe reside. From previous versions, the
diameter of steam exit orifice has considerably shrunk. As similar
power range E-Cat produced in December experiment 10 kPa overpressure,
now new E-Cat produced 20 fold higher overpressure.
As the power of E-Cat was just ca. 6 kW ± 1kW, E-Cat was deliberately
operating at lower power level in test phase due to safety issues.
However, Rossi has said that final product will produce 200°C steam at
pressure of 1.6 MPa. This should be quite well in line if E-Cat module
is operating at full power of 27 kW.
Anyways, Rossi presented excellent and ready for market product that
will produce 200°C steam. This is very much enough steam for many
industrial applications and even for limited electric power
production. Certainly this is enough for home appliances.
We need to only hope that there is no a fuel cell that burns ethanol
or other liquid carbon fuel. E-Cat produced more than 30 MJ excess
energy conservatively estimated. But as test was cancelled in half
way, there was still remaining other 30 MJ to be produced. As the
energy density of ethanol is 24 MJ/L, then it would tell us that at
least 3 liters ethanol was required to fake demonstration. Certainly
this possibility is not out of question. On the other hand, I would
say that the cost of that fake megawatt power plan was some hundreds
of kilodollars, I would say that his approach to do fakes is not the
most cost effective. Therefore I would consider a fake option highly
unlikely, although I admit that E-Cat is just far too good to be true.
This time demonstration was just perfect. It also shows that really,
calorimetry is far easier and more reliable to do from steam than from
sub-boiling water, because only thing what is required to measure is
the steam pressure. The relationship between pressure and total
enthalpy is very easy to establish with simple tests; steam sparging
test that measures total enthalpy and with hot water and steam
separation test we can quickly establish how much steam was generated
inside E-Cat. Then we can just establish relationship between enthalpy
and steam temperature and ultimately we need to monitor only steam
temperature and we can know total enthalpy very accurately. I would
say that Rossi debunked here Krivit’s debunking!
–Jouni
Ps. although I criticized Mr. Lewan hear quite harshly, his test was
absolutely brilliant in all the other aspects. And he has also done
absolutely brilliant work with reporting the adventures of E-Cat and
indeed he is my favorite E-Cat scientist, because my appreciation goes
for the scientist who knows the basics and does know how to calibrate
the thermometer. However too bad that the September test was
cancelled, although I am sure that we saw "enough" and decision was
"rational".
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
