Horace Heffner wrote:

A 0.7°C temperature rise is significant with any thermocouple. That can't be noise. There is no question there must be a heat source in the cell.

Yes - it is the 80 kg of cell metal which has stored heat.

Stored heat can only be released monotonically declining. The rate cannot increase, as far as I know. It is passive. The temperature can only rise if you increase the insulation or slow down the flow rate with this system. Or generate heat, of course.


What Catania calls "thermal inertia" can only release heat at a declining rate.

This is not true. There can be a slow transmission rate in the flow of heat pulses through matter.

Of course there can be a slow transmission rate or flow of heat! I didn't say you can't have slow transmission; I said it cannot _speed up_ on its own without some external or internal change. As far as I know that is thermodynamically impossible. Can you explain how this would work, or cite an example of this happening elsewhere? The flow of heat can only slow down, as the temperature difference between the two bodies decreases, per Newton's law.


It can never increase the temperature above where it reached when there was power going into the cell.

Again not true.

Sez who?

Lemme put it this way: that is my understanding of thermodynamics, and I have never seen data from a calorimeter that contradicts it. Calorimeters would not work if this was possible. You could not tell the difference between power and a situation in which metal suddenly decides to increase conduction for no apparent reason, with no change in the lattice.

- Jed

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