Peter Heckert <[email protected]> wrote: > > This discussion about "close contact to the metal" and "chemogalvanic or > electroosmotic voltages" is blather. I am sorry to be harsh, but it is > irrelevant, evasive, nitpicking blather. > > It is not. > Put 2 identical copper electrodes in water. Heat one, and the other not. > You get a voltage and a current between the electrodes. >
You misunderstand. It is blather because it is not important. Even if you right, it does not affect the conclusion, and it does reduce confidence in the results. As I said, if you had cut the thermocouple wires with scissors, or Mats Lewan had accidentally dropped his temperature log papers off a bridge -- if we did not have a single numeric measurement of temperature -- we would still know with absolute certainty that massive anomalous heat was produced, far beyond the limits of chemistry. You are discussing thermocouples instead of confronting this fact. You are nitpicking. Now let me nitpick a little. I suspect you are wrong Omega sells these bare wire K-Type themocouples, and they do not say in their catalog or on-line guides that things do not work when you tape them to a pipe. People do that all the time. I have done that. I have not seen unexplained fluctuations. The TCs remained in reasonable agreement with dial thermometers and other non-electronic devices. You might experience a problem if you are trying to measure a smaller temperature difference, such as 0.02 deg C, but you will not see a problem measuring tenth-degree increments. The problem is, the primary water flow is unknown. Rossi says 4g/s and Lewan > measured 0.9-2g. > No, that is not a problem. The water flow could 1 g/s or 10 g/s. That would not affect the conclusion at all. Again, you are nitpicking. If it was 1 g/s, that is 14 L over 4 hours. You cannot add 14 L of tap water to a 30 L vessel of boiling water without lowering the temperature, and without stopping the boiling. That is physically impossible. The outflow rate varied, and it was only 0.9 g/s when Lewan measured it, because the vessel was not full, and that was coming entirely from condensed steam. That volume of steam at that time matches the power measured by the secondary loop reasonably well. > All these unclear points, temperature instabilities and contradictions say, > there are unknown error sources in the measurement. > Yes, there are, but they have no impact whatever on the inescapable conclusion. The measurement error are large, but there is no doubt at all what the measurement proves. When the first atomic bomb was tested, Fermi dropped strips of paper to estimate the power of the bomb. The shock wave moved the paper so it fell in a different spot. Of course this was an extremely crude method, but it worked. It showed that the bomb produced roughly 10 kilotons TNT equivalent. Actually it was probably more like 15 or 20 kt I believe, but 10 kt proved beyond doubt that the bomb was nuclear, not chemical. If the only data from that explosion had been Fermi's falling paper -- and all other details lost to history -- we could still be certain that it was a nuclear effect far beyond the limits of chemistry. The same is true of the observation made of the Rossi device, that it was still hot 4 hours after the power was turned off. No possible combination of factors -- no flow rate, no surface temperature, no mass of hot metal inside the thing -- can begin to explain that. It can only be caused by kilowatt-scale heat generation continuing for 4 hours. A method can be extremely imprecise and yet still provide certain proof. The flow rate was nominally 4 g/s. For the sake of argument you can suppose it was 0.5 g/s, or 20 g/s, or any plausible number you like. We know that the flow of water was visible to the people, so it wasn't 20 mg/s. We know the pump works to some extent. Pick any plausible number you want. Nitpick it to death, and show that it might actually be 0.5 g/s. You are wasting your time. That has NO IMPACT WHATEVER on the conclusion. - Jed
