On 11-11-01 09:36 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence <sa...@pobox.com <mailto:sa...@pobox.com>> wrote:
Since the pump rate was constant, that means the power level was
constant with a precision of +/- 0.09 percent. (That's 9/100 of
1 percent.) This, in a process which is said to be hard to start
and hard to control.
Either that, or the water level fluctuated. That seems more likely to
me. When it starts to rise, you increase the reaction. When it falls
too far, you throttle it.
This is, of course, all old stuff being reiterated here. In the test
from last spring, the electrical power level was (supposedly) fixed; if
it wasn't then the calorimetry was nonsense. Consequently it's not at
all clear how the reaction rate was being controlled; the system, as
described, was apparently running open-loop. (Some people have imagined
interesting feedback controls in the blue box but no such thing has
ever been claimed by anyone who actually knew.)
In the 1MW test it's less clear cut, but one thing stands out: There's
no obvious indicator that Rossi could have used to tell him when it was
time to turn it up or down. Output temp would lag too much to be used
as the control variable, and the result would have been a "hunting"
temperature which wandered all over the place, certainly not an
essentially constant temperature which was indicative of a power level
which was nailed to better than 1/2 %. It would be nice to imagine a
sight glass, and Rossi's hand on the throttle with his eye glued to the
glass, but it's not clear such exists anywhere except in our imaginations.
Whatever, all such concerns have been dismissed in earlier posts, so
there's not a lot of point in arguing it further.
