Mary, your requirement for blank test run is unreasonable, but you are
misunderstanding the reason why blank tests are used in science. Blank runs
are used when we are measuring effects that may consist on multiple unknown
variables and with controls we try to eliminate those variables that we are
not interested.
Usually science is messy thing when we are observing something new and
unexplored. Effects are subtle and they are hard to differentiate from
background noise and correlating effects such as placebo and other biased
errors. Therefore it is required to ensure with (blind) controls, that what
is actually measured is the effect what we are interested on.
In this case, however we are measuring very clear effect that is total
enthalpy that is measured with accuracy of one megajoule. This effect
consist only two variables that are energy input and anomalous excess heat.
Because we know or we can assume that input energy source is from electric
band heater that works with efficiency of 95% or more. Therefore we can
just assume that electric band heater works with 100% efficiency to be on
safe side. And we can then subtract energy input from total enthalpy to
get the anomalous excess heat.
Of course running eight hour control test would be informative, because it
would give us valuable information about the efficiency of band heaters.
However, we are not interested of measuring the efficiency of band heaters,
but we can just assume it to be 100%. Therefore control experiment is not
required.
It is 1000 times more useful to run one 16 hour real test than to run one
real 8 hour test and one 8 hour blank run. If you really hard think this
you find this to be even more than 1000 times useful.
Accurate calorimetry is extremely simple and own instruments that are
required to be brought are thermometer, stopwatch and a water bucket. All
of them were on Rossi's allowed own instruments list. Just sparge steam
into bucket and measure the total enthalpy. This way it is easy to
calibrate the main calorimetry that was used, I.e. steam temperature was
measured. That is because in Rossi's system, where water inflow rate was
constant, steam temperature correlates with the amount of steam produced
(I.e. total enthalpy).
You see, idea with science is not to do excess work but to find the
simplest solution. The more simple measurements are used the more accurate
are results. Main idea with scientific experiment is to eliminate all
possible unknown and uninteresting variables.
—Jouni
