On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Berke Durak <[email protected]> wrote:
> (7) So Fioravanti had good reasons to believe that the steam was dry. > He is obviously assuming dry steam. But if we're (or his company is) simply supposed to accept that he had good reasons to believe that, then why bother with the report at all? He could simply have said: "The megacat works. It produced 470 kW for 5.5 hours without input. I have good reason to believe that." I suppose he might have added details about size and absence of emissions etc. But there would be no point in giving flow rates and temperatures. And there would have been no point in inviting the press to an event to show them anything at all. After all, if Fioravanti says Rossi has demonstrated a cold fusion device producing .5 MW, then it must be so, and they could go and publish their articles. Because otherwise Fioravanti would have to be a fake or senile or conspiring with Rossi. Since the report *does* give observations that are intended to support his conclusions, he is apparently not expecting the reader to simply accept that he had good reasons to believe something, but is actually trying to provide the reasons. We still have to trust that his report is honest, but at least we can check it to see if the claimed observations support the conclusion. The evidence he presents for dry steam are that water is not collected in the trap, and that the temperature is above 100C, the latter in conversation with Lewan, as reported in the comments in Lewan's column. But that trap would be useless for a mist entrained in fast-moving steam, and in any case, from Lewan's video, the valve to it was closed at 3:00. When asked about that, Rossi said it was closed after the run, but Lewan clearly states the time in the video. And since the pressure is not measured, the temperature at 105C could have been, and probably was, at the boiling point inside the pipe. Therefore the evidence he supplies in the report is insufficient to support the assumption that the steam is dry. Which indicates he didn't do his job very well. I find your "rate of change of power transfer too high vs thermal > inertia" argument intriguing, but it would be nice if you could > explain it logically and numerically. Currently, your explanations > are entangled with a multitude of hypotheses and suppositions. > I assure you, I didn't try to explain it illogically and innumerately, and I'm hurt that you find it thus. I don't think I can do better than I have already done. I don't have the luxury of temperature measurements of the ecat core or the heating element inside the ecat, or the actual mass or heating capacity of the heating element and its infrastructure, all of which has to be heated up in order to pass thermal energy to the water. I used all the numbers that are available to us, and as much logic as I could summon. I think it's pretty clear that an 8-fold power transfer increase can't happen in a minute or two. Here's another go at explaining it. I'll make it longer, but if you don't find it more logical, or more numerate, my apologies. To transfer thermal energy (heat) to the water as it passes through the ecat, the heating elements (hereafter, simply the ecat) have to be hotter than the water. And the rate of transfer (the power transfer) is proportional to this temperature difference. (This is a bit of over-simplification, because there will be a temperature gradient in the ecat elements from the core to the place where the water makes contact, and of course the water is changing temperature, but one could identify an effective temperature as some average, which would be proportional to the power transfer.) In the pre-heat phase, the temperature of the ecat is raised by electric heating to the point at which it transfers just enough power to bring the water to the boiling point at the given flow rate. That's the "sensible" heat or power, because it results in a change in temperature of the water. We don't know the effective temperature of the ecat or the core when this happens, but it is clear the core must be considerably hotter than the water, or the heat transfer wouldn't be fast enough. To reach that stage, the thermal mass of the ecat has to be heated up. With a power input of about 160 kW, it took 2 hours to bring the ecat to the necessary temperature. That represents considerable thermal mass. Now to vaporize the water at the rate it is flowing in, requires about 8 times as much power transfer, because in addition to the sensible heat, you have to provide the "latent" heat (that does not result in a temperature change). That means that the (average) difference between the effective temperature of the ecat and the water would have to increase by a factor of 8 or so. In the most favorable case, the ecat turns on to 470 kW just when the boiling starts (a coincidence in itself). So, the heating of the infrastructure would happen about 3 times as fast. But it has about 8 times as far to go, and so it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which this phase could be even as fast the pre-heating phase, let alone 60 times faster. It seems more reasonable that it would take several hours at least. And even that is optimistic, because, unlike the pre-heat phase, in the 2nd phase the temperature of the ecat approaches an equilibrium state, and so it would be asymptotic. That is, as a bigger fraction of the water becomes vaporized, a smaller fraction of the power from the core goes into heating the ecat up, and so the heating up slows down. OK, reading that over, it is probably more opaque than my previous attempt, but I'm afraid it's the best I can do. It seems obvious enough to me that the claimed power profile is physically implausible, but if you're not convinced, it remains true that the temperatures as quoted are still consistent with a very low degree of vaporization, and therefore with a power output of 70 kW, and so do not constitute proof of 470 kW. This is quite independent of the discontinuous 8-fold miracle argument, where 107 ecats turn on just when the boiling starts.
