I believe you should do a much simpler test. As I said, an experiment is best when reduced to minimum number of components. That is, when you test the claim to its essence. You keep it "clean." Test one thing at a time, in isolation, rather than the entire range of behavior the eCat exhibits. There is a company on Airport Road near my office where they test scrapped airplane wings for stress-related failure. As you can imagine, they do not test an entire wing, and they do not fly an airplane with sensors attached. They cut out a sample of a wing and put it in a mechanical press to flex it repeatedly, to speed up the process. Along the same lines you should not undertake to simulate the entire eCat, but rather the one aspect of it that makes or breaks the claim.
In this case you should do what I described earlier: Bring ~30 L of water to boil in a large pot Insulate the pot, but not much, so that the outer layer is still too hot to touch (60 to 80 deg C). Check the temperature periodically for 4 hours and see whether it remains at boiling temperature, or cools down. That may sound silly, but I am 100% serious. Any skeptic who sincerely believes the claim may be mistaken should be willing to do this test. Not just willing but *anxious* to do this test. Frankly, if anyone is being silly it is the skeptics who are unwilling to try this, or to deal with the fact that this is a direct simulation of eCat behavior. You can argue about some details of what the eCat does or does not do, but this is one thing it *unquestionably* does. No one has challenged that. It has nothing to do with instruments. The observers all agree the vessel surface remained too hot to touch. Lewan confirmed it with a thermocouple. They later dumped the water out and saw it was still steaming hot. It would be absurd to argue they are wrong, and the vessel actually cooled down to room temperature. That is the most important claim, in its essential form. The rest is either unimportant detail, or it only strengthens the claim. The latter includes, for example, the fact that during the 4 hours all of the water in the reactor vessel was replaced with cold water twice. Some people doubt that, although it is unquestionably true that some water was flowing into the vessel. Otherwise the vessel would have been empty at the end, and people observed that it was full. However, you can ignore that, not replace the water, and simply look at the heat lost from 30 L container. You can use a cylindrical pot even though that has less surface area than Rossi's square reactor. This is a much easier test than making a copy of the reactor. This is as definitive and irrefutable as a test with a copy would be. This test gets to the point, without confusing the issue, and without getting into debates about trivial and irrelevant matters such as the placement of the cooling loop outlet thermocouple. You can -- and you should -- ignore the cooling loop for the purposes of this test. The cooling loop is secondary evidence; the claim stands or fails based on this primary, first-principle observation. There is no benefit to adding in the complexity of Rossi's electric heaters and reactor geometry. This would only confuse the issue, and distract you. They have no effect on the Stefan-Boltzman law. Adding the heat initially with a gas fire produces the same results as adding it with an electric heater. The only way this may not model the reactor in all important respects would be if there is a hidden source of chemical or electric energy. There is absolute no evidence for that. To put it another way, if there is a hidden source, it is hidden so well no expert has seen any trace of it, and there no suggestions anywhere as to how you might simulate it; i.e. how you might hide wires large enough to keep a 30 L pot boiling for 4 hours. So you might as well not try to simulate a hidden source. (There are a few crackpot ideas about putting bricks heated to 3000 deg C into the reactor beforehand. There is no way that could work, and it would be dangerous, so do not try it.) - Jed
