On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 10:50 AM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
Eric, you mention that LENR devices tend to shut down by themselves in the > HAD mode. Rossi has insisted that his units only reach this state if they > run uncontrolled and self destruct by melting. I would consider this type > of operation a defect that needs to be corrected. > It occurs to me now that I was only addressing the general situation -- what we mean by "self-sustaining," and whether it implies that a device has to be in heat after death. But now that you draw my attention to Rossi's setup, I think you are right. He no doubt means something else by "self-sustaining mode," since we don't see a sterling engine or some comparable mechanism to convert heat into electricity -- assuming there is no such setup that we are simply ignorant of. You are probably right that by this he intends short perturbations in the input drive that kick the reaction up so that it can coast along for another period of time. In the absence of a mechanism to redirect the output power to a battery, those impulses would need to come from outside of the system, and a critical detail is that they will sum up over time to something significantly less than the power that is emitted; there is, of course, a claim to this effect, but nonetheless this setup is not necessarily what one would think of by the term "self-sustaining." An interesting detail in the case of Rossi's setup is the apparent input drive, where hydrogen is released by heat, if I have understood what I have read. The input drive, then, seems to be rather complex -- current through the device leads to Joule heating, which in turn leads to gas pressure. Eric
