Here's what Motl says about it: The emissivity is set to one i.e. they assume the "reactor" to be a black body. This choice is labeled "conservative". Except that the truth seems to be going exactly in the opposite direction. The actual emissivity is lower than one and it's the coefficient multiplying the fourth power of the absolute temperature to get the power. Because they seem to calculate the power from the measured temperature (the infrared camera is claimed to give the right temperature and automatically adjust the observed radiation for emissivity etc.; see page 7 of the paper), the actual power is actually much lower than [the calculated figure] 1609 watts. The emissivity of metals<http://www.omega.com/literature/transactions/volume1/emissivitya.html> at similar reasonable temperatures seems to be 0.2 or so – something of this order – which reduces 1609 watts to something like 300 watts, pretty much equal to the consumption.
Obviously, despite the fact that he cites page 7 of the paper, he didn't read it since it describes how low emissivity setting for the camera software overestimates the temperature. Hell, even Joshua Cude understood that this is a wash in the bandwidth of the camera's physical sensor. What's wrong with Motl? On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:23 PM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > I wrote: > > I believe Lubos Motl proposed somewhere that the E-Cat HT surface is not >> well-approximated by a blackbody and that the true emissivity is likely to >> be T^(4+d), where 0 < d < 1; i.e., that in the worst case scenario there >> will be ~T^5 relationship between temperature and power rather than T^4. I >> do not know what to make of this (assuming I have accurately reproduced the >> details). >> > > That it was Lubos Motl was unintentional speculation on my part, drawing > upon a comment by someone else in the comments to the recent Register > article [1]. The person who wanted to modify the Stefan-Boltzmann equation > was HolyFreakinGhost. Elsewhere there is speculation (from the real Motl) > that the "emissivity of metals" is 0.2 or something on that order [2]. It > seems pretty clear that the E-Cat HT was well painted with black paint; I > do not see how this detail could have been a point of confusion. However, > if Motl's value of ~0.2 were used for the emissivity, he estimates that the > calculated power would be approximately equal to the input power. > > Eric > > > [1] > http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/05/22/e_cat_test_claims_success_yet_again/#c_1833878 > [2] > http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/05/tommaso-dorigo-impressed-by-cold-fusion.html > > >
