On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 1:22 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
The resistive heating requirement is to be able to reverse the temperature > excursion at the proper time by removing the extra input. Constant heat > input will result in the destruction of the device when useful output power > is generated. > Dave, I don't disagree with this assessment. But there's a subtlety that the original question is getting at. I don't know how to express the idea with much accuracy, but consider two different models: 1. There is near-uniform heating in the charge. Temperature above a certain point kicks off the reaction. Once going, the reaction itself feeds energy back the into bulk of the charge, where it has been generated, and the reaction becomes self-sustaining. 2. There is non-uniform heating in the charge. Heat flows from hot spots to surrounding areas. The heat that dissipates from hot spots can either be (a) sufficient to kick off the reaction elsewhere or (b) insufficient, in which case it is just dissipated. There is a threshold temperature below which you get (b) and above which you get (a). It seems like a mixture of gasoline or a load of coal that has been ignited is generates heat somewhat uniformly and follows model (1). It seems that model (1), if applied to the E-Cat, would make the resistance heaters superfluous, however. So I take it that we are forced into model (2). To someone approaching things without further context, it's not clear why model (1) would not apply, and that would raise questions about the resistance heaters. Further, I think we have to assume that the heating transients in model (2) are quite high, since there is the possibility of runaway. These are the subtleties I'm getting at. It seems that the requirement for resistance heaters places constraints that can be used to infer useful information about what is going on. Eric
