On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 11:19 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: > This discussion makes no sense to me. As far as I know, when you add DC to > AC power, you get a DC bias. See:
Yes and no, it all depends on the input stage of the PCE-830. But the DC scam doesn't make sense and here's why. Let's assume that Mats Lewan did talk to a guy from PCE Instruments Ltd and that the PCE-830 is indeed insensitive to DC voltages. Nothing extraordinary here. Putting aside the fact that Rossi is being called a scammer with no proof, it remains that it would really be fearless of him to expect to fool high-caliber technical people sent by a utility trade association using a middle school DC trick. But maybe he's an experimented scammer and has contingency plans. Let's assume there is at least ONE honest person in the experimenters group. That one honest person might very possibly want to bring a $20 DC-sensitive multimeter. That's a very reasonable demand. So Rossi would have needed, at the very least, a means to switch the DC off when a honest experimenter measures DC voltages. (Or even if he doesn't, he might see DC voltages anyway while switching between modes on his instrument.) He also needs a team of knowledgeable people to keep an eye on the honest experimenter and flick the switch if needed. If they turn the DC off, the temperature would drop rapidly and this would show on the IR video and the recorded time-temperature curve. That would look quite suspicious. "As soon as we connected the multimeter, the power output of the e-Cat device dropped drastically." You don't want that in the report. So he would need some kind of emergency excuse. "We detected radiation and had to shut down the reactor!" Still suspicious, but alright... Nothing like that in the report, so the honest experimenter must have been talked out of checking the lines with a multimeter. Or maybe they put something in his wine. Now let's say that Rossi did all that. Let's assume Rossi knew beforehand the exact make and model of the power analyzer(s) the experimenters were going to use. He buys or borrows an identical unit (with identical probes and all) and determines that it can withstand a DC offset of, say, 300 volts for many hours without any problems. As Rossi needs to inject around maybe 3 kW there goes 10 amps. He gets a three-phase-to-DC converter and adds that between two phases with a remote switch in the middle. He makes sure the cables are thick enough, although ten amps is an ordinary amount and should be alright for the cables seen in the pictures. So far so good. Oh wait... he also has to make sure that no one has a compass, or a magnetometer... A 10 A current can easily be sensed from close range with a compass. No compasses as they may "reveal an industrial trade secret". Alright. But a lot of smartphones have digital compasses and this is well-known. As an experienced scammer that hasn't been caught yet, Rossi must be paying a lot of attention to small details like this. So he somehow made sure that no one came with a smartphone having a magnetometer. How did he spell out his conditions to Elforsk? He probably left a message like this: "Hi this is Andrea Rossi, I'm returning your call. I agree to the experiment but I want no multimeters; power analyzers allowed but I must pre-approve the model; I can already tell you that the PCE-830 is approved but Fluke analyzers are not approved; no oscilloscopes; no iPhone or Android devices; no compasses; no DAQ boards; no spectrum analyzers; no Hall effect probes. Thermal cameras are OK. Radiation sensors are OK. Nothing else." Now if Levi, Foschi, Hartman, Höistad, Petterson, Tegnér and Essén have agreed to such conditions then they were either complicit or are collectively stupid. As they are distinguished technical people, they must have been in bed with Rossi. In other words it's a conspiracy. As we don't even have specific motives for most of the experimenters, we must assume money. What amount of money would convince persons like these to risk their liberty, reputations and nice, comfy careers or retirements? I don't have much experience in organized crime but I would say $100k per head would be a minimum and I'm probably being very conservative. So to buy a majority of experimenters Rossi must have sunk something close to $500k for this report. So we have two competing hypotheses: - Rossi spent half a million dollars and bought a majority of the experimenters, who agreed to Rossi's stringent conditions. They kept an eye on the innocent one(s) so that Rossi can conduct his little DC trick; oh and these experimenters include people sent by Elforsk, a Swedish utility company. - The e-Cat burns nickel à la LENR and produces a few kilowatts of excess power. -- Berke Durak
