Rossi made a statement on his Journal recently that seemed puzzling at the time. He mentioned that he was turning on the drive power for 1/4 of the time and allowing the device to drift in the self sustaining mode for the other 3/4. He further told us that he was working of having the ECAT return all of the drive power even during the active drive time.
At the time, I did not give this statement much thought, but today I was reviewing the operation of my latest computer model and found his statement revealing. If you assume that he is driving the core with input at a rapid periodic rate so that the output power variation is well filtered by the time constants of the system then this goal would only yield a COP of 4. We know that he plans to guarantee a COP of at least 6 so I believe that we can dismiss a very short period PWM drive function. The model therefore points us in the direction of a slower process. Either technique can be used to achieve a stable(with great care) ECAT control system, but the slower pulse rate at this duty cycle can be induced to reach a higher COP. The reason a lower period drive achieves higher gain is because of the shape of the internally generated power waveform. Most of my original model work included this type of plan since it is easier to generate power input efficiently with rail to rail digital signals. I assumed that Rossi was going for the easiest and quickest method for his design since there is less risk involved. The internal core power generation mechanism exhibits an interesting behavior when the thermal runaway temperature threshold is approached. There is a time constant associated with the thermal balances acting in conjunction with the net thermal mass which approaches infinity at that exact point. Of course, Rossi can not afford to actually reach that level without active cooling since his device would melt with a tiny error in temperature. But apparently he is willing to come close to that level to reach his COP goal. As I mentioned above, the thermal time constant approaches infinity as a limit when the internal core temperature approaches thermal runaway. This results in the core holding onto the elevated temperature and associated power generation level for a time that extends in duration. This is a non linear process which effectively generates much more power than a linear time constant system. Most of the systems that we deal with have linear time constants and therefore that is what we tend to expect. The ECAT depends upon the other effect for its elevated COP. This conclusion is based upon my computer models and of course might be in error due to the lack of data from Rossi. I believe that the trends can be reasonably derived from the model behavior and the statements that Rossi leaks to us on rare occasions is well supported by the model. Unless he has a computer model much like mine, we can be assured that the ECAT is real since I can not imagine how he would guess at this type of mechanism without some form of evidence in support of his leaks. Dave
