We have noticed that the large mounting rings at the ends of the HotCat do not appear to glow in the same manner as seen on the smaller body of the device. The testers measured the power being radiated and conducted from these rings just as with the inner body and I decided to look into an interesting possibility.
The large tubes are mounted near the ends of the device but are still located within a region that should be receiving energy from the reacting core. With that thought in mind, I wondered if the thick and opaque nature of these rings might be used to our advantage as we analyze the operation of the ECAT. The testers broke each of the caps into 3 individual sections and I decided to concentrate upon the center ones since any heat transferring through this section would be pointing outwards and not much should travel towards the partially open ends. Both of the center sections calculated to radiate 9.05 watts which seemed like a gift. The area of the cap central sections was 12.566 x 10^-4 square meters. It has a length of 4/3 centimeters. I translated the length to 2 centimeters so that this figure matched the length of each of the 10 sections used in the calculations for the main small body radiation. The correction showed that the power expected to be radiated by the large cap center section would be 9.05 * 2 * 3 / 4 = 13.575 watts had its length been 2 centimeters. The two inner rings nearest the end caps were measured to be 13.18 and 11.18 watts. This calculation, although not precise due to several factors, adds a significant amount of support for the data the testers have presented. In this special case there appears to be far less leakage of photons through the material as is evidenced by the lack of visual radiation. The flat surface also allows for easy attachment of the thermal dots as compared to the difficulty expressed by the testers when dealing with the machined main body. Perhaps Rossi and his team have used this trick from the beginning to measure the performance of their devices. The surface temperatures of the center sections was 323.63 C when the closest inner ring areas measured 451.8 and 412.9 C. I averaged these two together and obtained 432.35 C. At that point I decided to see whether or not the radiation obeyed the standard 4th order relationship to absolute temperature. Since the outer ring has exactly two times the radius of the inner one, the power density should be 1/2 as much as radiated by the inner ring. The power density is 1/2 instead of 1/4 that many of you might initially expect because only one linear dimension is increasing with radius. I like to work with whole numbers so I inverted the 1/2 to get 2 and took the 4 th root. The result is 1.1892. This should be the ratio of the absolute temperatures of the two different types of sections. The large cap has a temperature of 323.63 + 273 = 596.63 K. Multiply that by the magic number just calculated and you get an estimate of the surface temperature of the inner rings if everything works as hoped. So 596.63 * 1.1892 = 709.51 K. Express that in degrees C; 709.51 - 273 = 436.51 C. The actual average I obtained earlier is 432.35 C which is pretty close. I think I have found a gold nugget! Dave
