Remember
Rossi's and Focardi's ECAT technology? The noise has died down and
excess optimism has now withered away. Today though we have this
excellent independent test that clearly shows that the device is
really working. I include Jed's review which makes the important
point regarding the quality of the work done. Notice just now long
it took to do this right.
The
take home is that the ECAT came through rigorous and skilled testing
with flying colors. We have a real heat source that can be used
safely. Theory becomes irrelevant simply because it can be
delivered. Recall our energy equations are a mere three centuries
old while the water wheel is as many millennia old. This is a very
hot brick and it produces heat well above break even.
Better
yet, we still have no idea just how long it can last. My guess is
that it will be years if not decades. We now have an over unity heat
source that may not be as easy to turn on and off as a natural gas
turbine but will certainly produce a good grade of steam.
From
the get go, I would tackle green houses in particular.
Levi Hot Cat paper
is a gem
Jed Rothwell Mon, 20
May 2013 19:10:00 -0700
I just read this paper
for the third time. This is a gem. These people think and write like
engineers rather than scientists. That is a complement coming from
me. They dot every i and cross every t. I can't think of a single
thing I wish they had checked but did not.
In ever instance,
their assumptions are conservative. Where there is any chance of
mismeasuring something, they assume the lowest possible value for
output, and the highest value for input. They assume emissivity is 1
even though it is obviously lower (and therefore output is higher).
The add in every possible source of input, whereas any factor that
might increase output but which cannot be measured exactly is
ignored. For example, they know that emissivity from the sides of the
cylinder close to 90 degrees away from the camera is undermeasured
(because it is at an angle), but rather than try to take that into
account, they do the calculation as if all surfaces are at 0 degrees,
flat in front of the camera. In the first set of tests they know that
the support frame blocks the IR camera partly, casting a shadow and
reducing output, but they do not try to take than into account.
Furthermore, this is a
pure black box test, exactly what the skeptics and others have been
crying out for. They make no assumptions about the nature of the
reaction or the content of the cylinder. They make no adjustments for
it; the heat is measured the same way you would measure an
electrically heated cylinder or a cylinder with a gas flame inside
it. It is hands-off in the literal sense, with only the thermocouples
touching the cell, and the rest at a distance, including the clamp on
ammeter which placed below the power supply. You do not have to know
anything about the reaction to be sure these measurements are right.
There is nothing Rossi could possibly do to fool these instruments,
which the authors brought with them. They left a video camera on the
instruments at all times to ensure there was no hanky-panky. They
wrote:
"The clamp
ammeters were connected upstream from the control box to ensurethe
trustworthiness of the measurements performed, and to produce a
nonfalsifiable document (the video recording) of the measurements
themselves."
They estimate the
extent to which the heat exceeds the limits of chemistry by both the
mass of the cell and the volume of the cell. In the first test, they
use the entire weight of the inside cell as the starting point,
rather than just the powder, as if stainless steel might be the
reactant. In the second test they determine that the powder weighs
~0.3 g but they round that up to 1 g.
They use Martin
Fleischmann's favorite method of looking at the heat decay curves
when the power cycles off. Plot 5 clearly shows that the heat does
not decay according to Newton's law of cooling. There must be a heat
producing reaction in addition to the electric heater.
I like it!
- Jed
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