Indeed thermometry has its problems but with good calibration and controls which are easily done it is remarkably accurate and far far less demanding than good calorimetry. All of us likely owe our lives to the accuracy of ‘thermometry’ as in when a parent placed their hand on our feverish foreheads to diagnose our health as children. The sort of wholly or wooly bogus thermometry that so persistently passes for experimental method in lenr is perhaps the one thing that most makes the field subject to such derision. To say nothing of the wishful social media twittering about said bogus thermometry.
From: Bob Higgins [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 2, 2016 10:31 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Vo]: Thermometry could be harder than thought One of the characteristics of at least Ni-H LENR is the likelihood that the energy from the NAE is transported away from the reaction site via low energy radiation. This creates the possibility that, like seen in a microwave oven, the surrounding apparatus may become hotter than the source. Rossi appears to utilize this in his eCat-X to heat tungsten plates to be incandescent hot. In such situations, thermometry is problematic for several reasons. It is possible that some portions of the reactor are hotter than others - which portion do you measure? It is possible that a thermocouple could get heated hotter than the spot it is trying to measure by radiation thermalization. In such cases, calorimetry is probably the best bet to guarantee that you are truly not violating your assumptions in inferring heat from temperature measurements. Also temperature measurements must use multiple redundant technologies to insure that remote heating effects are identified if they exist. Could the Lugano team have chosen infrared themometry for this very reason?
