On Oct 2, 2009, at 11:32 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I wrote:
As far as I know, Swartz has never actually attempted to turn a
flow calorimeter cell sideways to see if the performance changes.
Cravens and I have actually tested this hypothesis by experiment.
We tried turning cells sideways. It makes no measurable difference.
I forgot to mention the most obvious reason this hypothesis is
wrong. Many people -- thousands of people, actually -- run flow
calorimeters in the vertical configuration. They do this in cold
fusion and many other fields. McKubre and Storms, for example. When
they calibrate with a joule heater or run a non-working cathode,
their input equals output to within 10 ~ 100 mW. Their input power
and flow rates are comparable to the Patterson and Letts experiment
I observed. Therefore, if this configuration produces a 1 kW
artifact, as Swartz claimed, McKubre, Storms and thousands of other
people would see that artifact. Some of them would turn their cells
sideways (or rearrange the inlet and outlet flow) and they would
see the artifact go away. This does not happen.
I suppose there might be a very small artifact, at the milliwatt
scale, caused by the effect Swartz specifies. I wouldn't know. I
have never heard of anything like that. But I am certain there are
no heretofore unknown artifacts 100,000 times above McKubre's error
bars.
- Jed
It strikes me as fairy easy to control for gravitational thermal
instabilities in flow calorimeters. Just reverse the flow direction.
Also, dual method calorimeters, like those used at Earthtech,
overcome such problems by producing consistent simultaneous data
using isoperibolic methods.
Some experiments used the electrolyte for flow calorimetry. Doing
this just created fodder for debate. I think one way around this
problem is to use a heat exchanger inside the insulating envelope for
the flow calorimetry. This provides the advantages of up close heat
removal and bubble control, if that is necessary, with the advantages
of flow calorimetry using a pure medium, like water.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
