At 04:02 PM 6/19/2011, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
I've asserted recently that it was "obvious" to
me that the steam was wet, and I've said,
several times, that it would take too long to
explain why. I've got a few minutes, so I'll
see if I can fit in a coherent explanation.
I think you have made some unwarranted
assumptions, but let's see. By the way, I do
think, from all the evidence, that there was some
effluent water, it was not all dry steam. I'm not
disagreeing with that conclusion, only with how
you get there, which may very much affect our
understanding of *how much* this was a problem.
The attached graph (with my annotations) is from the paper
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EssenHexperiment.pdf
It has several interesting points.
Aw, these reports drive me nuts. I'd not read
this one, I think. They have a pump for cooling
water, it seems. So when they start up, they are
pumping an estimated 6.47 kg per hour of water.
They assume that this flow rate remains the same.
Why? I'm banging my head against my desk. I have to stop doing that.
However, it's not a *terrible* assumption. It
merely raises its own problems. What I'd worry
about, here, is in the other direction. They have
this thing boiling away all the feed water. That
means they cannot guarantee that the chamber
cools at a constant rate, I suspect, as there
comes to be less water in the chamber, the
cooling rate will go down. Control problem. This
thing gets hotter, the cooling declines, so it
gets even hotter .... Unless they back way off on the input power, quickly.
First, as I've said in previous email, the total
power dissipated in the device can be estimated
from the slope of the curve and the temperature
of the effluent. The power needed to heat the
output water goes up linearly with the
temperature of the output water, and the power
needed to heat the device goes up linearly with the slope of the curve.
Okay.
There was a claim of "ignition" at about 60C, at
which point the device started generating power.
Looks like that.
In fact, the graph says that can't be
right. If the device generated no power before
it hit 60 degrees, the temperature would not
have gotten to 60 degrees so quickly, because
(as stated in the paper) the heater temperature
was only adequate to maintain it at 60 degrees
with the flow rate used in the experiment. So,
the heating curve, instead of looking like a
straight line, would look like a capacitor
charging curve, and it would have taken much, much longer to reach "ignition".
This is the problematic assumption: that the
input power "was only adequate to maintain it at
60 degrees with the flow rate used." This is
derived from their statement: "If no additional
heat had been generated internally, the
temperature would not exceed the 60 °C recorded at 10:36."
That's preposterous, as you note. Had there been
no generated heat, there would have been a
continued rise in temperature, at the previous
rate of increase, declining asymptotically, as
you state. Quite simply, there is no stated basis
for this claim. It should therefore, be
discounted. The experimental evidence shows
otherwise, so I assume this was a simple error on
their part. I'll assume that they intended to say that "
the rate of increase of temperature would not have increased."
The steam was claimed to be dry in this experiment.
Yes. That claim comes from a visual examination
of the steam valve, and assumes that there was no
flow out of the hose at this point. Again, they
are not explicit about this, but they only talk
about "visual checks of the outlet tube and the
valve letting out steam from the chimney." If
there is no flow out of the outlet tube (the
hose?} and there is live steam at the valve,
easily seen by the short gap where the steam is
invisible, the physical arrangement would be
adequate for this assumption to be at least
approximately correct. They measure steam quality:
"Between 11:00 and 12:00 oclock, control
measurements were done on how much water that
had not evaporated. The system to measure the
non-evaporated water was a certified Testo
System, Testo 650, with a probe guaranteed to
resist up to 550°C. The measurements showed that
at 11:15 1.4% of the water was non-vaporized, at
11:30 1.3% and at 11:45 1.2% of the water was non-vaporized.
Did they measure this inside the "outlet tube,"
i.e., inserting the probe through the
thermocouple access port? I notice no gap in the
temperature recording from the thermocouple. So there is a question there.
However, this is where we rely on "authority." I
don't see any reason to suspect that Essen and
Kullen didn't know what they were doing. What I
can say is that *from the report alone,* there
are questions. Let's see what Stephen comes up with.
In that case, the output power was something on
the order of 10 kW once it started producing
steam. But the output power before that point,
which we can read from the graph, was about a
factor of eight less than that. So, once it hit
boiling, the output power must have increased
eight fold, very rapidly -- certainly more
rapidly than the power had been increasing up to
that point. But then, since the effluent
temperature did not rise above 101C, the power
generation must have stopped its meteoric rise
at exactly the core temperature needed to keep
the effluent at 101C, no more, no less.
There is a problem, but the effect of boiling
water isn't being considered. When you boil
water, the temperature of the water (at
atmospheric pressure) wlll not increase beyond
100 C, and the steam will be at that temperature.
Because of effects from the cooling chamber walls
being at slightly higher than boiling (it must
be, average), the temperature will be *slightly*
above 100, which will, aside from bulk water, if
present, dry steam. Assuming the temperature
measurements are accurate, this is a confirmation of (mostly) dry steam.
Their statement of percentage of water not
vaporized has some missing information. *What
water*? If this is a measurement of the steam
quality inside the outlet tube, they don't
actually say so. However, if the steam is the
only escape of water from the device, then that
percentage may be applied to the flow assumed
from the initial pumping rate. Kullen and Essen
are not ruling out fraud, and, given the
restrictions on their access, ruling out fraud
may not be possible, but a possible fraud
mechanism is available here: lowering the pump
rate, which could be done surreptitiously, or
even internally, with a valve that would throttle
down the water flow with a given pump pressure.
With the design, the temperature will not rise
above boiling, until and unless all the input
water is vaporized immediately, and thus can be
further heated by the cooling chamber walls.
If the device were running open loop, that would
be absurd. There *MUST* be a feedback mechanism
to keep the temperature almost exactly at boiling.
What I would expect is what the outlet
temperature shows, that is, that outlet
temperature would flatten at boiling, at least
for a time. If you take a paper cup of water and
heat it over a gas flame, the water temperature
will rise rapidly until it hits boiling, then
will flatten, and stay at that temperature until it's gone.
Apparently this thing operated with stability,
from the full time it was on. As is common in
reports like this, we are not given the full
data, only that part of it deemed "important." We
don't see, for example, continuous measurements
of input power. The general design of this thing,
which includes how it was operated in other
public demos, involves turning down the input
power when the reaction chamber reaches operating
temperature, at that point this temperature is
maintained by the sum of input heat and reaction heat.
300 watts in, however, may have been chosen so
that equilibrium temperature wasn't too much to
evaporate all the water in the cooling chamber.
The input power to do that would be a range of
powers. But there is nothing indicating that the
input power was not lowered. And that would fully
explain what is seen. They only measured the
input power, from the report, at initialization.
Again, to rule out fraud, this would need to be
monitored continuously. What if it were later increased?
Complex scenarios regarding the contents of the
blue box have been posted to the list,
explaining how the feedback must have been done.
However, as far as I can tell, these are pure
speculation, with no statements from Rossi to back them up.
Speculation has one use here: to posit a
reasonable scenario that explains the results
seen. That the blue box would lower input power
when the reaction chamber reaches operating
temperature is about as reasonable an assumption
as one can make, and we know that sometimes the
input power is, in fact, lowered.
Furthermore, there's no evidence of any
feedback wire leading from the effluent
temperature sensor, and no statement from Rossi
to indicate that such feedback might exist. On
the other hand, it seems unlikely that feedback
from a sensor in the core would be able to hold
the effluent temperature exactly at boiling;
feedback must have been derived from the actual effluent temperature.
This is the incorrect assumption. As long as the
power reaching the cooling chamber is within a
certain range, the effluent temperature will
remain at boiling, quite precisely. The feedback
is not on the effluent temperature, because,
until the chamber runs dry, that temperature will
be stuck at or slightly above boiling.
I'm not entirely satisfied with this analysis. I
really don't like the fixed coolant flow,
combined with full vaporization. However, as long
as the chamber doesn't run out of water, and as
long as the steam is high-quality, the
measurement of total power will be reasonably accurate.
But there's a much simpler
explanation: "Internal feedback", in the form
of entrained water droplets, would nail the
output temperature of the steam at, or just above, boiling.
No, that's true, but silly. Yes, if there are
entrained water droplets, the temperature would
be nailed to boiling, because any attempted
increase above boiling would simply vaporize the water.
I'm worried about this "Testo 650." That's a
relative humidity meter. Wouldn't the humidity be
nailed at 100% under these conditions? That's a
very different measure than steam quality. The
Testo device doesn't directly measure
"unvaporized water" and it's completely unclear
how they derived what they show. The highest
temperature probe shown on the Testo web site
only is rated up to 98% humidity, +/- 2% RH.
Again, did they know what they were doing? I
can't judge, but someone familiar with these measurements would know.
There's no need to imagine complex feedback
circuits, sensitive control electronics, nor any
need to postulate a reason why the optimal
temperature at which the circuitry held the
temperature must be EXACTLY BOILING, rather
than, say, 7.5 degrees above boiling. (BTW, if I
recall correctly, someone looked up the boiling
point that day at Rossi's location and ambient
barometric pressure, and it was actually about
101C, not 100C -- so this really was nailed *at*
*boiling*.) Furthermore, this avoids the need
to believe in the "inflationary" phase during
which power generation increases dramatically
for a brief period just after the output temperature hits boiling.
Yes, Stephen, it's nailed at boiling. That's what
boiling water does. I don't know what you mean by "inflationary phase."
I realize I've waved my hands a bit here; it's
been a while since I worked this out and I don't
have all the data and equations in front of
me. If anyone cares, I can go back and get some
numbers out of the above cited paper and tighten
up the argument a little. I could also plot the
temperature rise we'd expect to see if generated
power didn't start until 60C (it really does
look like a capacitor charging curve). But I
think what I've said here should make my reasoning pretty clear.
Pretty clearly flawed by the idea that some
special feedback mechanism is need to nail the outlet temperature to boiling!
Finally, there's a much more disturbing issue
with the attached graph. The temperature rise in
much of the graph is not just above what we'd
expect to see if the power generation were fixed
-- it's actually LINEAR. From initiation to
about 45 degrees it's dead linear; from 60 to 80
degrees it's dead linear. Other segments are look nearly linear.
Something weird happens on the way too boiling.
You've got to understand that you are not seeing
the reaction chamber temperature. You are seeing
the coolant steam temperature. If I'm correct,
the controller does measure reaction chamber
temperature, so it can back off on input power as
the chamber reaches temperature. There will still
be thermal delay to the cooling chamber, due to
the obviously high thermal resistance. It could
look quite linear within the ranges involved.
[...]
Finally, I have just one more comment on the
"dry steam" issue. It seems obvious to me, as
I've said repeatedly, that the steam wasn't
dry. Rossi says it was, and the folks he was working with say it was.
The question is what they saw that produced this
conclusion. Rossi isn't precise, even at best.
You may conclude that they're the authorities,
and therefore I'm all wet; that's a fine Appeal
to Authority argument (since they won't publish
the data on which they base their "dry steam" conclusion it's all you've got).
What I see here is "examination of the outlet
tube and the steam valve." Given that this could
be quite adeqate, this is only in a certain sense
an appeal to authority. In a trial, the witnesses
would be examined to clear up anything unclear.
"On what, sir, did you based your conclusion that the steam was dry?"
There are some good questions to ask Essen and
Kullen, through Mats Lewan, I'd assume.
But I, on the other hand, must necessarily
accept my own opinion <g>, and must therefore conclude something different:
Actually, you are telling us precisely how you
get trapped. It is not necessary, by any means,
to accept one's own opinion, and a genuine
skeptic will be just as skeptical of his or her
own opinion as that of anyone else (assuming some
equality of knowledge of the situation, and we
are notoriously bad at estimating our own
knowledge to that of others, in some
circumstances). Given this, the alleged
obligatory nature of the conclusion can be seen as an illusion.
None of these people can be trusted, either
because they're not honest, or because they do not know what they're doing.
Neither conclusion is warranted, at least not
yet. Your impeachment of the evidence provided is
based on your own assumptions and errors. You
have correctly, in some cases, identified
questions, but identifying questions and assuming
the answers is not adequate for impeachment of
testimony. Basically, Stephen, it is you who does
not know what you are doing, but you don't
realize it. You "accept your own opinion," even
if smiling. Drop it, give it up. Asking questions
is completely in order, even the ignorant and
"wrong" can ask questions, but be sure to listen
to the answers and don't simply make up more
reasons why you are right (since you *must* accept your own opinion).
I'm not suggesting that you abandon and
contradict your own opinion, necessarily, but
that you try to, assiduously. Take on the null
hypothesis and attempt to prove it, to disprove
your own opinion. That's science, by the way.
Consequently, as far as I'm concerned, the
results of all "private" tests for which we
don't have clear, conclusive reports and data,
and at which we didn't have competent observers,
probably should be ignored. And that includes
the subsequent "sub-boiling" run, of course.
No, they should not be ignored. They should be
accepted as testimony. Testimony, alone, is not
proof, and we are far from the point were anyone,
here, can assert proof either way. Your questions
are just that, questions, based partly on
unreported characteristics of the demonstration,
and partly on your own misunderstanding or speculation.
BTW somewhat similar reasoning applies to the
"natural ratios" problem. Rossi said
(somewhere) that the isotope ratios which he's
seen in the ash and generated copper are not
natural. Rossi has sent out one (1) sample to
be tested by an independent lab. The ratios found were natural.
And the meaning of this, given the paucity of data, is entirely unclear.
First of all, I have no reason to even suspect
that Rossi understands the reaction. He doesn't
claim to have developed a theory which then
predicted the catalyst. It's far more likely that
he applied brute force investigation to discover
the catalyst, though he might have been following
some intuitions that might be related to theory.
Such intuitions do not prove any theory, they are
just part of the process by which theory is developed.
Again, this doesn't mean that he's wrong. It's
just that developing a practical device doesn't
necessarily qualify him to come up with accurate theory.
Complex explanations have been proposed, ranging
from insensitive equipment to bizarre multibody
fusion theories. Yet, a very simple explanation
covers the result very well: Rossi lies.
No. That does not cover all the data we have, all
the testimony we have. (You are aware that all we
have is the testimony of witnesses, right?)
There is something you are completely ignoring,
the independent or related players here:
Ampenergo and Defkalion. Ampenergo has apparently
put in real money, already, based on private
demonstrations they saw last year. Defkalion is
claiming operating devices, and Defkalion,
apparently, has people on their board with heavy
business experience, not about to toss their
reputations to the winds by supporting a fraud.
Suspecting fraud from Rossi's behavior alone is
quite reasonable, but there are alternate
explanations that don't involve fraud. And they
make simple error pretty unlikely.
Rossi, I'll assert again, is allowed to lie, as
long as he doesn't like to the people putting in
money. Since Defkalion isn't paying him yet, he
might even be able to lie to them. We don't know
what has been said privately between these
parties, we can only stand at a distance and
watch. Some people may investigate, like Krivit.
Krivit seems to have been satisfied, it may be,
by his personal interaction with Rossi and Levi,
which is unfortunate, it would not be the first
time he's made this mistake. We'll see, he's not
committed himself yet, he's just made preliminary noises, mostly okay.
I'll say more: Under the present conditions,
Rossi is *expected* to lie. Quite simply, it's
irrelevant. I don't know whether he is lying or
simply making some ill-considered statements
sometimes, not precisely specified to make them
true. That happens. He's busy. Etc.
