Third Party Tests Conducted

Credible third party tests using something that looked like precision colorimetry gear would be a start. I can't see any journal accepting that paper apart from possibly "The Journal of Irreproducible Results".

Walks like a duck quacks like a duck. Nature is the final arbiter.

The use of a calorimeter would have been nice, more exact. Measuring temperatures is almost meaningless. I can make something get real hot too. ;)

Cheers

I'll play!

Before I started, I went and read the Wikipedia entry on the device under test, but I didn't read any of the other criticism or alternate explanations for what it may be doing.

The numbers are page numbers in the PDF. I have also given the section titles from the PDF.

--- "Introduction"

3: I guess the researchers had to infer how many resistors there were and how they were arranged because they were not allowed to see the device disassembled, either before or after the test. Seems a little strange. I would think the inventor would at least be willing to show people the outer housing and resistors, without the "secret sauce" installed.

"Part 1" "Device and experimental set up"

3: The internal construction of the device is described, but then it says they couldn't weigh parts of it because the device under test was already running when the test started. So how do they know that the description is accurate?

3: Why is the AC input waveform a secret? Does plain old sinusoidal AC (at whatever frequency) not work? How about DC? DC would be a lot easier to measure accurately and cheaply.

4: The seal of the end caps is asserted to be hermetic, without any further proof. Couldn't you take a similar cylinder, hammer an end cap into it, and work on it with pumps and pressure gauges to test that assertion? Hydrogens are pretty small, so they will leak through tiny places. If the hydrogen is essential to the process, leaky end caps would make the device work worse. On the other hand, oxygen, nitrogen, or other stuff leaking *in* might make it work better.

4: I'm sure the 1200 C black paint has a product name, part number, data sheet, etc. Where is it?

4: In so many words, "We weighed one that was just like the one that was already running". How do you know? Why not 1) look at the shell of one, weigh it, measure it, x-ray it, whatever you want to do; 2) make a unique mark on it somehow; 3) let the inventor put the secret sauce in it; 4) observe that the mark is still there; 5) do whatever additional measurements you want; 6) THEN turn it on? In super perfect world you'd get to watch the inventor putting the secret sauce in it, but that seems unlikely to happen here.

4: The whole idea of working out the heat produced via an IR camera seems goofy to me. I know you can use IR cameras for this purpose, but as far as I know they tend to get used for relative measurements (this IC/circuit breaker/whatever is warmer than the one next to it), or for things that don't have built-in temperature sensors, like maybe electric motors or engine exhaust pipes. In the latter case, you usually only care about the instantaneous temperature, not the heat produced. Also, you don't usually care about a 1 C or a 5 C difference; the minimum step you care about is 10 C or more. The application here seems to require much greater precision than that.

In high school physics we did calorimetry with thermometers and polystyrene cups. There was a picture in our textbook of an industrial-grade version with a vacuum for insulation and all that. Why couldn't you stick this device in a calorimeter like that?

The device is going to have some amount of thermal mass. Presumably the input power gets diddled at 50 Hz or 100 Hz or so, but the camera is only updating at 1 Hz. I'd think you'd want a little better update rate on the camera.

5: They decided that they only cared about the apparent power. I think another way to put this is that they assumed the power factor was 1.0. Why not at least look at the active and reactive power just to make sure that's a good assumption?

Can the meter they used deal with the presumably goofy waveform they used? The meter specs say it can autorange from 45 to 65 Hz. If the waveform is goofy enough, it will have components outside that range. The meter specs say it can measure harmonics, but is it looking at *everything*, or just at 60, 120, 180, 240, etc?

Why not hook up a couple of different meters and see if they agree? Given the levels of power involved, the voltage inputs to the two meters shouldn't load anything down excessively.

Filming the meter and a wristwatch is kind of a cute idea (I've proposed it myself for other applications) but that meter can also log data to its internal memory... so why not use the internal logging?

Again, it sounds like they used 1 Hz update on the power meter, which seems like it might not be enough.

6: Why not include the results of the radioactive monitoring in this report?

"Data analysis"

6: They assumed conduction was negligible. It would have been really complicated to stick a couple of thermistors or thermocouples on the steel framework periodically to see how hot it was getting, I guess.

"Calculating the power emitted by radiation"

7: Why couldn't they measure the emissivity? This seems like something you could easily do if you had the outer shell, devoid of the secret sauce.

7-8: They only had one IR camera looking at the bottom of the device. Why not have another one or two looking at the sides? I understand that if you had one on top, convection would tend to heat up the camera itself, but I would think you could tell the camera to factor that in when computing a temperature.

"Calculating power emitted by convection"

11-12: Well... OK. I guess you can do it this way, but I think I've read that in the real world, this depends a lot on the fluid, currents in the fluid, the exact shape of the devices involved, and so on.

Again, wouldn't it be simpler to stick it in a calorimeter, and know that you've captured *all* the heat the thing is putting out?

"Performance calcuation"

13: Is there a rationale for the 10% error number?

"Ragone chart"

14, Fig. 9: Why not get a chart that has both conventional and nuclear sources on it, so the results for the device under test can be plotted with some context?

"Part 2"

"Device and experimental set-up"

15: This time they at least give a brand name for the paint. Still no part number or spec sheet. They also admit that somebody can't paint evenly. Still no emissivity measurement.

15: Magic power supply again. I wonder what the output waveform looks like?

16: Using two IR cameras now, which is maybe somewhat of an improvement.

16: Assertion that the video recording is non-falsifiable. Got a chain of custody for that recording? Did you buy the camera at random from a shop?

17: Trying to measure the emissivity. Again, why couldn't you do this in a more accurate way by testing the outer casing without the secret sauce in it?

18: Again, why not include the full report on possible radioactivity?

"Analysis of data obtained with the "dummy""

18: They did try their power meter on the input line to the resistors. No mention of what the waveform looked like, or what the meter thought the distortion was, or anything like that. If the control box really was dissipating 100 W, it must be a fairly beefy thing.

"Analysis of data obtained with the device"

20: The 35%/65% on-off time is kind of interesting, but over what time period?

20: Any rationale for using 5 divisions instead of the 10, 20, or 40 used in the previous test?

22: They seem to be using the 2% "error" number for radiated energy as the error number for the convective energy also. I am not sure this is justified.

"Ragone Chart"

22: Why not just do 37.58 kWh / 116 h = 0.324 kW for the average consumption, and not have to refer to the (estimated? calculated?) 35%/65% duty cycle?

22: Is there a rationale for the 10% error number?

23, Fig. 15: Why not get a chart that has both conventional and nuclear sources on it, so the results for the device under test can be plotted with some context?

"Remarks on the test"

25, Plot 3: Would you care to label your X axis? It is presumably seconds, but this is not stated. For extra credit, tell Excel to scale it so that the major divisions are 60 seconds or 100 seconds or something reasonable.

26: Trying to prove the heat output is not due to a resistor alone. How about a resistor inside the same steel can but with no secret sauce?

27, Plot 7 and Plot 8: Again, label X axis please. Scale X axis to even units. On the other hand, this does seem to show that the on time is roughly 2.5 minutes (assuming the X axis is seconds), which answers a question I asked above.

27: The argument seems to be "the emitted power keeps going up after the resistors are switched off, so something else must be happening". What if it's just the heat from the resistors finally working its way through to the outside of the cylinder?

---

Before anybody asks, I don't work for an oil company, mining company, or anybody in the power generation and transmission industries (coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, geothermal, whatever). The investments I have in any of these companies, if any, would be through a 401(k) plan, nothing direct. I also don't work for or have any investments in the manufacturer of the device under test.

Matt Roberds

No gamma ray detectors?

Michael

Over the very long history of free-or-excess-energy inventions, the success rate so far has been exactly zero. Which is why we keep drilling oil and gas wells.

There are still people digging up old dump sites looking for that

300MPG carburetor! Mikek

I just wonder how many of them the oil companies have bought or had them added to the compose heap.

Jamie

I wonder how many on this group have ever taken a thermo course?

• Note "hydrogen loaded nickel powder plus some _additives_" sounds similar to test by Pons etc and others after the announcement. Seems that good production correlated with "additives" and/or contamination.

• A heater is a heater is a heater, "secret" waveforms total bullshit. Use adjustable DC. Better yet, if it is so damn good,toss the F-ing heaters and let it power itself!

Wouldn't that be a 300 MPG fuel injector these days?

DC would not allow you to cheat energy supply past whatever goofy way of trying to measure it these well meaning cowboys cooked up. Their attempts to measure energy in and energy out are risible. The whole thing looks like a bad example of a high school science fair project!

If you think about it even for a moment if the peak power generation and energy density of this thing was anything like what they claim from the moment the "nuclear" reaction initiated it would require active cooling to prevent meltdown. Instead it continues to consume power using the magic waveform that defeats simple measuring instruments.

See the Ragone diagram on Forbes. Incidentally why are Forbes pushing this? Do they have shares in this operation they want to pump and dump?

A humble wood burning stove is two orders of magnitude lower down the peak power pecking order and they put out a lot of heat. The obvious thing to do was insulate the test rig to the point where any additional internally generated energy becomes obvious and then look for *nuclear* reactions. I would probably have palmed one of the "tube reactors", substituted a fake then subjected the original contents to ICPMS analysis so that we could see what the thing *actually* contained.

Basically it still looks exactly like an experimental setup by a well practiced conman who has duped a bunch of scientists/engineers.

Fleischmann and Pons did at least generate enough peak power to actually damage their equipment even if it was not cold fusion. Their problem was that they were electrochemists and their practice of calorimetry (which was much better than this crap) was not up to snuff.

[...]

Whoever gets duped by this nonsense is *not* a scientist or engineer.

Jeroen --TANSTAAFL-- Belleman

If you look at the report close enough you'll find the mathematical and measurement errors for sure. The standard way to test these kind of systems is measuring the caloric value of the energy produced. Any other test can be tampered with.

From the paper, they did melt down the first one tested in November. Mikek

I did. Steam tables are really boring. We already knew a lot of that stuff from Physics.

y

Ughh.. you must really want to believe this stuff.

OK let me ask one question... (I didn't read the whole thing), but they guesstimate the heat produced by measuring the surface temperature. And they claim not to be able to measure the emissivity of the surface.. but "conservatively" assume it's 1. Now correct me if I'm wrong but that is *not* a conservative estimate. If the emmisivity was (say) 1/2 then the thing would have to come to a higher temperature to get rid of the same amount of heat!

George H.

38

I can't imagine why. Amusing sci-fi plot but useless engineering.

Fleischmann & Pons were at least credible scientists who rushed into premature publication based on slightly iffy calorimetry and had everybody and their dog trying to replicate their cold fusion experiment.

This lot aren't even remotely credible except in the eyes of the terminally gullible who fall for every other "free energy" scam.

And six orders of magnitude more bullshit than actual reality.

Take with one very large pinch of salt. About 1 tonne ought to do it.

party

s.

. y

Hmm... well I didn't read the whole thing. But if you measure the temperature and then from that you want to get the energy that is radiated. Then higher emissivity means more radiated energy.

If the 'conservative' estimate of emissivity is just to get the calibration of their pyrometer... then I just throw up my hands. Measure the surface temperature some other way (a thermal couple).

So if the calibration of the pyrometer is a bit 'flaky', giving an uncertainty in the temperature... and the energy radiated goes as T^4, then that's an even bigger error.

As others have said, there are lots of ways it could have been done better.

Why do you want so much for this to be true? I tend to be skeptical about science claims... even in a peer reviewed journal.

George H.

and

are

all/

I was perhaps a bit quick to accept this as legitimate and convincing, but I still think it may have some validity. I did some searching of the Cornell University papers and found some more theoretical and probably more realistic analyses of "cold" fusion and low energy nuclear reactions of heavy nuclei such as Nickel. The probability of such reactions according to classical physics is in the order of 10e-2682, but quantum mechanical effects may have a more realistic probability. I posted a large number of links in a discussion in the DIYelectricCar forum:

on-device-86033.html

But the paper that seemed most relevant was:

I am not a physicist by any means but it does seem that nuclear fusion as observed in Rossi's tests is at least possible. I doubt that the simple apparatus he has built can actually produce the results he claims, and I

agree that many of the experimental methods are highly suspect, but I try to avoid knee-jerk rejection of such presentations and keep an open mind.

Paul