I allowed Ric Werme to post a couple of entries on the E-Cat “power reactor” by Andrea Rossi in the past, mainly to spur debate on whether this idea had any merit at all. I shut down comments on the last E Cat thread because it was getting out of hand. I expressed my doubts then that this was a viable energy source.
I think even less of the invention now after reading this essay over at Luboš Motl The Reference Frame. Follow the Joules. Excerpt:
So what Andrea Rossi has achieved was to use the electricity from the power outlet to heat the water right beneath the boiling point at a 75 percent efficiency; something that a good housewife should be able to do in the kitchen at least twice a day. If Mr Rossi has a genuine reactor, a simple way to disprove this description of the details of his stupidity (or his naive magic) is heat the water/steam to 110 °C instead of 100.1 °C using the same gadget. 😉 This is not too much to ask for: typical steam generators in nuclear power plants are pressurized at 60-160 atmospheres and the temperature of water and steam is 220-315 °C.
Maybe the E-Cat might be useful to Starbucks, but as for net positive power generation, it doesn’t seem even remotely plausible. Maybe Mythbusters will take it on for entertainment.
Hey GallopingCamel! Good to ‘see’ you here. I haven’t been over to bravenewclimate to check for any Fukushima posts in ages… but I enjoyed your posts over there and our brief interchange, so I couldn’t resist a quick hello on seeing you here. Have you run across any sites that have good Fukushima technical information and updates by chance? (beyond the relatively simple jaif type updates, I mean)
Kind regards,
Rational Debate
Attn Rational Debate.
For full analysis of Fukushima try here:.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/24-hours-at-fukushima/0
Kindest Regards
re post by: G. Karst says: November 28, 2011 at 12:55 am
“Someone” isn’t claiming your tin foil hat emits gamma – you yourself are claiming it, and the regulatory bodies would be all over evaluating it, if it were possibly true. Besides, as I said before – if you knowingly operate a device that emits radiation, without proper licensing up front, you’ll likely be in a world of hurt with the regulatory agencies. That would be increased exponentially if you possibly exposed anyone else to radiation also. Just keeping anyone from detecting emitted radiation isn’t going to keep you out of trouble, not when there is plenty of evidence that you built the device fully expecting it to generate radiation (check), tried to avoid the licensing quagmire by keeping anyone from noticing you’re operating said radiation emitting device (check), and then proceeded to operate it repeatedly without any of the required safety precautions in place (check), potentially exposing yourself, workers, and members of the general public to radiation that you claim your device creates (check).
Do you really believe that facilities such as ITER or fusion research facilities manage to avoid all licensing and required radiation safety precautions just because they haven’t yet actually generated any radiation? That they only become subject to such requirements after they’ve created a pulse that someone happened to manage to be near with a meter at that moment and notice the radiation spike (even if the facility tried to exclude them to avoid regulation)?
‘Awe, gee, sorry we just killed a dozen people, but we hadn’t managed to produce any actual radiation before, so we weren’t subject to rad. safety regs….’ Er, I don’t think so.
The legitimacy or not of the Rossi E-Cat does not have to considered to note the criticisms too frequently amount to a strawman argument based upon gross misinformation about these types of experiments. A discussion of the topic is worthwhile if for no other reason than to dispel much of the misinformation about LENR (Low energy Nuclear Reaction), CANR (Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions), related types of research, and the science from which such experiments arose. In the wacky world of atomic scale and sub-atomic scale events, quantum mechanical effects can do some very surprising and previously unexpected things. LENR experiments have been curiously consistent in reporting some very interesting reactions involving Hydrogen and various metallic elements that are also known to involve quantum mechanical tunneling and electron captures by nuclei. The observed emissions from such events do not correspond with the above erroneous assumptions about Gamma Ray emissions. The reactions involved are not the same, so the emissions would not necessarily be the same either, which experimental observations seem to demonstrate. Everyone would be better served by putting preconceptions aside and allowing experiment and observation to inform the scientific debate, regardless of the events unfolding with the Rossi E-Cat. There is much to be learned and re-learned with respect to low energy nuclear reactions, quantum mechanical effects, and the mysteries of the sub-atomic domain.
Also, it needs to be noted that many of the LENR experiments require electrical power to energize the system just as any tunnel diode requires an electrical circuit to perform quantum mechanical tunneling through the Coulomb Barrier. The question to be answered is whether or not any energy released from the nuclear reaction is sufficient to produce more energy than it consumed to produce the nuclear reaction. High energy nuclear reactions in fission nuclear reactors can do so. Now we need to see if a low energy nuclear reactor can be invented and built to do so.
re post by: a jones says: November 28, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Thanks, I’ll take a look! It’ll be very interesting to see if what looks like a blow by blow of the first 24 hours has much new information compared to similar reports from a few months ago.
I know the sort of info I’m hoping to find may not even be available (yet), and I confess that I haven’t gone digging for this sort of info for a little bit now – but for example for awhile I was trying to find stuff like good evaluation/information on if, and how, the incore temp & pressure monitors might have failed (or survived), how likely the replacement of at least a few done “on the fly” both in terms of installation and calibration, was to provide meaningful data… I never was able to find out much in that regard. Or things such as greater/better detail on radioisotopes measured (e.g., NOT just Cs & I, or even Sr levels, but other isotopes, some of which have to be involved), particularly within the plant or within plant boundaries (liquid, soil, or air) – and what caused some of the obviously incorrect isotope detection reports initially, if the drywell CAMs are thought to have been accurate or failed (& hypothesized failure mode if thought to have failed), more details on discoveries of equipment that failed and why – or that was thought to have failed but turned out to be intact…. just all that sort of stuff – stuff that one might expect to see as after accident investigation reports or similar within the industry or in university departments teaching nuclear/radiological curriculum as overviews for those interested.
All information which, particularly considering this occurred in a foreign nation, just may not be put together into reports available for us yet, I know.
Learning about E-cat affairs generally means reading his blog and picking useful notes by Rossi.
Here’s what I’ve found for November.
November 1st, 2011 at 2:03 PM
We soon will reach 400-500 Celsius using diathermic oil as a primary fluid. We are studying this throughly with our Customer for his next needs.
[A diathermic oil is just oil used for moving heat, typically at higher than 100°C temps and at atmospheric pressure.]
November 2nd, 2011 at 9:32 PM
INFORMATION:
An imbecile is going around sending “confidential” letters saying that our plant tested on the 28th did not have safety valves. Of course everybody with a minimum of knowledge of the matter knows that it is not possible not to put safety valves in a steam generator , but let me confirm the obvious: the plant has 104 safety valves, one per every vessel, regulated to open at 3 bars. The imbecile who is expanding this and other falsities is not a puppett, he is a puppetteer. Before or later I will publish the story of our relationship with this guy, as well as tapes in which he and his fellows have been videotaped while trying to steal samples of powder in my factory during a visit, as well as a draft of a contract which was a fraud. Desperate of the fact that we started the manufacturing of our 1 MW plants the puppetteers are scratching the bottom of their bullshit barrells, and teaming up with other gangs of thieves too.
[Yeah, light on the science. I don’t think this is Steve Krivit, Rossi usually called him the snake.]
November 4th, 2011 at 4:01 AM
I know very well the Seebeck Effect, also did a patent in the nineties. The issue is that the efficiency drops very low when you industrialize. I got 20% efficiency when I made myself the directional fusion of the semiconductors, but when I needed to produce industrial quantities the efficiency dropped below 5%.
Of course if someone industrializes a thermocouple able to reach 20% of efficiency, that would be great. I worked for three years on that, but unsuccessfully at last.
[This refers to thermoelectric modules, one area where Rossi had a prototype he claimed worked well but couldn’t deliver to the customer (US Army). See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/28/test-of-rossis-1-mw-e-cat-fusion-system-apparently-successful/#comment-783297 ]
November 8th, 2011 at 5:15 AM
[In response to “How far are you on succesfully connect the e-cats in series?”]
We reached still stability up to series of three, so far, but we are resolving the problems to increase the serialization.
November 10th, 2011 at 5:10 PM
Today we have been attacked by a strong hacking action. Our informatic [IT guy] has won the battle in few hours. I heard that we will be attacked again, and also got rumors that I will be personally attacked strongly in the next days: I am very happy of this, first because I will fight back, and this is my natural attitude, second because the more the puppetteers get ballistic and keep frenzy their puppett-snakes, the more i get evidence that my job is well done.
November 13th, 2011 at 2:38 PM
Berke Durak
Dear Mr. Rossi,
Here is a hypothetical block diagram of your October 28th e-Cat demonstration.
http://i.imgur.com/GbZri.png
We have discussed it a bit on the Vortex mailing list and we’d like to know
if this diagram is accurate.
[Rossi published this but didn’t reply. One surprise (perhaps I had read a reference in the past) – there were two generators, I assume one was a standby.]
November 24th, 2011 at 9:27 AM
[Commentor: When will the experiment in Bologna and Uppsala university start?]
Soon, but remember that such R&D will be closed doors made and not public. I repeat: no more public tests will be made. We will make only closed doors R&D and tests for our Customers made along the test protocols agreed upon the purchasing contracts. No more information will be released until proper patent protection will be granted. Too many vultures fly around, ready to steal critic info. Look to what is going on around the Balcans: there are clowns saying they have a technology copied from us, actually they have just a moke up, waiting for the piece of info they need to make a real copy. They believed we would have been selling in October the small E-Cats, so announced they would have made a demo in october ( buying a model, disguising it as a copy made by them). But it was just a trap we made. Conclusion: from now on we will be more sealed than ever, and we will be open exclusively with our Customers.
To put for sale the small unts we need:
1- safety certification
2- granted patents
We are working on both the issues and I think they will be addressed within 1 to 2 years from now.
Oops – I forgot to include the link to Rossi’s blog. (And mods, my comment fell into spam purgatory, please rescue it.)
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=516&cpage=14#comments and earlier pages.
Inciteful (yes, inciteful) commentary; a sneeze short of being outright rude and derogatory; seeks to make a point using circular argument; also reveals commenter has not kept pace with continuing developments the last couples of years. Please stop by and play again …
.
Could not possibly be More Wrong.
I’ve played this card before on this subject, and I’ll play it again: Just because you know you’re weak in the area of calorimetry measurements (as would be used to measure the added heat-energy to a waterflow stream) and the measurement of irregular AC and DC waveforms (including pulsed DC, variable PWM DC or intermittent or non-cyclic AC) via RMS techniques for the purposes of accruing power-in ratioed against power-out plotted over time plus the measurement of the volume (or mass) of any particular gas being supplied – DO NOT assume the remainder of the world (including more than just a few EEs) are incapable of a) assembling the required instrumentation and b) performing these basic measurements …
Would like an itemized list of the equipment, manufacturer and model numbers required to perform these measurements?
Would you be surprised to learn that most of it can be purchased off eBay on any given day?
.
@ur momisugly a jones & gallopingcamel
I just ran across this set of comments at another WUWT thread (http://tinyurl.com/7s5t65x), and couldn’t resist posting them here for you two and any others here who might also enjoy the levity. It began with:
kim2ooo says: November 27, 2011 at 9:00 am
Followed by the oh-so-utterly-appropriate reply by davidmhoffer says: November 27, 2011 at 9:40 am
@tallbloke and others
“The Oct 28 test was on a much larger device. If the measured ouput of ~470Kw is kosher, I doubt he’d have been able to suck that much juice from the local grid without making some lights go dim in the local area…”
It was not connected to the local grid. It was connected to a huge generator on site.
If electricity was used to heat water under pressure to 105 C and then continued to be heated by that same power, while at the same time depressurising it slowly, it gives the impression of generating more heat (mass of steam) than it is using. The water temp and pressure has to be observed, not just the steam temperature and mass. I wanna see it for myself.
All you need to do to scam people is to have a pressure gauge that is stuck or controllable. If the pressure was 2 bars to start with, and 1 at the end, there is a great deal of steam that can be produced as it slowly depressurises. Supplemented with additional heat, the experiment is extended.
http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg42311.html reports the pressure inside the cell was 80 bars! And it was heated to 101 C. (Maybe it was heated to 200!) If you heat water up to 101 C and depressurise, you get the impression of 2257 J/g of steam while heating water at 4.186 J/g/Deg. It appears to be 335 Watts input and 2257 Watts output, a ratio of 6.73:1. Do a little math. If the pressure is dropped at a slow rate, how much over-unity can you pretend to have in a system with decreasing enthalpy?
Disconnect the heat source and it still works as long as the pressure is dropping and water is over 100. Keep the pressure gauge frozen so no one can see the drop and we are all wowed.
Just out:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=510&cpage=35#comments
Andrea Rossi
November 28th, 2011 at 6:48 PM
Dear Herb Gills:
Today we sold in the USA a 1 MW plant which will go to a normal Customer. This installation will be visitable by the qualified public.
We wait to have completed the contractual procedure through the attorneys, then we will give communication. It will be in the North East of the USA, where I have been in these days.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
Rossi is getting there bit by bit.
Followed this since the first announcement in January. So far we are still at the situation where everything is “Rossi says”.
I’d like to be proved otherwise, but it’s still the case everything on this subject is “Rossi says”.
Unfortunately that is not a good basis for science.
Hillarious really.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
November 28, 2011 at 10:46 pm
> http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg42311.html reports the pressure inside the cell was 80 bars!
That was the hydrogen side. Hydrogen, nickel. the undisclosed catalyst, and resistance heaters are in the core of the E-cat module, water flows around to take heat away. I assume the high pressure is to increase the density of hydrogen molecules (and atoms, according to some speculation of what the catalyst does) on nickel. I assume water on nickel doesn’t work. Note this is very different than something like the P&F cell where water was an essential part of the electrolytic loading of deuterium into palladium where D+D fusion took place.
The water side of the system has a number of atmospheric connections. The piece you cite is a speculative work on the potential fraudulent/self delusion explanations of the January demonstration (it was posted “05 Feb 2011”).
Accepting some of that implies that weighing the H2 tank before and after the run was falsified too. Also, at 80 bars, it wouldn’t take much of a crack to leak a lot of hydrogen.
You note:
[Crispin is referring to the October 28 demonstration.]
Steam wasn’t released – it was condensed in two radiators, I don’t recall if the water was recycled to the input, dumped, or saved and weighed. If you’re curious, I think the answer is on the Web, shouldn’t take you very long to find it.
MrV says:
November 29, 2011 at 2:24 am
Ever tried getting information from Apple about new products, shipping numbers, manufacturing locations (and pollution from suspected manufacturing locations), etc?
Rossi isn’t a scientist, he’s an industrialist.
In due time. It’s his schedule, and I remain surprised at how open he has been, though he said he’ll be quieter in the future.
I like to read what Luboš has to say about QM, QFT and String theory and I check frequently his blog, but in this case I am appalled by his illiterate comments.
So I just wonder whether or not we can expect some symmetry in his “food chain innovation” in the case if Rossi will be proven right?
“Ever tried getting information from Apple about new products, shipping numbers, manufacturing locations (and pollution from suspected manufacturing locations), etc?”
Apple have a long history of delivering products, and nothing they do involves new realms of physics. If they announce they’re going to release a new iPod, the world yawns because we’re all expecting that anyway. If they announced they were releasing a cold-fusion-powered iPod then ears would perk up but few people would doubt them because they have a long history of releasing what they say they’re going to release, and we assume that if they say something like that then they must mean it.
I worked in the electronics business for a while, and one thing I can guarantee you is that when we invited the media to a demo, we didn’t do it in such a way that they couldn’t verify anything. Typically if it was a PC add-on we’d have the top of the PC off so they could see our card working or if it was a self-contained device we’d have one dismantled and in a clear plastic case so they could see the internals while they used it.
Because we wanted them to know that we had what we said we had, and it worked the way we said it did. If they wanted to connect up a power meter and check that we really were playing HD video with only 1W of power or whatever we were claiming, sure, go ahead. We didn’t want them to have any doubts when they left the room, because we wanted them to tell their readers/viewers that there was a great new product coming their way.
We would have done private demos for large potential customers before that, but they were private demos with no-one else invited; none of those customers would have wanted the media there. By the time we were showing anything to the media, we were pretty much ready to ship it.
So to someone who’s actually been involved in various product launches, nothing about Rossi’s demos makes any sense.
“So I just wonder whether or not we can expect some symmetry in his “food chain innovation” in the case if Rossi will be proven right?”
Will all the true believers come back to admit they were wrong if it turns out his device doesn’t work?
With all these fringe science devices I routinely see the true believers puffing out their chest on web forums and saying ‘You’ll look so stupid when I turn out to be right! I bet you won’t come back here and admit you were wrong!’ And, surprisingly, when the true believers turn out to be wrong, I’ve never yet seen one of them go back to the forum and admit it.
Again, I really hope that Rossi’s device works. But I’ve seen no reason to believe it when all we appear to have is his word that it does; I’ve seen nothing on the web from any third party who’s actually been able to verify that. And if the linked article is correct that the water was never vaporised, then our earlier discussion about generators is pointless because it would have required far less power than even Rossi’s claimed generator output could provide.
http://pesn.com/2011/11/29/9601965_A_Week_of_E-Cat_News_Flurry/
….is the URL of Sterling Allen’s list of recent activity about the E-Cat. He expects to provide weekly updates. It won’t be long before the primary question is settled, according to current information. Then, if the Rossi (and similar claims) are indeed confirmed, the real fun starts.
There is an old remark about the Manhattan Project — the only secret was that the bomb worked. Right now, there is understandable doubt, so LENR is still a ‘sociological secret’ in that sense. IF the Rossi claims are supported by the next customer, etc, then there will be an explosion of activity and re-examination of many radical energy concepts.
The legacy systems will take a long time to replace, but it is highly entertaining to project the economic and political effects that would obtain. I suggest that, if Rossi is confirmed, WUWT could be a major site for such commentaries and speculations. Incidentally, the financial aspects would be important at the level of individual portfolios. Lots of web traffic for WUWT, but the end of AGW as a scare tactic by the left.
Guys might want to check out Dr. Brian Ahern (MIT, Ames National Lab, USAF) who is making an announcement about his patent and theory of the LENR phenomenon in NYC. I get confused why all these PhDs are delivering public lectures on the technology – if it is based on a “scam.” Unless these docs are all in on it…
http://citi5.org/launch/?page_id=1803
re: post by: Ric Werme says: November 29, 2011 at 6:04 am
The problem here is that the equation changes rapidly as soon as a sale is made and customers begin using the product. In Rossi’s case, as I understand it, he claims that his product has been and is being successfully used by several different clients already – and now that he’s supposedly made at least one new sale to a large customer. But I’ve yet to see any of these 3rd parties come forward raving about how the thing actually works.
Can you imagine if the very first smart phone were sold to several people, the media made aware of it (as is the case claimed by Rossi), but you hear zero feedback from those third parties, only more claims by Apple?
Reminds me of this guy a little… 🙂
OOpss…reminds me of this guy a little….:)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14403432
Which also reports:
“Not only did the mysterious client take delivery of Rossi’s first 1MW heat energy production system, but ordered a dozen more for use in cold, remote locations.”
But from following the links, it would appear that the only source for that claim is Rossi. As far as I can determine, no customer has said they’ve bought dozens of these things.
If I went to the phone store and the guy behind the counter said ‘no, you can’t look at our new phone, but a mysterious customer has bought a dozen of them so they must work great’, I wouldn’t be terribly impressed. Normal business just doesn’t work this way.
Hold… on you Climate Skeptics…
The reason I come to this site is that it purports to represent observed and critical thinking. You folks are brushing of ‘cold fusion’ based main stream religious bias… which you abhor from the likes of Al Gore and yet you would easily throw the same stones at cold fusion.
Now it is clear that Rossi is an unsavoury character but he is standing on the shoulders of other established researchers who are real.
I have personally observed Professor Arata’s demonstration at the U. of Osaka with Palladium and Hydrogen. I have followed carefully the McKrube (SRI) work and the Piantellie/Focardi work at the University of Bologna… and the Haegelstein work at MIT.
Google “Journal of Condensed Matter” it is real.
More could be said.
—
Now whether Rossi is real is still a good question.