Lugano performance recalculated - the baseline for replications

1st Official Post

    Dear all,


    I have been fascinated by the independent Lugano test and read the various comments about it with great interest. I enclose a decently written formal comment on the Lugano Report. I've put together all the previous work on this to reach what is I believe a coherent whole.


    This report is interesting because unlike previous tests where there were significant aspects of the experimental methodology unreported this one has very complete data. My analysis supposes that this data is correct and follows through the calculations done by the Lugano Profs to check them.


    The results are surprising: and should be required reading for anyone now seeking to replicate this test.


    My work linked below follows that of Bob Higgins, referenced in the paper, correcting a small mistake Bob made and doing the (rather complex) calculations as accurately as is possible.


    https://drive.google.com/file/…weTVNbjg/view?usp=sharing
    Substantive critical comments very welcome - criticism is the best way to strengthen any argument!


    PS - for some reason Frank Acland on ECW did not wish to publish this as a user-sourced comment there. I'm hoping that this site will provide a more objective forum for discussion.


    Enjoy!

    • Official Post

    We share the conclusion that the test should be redone with calibrated calorimetry.


    Beside the dubious calorimetry, it is hard to believe that the reactor was not able to show reasonable performance.
    The estimation seems more coherent than the choice of the physicist, but it may suffer from the lack of calibration too.


    One possibility is that as you propose the COP was weak, or unity, and this cannot be what the manufectured was imagining. A correct measurement would have seen it clearly, and even a weak COP able to challenge current physics, would be an industrial failure.
    This mean that the reactor was badly handled... not enough energy in, bad sealing... but the huge isotopic shoft show something happened...


    Another is that, if there is clear lack of calibration, finally the result is not far from reality... is it errors that compensates, emissivity that is in fact as expected, IR cam that is intelligent enough to compensate errors... We don't know well the algorithm used by the IR cam, and the manufacture simply ask people to calibrate.



    Note also that Ferrara test, if you eliminate the usual conspiracy theory that are impossible with this independent test (and even with ferrara because wiring was checked freely), the COP was high and calibration was good.


    Note also the isotopic shift, that look so strange that it would be absurd to be manufactured.


    You are right is raising some of the inconsistency in the report, but I think that the report even miss data to safely ruleout a good COP.
    It need to be re-done.

    • Official Post
    Quote from Thomas Clarke

    PS - for some reason Frank Acland on ECW did not wish to publish this as a user-sourced comment there. I'm hoping that this site will provide a more objective forum for discussion.


    Don't worry, as long as people are not insulting or flooding the forum with their postings, we also admit critical point of views and sceptic comments :)
    We are a discussion forum, and constructive cristics are needed and welcome! :thumbup:

    This was predictible, the Lugano Testers had behaved very irrationally. When you claim results of such earth-shaking importance you must confirm them- or if you cannot- then retract them
    And this must happen in a relatively narrow time-frame- ay 3 months.
    To err is human, to persist in error is devilish but to shut up so long is a bit suicidal- and repels even your best friends and supporters.


    The weak part of Thomas report is what he says about isotopic shifts- too Mary Yugo inspired.
    I wonder if Bo and Co. will answer now in the 13th hour.


    Peter

    Thanks for these comments, I'll try to reply.


    Assassination. That is emotive language and not I think justified. The authors made one mistake - easy for non-specialists - its consequences were not obvious to me for a long time looking at the Report. I agree, it is unfortunate and to me surprising that they have not yet replied. Replying to significant critiques is an important part of the scientific process.


    What is also surprising is that this mistake totally nullifies the conclusion of excess heat - in particular, even though the experimental errors from this remain high, they are not expected to be very different between the two high temperature tests. Therefore we can say with some certainty that this system exhibits no strongly temperature dependent exothermic reaction. There seems a lack of clarity here with most "replicators" claiming that this is expected.


    Mary Yugo. I try very hard to address science issues without any personalisation. That way it is easier to have an informed critical debate. I don't therefore think this comment relevant (I also don't understand it - the work here is all my own except where I have referenced others).


    Isotopic shifts. If the shifts are as stated in the report then it is prima facie evidence of nuclear transformation, but also inconsistent with mass-energy balance as I've argued. If the shifts are partial (which they could in principle be), then this is no evidence of nuclear transformation. Such partial shifts could come from one of many possible fractionation processes. I reference the Hg CFL fractionation in the my comment.


    The point is that without excess heat, the evidence here is more easily explained by fractionation (if you think the isotopic results are partial) or some sort of mistake, if you think the isotopic results are real.


    There is no evidence for LENR, which would predict excess heat of a calculable magnitude to go with the transmutation. Arguing an endothermic reaction to balance the exothermic one seems very complex and coincidental, especially because the Ni62 if real goes to completion which does not fit the power vs time graph. Also there does not appear to be any such, the Li change is not enough to undo the Ni change. I have not worked this out in the paper because it did not seem necessary but did consider it myself.


    In my comment I stick to the scientific facts rather than attempt to explain how mistakes could happen. Generally scientists find that leads to a cooler and more useful evaluation of evidence, and I agree.


    Comment. This is a non-scientific comment, but an obvious one. This test was billed by Rossi as definite independent evidence of working product. He had access to the testers, could have told them what to do to make the reactor work. He was claiming much higher COP many years ago. So there is a big question as to why he produced for testing a reactor that has such a very low COP. It does not make sense to me, unless he could provide nothing that worked better. He must have known that the isotopic measurements would not be viewed as independent and therefore dismissed. So the tests would appear to be a charade, with apparent positive result only because the testers made a mistake in how they calculated temperatures.

    Quote from Thomas Clarke

    PS - for some reason Frank Acland on ECW did not wish to publish this as a user-sourced comment there.


    Frank is a coward. Or maybe he is with the scam. I dunno.


    Anyways, it will be fun to follow what the Religion of the LENR will bring forth. :doofy:

    The weak part of Thomas report is what he says about isotopic shifts- too Mary Yugo inspired.
    I wonder if Bo and Co. will answer now in the 13th hour.


    Peter[/quote]


    Isotopic shifts were observed - no need to paint the post as anything other than objective and any more of this detracts from the credibility of said poster.


    The shifts need to be accounted for - one way or another. Given the "success" of the Lugano experiment, after thrashing out the science, the phrase "Cui bono" is a natural extension to basic curiosity.


    physicsdog

    Thomas Clarke has addressed one measurement issue of the Lugano report but there are others which Peter Gluck and others love to ignore.


    First, nobody is sure about the input power because it used Rossi's wiring and his measurement method involving clamp on ammeters. As has been shown by others, it is easy to fool this method, using nothing more than trick wires (the "Cheese Video").


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovGXDDvc3ck


    The proper method to measure input power is to provide your own wiring ahead (upstream) of Rossi's. Actually, the use of an uninterruptible battery based power supply would be the best. The Swedish scientists, sometimes derisively referred to as "blind mice" did not do that. Why not? And there is not nor was there ever a need to use confusing three phase power, especially with one phase disabled, as apparently was seen in at least one of Levi's recent "hot cat" experiments. And don't kid yourselves. These experiments are conducted under heavy supervision and participation of Rossi via Levi so they are anything but "indipendent."


    Second, the Lugano experiment did not have, as even Alain admits, proper calibration. It is claimed that the reactor contained a thermocouple but the readings from it were not made available. There should have also been surface thermocouples and even heat flux meters to pin down the heat flow measurements accurately. And of course, the calibration should have encompassed the entire operating temperature range for reasons Thomas Clarke made elegantly clear. It was not done -- not any of it. Blind mice could accomplish more.


    The background to all this includes these facts:


    Every one of Rossi's and Levi's 2011 experiments and demos had major issues. Each was a method of spoofing/faking the measurement to provide a larger "COP" than actually existed. It started with mismeasurement of wet steam as dry. It went on to bad thermocouple placement to make the output stream appear hotter than it really was. Rossi was told about the deficiencies by many people and each time refused to discuss the issues and repeat the experiments properly. Instead, he went on to more, equally obscured and ever more confusing methods of energy accounting. And NONE of the early experiments/demos had any calibration whatsoever. This is science?


    The claimed COP (actually the output/input ratio) of Rossi's ridiculous looking devices has decreased steadily with time by orders of magnitude. I guess that's progress to Rossi fans. It started with a "COP" of 200 during experiments with Focardi in 2007. Then Rossi said he heated a whole "factory" with a boiler containing just one ecat heater. Nobody ever reported about that wonder! It has never been seen. Then, Levi reported a COP of 30 and an average output greater than 10kW from a tennis ball sized ecat in 2011. When confronted by Krivit about the deficiencies in the report, Levi never answered and never repeated the experiment. Levi even refused to respond to an email about this from no less than Nobel laureate Brian Josephson! Then, Rossi's other demos had COP's around 6. Until the present when even the claim is less than 3 and the probable real result as Thomas pointed out, is one with an error band of at least 30%. And that is before you rule out cheating with the input power measurements.


    Nor has Rossi ever given a satisfactory reason why such a high energy producer as his hot cats need continued electrical power input! It should be straightforward to power them with their own heat but somehow this feat has escaped Rossi since he began in 2007. The excuses about lack of stability make absolutely no sense. No instability of an ecat has ever been shown. A nice fat explosion in the desert somewhere would have been nice but we have never seen one from Rossi's devices.


    Going further back, Rossi has NEVER had a successful result or product. Everyone has their own interpretation of Petroldragon but if Rossi really had a good way to convert waste to oil, he'd be doing it now in the US. It was a disastrous and costly scam. And then there were the non-existent thermoelectric devices which cost the DOD almost $10 million of wasted money in the early 2000's. Again, if this had had merit, Rossi or someone would be doing it now. Instead, DOD tried to erase the whole event from the internet.


    These are the "maryyugo" things that Peter Gluck and other Rossi enthusiasts dislike reading. I wonder why.

    Quote from Peter Gluck

    The weak part of Thomas report is what he says about isotopic shifts- too Mary Yugo inspired.
    I wonder if Bo and Co. will answer now in the 13th hour.


    Bo and company are going to go the way of Defkalion and Hadjichristos, that consummate liar and bully. How they doing over at Defkalion now, Peter? Hear anything from Hadjichristos? Where are the Hyperions that made 10kW on a desktop in 2011? The ones that Jim Dunn wanted Dick Smith to invest a million dollars in during 2011?


    I doubt you will ever read anything cogent from the esteemed Swedish Professors. In real life, if someone thought they had proven the existence of robust and powerful LENR/cold fusion, they would be running to the press and the main line literature to report it. Instead, we have heard nothing from these "blind mice". If you believe Rossi has the goods, that makes no sense.




    And I suppose it makes sense to anyone that Rossi, having the greatest discovery of the last hundred years, sits on it for four years, doing nothing except a small contract from a company which specialized in reclaiming polluted land?? That now, he has to test an assembly of fifty or more "reactors", ensconced in a silly ship container in some industrial park somewhere for A YEAR? Supposedly testing this ridiculous kludge? What would a real inventor of a cold fusion reactor actually do in real life? He or she would probably contact industrialists and visionaries such as those at Google, Tesla, eBay, Microsoft, various government labs and foundations. And they would give a convincing demo to the patent office with the press in attendance so a patent could not possibly be refused. Instead, Rossi languishes with a few friends inside that container, running unnecessary and meaningless tests on a device clearly powered from the mains. Richly powered from the mains or have you not seen Rossi's own indictment via this image:


    http://andrea-rossi.com/1mw-pl…xec1olem2kk3m7tictapmf1bn
    Want to guess what powers the "megawatt plant"? Just look at that huge, honking power source.

    Mary,


    The points you raise are nothing new, and I'd broadly agree - certainly that Rossi has never had credible evidence to support his extraordinary claims, also there is positive evidence of problems with nearly all of his tests.


    The Lugano test is interesting even so, because the data from it is so detailed. I believe that the profs who did it obtained decent data - though with obviously flawed methodology. The lack of control or even direct temperature measurement is a serious issue I highlight. Still, their own results prove that this device does not work as billed. That is only possible because we have such a lot of data about this test. So we have positive evidence of null device, rather than null evidence.


    For a scientist there is little difference. LENR is extraordinary - you don't need positive evidence it does not work to judge that it is highly unlikely to work in the absence of extraordinarily powerful confirmation.


    For many people here however there may be a difference.


    While reversed clamp etc remains a possibility, and certainly we have positive evidence of a wiring change between dummy and active tests, the numbers obtained show a good match to COP=1 without a reversed clamp so I don't think it is the most likely solution. The electrical Joule heating issue is thorny and I avoided it beyond a general caution. Once you reckon the are connecting the active setup in a different configuration (Wye vs Delta) there are too many variables about wiring resistance, and what they calculated, to do more than add this as another uncertainty.

    Quote from MY

    And I suppose it makes sense to anyone that Rossi, having the greatest discovery of the last hundred years, sits on it for four years, doing nothing except a small contract from a company which specialized in reclaiming polluted land?? That now, he has to test an assembly of fifty or more "reactors", ensconced in a silly ship container in some industrial park somewhere for A YEAR? Supposedly testing this ridiculous kludge? What would a real inventor of a cold fusion reactor actually do in real life?


    There are very many things about Rossi that make no sense if he has what he claims. Most striking to me is his (and [lexicon]IH[/lexicon]'s) happiness to let scientists reverse engineer his device and test both fuel and ash. You cannot get a more severe loss of IP than that, and Rossi has no patent protection.


    I've never heard a satisfactory answer to that specific point, except to say that Rossi is not entirely rational. And [lexicon]IH[/lexicon] is not a "normal" company that would never allow such a leak of its IP.


    That is an excuse for any weird behaviour, and cannot generally be ruled out. Then, you judge how likely such a specific loss of rationality is in an inventor who has a world-beating invention.


    For most people there is an obvious answer not shared by many following the story here.

    Dear Thomas


    Excuse me please for the delay< each evening I am launching an issue of my Ego Out blog
    Your comments are cited there.
    Assassination is not the intention but it is the effect of your paper.
    You have seen that accusing Rossi of manipulating the sample is a Mary Yugo like
    act.
    But openly I have no problems with your opus, I am very angry with the Lugano testers
    It is professional seppuku what they make, very sorry for them.
    Best wishes,
    Peter

    Thanks Barty.


    If it is those wires, we don't really know the gauge ex insulation. And recall clearly that they are not hooked up at all in the full image. Wonder who cropped that?


    Not to critique the critique. But let's keep it quantitative "Mary".


    Perhaps to your point, if those were say 00 gauge and running at 440 V., I would grant it would be a honking system of some sort. Say 10 wires at 225 A each, i.e. 2250 A X 440 = 990,000 watts or very close to one MW....

    It would be very good show if Rossi, Parkhomov, Song Sheng Jiang and possible others are fooling with us.


    Maybe his intention was always good.. We can just speculate.


    All in all, there were lot of scientists that observed e-cat very closely and it worked. In 1MW plant he is working with collegues, do you think they are all frauds?
    Even today for example Levi is trying to reproduce it too - he is still very convinced.


    Why is Rossi happy for replications? It can help him too, it can show that his device can really work.
    And he can do nothing about it.

    Quote from Peter Gluck

    Dear Thomas


    You have seen that accusing Rossi of manipulating the sample is a Mary Yugo like
    act.


    I take your point that accusations of dishonesty are corrosive, because they are strongly resisted and a scientific discussion descends into a comparison of character.


    That is why it is best just to present facts, as I do. For example, you may assume that my comments about the fuel/sample handling of Rossi preventing that aspect being independent mean that I'm accusing Rossi of tampering.


    Logically, that is a possibility. But it is not what I say, which is why I think "May Yugo like act" is not fair.


    For example, the samples could have become contaminated or mixed up in some way not necessarily nefarious. That has happened before in the Rossi story - with the first sample ever tested for isotopic composition declared by Rossi to be contaminated a long time afterwards.


    Now I realise, given all of the evidence,
    some people (including I guess Mary Yugo) will argue strongly that Rossi is a fraud. That is their priviledge, but equally it is my priviledge to stick to the science and not go beyond pointing out inconsistencies.


    I'm wondering whether you are taking a personal stance in this matter. Just as assuming Rossi dishonest makes objective analysis difficult, so does assuming Rossi honest.


    Best wishes, Tom


    I hope you're right. We've each spent at least hundreds of hours studying and/or working in this field. I imagine even many of the critics have spent hundreds of hours each as well. In some very real way we can blame the USPTO administrators or their likely overly self assured "informants" for failing to consider LENR or CF as even possible. Under the rubric of "perpetual motion" the USPTO excluded such patents for nearly two decades. The result has been a secretive approach by many in the field. This has then prevented or discouraged full disclosure, (the very first reason patents were allowed in the first place-- in the US about 200 years ago). The loss of disclosure has impeded verification or falsification of claims.... you cannot prove or disprove what you do not know. The exact result is to halt progress, that is to return us to an era when "arts" were "trade secrets" before the industrial era. It is rather neo-medieval methinks.


    Rossi's patent applications are so poor it would be laughable if not for the tragic consequences of wasted or misdirected research efforts imposed on others... one wonders who his US IP attorneys are or where they received their training and experience. I would contrast his applications with those of Lipinskis at UGC, which are almost overly abundant with descriptive details and with an immense number of experimental results showing the effects of a wide array of changes in conditions. One can only speculate that the Lipinskis have little or nothing to hide when compared with the murky and apparent misdirection aforementioned.


    By contrast one has to wonder what Rossi might be hiding-- in addition to any technology he may or may not have developed....

    The reason why I keep repeating Rossi's past history with respect to prior tests and demos of the ecat is that enthusiasts and believers always seem to forget it. If they didn't, nobody sane could continue to believe any of Rossi's claims. It is equally important to recall Rossi's past frauds, the horrible Petroldragon disaster and the ripping off of US tax payers for millions with the thermoelectric fiasco.


    Remembering these facts maintains the proper context in which to view whatever claims Rossi makes on his idiotic blog currently and whatever new claims are made by "replicators" and Lugano experimenters. I apologize that such reminders may seem off topic in a thread like this one. But it is important to view Thomas Clarke's elegant analysis in the light of everything which came before and the way in which the Lugano investigators failed to respond. Clarke's analysis reinforces the opinion that Rossi has nothing and by deduction, that he never had anything. Rossi and Levi always failed to respond to prior critiques. It's all consistent and the only thing it's consistent with is fraud -- KNOWING fraud on the part of Rossi. Nobody makes that many "mistakes" by accident and nobody who is honest fails to correct and repeat the experiments when deficiencies are so clearly pointed out.

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