Experimental Evidence on Rossi Devices


    You just don't have all the data.


    I now believe that Rossi has a refractory foam fuel holder inside the alumina tube that shows the correct temperature when viewed by the Lugano test instruments. The temperature probe is passing through the semi transparent alumina to take the temperature of the refractory foam and fuel in the center of the aluminum tube. Please rework your analyst to assume a silicon carbide or tungsten carbide form structure inside the alumina tube.

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    I now believe that Rossi has a refractory foam fuel holder inside the alumina tube that shows the correct temperature when viewed by the Lugano test instruments. The temperature probe is passing through the semi transparent alumina to take the temperature of the refractory foam and fuel in the center of the aluminum tube. Please rework your analyst to assume a silicon carbide or tungsten carbide form structure inside the alumina tube.


    OK. What is the inner diameter of the alumina tube, and am I to assume it is solid alumina?

    @H-G The CCI Compact Fusion controller has a unique control mode they call "Zero Cross", whereby a varying number of complete half-cycles of conduction are interspersed with a varying number of skipped half-cycles. Power is controlled by varying the ratio of these two half-cycle counts. Sample waveforms and a segment of the coefficient table used can be found on page 7 of the Compact Fusion manual.


    An example for one phase is visible on the PCE-830 display image in the Lugano report. This image is usually mis-identified as phase angle control.


    I built a SIMetrix (spice-like) simulation of this control system to see how it would work on 3-phase power. In this simulation output image, each phase is a different color. The simulation is configurable to show several different cycle patterns. Let me know if it might be helpful to your analysis.


    Magicsound, that must be the humming of Rossi’s three phase power controller!


    Yes, you are absolutely right. In fact, I was never quite comfortable with the look of the curves in http://www.elforsk.se/Global/O…er/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf, Figure 5. They agree so much better with your description.


    Now it all figures. What we see on the PCE-830 is simply e. g. the first two positive Green half-waves in your nice figure. As we can see the three resistors are driven in sequence by Red-Green, Green-Blue, Blue-Red phase pairs.


    This simplifies my argument; I don’t have to worry about overlapping phase currents. (Which possibly had made no difference in the end.)


    But this opening has another interesting consequence. The combined resistance for the three resistors that I calculated from the data is very low, 0.821 Ohm.


    With full 400 * 1.414 = 566 volt peaks the peak current will be 689 amperes. That is pretty much for the 100 ampere PCE-6801 current probe and this is also what the PCE-830 display says in Figure 5. OL means OverLoad and therefore the meter will show a too low value.


    So the ultimate reason for using this ridiculously low resistance (100 ohm would have been better) together with this fat power controller seems to have been to fool the power meter.

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    With full 400 * 1.414 = 566 volt peaks the peak current will be 689 amperes. That is pretty much for the 100 ampere PCE-6801 current probe and this is also what the PCE-830 display says in Figure 5. OL means OverLoad and therefore the meter will show a too low value.


    Right. Since we are in speculation territory -but unlike Axil's stuff we are constrained by fact - Rossi could well have been trying the "overload the current clamp" mismeasurement (X4? difficult to know - could be anything). When I say trying, for those with sensitive souls or preferring accuracy, I don't mean any deliberate act, just that these measurement problems seem universally to happen with Rossi, and he is strangely unwilling to correct them when asked to do so.


    But - he could equally have been trying the "use the wrong emissivity" mismeasurement (X3). Or - he could have been trying the "forget alumina is transparent" emissivity mismeasurement, but this one is complex, could go under or over.


    With experiments like this is it any surprise that Rossi can go on believing and convincing others that his stuff works?

    H-G B:

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    The combined resistance for the three resistors that I calculated from the data is very low, 0.821 Ohm.


    This resistance you have determined is consistent with a wye circuit, where two resistances of roughly 0.41 Ohms each are electrically in series for each conduction period.
    The very low resistance is consistent with the coil wire gauge size mentioned in the patent application, which seems to be 15 (AWG?) for the Lugano device. The application is not very clear on this point, and I asked Rossi if he would clear up the messy description, but he replied that his patent attorneys would have to look at it and fix up the patent application if necessary, but he would not clarify the section personally.

    Paradigmnoia, I think that you are referring to this document: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2015127263&recNum=1&maxRec&office&prevFilter&sortOption&queryString&tab=PCTDescription


    Section [0076]:

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    For example, a 15 gauge wire with resistance of 2.650 ohms/ft is one example of suitable wire.


    It is described how several wires can be twisted together:

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    each of the resistance wires 16 as shown may include two or more wires that are spirally wound together


    In the Lugano report they say:

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    Three braided high-temperature grade Inconel cables exit from each of the two caps: these are the resistors wound in parallel non-overlapping coils inside the reactor.


    The wires are probably not braided, that would be highly impractical for wires with a diameter of 1.45 mm and it would also contradict the wording in the application. But I suppose that the test group saw that there where more than one wire. Let us assume that there were three wires in each resistor. (Then they could have been braded!)


    If we use the given dimensions for the dogbone and count the glowing resistor turns in the Lugano report, Figure 12a to make a resistor from the wire mentioned above it will have a resistance of 1.27 ohm which agrees well with my earlier calculation using data from the Lugano dummy test which was 1,23 ohm. Of course you could arrive at other values with different number of parallel wires. But we seem to be in the right football stadium.

    1.23 Ohms is consistent with 3 resistance sections each of 0.41 Ohms in a delta configuration, where the DC equivalent circuit is a series arrangement, excluding leads outside of the delta (R1 cables), and the nearly insignificant resistance of the R2 leads.
    I also asked Rossi about the resistance in the patent application, since it does not correspond with any wire type I could find. That is why I asked for clarification on the wire size. Wire of a different size might make more sense with the resistance specified. 15 AWG is an odd size, but is similar to a somewhat common European specification of 1.5 mm diameter wire. The older British wire gauge size 15 is close enough to the American version that it doesn't help with the roughly order of magnitude variance with any resistance from anything I could find in that wire size. With braided cables, things are a bit more complicated, but not exceptionally so. A braided cable will have a greater surface area, which may improve heat dissipation.

    I will quickly add that there is an old US patent (application?) for a method and formula whereby a significant reduction (5 to 10%; something like that) in the mass of wire needed for a specific resistance per unit length. Essentially, the ideal single strand wire is determined, then a formula determines the ideal diameter of two strands with a specific number of twists per unit length that duplicates the resistance performance of the single strand, but is more durable and uses less total mass of wire. This results in a significant cost savings in a mass-produced item using calibrated resistance wire. It may extend to mass reductions in other types of cables, with appropriate modifications to the formula.

    Just want to add an observation regarding this post by magicsound: Experimental Evidence on Rossi Devices


    As I noted earlier, this power control scheme with full height voltage peaks produces very high current peaks that could saturate the current clamps which would cause too low current readings.


    What I didn't think of at that time was that this error mechanism would have the same effect on the measured current in the dummy test as in the main test, because the current pulses were of the same height (giving the same saturation) in both tests, the only difference being that there were fewer pulses per second in the dummy test.


    So clamp saturation cannot explain why COP was ~1 in the first test (low power) and ~3 in the second test (high power).


    But the inconsistency in the calculated resistive wiring losses in relation to the electric power inputs remains. As long as this in hindsight obvious flaw exists there is not much point in discussing other aspects that concern the validity of the Lugano test. But of course you could do it for fun. The isotopic shifts for instance are well worth it, they are hilarious.

    One problem with the clamp saturation idea is that the instantaneous power peaks would become huge. At 1.23 Ohms, 100 A (minimum value for possible clamp saturation), it would require 123 V, but then 12300 W are developed. The thing could barely be "on" at all (very low duty cycle) without melting something (hopefully a fuse). The controller basically would be always be preventing anything near full conduction or voltage. A small increase in voltage or conduction period would indeed result in huge increases in power output.
    It would be useful to know how big the breaker on the supply panel was.


    Just for the heck of it, if the peaks were 6 times higher than the maximum rating for the clamps (I.E.: 600 A), then 738 V would be required (at 1.23 Ohms), and a mere 442800 W would be developed. Even for an instant, that is unlikely to actually occur without blobs of liquid metal forming somewhere in the circuit.

    Paradigmnoia, according to magicsound the Compact Fusion power controller was used in a mode where not all of the AC half periods were let through, the more of them the higher power.
    From the manual:

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    In zero-cross control, load power is turned ON
    and OFF only when instantaneous value of
    the sinusoidal waveform is zero. Load power
    is controlled by switching the SCRs “ON” for a
    number of complete electrical half-cycles, and then
    “OFF” for a number of complete electrical halfcycles.


    Click on the image to see all of it!

    I have had both the Installers and Operators manuals for over a year.


    With zero cross, no special waveforms are possible. Either phase angle or zero cross is available as an option and is factory set. Both are not an option.
    So massive current spikes are the result if zero cross mode is used. Enough that at best a fuse will blow before anything else happens.


    Removing all fuses, etc.: At 230 V (One phase to neutral, lowest V possible with one full wave), 1.23 A, 179 A will attempt to flow and over 39000 W of instantaneous power could be developed. Poof! Lowering the resistance just makes it worse.


    Using 230 V, at 20 ohms, the device should work pretty well, and probably the minimum resistance is around 10 ohms for a zero cross set up (around 5300 W instantaneous) for a 220 V set up. (Which does not jive with any other calculations based on the report). Bumping the volts higher gets nasty high peak currents again, even with the higher resistance.

    Paradigmnoia, a fuse is a resistor with a resistance value that is small compared to the resistance in the load circuit. Heating the fuse wire to the melting point takes a certain amount of energy. This means that it is not the peak current value by itself that determines if the fuse is going to blow or not. It is the effective current Ie that will blow the fuse if too high.

    Take a 500 foot roll of typical 14 Ga house wire (about 1.25 Ohms) pull out the three conductors from the loom and connect them so they make a triangle. Connect each corner to a 6 Ga cable a couple of m long, and plug those into a 380 V industrial 3 phase supply, one lead to each phase.


    Flip the breaker back on.


    How long could you expect this circuit to last? What do you suppose the Compact Fusion box would think of this in zero cross mode, at 5, 10, 25% power delivery? Cut the 500 feet down to about 160 feet and try again.

    Now, channeling Harry Potter, magically shrink the three 160 foot leads to a space of 30 cm X 2 cm X 2 cm, so that there are no wires touching each other, and all the wire stays the same size. You may also magically increase the melting point of copper to that of inconel. It won't make too much difference.
    That is the Lugano device with no thermal insulation or core. Just the heater part.

    The whole point about embedding wires in ceramic is that you get more stable temperatures due to the specific heat capacity of the cermic which acts as a heatsink and radiator.


    That applies even more for pulsed power where the ceramic prevents the heater from getting too hot. But actually the short pulses here are probably not long enough anyway to make much of an instantaneous change.


    To answer your question:


    150m of 15 ga (2mm) wire. => 400cm^3 That is much too large


    Try 1m of 14 ga => 3cm^2 wire. or approx 20g.


    For a duty cycle of 5% and 1kW in we have 20kW peak power. This is at a repetition rate of 10ms (or possibly less).


    So we have 500us, 20kW => 10J absorbed by 20g of metal


    Specific heat capacity of Inconel is 0.5 J/gC => we have a temperature rise inside the wire - even without ceramic heatsink - of 1C.


    OK, these are very approximate calculations but you can see that high powr pulses from such a box do not cause the wire to fuse.

    Rent a Compact Fusion controller and try it. Please explain your math to the supplier when returning the smoking remains.


    Edit: Also don't forget the critical radius for insulation when considering alumina coatings as a heat sink. For a 14 Ga wire, the difference in thickness between improving heat transfer and decreasing heat transfer isn't much. Not to mention that the wire isn't embedded anyways.

    Paradigmnoia, you inspired me to think one step further on the problem, thank you. I realize now that the zero cross power control scheme is to coarse, it will not work in this application since the resistance is very low so the discrete power steps will be too high. Originally this was a suggestion by magicsound. I will leave it to him to further defend the idea if he so wishes.


    This means that we are back to phase angle control, which will give you a continuous regulation starting from zero all the way to practically exploding the device. Or the fuses.


    I agree that it is against common sense to use resistances as low as around 1 ohm, so I started out with the theory that there must be a transformer somewhere and for a while I was convinced that the gray box contained one. But Vessy Nokolova helped me to dismiss this theory, here is a picture and a description of the gray box: http://www.ecat-thenewfire.com…rossi-three-hot-cats-row/


    Actually, you can see it as the little SW box in the wiring diagram, Figure 4 in the Lugano report. And there is no visible transformer in the diagram.

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