Rossi: “Steam Was Superheated” in 1MW Plant Test

Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

Dewey Weaver is connected in some way with IH. He may have explained this privately, but I don't remember the details and I'm not going to look it up, because ... it would be private! He is providing "information" in dribs and drabs and hints. I do not interpret this as representing IH in any way. Rather, Dewey is not a "grizzled internet veteran" and this kind of on-line flaming is new for him, if I'm correct

Most of the posts of this Dewey person -who is supposed to be much more than a random Joe with time to lose online, what proof is there he's who he pretends to be?- could be created by a bot: directed sarcasm + supporting his pals. A cutting-edge software with good parsing capabilities could do that, imo.

Also, his vitriol is clearly the product of a thousand internet wars, his flaming is up to par with the best there are.

So, few possibilities:
- A buttmad investor with too much time to spend online, and boiling rage; but why so irate? IH has other LENR projects, also 11m dolla is not a lot for those kind of businesses. People like him didn't become who they are by brooding over failures they are not even responsible of.
- Computer-assisted online trolling, by some social engineer POS told to impersonate this person, or this person himself, who then merely has to check if the bot performs well, and put out from time to time a more human-sounding post.

It may also be that this person is closer to a bot, in his inner workings, than a human being, which could explain all this (except the time lost debating on a fringe forum)

Call me a tinfoil hatter all you want, but the way this Dewey expresses himself is completely akin to the fashion in which trolls sent all over the internet to discredit fringe subjects, convey FUD

Quote from quizzical

[I wrote:]"So, my summary analysis of what happened in 2014-2015: The agreement between IH and Rossi, based on the text we have, obviously contemplated an independent test, I think with devices manufactured by IH, and with IH running the testing in their own facility and under their own control. The point of the test was to confirm that the IP had been fully transferred. It was a test of transfer, not of heat as such. By 2015, this had not happened with the megawatt plant, and Rossi was, as he had long done, insisting on a megawatt test instead of the much easier to arrange and validate single-reactor tests that so many wanted. I imagine that Rossi insisted on going ahead with the megawatt test, which he was going to run. This demolished the intention of the agreement."

Abd, are you just making stuff up?

Omit the word "just" and I'll agree, I'm inventing meaning, which is what human beings do. There was a misunderstanding on my part, somehow I got the idea that the devices to be tested would be manufactured by IH. However, the agreement clearly provided that the 1 MW unit would be delivered to IH. The location of the testing was not described, but at that point, the unit would be under the full control of IH. They would be obligated to allow Rossi to service and repair it as needed. Rossi was also allowed to observe the testing.

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Your summary analysis above is a distortion of the agreement between IH and Rossi, dated October 26, 2012.

See animpossibleinvention.files.wo…sdce-16-21199__0001-2.pdf

Have you read this agreement?

Many times. Over and over. My comment is only partially based on that Agreement, which left a great deal unstated. The Agreement itself only considers performance, by a very specific -- and defective -- measure, albeit one that Rossi always insisted on, but also describes full technology transfer, and that full transfer could be considered to be of the essence. IH was not just buying a single 1 MW plant.

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The agreement explicitly states that once a successful 24-hour Validation test has been carried out (see Sec. 3.2(b) and Sec. 4 of the agreement) then IH will release the $10,000,000 held in Escrow,

This is the first phase, completed. At that point, as well, Rossi agreed to completely transfer the IP, including the "Catalyzer formula." Then the next phase was entered.

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and that this will then be followed by a "Guaranteed Performance" test during which "the Plant" (meaning a 1 MW E-CAT unit, see Sec. 1.2, which has been manufactured and delivered by Leonardo) will be required to operate at the same level (or better) as the Validation test for 350 days within a 400 day period. "The ERV (or another party acceptable to the Company and Leonardo) will be engaged to confirm in writing the Guaranteed Performance."

The language of the Agreement is vague here. My sense is that Rossi wrote this agreement, and that can affect how a court will view it. There are aspects to it that are unconscionable, if applied in some contexts, and especially in a context where operation of the plant was under the full control of Rossi.

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Now it's possible that, as you suggested, Rossi failed in doing this before 2015, although the claim on Rossi's side is that IH did not want to do the test. (I must admit that this last part, i.e. the part about finding a Customer, does not make sense to me, since this is not in the agreement, although as I understand it IH received a significant amount of money from the Customer to pay the electricity costs). In any case, the agreement explicitly states that the 350-day Guaranteed Performance test will be made on a 1 MW unit. So this is NOT a case of "Rossi...insisting on a megawatt test".

You are looking at the agreement and are assuming that this was a fully mutual desire. Again, have you read An Impossible Invention? But it's not only Mats Lewan. Many observers pointed out over and over that a megawatt plant made no sense, with an undeveloped technology. It made everything difficult.

What I would want, considering this technology, is the individual devices. I'd want many of them, and I'd want to test and determine reliability and operating life. Individually. A megawatt plant, consisting of many devices, will tend to make that information less visible.

Now, I mention "unconscionable." The agreement describes the duty of the ERV ("Engineer Responsible for Validation"). It is quite constrained, though it could be interpreted more broadly. The Validation test and Guaranteed Performance test descriptions were similar, the difference being that the Validation test was for 24 hours and the GP for 350 days out of 400.

The ERV is to "certify in writing that during a 24 hour test period the Plant consistently produces energy that is at least six times greater than the energy consumed by the Plant ... and the temperature of the steam produced by the Plant is consistently 100 degrees Celsius or greater. To make this measurement the ERV will measure the flow of the heated fluid and the Delta T between the temperature of the fluid before and after the E-CAT reaction."

The problem: the information collected by the ERV is inadequate to certify most of the possible energy production. It is implied that steam is produced, and the issue of "steam quality" has often been raised, but there is a much more serious problem, though of the same kind. Water at 100 C may be liquid or vapor. The production of vapor requires much higher energy than merely heating water to 100 C.

I would have thought that the ERV method would not be specified. Further, an engineering analysis should, if possible, be based on more than one measure. The serious flaw in the prior E-Cat tests was consistently a failure to examine the outflow water/steam. It was considered enough, for example, to probe the chimney of the E-Cat with a humidity meter; unfortunately, a humidity meter cannot measure steam quality and certainly cannot measure overflow water.

In the actual test, the ERV apparently was not given access to the "customer area." That is, all the ERV could look at was the Plant itself, the temperatures in the inlet and outlet pipes, which is enough for the test as described in the Agreement.

The application of energy -- or its dissipation in a radiator -- would validate the power, and one of the ideas behind a megawatt plant is that this would be so obvious, it was thought, that error in measuring heat would be unimportant.

But then the actual test concealed the usage!

There are many details we do not know. I can now come up with ways for this test to be faked, including self-sustain mode. These are armchair proposals and I make no claim that they are what actually happened. However, consider:

Electrical heat is stored in the modules as increased reactor temperature. In "SS" mode, this heat is released to the circulating fluid. At that point, there is no heater power being supplied. COP is very high, because the input power is reduced to pumping and control consumption, not heating. To truly know that there is self-sustain mode, one would need internal reactor temperature data. Was it being sustained with no heating, or was it cooling?

I have never seen such data from Rossi.

The protection here would be that the ERV is required to certify power production, and if not allowed to collect additional necessary data, would refuse to certify on that basis.

It is remarkable, Rossi's apparent agreement to not consider the energy necessary to heat the water to boiling. Since water will not persist as liquid beyond the boiling point, then, the only measure being used is how much water actually boiled. And this cannot be derived from temperature. Even if the temperature is above boiling, this would only indicate that the steam is high quality, but ... there may be water flowing underneath it. The ERV would have only two temperatures, inlet water and outlet water, and he is told to disregard the inlet, so .... all there is, is the outlet temperature, which, by itself, doesn't tell use the energy production.

So the whole banana is the state of the water. Rossi consistently assumed that all the water boiled. Yet his design, by my analysis, required overflow water, at least some. Why?

Well, this is old analysis. He was controlling the reaction with heat. He would set a constant water flow, then adjust heat according to temperature readings. If the device boils all the water away, cooling capacity is lost, so the temperature would rise, he would get runaway. So the flow rate must be enough to maintain the presence of liquid water cooling the device. It is impossible to set this exactly, but the water flow was manually set. So it would be set such that it would not all boil, and therefore there would be some overflow water. This is all assuming he has a real reaction and is actually generating heat.

Once we realize that there could be overflow water, the immediate question becomes "how much"? And it was never measured. People with experience in calorimetry wanted to sparge the steam, i.e., bubble it through water in a container, such that all the steam is converted back to water, and the known mass of water is then elevated a measured temperature, from which the heat can be much more directly calculated. For this, steam quality is irrelevant. Rossi never allowed such testing, even though it would have been very simple.

And, here, the steam consumption was hidden behind a wall with a locked door. This is similar to steam -- or hot water -- going down the drain in his demos. Invisible, hidden.

Always, an excuse.

Quote from Renzo Barbieri

2) Why did IH filled a patent for a device with a cop of 11, with Rossi as co-inventor, if the previous work had never been substantiated?
3) Why was it an international patent? Isn’t that beyond its license area?

There are many questions there where answers could be useful. Some of them have answers in the vast pile of accumulated reports and claims, but almost none have verifiable answers. It's all "so-and-so said."
But these two questions can be answered, based on general principles. Many people don't understand patents.

There is no requirement in a patent that information in it be true. One can actually lie in a patent without harm, if the lie does not impact the purpose of the patent, and many patents fail in their purpose.

A patent may be premature or speculative. It is not necessary in a patent to prove claims. In patents related to cold fusion, for a long time, a requirement for proof was created, which was, to my mind, a corruption of patent law. Bottom line, a patent claims a technology. That claim may be completely bogus. It may be file on the chance that it's not bogus, that it works, and defects in the patent may be remedied, at least under some conditions.

In other words, a patent is not a warrant that what is claimed actually works or has been tested. Lattice Energy patented a "gamma shield," (the existence of which is an element in Widom-Larsen LENR theory) with no evidence at all that it works. The claims do not need to be "substantiated."

As to international patents, the Agreement license area was not just the U.S. Hence international patents would be filed. The matter is complex, but my sense is that the patents are relatively meaningless; Rossi is claiming that they were improperly filed, but that is all something that would ordinarily be worked out later. If a patent is improperly filed, it may be invalid, that's all. There could be improprieties in filing that are of no consequence. Etc.