Why was the one-year test performed?

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Dramatic effect from a badly instrumented but impressive seeming test may be a way to get investment from others to support a non-working product, of course. And some partners would rely on that to get funding. Maybe Hydrofusion is such, I don't know.

Appealing to the dumbest investors is something conmen routinely do. After all, what is the point of going after the smart ones? It is much harder to make them fall for the bait and they tend to ferret out scams and fraud much better and react to it. In the past, Rossi and Defkalion were good at choosing "marks" (victims) and did not ask huge amounts of money from them. But pride or whackiness got the better or Rossi. He miscalculated badly when it came to IH and Darden. They were extremely dumb about not properly vetting the ecat. Now that they have been personally burned by Rossi and they realize that they've been cheated, none too cleverly, out of a very large amount of money, they are actually getting angry and doing something about it. Rossi was very lucky until recently but now, it is clear he screwed the pooch big time by cheating IH.

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The difference might be that heat from a reaction comes from a larger mass of material, so the average temperature of the material is lower. The Joule heater wire might be smaller than the reactant in the tube, so it would get hotter, and melt.

How does that work? The idea is to reach a given final temperature present during the supposed reaction. If you get there slowly enough, there will not be a significant delta T between the heater wire and the supposed fuel mass. Remember, this kludge had no forced cooling system of ANY SORT. There would not be a huge temperature gradient in the fuel during a calibration done using the heater and performed with a slow ramp up. My math is rusty so I can't back this up with equations but maybe someone reading this is a heat transfer specialist.

I do agree that if it were necessary, which I doubt, Rossi could have simply used thicker or tougher wires.

Quote from JedRothwell

Mary Yugo wrote:

The difference might be that heat from a reaction comes from a larger mass of material, so the average temperature of the material is lower. The Joule heater wire might be smaller than the reactant in the tube, so it would get hotter, and melt.

I am not saying this was the situation; I am saying this is plausible. If that is the case, it is no way to design the experiment. You need more heater wire.

Well, yes, as to the conclusion. However, it still doesn't make sense. The claim was that if one put the same power into the heater in the control as in the experiment, the heater might burn out. This is *not* raising it to the same temperature, necessarily. If there is XP in the experiment, this would raise the control to a lower temperature. This would not be a full calibration, where one wants to take the device through the full range of temperatures, but a power calibration, where the same power is input. Yes, a full calibration would be better. If being done after the experimental run, to take it up to the same apparent temperature, seeing what the input power is for that. This is what could burn out the heater if there has been XP.

It is that temperature calibration that might burn out the heater wire, as stated by Jed. But that's not what was has been suggested, just putting in the same power in the control as in the experimental run. And it is that same input power supposedly burning out the heater wire that is crazy. How would XP "protect" t he wire. It would make it hotter! And, in fact, the claims in that test (or was it the prior test) that the dark lines are the supposedly cooler heater wires against the hotter interior seem equally crazy to me. Put heater wires in a hot environment, run current through them, they get hotter than the environment, at least that is what I'd expect. They already had this thing being insanely hot, I find it bizarre that this report was at all accepted. But that's hindsight! I did state some of these reservations at the time, mostly on the private CMNS list. As did Jed, by the way.

Quote from axil

FYI: Based on an update to Rossi's patent, Rossi does not use heater coils anymore during reactor operations.

This comment is irrelevant to the discussion, which had wandered into the Lugano test, which is related to -- preceded -- the "one-year test." As to the claim, Axil did not give us any reference, but rather wrote from his deep well of unverifiable knowledge, or is it verifiable? Which patent? he has many. The communication of verifiable knowledge is science.

Quote from AlainCo

The material will have a certain resistivity. A particular current density will then define the heat per unit volume generated in the material by current flow. If that exceeds a certain value, the material will fail. This has to be related to temperature. However, the heat conductivity and heat emissivity will limit how rapidly heat can be conducted away. So even a cold wire may fail at a certain current density. However, the same wire will not be safe because it is at a higher temperature from its environment!

If a material is not uniform, hot spots could develop. That might be an issue. Material with large crystal domains might have higher resistance at domain boundaries, and there may also be anisotripic resistance, I don't know.

About Lugano calorimetry:

[quote]anyway an air calorimeter, even rough, would have been calibrated with a basic heater, and would have done the job, saying if COP was above or below 2

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Right. Two confirmations: a dummy reactor with the same input current should clearly have been done (and I think MFMP more or less did this later.) And then air calorimetry could have been done and itself calibrated with a heater identical in shape and air flow patterns. The air calorimeter could have had a window so that the IR thermometry and analysis could be done. This was poorly planned, to use the technical term, "half-assed."

(The window would have a mirror that could be moved into place, so that radiated heat would be converted to air temperature rise in the calorimeter. Basically, if the device is operating steady-state, as it apparently was, various tests could have been done to create depth. Instead, what were they doing for the month?)

Quote from Paradigmnoia

Anyways, to get this thread back on track, I suggest that the reason the one year test was performed is that Rossi had a dream of doing this for years.
Now his dream has come true. Sort of.

If the effect is real, this delayed application for years. One part of the idea still makes some sense. A megawatt reactor can sell power instead of reactors, and it would be worth an attendant who manages and operates it. This, then, would allow Rossi to preserve his secret. Selling devices will almost certainly reveal the secret to reverse engineering.

A clear pattern had emerged in Rossi's behavior by 2011, and what ensued continued it and made it even more obvious: Rossi avoided independent testing, and excluded anyone from his demonstrations that was too nosy. We can justify this, but only by justifying his paranoia. It appears that IH may have been ready to test the Plant in North Carolina, but Rossi refused. It appears that he gave the excuse that it would not be "independent," i.e., if it was in the IH facility, it might not be seen as "proof."

Wait! Proof for whom? The purpose of the GPT was to convince IH that they could pay another $89 million! It was contemplated in the Agreement to be in their facility!

I maintain, as does IH, obviously, a dual hypothesis: Rossi total fraud, or Rossi Effect real but Rossi is keeping it secret. Total fraud is simple and obvious. It needs no explanation other than it does require some kind of insanity, to continue to pursue a fraud when attention is increasing. Most relatively sane frauds will disappear at that point. Rossi did not, so some think this is proof that he wasn't a fraud. It is not. This idea is based on a model that Rossi is relatively sane and wouldn't do something so crazy. This, by the way, is more or less Lewan's position, if I have it right. What is weird is that he doesn't apply the same concept to IH. Apparently that seems more likely, that a company would commit fraud than an individual with perhaps a few accomplices. (i.e, Johnson, Penon, and maybe Fabiani, all being paid).

Rossi constructed the Doral test to fail to convince. This is unquestionably clear. The fraud scenario more or less requires that he think that IH would back out and back away, after all, it had worked with Hydro Fusion!

He did not understand IH and their motives, his model was "greedy venture capitalists."

The Rossi-Effect-real model has Rossi not teaching IH how to make reactors because he didn't trust them. He did not trust that they wouldn't manipulate a GPT in their facility to fail. Let's imagine that he knew that the reactor must be operated exactly-so in order to work. So, within his world, he had to set up the test where he could control it. He did not understand how this, ipso facto, would destroy the utility of the Test. Even if there was a real customer, operational control of the customer was given to Rossi, and the customer President was the President of Leonardo Corporation, his company. Nobody in their right mind would think this independent.

This is part of the Rossi world view: he doesn't trust others, and part of his standard for whom to allow access is that they trust him, and are not seriously skeptical. Does he realize that his own behavior, routinely repeated, lead others to not trust him? How could he think that anyone would trust that sham in Doral? What is remarkable is that, even with what we clearly know, some do continue to trust him. He lies to them, routinely, but ... they simply overlook it or explain it away. "No divorce," he said a couple of weeks before filing the lawsuit, at a point where communication was already through their lawyers, and long after the relationship had clearly gone down the tubes (at least by July, 2015, when he refused the visit by Murray, blatantly violating the Terms Sheet).

He knew that they would not consent to this, so, his "masterpiece": arrange the test, but don't call it that! Did he realize that this would be legally invalid?

Maybe. Maybe his purpose was to run that test, then announce the results to the world and sell more licenses. Maybe filing the lawsuit was thought of as publicity. He must have something real, or else he would not have filed! I have actually seen this argument on Planet Rossi. It might be working. Hydro Fusion is said to be dealing with him. In spite of what he did to them in 2012.

After all, fabulous profits! And besides, Save Humanity! Think of the children with cancer!

Sure, Shane. Rossi could have a small effect masked by behavior. And Obama could have travelled to Mars with high school students as claimed by an article in PESN just before its owner, Sterling Alan, was arrested for child molesting (this isn't libel, he really was). Hell, anything is possible, isn't it?

BTW, the "early Rossi" is a nonsense myth. In the mid 2000's, Rossi was most likely either in prison in Italy or trying very hard to stay out of it and spending tons of time in court in Italy. That's probably the reason DOD did nothing to bring him to task for his thermoelectric fraud and con he perpetrated on them (also embarrassment). See Gary Wright's old or new website for details.

Quote from Shane D.

Still, even though the 1MW may have some impressive engineering features, the "human factors" surrounding the legal battle outweigh that, leaving me to conclude the 1MW just does not work as advertised. But I think it very possible he does have something due to those early years. He could also have a small, yet still unreliable effect, that he has been masking by his odd behavior.

It might even be larger, but probably unreliable. One idea that has been floated is that he had an effect and lost it. That has happened in the history of cold fusion, that one has an effect, it seems reproducible in the lab of discovery, then it disappears. It happened to Pons and Fleischmann when they ran out of their original batch of palladium. So they obtained more. It didn't work. Turns out Johnson-Matthey had changed their process! It was some time before they could demonstrate the effect again. Some of the meshegas of their behavior might be traced to that, they were in a bit of a panic. What would have served them would probably have been to be completely open about it. But people often don't do that!

So Rossi kept re-engineering, and the old devices were never thoroughly tested and nailed. And Rossi would keep on, believing that success is just around the corner. Under those conditions, inventors will sometimes fake tests.

We saw a very minor example last year in the "fake data" from Parkhomov. He didn't realize, I think, the seriousness of what he was doing. After all, it was just a presentation of a noisy interval. In fact, though, he was hiding something. He was hiding that he had a period with no data. And that probably would have revealed a serious problem with his instrumentation, I suspect, high noise, induced in his thermocouple that might as well have been a secondary in a power transformer with his heating coil. To get rid of the noise, he needed to isolate the thermocouple, running the computer on battery, floating the whole system. (Dangerous!) The battery ran out of power, needed to be recharged. He never did fully confront what had happened. The fake data was probably close to what the real data was for the period.

But ... an attitude was betrayed, an attitude about appearances that is a problem in science. This attitude is also connected with the rather common stonewalling of criticism. Defensiveness reigns.

There is a loss of trust in Reality itself, a fear that if we honestly report what we really have done and experienced, something bad will happen.

It's a fundamental human problem.