Parkhomov Reports COP of 1.1-1.3 in LENR

Quote from JedRothwell

Mary Yugo wrote:

I could take your money now, because I have photos, data and e-mail from the U.S. military testing of one of Rossi's gadgets. I spent a couple of days meeting with those people. But the gadget didn't work, so it is nothing to write home about. Really, who cares? It was one of his small reactors. It leaked.

Most of Rossi's tests failed. A few seemed to work.

Heh! An escrow would have to be set up for the bet. However, suppose that had been bet. Mary could then claim that a single reactor is not a "plant," and, in fact, what Rossi claimed -- or strongly implied -- was not a single reactor but a 1 MW plant. The only controversial statement here, based on what Jed knows, is "no ecat ... ever produced more energy than Rossi put into it." That would be very difficult to prove. Pseduoskeptics often make pseudoscientific statements, i.e., they are unverifiable. What could be shown is that a particular test or set of tests was flawed, and it might even be possible to show criminal fraud, but none of this would prove the claim made in the imagined bet. Similarly, though, "based entirely on deception" is unprovable, taken literally. That requires the elimination of all possible contrary facts.

This is all a distraction from the substance, which is that, to our knowledge, nobody has taken Rossi IP and created devices that work from it. This creates a preponderance of the evidence conclusion that the patents don't disclose how to do it, and the lawsuit and what is coming out of it shows that IH, even with alleged full disclosure of everything, including trade secrets, did not confirm it. That's devastating.

We did not know this until Rossi filed the lawsuit. The suit, of course, implies that the IP was confirmed, but anyone independent looking at the conditions, as can easily be known from all the commentary from Rossi, would say that this was not a true independent test. It's completely obvious and undeniable, for reasons that many have given, such as the one that Jed has underscored, the exclusion of the IH expert from the customer area, where the alleged 1 MW would have to be dissipated.

Quote from andrea.s

The early results of Parkhomov were quite astonishing for me, and a good reason to wear my donkey cap given my dismissal of Lugano's TPR2. I found his calorimetry admirable: self made or heavy duty equipment, and no bullshit. And his seemingly careless handling of safety-hazardous materials gave the impression of a very experienced experimentalist.

Or a naive one. His conclusions were hyperexcitable. His original announced result looked quite good, but then I looked at it much more closely. I inferred from his sketch information what his input power sequencing had been (it's easy, he set power at round numbers) and then plotted device temperature against input power. It looks like a normal plot, until the device is breaking up. There is no sign in device temperature of XP. Yet to increase the heat to the water bath would require the device get hotter. It did get hotter but at no sudden increased rate, compared to the sudden increase in COP reported. This pointed, then, to possible calorimetry artifact.

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However, his sequence of results have a COP gradually diminishing, and blank runs were at substantially lower temperatures, except for those reported after his last positive run of Jan 18, 2015.
scribd.com/mobile/doc/25432336…movPaper-20150129-English

Actually, what I noticed was that the absolute power being generated was declining drastically. He insulated the reactor in non-reproducible and sloppy ways, which allowed him to get hotter with lower input power. So he might claim COP, but at much lower levels of heat, and his measure of water evaporation was imprecise. Further, there were signs of water splashing out, and that was not eliminated or quantified. His design would create bumping from the way the elements in the test were arranged. I.e, boiling on the bottom of the inner metal container.

He then changed to thermostatic control of temperature, being plagued with devices that burned out. His first calibration was abruptly terminated after a short time due to burnout. Basically, it was all not well-controlled and pushing the edge of what the materials could handle. Instead of backing up and nailing it all down, to investigate his original results through careful replication, he barged ahead to "improve it." Classic cold fusion error. The real work in the field was boring, plodding, step-by-step, experiments being repeated over and over, developing commensurable data.

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So I went quiet waiting for him to replicate his results, which didn't happen. Now the reason may be that an unintentional "secret sauce" ingredient went away.

Maybe. However, this is crucial: science requires skepticism. Not pseudoskepticism, which pretends advance knowledge of impossibility, and "if I can think of an artifact, the finding is bogus," but genuine skepticism that will investigate and test possible artifacts, and that is willing to take mysterious results as ... mysterious!

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Or, more likely to a skeptic, that a measurement artifact gradually went away.

Yes. It can look like that, and that is possible.
{quote]My suspicion is that the metal "vessel" holding the reactor was gradually oxidized by water with an exothermal reaction. The vessel looks like enameled cast iron, and enamel coating is applied at 830°C so I wonder whether the coating cracked due to thermal gradients at the higher temperatures 1080°C and above. The energies are huge if compared to the reactor mass but not if compared to a piece of iron cookware.[/quote]This idea is not plausible. In the original work, the reactor -- the alumina tube containing nickel and lithal -- is sitting on alumina fabric inside the box. The box is not in contact with the reactor; rather it is submerged in a water bath, at ambient pressure, so it cannot move more than insignificantly above 100 C. The outer container, the water bath, is also limited to 100 C. Much simpler in that original design: a combination of measurement errors (Parkhomov's measurement method was quite crude) and bumping of unevaporated water out of the cooling bath. The apparent XP set in when the bath started boiling, and the more it boiled, the more apparent XP. It's pretty simple.

The present method looks much better, the water is not allowed to boil. But there are plenty of opportunities for error. For example, water flow measurement could be off. His calibration shows more variation than I like. (Look at prior work with PdD cold fusion and calibrations, they are clean straight-line.) With good calorimetry, he should be able to detect the expected chemical heat. I don't think it's that accurate. However, if he nails all this down, maybe he has some heat! Will he nail it down, or will he keep "improving" it to get More Heat, which is what he claims is his goal. That's a goal that has sunk many a cold fusion ship. First things first! Get some real heat, above noise, nail it, then get some independent replications showing the same, and if you want to knock the ball out of the parkhomov, measure a reaction product (like helium with PdD. What is the reaction product from NiH reactions? Not helium, I'd expect! Deuterium? Maybe.) Again first things first. He is apparently showing extended heat, enough to be able to detect a deuterium product if using deuterium-depleted hydrogen. (I haven't calculated it, but this is my seat-of-the-pants estimation). If he can nail the heat and if this can be replicated, then it is worth the effort to measure reaction product, which is not easy or cheap.

Quote from Mats002

Abd: your sceptiscism is on the level that P might as well scoopet some water off of the bucket to get the COP.

No normal science (like a mars rover finding an unexpected composite) dis-believe claims at that low level of confidence.

I'd be willing to bet that I've spent ten times as long with the Parkhomov data, that first experiment and then next few, as you have, Mats. I have no suspicion of Parkhomov engaging in fraud, and scooping out water would be deliberate fraud. (His later data fabrication was a naive error, showing that he had no idea what he was dealing with globally.) Water was observed outside the bucket in one report. The design supports the idea. Now, I haven't gotten quantitative on how much water would have to escape, but by the time that this becomes relevant (the reactor is at high temperature and the water in the bucket begins to boil), the water would be at 100 C and would rapidly evaporate if it escapes. Easy to miss, unless one actually looks for it. As I mention, his new apparatus does not have this problem, but, then, he is showing much lower COP, and there is then a reasonable speculation that the original high COP was artifact. That's all. It's not proof. And because all those experiments were essentially abandoned, as he kept "improving" the experiment, we may never know. As the Chinese are showing, there are many, many issues to address, including thermocouple failure at high temperature, etc. Parkhomov now appears to have a crucial thermocouple inside the reactior, exposed to hot hydrogen. What kind of thermocouple? There are many, many ways to create artifacts, this research can be very difficult.