Rossi: Customer’s Manufacturing Process was Endothermic

    • Official Post

    [feedquote='E-Cat World','http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/08/14/rossi-customers-manufacturing-process-was-endothermic/']Here are a couple of exchanges from the Journal of Nuclear Physics that give us something of Rossi’s case in regard to the E-Cat customer’s use of the heat from the 1MW plant during the one year test. Q: When you say that the Customer “used the heat” does this mean that the manufacturing process […][/feedquote]

    • Official Post

    I am not a chemist - more an engineer, but have worked as plant operator and research technician in many areas of industrial chemistry making all kinds of stuff, from synthesizing new kinds of polymers by high-pressure hydrogenation, to developing sealants, paints and adhesives. As well as which I have had a lot of 'private fun' which many years ago used to involve things like making tiny batches of Nitroglycerine and Amyl Nitrate for doping gasoline. Not for the faint-hearted!


    Most of the very endothermic chemical processes Rossi would require involve seriously high temperatures to kick them off in the first place. For example, the conversion of Calcium Carbonate to Calcium Oxide (Lime-burning) or the reduction of Iron Oxide to metallic Iron.


    Bob Greenyer of MFMP suggested that the manufacture of PU foam board at 28kWh/Kg was a low temperature process that was highly energy intensive - a good thought. But Bob understands that it really doesn't suit the case since at 1MW output it would require the consumption of around 40Kg of raw resins per hour of operation - a 40 gallon drum-full every 4 hours (I tonne/day approx). While this is not extraordinary, the extraordinary increase in volume associated with foaming means you would need to remove around 1000 litres of finished product every hour - 24,000 litres per day. Which is a good-size truckload in volume terms if not by weight. And no trucks were seen, allegedly. They would take an hour to load at least, every day. And you could never get anything of a serious size through that little white door.


    I visited the Knauf thermal insulation plant in Sheppey UK in the late 80's, where they use this process to make thermal insulation bonded to plasterboard (sheet-rock in the US) . The noise, smell and waste heat, as well as the 200 meter long production line rule this out entirely.


    As much as I support Rossi in his adventures, I feel that this 'waste heat' problem is the biggest flaw in the story so far. I had always assumed he had his plant plugged into a laundry or a bakery somewhere. Swimming pools in Florida generally require evaporative cooling rather than heating btw.


    None of this means the plant doesn't work, but it does in my opinion mean that it could never have worked at 1MW for more than short periods - maybe dumping heat into an indoor pool that could be emptied down the drains at night - or left to cool down on its own over a weekend with that much-discussed small roof vent taking away the steamy warmth. I suspect AR has talked himself into a corner. BUT - this is Rossi, the escapologist extraordinaire - so you never know.

  • To get an idea what a couple of Megawatt of heat can do with respect to industrial processes that consume heat / energy: some google search reveals that e.g. in Germany where so called "Fernwärme" (via steam) is still quite cheap and very common in many cities and industry branches, ca. 22MW (200.000 MWh/y) is enough to cover the heat demand of 32.000 homes / houses per year! Can someone imagine that this little black box behind the wall was able to suck and compensate the energy (warm water , heating in winter time) of ca. 1500 normal houses?

    • Official Post

    assuming we have a very endothermic reaction, the maximum possible in chemistry, what is the mass of product require per day ?


    the same way we can rule out chemistry in some LENR experiment, maybe we can rule out endothermic process without one 38T truck everyday.


    anyway, the evidences add-up and maybe it is not worth the effort.
    I think proposing a post-e-cat line of research would be a good idea, because like IH, we have here motivated people wanting to investigate a promising phenomenon.

  • Quote

    The Rossi-story is becoming very sad...(in the way how naive Rossi is answering such questions).


    It has been very sad (for those deceived) for a long time. Good now that the truth emerges. I don't feel sorry for Rossi. His disrespect for science and engineering reality is as strong as his disrespect for any partner he has worked with.

  • I agree with the idea of determining the most endothermic industrial processes and attempting to discover if any of them could have been utilized without a large amount of product being shipped in and out.


    If there are no processes that could have theoretically been utilized that fit, a paper should be produced and published online. The first place it should be published, of course, is the Journal of Nuclear Physics. However, the purpose of the paper would NOT be to determine Rossi's guilt or innocence, but to present facts so people can form an educated opinion.


    In addition I agree with Alan, regardless what happened in Doral, Florida, it has little bearing on the overall reality of the "Rossi Effect" since third parties have performed tests and more testing is on the way.

    • Official Post

    about endothermic phenomenon, account also for the size of the "plant" which does not allows much room for storing raw and transformed material.


    I looked at fusion enthalpy on wikipedia and found that water is among the highest enthalpy at 333 J/g.
    for 1MW this led to 3kg/sec of ice melted, thus 10 ton per hour, 260ton per day, thus 2x6 trucks of the maximum size allowed in France (44Tons 5 axis).
    this occupy 260 cubic meter, which under 2 meter of roof is 130 sqmeter, thus about a square of about 12x12meter.


    you can cross check my computation, it looks crazy, I'm not confident.

  • Splitting water can be done with 80% or so efficiency by electrolysis. It cannot be done using low grade heat without massive inefficiency. In fact I'm not sure it can be done at all, but theoretically it could: for example with a heat engine and then electrolysis!


    It comes down to entropy. With heat at 100C and a heat sink at say 50C you can extract very useful little (~ 50/300 = 1/6) energy as anything but heat. That is a thermodynamic law you cannot get round. Chemical energy like electrical energy is low entropy. Check out Carnot. So we have waste heat of 5/6 MW to dissipate.


    The whole "endothermic reaction" idea is plain silly, and while it is a nice game, anyone who seriously believes this is a viable solution is bats.

  • Well maybe ice melting is not enough... For example H2 dissociation energy is 436 kJ/mol, so if I got my calculations right, with 1MW and 100% efficiency only 16 kg of H2 can be dissociated in 1 hour.


    Obviously 100C steam cannot do that and 100% efficiency is impossible, but the H2 example gives the idea. If real, I guess the 1MW steam flux was needed in a multi-stage dissociation process where final components are then stocked separately.


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  • My hunch is that Rossi neither believes what he's saying about an endothermic process nor does he care that people can readily identify it as implausible. He's just responding to questions, while his endgame plays out. I do not think his motives for initiating the lawsuit with IH are transparent. My suspicion is that he did it for reasons other than those stated in the claims — perhaps he wanted IH to back out of the license so that he could enter a new business arrangement unencumbered, and IH were unwilling do do so. So he tried and tried to persuade them, and then he started acting more and more like a loose canon to scare them, but they didn't budge (although they were surely aware of his erratic behavior). And then finally he started going through the motions of a GPT, with the implicit threat of a lawsuit behind his actions if IH did not either cancel the license agreement or pay up 89 million dollars. But all to no avail, because they were willing to play chicken with him. And finally the end of the purported test came, and they hadn't budged, so he went gonzo, doing what he had been implicitly threatening all along. And they countersued, without offering a settlement. So now he's probably thinking through his next steps.

  • Well according to the letterhead in exhibit 18, they were manufacturing Johnson Matthew" "Platinum Sponges"


    Maybe someone could figure out what kind of chemicals can be made from platinum group metals in sponge form.

  • It's actually "Advanced Derivatives of Johnson Matthew Platinum Sponges", on the letterhead


    So Johnson Matthew would be the supplier of the raw material. Could just be a misspelling of J. Matthey.

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