Some Points Regarding a Recent Presentation at ICCF20 on the ‘Lugano Report’ (Rainer Rander)

This business about "Aramco."

Quote from randombit0

Jack Cole wrote:

Sirs ! Be serious if you are able ! No page of the Optris manual say to use "Aramco paint"( Aramco actually seems to be a company related to Oil extraction en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Aramco)
instead on page 71 and 72 Optris manual suggest to use their reference dots or a not well specified black paint.The Lugano team used the reference dots and successfully measured the emissivity of the Alumina pipes.

This was merely a typo. Aremco. The brand is not mentioned in the Optris manual, and there is more than one manual. The IR Basics guide just says ""a band or color with a known emissivity," and then refers to this as "band or paint." The reference was to a calibration at 1000 C. (This was not from the MFMP paper, but from a comment on E-Catworld, quoted here: Some Points Regarding a Recent Presentation at ICCF20 on the ‘Lugano Report’ (Rainer Rander))

The Lugano team used dots and measured the emissivity of "pipes" at far lower temperature, not 1000 C. The IR Basics manual does not suggest using dots.

The camera manual is at http://www.optris.com/thermal-…Manuals/Englisch/Infrared Cameras/Manual optris PI.pdf
It mentions dots:

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If you monitor temperatures of up to 380 °C you may place a special plastic sticker (emissivity dots – Part No.: ACLSED) onto the measuring object, which covers it completely.

(The meaning of "covers it completely" is unclear.) Without being very clear that this is for higher temperatures, the camera manual then has:

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Cove[r] a part of the surface of the measuring object with a black, flat paint with an emissivity of 0.98. Adjust the emissivity of your infrared thermometer to 0.98 and take the temperature of the colored surface.

As the brand of paint is not specified, this is where I'd call the manufacturer. The Aremco paint does not necessarily have an emissivity of 0.98, the manufacturer says it greater than 0.9. How MFMP determined the emissivity of this paint, I don't know, but what it is good for is high temperature. There is a paint with an emissivity of 1.00, "optical black." But I doubt it would handle high temperature.

However, on the face of it, MFMP nailed the matter by using the pyrometer. This is what Greenyer wrote:

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7. We used a Williamson IR dual-band spot pyrometer ($11,000 tool considered by all in the heat treatment industry to be the only effective and accurate way to measure the temperature of Alumina over a wide range of temperatures since it correctly adjusts emissivity based on years of research at MIT as the Alumina temperature varies) This agreed with our B-Type, K-Type and Optris (when Optris set to 0.95)

Reading the paper, though, "agreed with" is a bit loose. The B and K thermocouples were not solidly heat-sinked to the alumina, but merely tied on with kanthal wire. So they were quite a bit cooler. Still, using the pyrometer appears to be sound. If it were important -- it actually isn't -- I'd want to see a more solid calibration, if possible, and it seems that it could be done.

The camera manual does indicate emissivity of 0.95, but not for "alumina" and not on "page 42" as Greenyer had written. It's on page 76, and it is for "ceramic."

Quote from randombit0

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

Ha ha ha Dear Abdul,

Abd, Zero.

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Mixing up a lot of bad reasoning and second hand opinions you arrive to a wrong conclusion. Is interesting that your only reference is the TC "paper".

Nope. this kind of lying is common for tolls, who will deny what is completely obvious from present evidence. I cited and linked to TC, to the MFMP paper, to Optris documents, and to many other pages and references as needed.

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You have not searched and not cite any other literature.

I have searched for a great deal, and have read a great deal that I have not mentioned. Typical for Zero, and for his friend, he makes many vague references with an aura of confident superiority. However, we see right through, it, he is transparent.

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But I can ensure you that there is quite a lot of literature to look at.

I'm sure. I am particularly enjoying Rossi v. Darden, a treasure trove of Rossi documents at this point. It bears on this matter, for reasons I'm sure you will understand. If we are studying a test, is there additional information, has there been any other attempt to confirm the test results?

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You seems also to ignore all the arguments we have proposed here, even in a simple and comprehensible form, that demonstrate that a body with an emissivity lower then a BB, must have a temperature higher then a BB, for the input power.

A body with emissivity lower than that of a black body, with the same dissipated power as a black body, must, at equilibrium, have a higher temperature. Everyone here agrees on that, I've said it many times, this is totally established. What is odd is that Zero seems this is being ignored. What this demonstrates is one of two alternatives: he is unable to understand the conversation, or he is essentially lying, pretending not to understand in order to keep on arguing endlessly.

He has no credentials, no recognition, only arrogant pretense. I have some suspicion he is not Rossi, but a troll, creating a fake Rossi clone in order to discredit him. I have, however, seen Rossi argue something like this on his blog, but never, of course, with such a high level of interaction.

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You accuse other to "cherry pick" data but seem that you are the first to make an accurate selection of what to cite and what not.

Thank you. Of course, if I miss something, others are always welcome to fill it in. I'm not seeing anything substantive from Zero.

Quote from Shane D.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.3913.pdf
"Finally, the outermost shell was coated by a special aeronautical-industry grade black paint
capable of withstanding temperatures up to 1200°C."

Abd,

Maybe you are mixing up the "aeronautical-industry grade black paint" coating the Hotcat referenced above from the very first (TPR1/Ferrara) "Hotcat" report , with this Aramco, or whatever paint you mention in regard to TPR2?

No, I'm not mixing things up. Someone might, reading part of the evidence. That was the Ferrara report, which I did not cover at all. Mentioning it may "mix things up" or not. I think it's relevant, but MFMP used Aremco paint with a specific temperature rating, and designed for high emissivity, but with emissivity not actually specified accurately. (and it might vary with how the paint is applied and other surface conditions). So it would also need to be calibrated! The only method that might not need to be calibrated would be the black body calibration using a hole, and I would want to see the hole either be in an opaque material or coated with such, at least until it were shown that hole in alumina were adequate.

MFMP may have calibrated accurately enough using the pyrometer.

At Ferrara, the reactor was a cylinder, not finned, a much simpler device to model thermally and to study. As with Lugano, no data from the internal thermocouple was presented; presumably there was one, used in setting up the reaction.

The entire cylinder was painted with that paint. They say about it:

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Conservatively, surface emissivity during measurements was set to 1, i.e. the temperature values
recorded are consequently lower than real, as will be explained below.

This, in fact, betrays a test bias. "conservatively" is not what one goes for when simply measuring things. One goes for precision and accuracy. Then a scientist will, based on data and calibrations, create error bars, and then if one wants to make some "conservative conclusion," it rooted in fact, not in an a-priori judgment of some goal, i.e., to "prove" excess heat.

The paint is not specified, a flaw in the report (typically in scientific reports the exact material or exact device will be specified, and where it is generic, the supplier may be specified. Read a lot of papers, one will see this!)

The above description was from the earlier Ferrara test. For the later one, conditions were changed. (The importance of maintaining conditions in creating commensurable results is often lost in relatively amateur efforts, and Ferrara must be consider that.) They say this:

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The outer surface of the E-Cat HT2 and one side of the flange are coated with black paint, different from that used for the previous test. The emissivity of this coating, a Macota® enamel paint capable of withstanding temperatures up to 800°C, is not known; moreover, it was not sprayed uniformly on the device, as may be seen from the non-uniform distribution of colors in adjacent areas in the thermal imaging.

The concept of measuring emissivity accurately seemed to be elude them, though, to be fair, the HT2 had complex emissivity. They report an effort to use dots ... beyond the temperature range for those dots. Basically, bumbling amateurs. (It is not necessary to report obviously predictable failures!)

They did do a "dummy test." However, their entire presentation is enormously and unnecessarily complex. If one does a power calibration, using a dummy that is as close as possible to the experimental device -- ideally, a fuel tube would be present, but without an active fuel, but a dummy charge, attempting to create a similar heat distribution profile -- it is not actually necessary to determine temperature, because camera readings at specific locations could be correlated with power input in a dummy, presumably with no XP, and then used to much more directly measure experimental power dissipation.

I don't see the simple display of data that could have been created in this way. They went for the Lugano method: determine temperature, then using thermal modelling, determine dissipated power.

There is a problem: they assumed emissivity of 1.0 for the reactor temperature measurement. However, actual emissivity will be lower than that. They do not seem to be clearly aware of the importance of band emissivity, and may be assuming that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, i.e., whatever emissivity is used for temperature can then be used for estimating radiated power. In fact, the two are quite different, as the discussion here has shown. 1.0 would be "conservative" for determining temperature, i.e,. the actual temperature would be higher with a real non-black body. However, radiated power would be the opposite. Assuming 1.0 would increase the estimate of radiated power. These do not cancel out, necessarily. Band emissivity for the painted alumina would be very high, perhaps. So, here, assume it is high, close to 1.0. The temperature measure would then be correct. Then assume total emissivity is lower. Radiated power for that temperature would then be lower. So the "conservative" estimate was conservative in half, but would be "generous" in the other half of the power determination process. Did they use a lower estimate for emissivity for radiated power? Yes, it appears so. They did attempt to measure emissivity and came up with values of something like 0.8.

This, by the way, contradicts the naive analysis of Zero in this discussion. They understood that the emissivity needed for the camera could be different from the emissivity involved in calculating radiation.

This was irregularly painted alumina, not the raw alumina of Lugano.

But the entire approach was defective, making what could have been very simple into something complex and thus prone to error. Power calibration, which would use every point of the device as an emitter with radiation depending on and highly correlated with input power. Set the camera for a decent emissivity value, but as long as the setting is consistent, this should give quite accurate measure of input power, bypassing all the complexity.

I have not seen enough to declare the Ferrara test "dead." It is odd that it was, in some ways, more sophisticated than Lugano.

In Lugano, the claim -- repeated by them -- that a full-power calibration could not be done because of possible heating coil failure led them to not do one. Where did that claim (preposterous on the face) come from? Who would know about alleged vulnerability of the heating coils to being heated without XP in the device?

There is an obvious answer! And the Lugano team did not stand up to him, but went along. There would be an obvious psychological and practical motivator for that. IH did not insist, either, and the reasons for that would, again, be obvious in the same way. They were hoping Rossi would reveal the technology to them, as agreed by then, and didn't want to spook him, and he was known to be easily spooked.

Quote from THHuxley

I vaguely remember this paint as being disclosed as Aramco at some time. It certainly could be so: they do paints for hot temperatures.

Hmmph! Sometimes I wonder why I bother. Just above, I covered, specifically, the "Aramco" issue. It was a typographical error by Bob Greenyer wrt the MFMP work.
Some Points Regarding a Recent Presentation at ICCF20 on the ‘Lugano Report’ (Rainer Rander)
They disclose the explicit paint, as thought I showed. So much for memory! I did not link to the paint nor quote the explicit name of it. It's in the MFMP report and I did previously cover it.
Some Points Regarding a Recent Presentation at ICCF20 on the ‘Lugano Report’ (Rainer Rander)
http://www.aremco.com/wp-conte…/A05_S2_15_Emissivity.pdf is the paint specification page.

The Ferrara test used two paints to cover the whole reactor. In the first Ferrara test, https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.3913.pdf

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Finally, the outermost shell was coated by a special aeronautical-industry grade black paint capable of withstanding temperatures up to 1200°C.

And in the second test

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The outer surface of the E-Cat HT2 and one side of the flange are coated with black paint, different from that used for the previous test. The emissivity of this coating, a Macota® enamel paint capable of withstanding temperatures up to 800°C, is not known; moreover, it was not sprayed uniformly on the device, as may be seen from the non-uniform distribution of colors in adjacent areas in the thermal imaging

Likely one of these paints. http://www.macota.it/lista_prodotti_sottocategoria.jsp?cat=100&subcat=13

A careful full power calibration would have made all the complexity about emissivity unnecessary, as long as conditions were otherwise the same or adequately similar.

Quote from BobHiggins

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

While the Aremco paint may withstand high temperatures, the emissivity at high temperatures is not specified by the manufacturer. When we asked about this, they said that if MFMP got a good measure of the emissivity at high temperature, they would like to know what we measured.

Thanks for the confirmation. Entire generations could now be confused if you provide a half-assed measure.

However, you won't do that, right? This could be a fairly simple evaluation, if you still have the pyrometer as one measure. I'd suggest exploring using a black body for calibration, as Optris describes. For studying the paint, the base does not need to be alumina, though for a true and complete evaluation, alumina would be studied together with other bases. The black-body calibration, if alumina is fully opaque in the band, would provide a first-principles correlation with temperature, at least within the camera precision. With an alumina base, thermocouples could be bonded to the base with a heat-conductive cement. Indeed, a well could be drilled and a thermocouple buried in the alumina, covered with alumina cement, the kind used for the fins.

You would then have a triple measurement of temperature and could calibrate just about anything this way. If you still have the camera.....

I could imagine Optris supporting such calibrations. Even more, though, you can establish a procedure for calibrating explorations of LENR devices using an Optris camera or the same principles. When I first heard about Ferrara, I thought that it would be possible to use a camera, if calibrated. You can use almost anything if calibrations demonstrate reliability. Pyrometric cones could be used, where the cone will droop at a known temperature, and the rate of droop can be used to get a more precise measure.

Thanks for your work.

I consider MFMP an amateur effort. And amateurs can accomplish real science, it simply is not automatically expected. Here is an example of an opportunity to extend the literature. One who becomes a "serious amateur" -- which means one puts in considerable time and study, while developing scientific reserve -- may readily develop world-class expertise in a narrow area. Besides, it's fun.

Quote from BobHiggins

Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
I consider MFMP an amateur effort

I don't really consider that an apt description of MFMP. MFMP is composed of volunteers having a wide range of experiences. Personally, I am an MSEE with 36 years of R&D experience, about half of which was specifically spent in research of electronic properties of materials. I also have a background in optics, photometry, electromagnetics (measurements, propagation in free space and around the human body, and simulation), integrated circuit design and fabrication, acoustics including microwave acoustic devices; and some experience in electrochemistry, and vacuum techniques. I have about 30 issued US and international patents. While I have no nuclear experience, I did have university training in nuclear science. I am currently developing expertise from the ground up in radiation measurement technology. As with almost anyone you pick, including members of the Lugano team, they can be professionals in one field and amateurs in another field. Clearly, the Lugano team members were not up to the task of accurate measurement of the Rossi device - were they "professionals" in the fields required for the Lugano analysis? One of the most obscure of professionals is one that is widely experienced in calorimetry. The LENR field requires expertise in disparate sciences. Almost none of the LENR practitioners come to the field having professional expertise in all of the required technologies.

Please don't quote the "amateur effort" out of context. I am not denying your experience, at all. I had some of what you show (though not as much experience!) and I consider myself an amateur. It really means, "not paid, not employed, not a professional in the field." You are correct about the Lugano researchers. Yes. one can be professional in one field and amateur in another. Pons and Fleischmann were expert in electrochemistry and, I think, in calorimetry. Not in measuring neutrons. So where did they screw up? Where they were not professionals! Obviously. The error, then, was in publishing without careful consultation with experts, which would have revealed their error. They were in a rush. Haste makes waste!

I have been objecting to the attacks on you and MFMP in general from Planet Rossi, and the real accusations of professional incompetence are coming from that direction, certainly not from me. I have encouraged MFMP since I first met some of the people at ICCF-18. I remember the excitement when, at breakfast after the last day of the conference, one person figured out and explained what Defkalion was doing! (And it was quite plausible.) That excitement is great! Now harness it with mature insight and caution. Both.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

Wyttenbach,
The MFMP used 1.0, 0.95 for emissivity at various times, and more recently 0.945 in tests. It would be wise to see which they used with what temperature. 0.90 was never used as far as I know.

I calculated an integrated emissivity 0.925 at 1050 K from the Manara et al alumina spectral emissivity plot.

For a reductio ad absurdem argument here, suppose the camera measures illumination intensity in a very narrow band, perhaps even a single spectral line. And that it happens that the material only has high emission (as an example) in that spectral band. Elsewhere it might have the same, or quite different emissivity. From the spectral emission, the full emissivity cannot be measured. A change in the emissivity at the single spectral line would bear no relationship to the emitted power. We only know that both band and total emissivity are in the range of 0 to 1, and that total power thermal radiation is at a maximum for a black body, and then, what Zero has claimed -- believing, apparently, that nobody else understands this -- is that if the alumina is showing a particular emission, it must necessarily be hotter than a black body showing that same emission. This completely misses that in the camera band, alumina is almost a black body, i.e., emissivity is close to 1.0, not far below it. But over the full spectrum, total emissivity is much lower, on the order of 0.4.

We do know that a black body has maximal thermal emission. This sets some limits, but any effort to convert error in band emissivity to correction of total emissivity and thus power is necessarily doomed. Both band emissivity and total emissivity will vary with the material. Both values must be determined experimentally, through calibrations, for accuracy.

By making certain simplifying assumptions, one may then make such calculations. But those are simplifying assumptions! The only way to know if the material will match those asssumptions is experimentally. Here, Paradigmnoia does some work with actual measures of emissivity of "alumina" from sources, but, as one of the few useful comments from Zero and some others, that material could be different from the Lugano material, but this, then, throws us back on Lugano itself, and how they determined emissivity! They did less work on this, not more. They did not appear to be aware of the band vs. total emissivity problem, and appear to have used the same value for both, leading to major error.

And then Zero tried to make the claim that total emissivity must be the value to use for both setting the camera and for estimating power dissipation, giving a totally spurious conservation of energy argument. Instead, band emissivity is useful for converting irradiance to temperature, and total emissivity represents all radiated power in all bands. That the same value would work for both would be limited to gray bodies, but alumina is very much not a gray body, as is shown in many sources, emissivity varies with temperature.

Lugano did do a calibration at a relatively low temperature. At that temperature, band emissivity and total emissivity were close enough that their calibration confirmed their power calculation. Bad luck. And a setup to be bitten by that particular bug. As McKubre pointed out immediately in his Infinite Energy article, they were not experienced with calorimetry. Anyone experienced with calorimetry in the cold fusion context (where artifacts abound) would know not to rely, if possible, on a single and complex estimate, but to calibrate the hell out of everything. These were professors, all right, but without the kind of experience that would have led them to identify and avoid the problem. Normal scientific process would iron out the wrinkles, but this was not normal scientific process. They were unable to publish the paper formally under peer review. They were rejected from arXiv; excuses may be made from that, but this paper could have been published under a less hostile peer review in JCMNS. They did not attempt that. This was not science, it was a type of commercial promotion, aided and abetted by some academics who provided opinions outside their expertise. It looked good enough to fool some scientists, even, at first. Not when it came under careful examination.

Scientific study of the "Rossi effect" only exists, as far as we know, within the Industrial Heat attempts, which were highly motivated, initially, to confirm. They have reported failure; while this data has not been published, it is an indication. There are no other scientific studies, there are at best anecdotal and unverifiable results here and there.

Quote from THHuxley

When you look into the details of their methodology it falls to bits in ways quite surprising: though superficially it is both badly conducted and badly motivated, little fudges like this, not fully disclosed, are from my POV even worse...

We therefore took the same emissivity trend found in the literature as reference; but, by applying emissivity reference dots along the rods, we were able to adapt that curve to this specific type of alumina, by directly measuring local emissivity in places close to the reference dots (Figure 7).

It is generally understood that post-hoc analysis, if not guided by an established protocol, is very dangerous, because one may decide to accept the analysis, consciously or unconsciously, because it confirms expectations or desires. With post-hoc analysis, one may determine possible conclusions, suggesting further research that would be carefully controlled, but not more than that. A great deal of LENR research has relied on post-hoc analysis, rather than established and determined protocol. As such, it can be great for exploration, but certainly not for confirmation. So it is quite possible that they manipulated the data from the low-temperature calibration to increase the appearance of accuracy. THH is correct to note the problem here. It might indicate what is suspected. Or it might not, but in either case, what they actually did is obscure, poorly reported, while the report is full of largely irrelevant fluff. Who needs a Ragone plot? Who needs all that data on radiation measurement? For a first-report, each of these could be replaced by one sentence or little more. The absence of significant radiation is a known LENR characteristic, mysterious as it is.