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

Quote from IH Fanboy

That is essentially what they were referred to, perhaps not using that exact term in every instance, although some even referred to themselves using that term.

Where did you read this? What are your sources? Who referred to them this way, and which of them referred to themselves this way? I knew many of these people. I worked with them. I have never heard of anything like this.

We are talking about people such as two Nobel laureates, a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Department Chairman (Pons), and Bockris, who literally wrote the book on Modern Electrochemistry. (That's the title.) They included two of the researchers who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, the researchers who developed the atomic bomb for India, the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, and one of the commissioners on the French AEC. Most of them were jealous of their prerogatives. Full professors with 30 to 50 years of experience never refer to themselves as hobbyists or amateurs. Look at the credentials of the people who attended the 1989 NSF meeting, for example. Are you suggesting that Edward Teller was a hobbyist?

I think you made this up. I think you have not met the researchers, and you read nothing about them, or the books by Mallove and Beaudette.

I suppose some ignorant internet trolls have called them hobbyists. People have called them every name imaginable, but "hobbyist" would be one of the most inaccurate.

Not only are they not hobbyists by any stretch of the imagination, but there is a world of difference between the quality of their equipment and experiments and that of the hobbyists. The hobbyists made dozens of mistakes that no professional scientist would make. The scientists know enough to write multivolume authoritative books about electrochemistry, calorimetry, tritium, spectroscopy and other key subjects the hobbyists know nothing about. All of the professionals have PhDs, which means they spent years slaving away under people such as Bockris and Fleischmann, learning every aspect of the research.

Let me add that LENR+ does not exist. It is a figment of Peter Gluck's imagination. Most of the claimed LENR+ results are either fake or mistaken, and the others are no better than the mainstream results. The best real results ever reported were with bulk palladium, reported by Stan Pons.

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After reading all of the claims by some posters of fraud on Rossi's part, I think that at least for the moment it is worth repeating that - if I understand it correctly - the MFMP analysis does not rule out the possibility of a COP > 1 (around 1.15 - 1.3?). This is consistent with recent work by Parkhomov, Songjiang Chen and several others, as well as the recent report of Tom Conover. (Also, MFMP itself believes that in similar work it has seen a "signal" at least twice.) So, perhaps Rossi's "recipe" is not so bad after all?

This is an example of a true statement used misleadingly. All of Rossi's tests that we know about have had notable sources of innacuracy (Even the best of the bunch, Ferrara). Lugano in particular is an indirect measurement with significant uncertainties. That puts us in the happy position of not knowing that his device has COP very close to 1. The Lugano test, I'd reckon allows COP=1.4 or COP=0.8 or anything between.

What I fail to understand is how this lack of precise measurement can be turned into a positive?

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P.S. If the Lugano professors made an error in their analysis which led to an inflated estimate of the COP, and also didn't choose to test it using self-sustained mode, is this Rossi's fault?

There is no if here. The mistake in calculation is written in their report, and can be validated any number of times.

It is most likely Rossi's fault, yes. He produced a system that could only easily be tested indirectly by IR thermography and just happened not to be painted black and therefore capable of this large known positive error. He has a thermocouple inside (used for temperature control) and he seems never to have calibrated it. He was present for nearly a week of the testing time at start and end. Therefore he saw the reactor. Either he was consistently making the same mistake, or he knew very well it was much cooler than its "working temperature". For him not to mention this, working with the testers over an extended period, is not plausible.

It is true that had the testers been more competent we would not have this problem. That, also, is indirectly Rossi's fault. He has refused tests a number of times from people more competent, and accepted these tests from naive Professors who were strongly inclined to believe him. That is a pattern through all of his behaviour, and it worked well until IH.

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P.P.S. For those pathoskeptics here who have already decided that everything is known about Rossi's techology, even though they have no firsthand knowledge about the one-year test (I'm excluding Jed Rothwell because apparently he claims such knowledge even if it is not firsthand) I'm a member of the open-minded (not "closet-minded" as Jack Cole suggests) "minority".

There are three different issues here that get conflated. Most of the people here, and pretty well all on ECW, are convinced by weight of evidence from other experiments that some supra-chemical effect delivering excess heat exists in metal-hydride systems. (Not all would think it likely to extend to NI-H, but none could rule out the possibility that there is some related effect to that they think proven). A few here such as me, and many off this blog, don't see the evidence presented so far as in any way persuasive. They may see it as interesting (and hence be here) but reckon it is strongly likely not to be something as extreme as nuclear. The nature of the evidence to date is such that it could be artifact, because there is no coherent reproducibility.

You have characterised such people as pathoskeptic. That is a value judgement. Many times the same evidence has been presented and argued, and different people judge it differently. It is in no way pathoskeptic, with current state of evidence, not to think it implies a real nuclear effect. One could just as well see that those who are convinced of that as believers with some religious or psychological attachment. While both characterisations are possible, and might in some cases be true, to assume either one, as you do, is grossly disrespectful and poisonous to good dialog.

Supporting Rossi is inherently a separate issue.

I also don't see being open-minded as a virtue if it leads to supporting or even half-supporting people like Rossi who are self-professed fraudulently deceptive about their technology. (Unless you are willing believe the IH letter a forgery, and hence IH guilty of perjury, which it will come to, when they testify to the letter's genuineness. A far greater crime).

That judgement about Rossi is independent of whether you think there might likely be some metal-hydride excess heat effect in his equipment. I'm stating that Lugano provides no evidence to support this. As did TC. I'm not certain what MFMP are saying because I have not seen their error analysis or error bounds yet. Without that they could not likely be more certain than TC, and therefore would not support that experiment as evidence of excess heat.

It would indeed be pathoskeptic to claim that 15 or so highly inaccurate experiments all with possible error modes, nearly all with circumstantially validated error modes, can prove a device does not generate excess heat! No such bad experiments can prove that! Nor do they provide one iota of evidence that there is excess heat. They do however with hindsight show Rossi to be highly unreliable and capable on a serial basis of making null information tests look, for a selected set of observers, like revolutionary technology.

The evidence that Rossi is no scientist and and allows others to draw conclusions about his devices that he knows to be false is indisputable. (Again, the IH letter, but also much circumstantial supporting evidence).

You may feel nevertheless that he can properly be supported, admired, etc. But it is not pathoskeptic to reject that as idiocy.

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Judging by the small number of regular - and extremely repetitive - posters on this forum compared to ECW, as well as by the relatively high quality of a number of the posts on ECW, I would guess that the readers/posters on ECW are neither a minority nor are they any less technically qualified or knowledgeable than those who post here.

That is what you get on the internet. All sides argued. In this case without technical background you can't distinguish. Maybe you can in retrospect with Lugano. Who was right, the posters here making detailed technical argument, or those on ECW who banned TC from putting one side of the case and therefore never had that debate?

Censorship is not helpful. ECW for a very long time did not allow criticism of Rossi, and therefore got rid of anyone with clearly held contrary technical views.

Maybe we can all donate to the MFMP to get them a certification in how to use an Optris IR thermographic camera?

So maybe then after a few years their comments on the Lugano test does have some crediblity.

Reading the comments(and the update) of Rainer Rander made MFMP look like real amateurs.

@Jed

It took me all of 30 seconds to find an example of one of the most prominent scientists in cold fusion research referring to his "hobby", as in maybe he will be finding another one besides cold fusion:

http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3595

I'm not disputing that renowned scientists have been involved with cold fusion from the beginning, because clearly they have. But they were mostly side-lined, denigrated, and called all sorts of names including crackpots, fringe scientists, and worse. Hobbyist is one of the least harsh terms used. Not sure why you are all up in arms about this.

Quote from IH Fanboy

It took me all of 30 seconds to find an example of one of the most prominent scientists in cold fusion research referring to his "hobby", as in maybe he will be finding another one besides cold fusion:

That's Ed's way of saying he is not funded. He did not literally mean that he is a hobbyist. He is every inch a professional.

Quote from IH Fanboy

I'm not disputing that renowned scientists have been involved with cold fusion from the beginning, because clearly they have. But they were mostly side-lined, denigrated, and called all sorts of names including crackpots, fringe scientists, and worse. Hobbyist is one of the least harsh terms used.

Yes, they have been called all kinds of things, but no, they were not hobbyists or amateurs. They were not crackpots either. Calling them these things did not make them what they were called. No amateur is capable of doing a cold fusion experiment, any more than an amateur could perform surgery. No amateur has contributed anything of value to cold fusion, to my knowledge.

Your assertion was that some people doing cold fusion experiments are amateurs or hobbyists. That is true; some of them are. However, they have contributed nothing, and there is no chance their experiments will work. For that matter, many of the professional experiments have failed. The people at U. Missouri showed that Parkhomov failed. The professors at Lugano also failed. Many others have failed for various reasons. Sometimes, professional scientists make stupid, amateur mistakes, but that does mean they are actually amateurs.

As far as I know, all of the technical papers at LENR-CANR.org and listed in the index are written by professional scientists. There are 4,881 authors. I have not checked them all, but I don't recall seeing any who were not affiliated with a university or other professional lab. A few are journalists or non-scientists, including me, but we did not write any technical papers.

In his 1-year test, Rossi did not fail or succeed. It was a complete fraud from start to finish. An obvious, indisputable fraud, as you see in Exhibit 5.

Quote from Mary Yugo

Rossi having a small effect is still on the table.

About as much or maybe less than my pink, invisible, flying unicorns (PIFU's).

What is the point of repeating this inane comment? We all know you think so. I think you are wrong, as shown in the first Levi paper. I think there is some evidence of heat there, although it is muddy and it would have to be independently replicated before we take it seriously. I do not think you have found any problems in this paper. In fact, I do not recall you have found any technical problems in any paper. So your views have no technical merit. You are merely betting with the house, as I said. Anyone can do that and win most of the time. Just declare all results wrong and you will be right most of the time, but you will be no smarter than a Magic 8 Ball.

Quote from THHuxley

Quote: “After reading all of the claims by some posters of fraud on Rossi's part, I think that at least for the moment it is worth repeating that - if I understand it correctly - the MFMP analysis does not rule out the possibility of a COP > 1 (around…

I know that there's not much point in my replying to your rather long-winded comment, especially after your distortion of my statements. In fact, all of this discussion comes down to "prejudice" in the sense that I am "prejudiced" or biased in favor of the possibility of LENR and/or LENR+, and apparently you are biased against this possibility, and so would only consider it seriously if there were stronger evidence. You also seem to enjoy posting rather long-winded comments "explaining" these "facts" to people. While I would expect that while we would both consider ourselves to be objective and scientific in that we would only be convinced if there were strong, replicable, scientific evidence, this seems to be the main difference between our positions, not as far as I can tell any superior knowledge or wisdom on your part. In any case, I don't have much interest in reading non-technical comments in which the authors reassure themselves that they are the only objective ones, and while there are some good technical comments on this forum, at some point they become repetitive. It is for these reasons that ECW is in many ways more useful - the "replicators" don't need extensive gratuitous comments explaining to them why Lugano was wrong or LENR is impossible and has never been proven to work, and so it is very good that these excessively repetitive and tendentious comments are censored. (Although I would point out that there are plenty of scientifically critical comments there as well.)

Here's a quote from your post which appears to me to summarize your position: "There are three different issues here that get conflated. Most of the people here, and pretty well all on ECW, are convinced by weight of evidence from other experiments that some supra-chemical effect delivering excess heat exists in metal-hydride systems. (Not all would think it likely to extend to NI-H, but none could rule out the possibility that there is some related effect to that they think proven). A few here such as me, and many off this blog, don't see the evidence presented so far as in any way persuasive."

OK. That's fine. Although how you can tell what is in the minds of hundreds of anonymous posters is beyond me.

Also, if the evidence is so far from persuasive then why do you waste so much time "attacking it"? I'm sure that others can figure this out, especially since we have already had extensive discussion and analysis of the Lugano test.

Getting back to the general topic of metal-hydride systems. Have you read the Focardi and Piantelli papers? Are you familiar with the recent work of Piantelli in which he claims excess power (without any input) for months of around 100 W? Are you aware that Clean Planet in Japan now claims 100% reproducibility? These are experiments that were carried out by LENR researchers (Iwamura, Mizuno) with a long scientific background in the field. Based on these works, as well as many others, I still believe that there is a significant probability of supra-chemical effects. However, I am still not "convinced" that this is necessarily the case.

Also, since you seem to be making a distinction between non Ni-H and Ni-H metal hydride systems, I assume that you are also referring to all of the Pd-D work of Fleischmann and Pons, McKubre, Miles, Bockris, Cravens, Letts, Swartz, Fralick, Boss, Szpak, Forsley, Takahashi, etc. which you don't find convincing as well. In this case, perhaps you and Abd (or some other expert on Pd-D) should have an extended discussion.

See, it was easy to write a wall of words.
That's why I like pictures.

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Have you read the Focardi and Piantelli papers? Are you familiar with the recent work of Piantelli in which he claims excess power (without any input) for months of around 100 W? Are you aware that Clean Planet in Japan now claims 100% reproducibility? These are experiments that were carried out by LENR researchers (Iwamura, Mizuno) with a long scientific background in the field. Based on these works, as well as many others, I still believe that there is a significant probability of supra-chemical effects. However, I am still not "convinced" that this is necessarily the case.

Yes, no and yes. If the more recent results are particularly significant they deserve proper comment here with enough context to indicate the significance. (You need at least one other ball park number before the 100W figure becomes extraordinary).

Yours is a perfectly understandable and reasonable position. Calling all those here with a more negative judgement of this matter pathoskeptics is wrong. Conflating those with an more judgement over this matter, and those who think Rossi should not be supported, is wrong.

Quote from quizzical

Getting back to the general topic of metal-hydride systems. Have you read the Focardi and Piantelli papers? Are you familiar with the recent work of Piantelli in which he claims excess power (without any input) for months of around 100 W? Are you aware that Clean Planet in Japan now claims 100% reproducibility? These are experiments that were carried out by LENR researchers (Iwamura, Mizuno) with a long scientific background in the field. Based on these works, as well as many others, I still believe that there is a significant probability of supra-chemical effects. However, I am still not "convinced" that this is necessarily the case.

Piantelli has made these claims, but has presented no formal write-up to be able to evaluate his more recent results. For example, back in 2012, I covered this claim of a device maintaining 300C for some months with no power input. Sadly, it just ends up being not much better than an anecdote. There is no information to inform replication or to even understand what they did to verify the results. The same goes for Iwamura, Mizuno. It is no better than anecdote, and Mizuno has been incorrect several times in the past. That happens and is why replication is necessary.

There are poorly done studies (and anecdotes) that suggest the possibility of high levels of excess heat. There are a number of better studies that suggest the intermittent possibility of lower levels of excess heat. There are lots of well done studies that suggest no excess heat from NiH. Given the large number of negative replications, I think it doesn't look to good for NiH, but maybe there will be a surprise.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

See the Optris version of the ε below.

O Dear Paradigmoia,
Thank you very much for the link to the "Infinite Energy" page. I see from that page that MFMP used the value of a generic "CERAMIC" emissivity as a first guess, tacking it from the manual of the Optris PI camera. This is quite wrong. CERAMIC means a vast number of materials so that number could be referred to a generic ceramic not to pure Alumina.
In fact fro the table of the book IR-Basics of Optris (not the manual of the camera)we see that the tipical Total emissivity of alluminium oxide is extremely low, with reported values (0.2; 0.3; 0.46; 0.16) that are even lower then the actual values used by the Lugano group.
Note also that those single values do not take in account the variation of emissivity with temperature.
Because this dependancy is important the Lugano group correctly found a measurement in literature and referred to that.
Without referring to previous work any measure or scientific activity should start from scratch, and we would have no progress.
It is so quite natural and not, certainly a scandal, to refer to literature from NASA for the emissivity of Allumina on Inconel.
Measures have value independently from the year on which they have been made.
So what's the problem ? Are you in trouble because your ideas are falsified by NASA ?
And about the iterative method: This is quite a normal graphical method to solve an equation, is called Fixed Point Iteration Method.
Try to search it with Google.
The ref in the Lugano paper show that this method is applied also in the thermography field.
So my dear Paradigmoia what's the problem ? The more we study this topic the more we see that Lugano procedure was correct.
Sorry if this hurts you.

Quote from randombit0

So what's the problem ? Are you in trouble because your ideas are falsified by NASA ?

Please check an actual manual like http://www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/tiedotteet/1996/T1792.pdf page 10. Here you see correct calibration sets fur Alumina Cement!

Quote from Alan Smith

Your assertion was that some people doing cold fusion experiments are amateurs or hobbyists. That is true; some of them are. However, they have contributed nothing, and there is no chance their experiments will work.

Like this bunch then...Fekin' amatuers!

The comparison is invalid. Most of those people made contributions at the beginning of their respective fields when there were no professionals. There was no body of knowledge to master. Take Franklin's work on electricity, for example. It did not take years of training to master electricity when Franklin did his pioneering work; it took only genius. Centuries later we have textbooks describing electricity in detail. No one could make a contribution to the science of electricity without first mastering a large chunk of what is known, and this takes years. You do not have to understand every aspect of electricity but you need to learn a lot more than Franklin did to reach the frontier of knowledge.

To do an electrochemical cold fusion experiment, you have to be an electrochemist. You have to have a PhD, or at least, you have to have as much knowledge and practice as someone with a PhD in that subject does. Or you have to work with an electrochemist in a team of scientists. Electrochemistry takes years to master. It is like becoming a surgeon. No amateur one could perform a serious operation on a person or animal and expect the animal to survive. It takes practice and you have to master a lot of knowledge. Doing an electrochemical experiment is roughly as difficult. I have heard electrochemists such as McKubre and Bockris discuss the details of cold fusion experiments. I had no idea what they were talking about for the most part, and I know a lot more about the subject than most people do -- far more than Mary Yugo, for example.

Some of the people you listed had formal training and deep knowledge of the subjects. Darwin, for example. Edison knew far more about electricity and chemistry than he let on. He played the part of a rustic know-nothing tinkerer but it was an act, as you see from his lab notebooks.

Needless to say, many people are fully qualified professionals even though they have no formal training or PhDs. You do not have to go to a university. You do, however, have to know the textbooks through and through, and you have to have years of hands-on experience. Most people do better and learn faster with formal training, but some can master a subject on their own. A person who already has a PdD in one field of science can often master another on his own. Ed Storms knows as much electrochemistry as an electrochemist. He had a degree in physics already, and decades of experience in the labs at Los Alamos.

Quote from quizzical

Are you aware that Clean Planet in Japan now claims 100% reproducibility? These are experiments that were carried out by LENR researchers (Iwamura, Mizuno) with a long scientific background in the field.

These are two separate experiments. Mizuno has been doing this for some time. He made mistakes at one point, which I described. (http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreportonmi.pdf) I think he has fixed the problems and he now has better results. Unfortunately, he was ill and unable to report them at ICCF20.

Iwamura began a replication of this about a year ago. He is doing several other experiments at the same time. I get a sense he has not devoted much time & effort to this one. He described the results to the Nikkei reporter, and he described them briefly during ICCF20. I have some additional data from him. I am not impressed by the calorimetry. I do not have enough information to do a careful evaluation, but I am not impressed. There are only four calibrations at two power settings and two pressure settings (four in all). There are four excess heat tests at the same power and pressure. I think there are many ways that could be a mistake. There may be additional data I have not seen.

@randombit0,
Again, the alumina on inconel emissivity was the total hemispherical emissivity in the Wade report.
Note that a Total Radiometer was required to see the total IR band. In a vacuum, no less, due to the atmospheric IR absorption bands. The age of the report is not significant if the work was well done. I think that the report was both well done and very obvious in its statement that the total hemispherical emissivity was being measured, not a limited range of the IR band that IR cameras (yet to be invented) were to use.

The thickness of the coating of alumina and zirconia on the Inconel should also be taken into consideration, because beyond a sufficient optical thickness of a coating, the substrate will not affect the surface emissivity of an object. In the Wade report, the thickness applied to the Inconel strip was as follows: "When the ceramic-coated test specimens were heated during measurement of emissivity, the radiant flux emanated from both the ceramic coating and the underlying metal heater up to a certain limiting thickness of the coating. This limiting thickness is governed by the particle size and the refractive index of the ceramic (ref. 7)." - page 7
and "The ceramic coating was applied in thicknesses varying from 0 to 0.016 inch." - page 7
Unfortunately, only the zirconia coating over Inconel is shown in the report, but the plot shows that by 0.014 to 0.016 inch* thickness, the zirconia coating is opaque to the underlying Inconel radiation spectra. (see plot below, from the Wade report) This means that certainly a 1-2 mm or thicker coating will be opaque to the heater wire IR signature, and so the surface emittance will be solely caused by the alumina (or here, zirconia) IR spectra. Which is what I already reported months ago. (In the case of alumina glass, this may not apply, but alumina glass was not used.) In other words, the transparent IR bands of alumina are of no significance to IR measurements above 0.4 mm thickness, and certainly not above 1 mm thickness.
*0.016 inch is about 0.41 mm

My choice of ceramic for the the Lugano emissivity starting point is much better than the oxidized aluminum that you chose in your essay. Oxidized aluminum is clearly listed under the Metals section. I think you will agree that the Lugano device was not a metal device, at least on the outside.

If there is so many versions of aluminum oxide to chose from for total emissivity, then perhaps that should also have been tested in Lugano also.

The iteration method requires multiple IR intensities or multiple IR bands to be used properly. It is the basis of two band IR temperature probes. Two or more IR bands allows the generation of an emissivity slope, from which the emissivity and therefore the correct temperature can be determined more accurately. The dual or multiple band IR method boils down to that the measurements from all separate bands must be consistent with points on the same curve based on Planck's radiation formula and Wien's displacement law.