If one was to use only 20kW I suppose only about 25 - 30kg kg of saturated steam or so would be produced an hour. This would be about About 0.008 kg/s. that's about half a tablespoon a second. is this right?
Probably, no steam was produced. There must have been some back pressure from the heat exchanger. At these temperatures there was no steam; it was all liquid water.
Thanks for your reply. I understand your point Jed I think. but I think the back pressure if it was there would be at the condensor end and condense to water there I suppose and therefor if there was excess pressure there despite the cooling and condensation it would reduce the pressure drop along the pipe. I'm not sure how it would increase the pressure in the pipe at the supply end. I also don't see how the pressure would increase above the supply pressure. Unless there were shocks or artifacts from very high velocity steam which I think we all agree was very unlikely.
Even if it did condense in the steam pipe though could the amount of water produced from steam produced by 20kW really be as low as i estimated?
1/2 tablespoon a second seems really low to me hardly even a trickle so probably there is something wrong in my calculation. But if it is that little would 1/2 a tablespoon of water a second in a 3inch DN80 gravity return pipe would it be sufficient to even turn the flow meter proposed? If it is sufficient could it turn the meter at the rate we see?
I'm really not knowledgeable about the limitation of flow meter in this case so maybe it can be handled by them.
I'm very glad to see you here and hear your obviously experienced comments. Many of us are curious but like myself don't have the proper background in your field of knowledge. I hope you can continue to add your knowledge here.
Were you talking about the pipes coming out of the blue conex? (I'm assuming the conex is the container a new word for me)
WMartin ,
Thank you for that post. I had wondered about some of the points you raised when trying to identify that 2/0 mark on the brass ball valve. I could not find any example of 2/0 being used to identify 2 inches on any valve (the valve seems smaller than the main connection to the blue Plant).
That valve appeared to me to be a standard 2 inch bronze body two part threaded ball valve. I am not going to definitively say that for sure because we are dealing with pictures not showing the entire valve. I looks too big for an 1 1/2 inch valve. I believe that the quote of 40mm is a mistake and I believe that the 40 was probably schedule 40 piping. On the other hand, 3 inch valves are much bigger than the valve shown. From memory ( I left construction about 8 years ago because of an injury), the flat sides of a shipping container is between 4 and 5 inches wide. That is a good secondary check on the size of piping,
WMartin ,
Best to keep in mind that the DN40 remark belongs to the new red container in Doral, while the blue Plant photos are in Italy, from two different times. The idea was more to say that the steam pipe as it appears in Doral can be much smaller than many suggested, due to thick insulation, which was what was being compared originally to the blue container photos.
I did scale the container (in CAD) to get pipe sizes, that could have been as big as 3", but not the pipes complete with valves and plugs, just bare pipes sticking only a few cm out of the container. The valve and flexible extension appear to screw into the 3"-ish pipes extending from the container. Most images of the pipe extension and valve are distorted by fish-eye lenses and perspective, and are very hard to scale properly.
Quoteit's definitely an intelligent and interesting observation
I'm just looking who is upvoting it... 
(Jack Cole, bang99, Paradigmnoia, StephenC, Alan Smith, Eric Walker,JedRothwell, Malcolm Lear, oldguy, Hermes in this moment)The bronze valves are indeed used for industrial steam circuits up to 500 Degrees Fahrenheit (260 °C) and 150 PSI, so there is absolutely no problem in connection with AR boilers (100 °C and zero pressure). They're using steal ball within modified Teflon seat..
Zephir_AWT. Well the data certainly gets curiouser but WMartins observation about was also certainly interesting. He made good points.
The e-cat was also designed for hot water as well as steam by the way 😉
Edit: I would also naively expect a low pressure steam pipes to come from near the top of the container like in Doral rather than near the bottom.
Edit2: Hot water in the other hand could benefit from coming lower down by reducing the amount of head required to pump it.
You can use bronze ball valves for steam but they are not reliable. I worked at a plant that used ball valves in steam lines for over a year. We (maintenance) agued with the upper management about using those valves constantly. They will work for a while. The problem is that the valves are not reliable in steam usage. After a couple of months the valves would not shut off because the steam damaged the Teflon seals. We would have to shut entire units down to make repairs to one line. Ball valves that are reliable in steam service are very expensive because they use a special rubber like polymer to survive the heat. A standard gate valve is much cheaper and longer lasting. Also no plant I worked for used threaded fittings for steam service because steam leaks quickly cut any material while they are leaking. I remember one time we had a steam flange leaking. It took 48 hours to safely isolate the leak so that it could be worked on. We ended up having to replace the entire flange because the sealing surface was too cut up to seal.
I freely admit that you can use threaded ball valves in steam service. You will, however, have no end of headaches and a massive amount of downtime unless you have a lot of redundant piping, On the other hand, that could be one of the reasons that Rossi had to almost live in the E-cat during the test. Like I said before, My experience is that the valve in the picture of the blue shipping container is more for liquid water service. A stainless steel or carbon steel welded ball valve would change my opinion. I looked up a couple of industrial supply places and their bronze steam valves were only rated for fractional steam service.
On a related note, when you are just doing experimentation, the type of valve would not make any difference because your taking apart and putting things together constantly. Does this show that Rossi is not getting any help from practical mechanical engineers in trying to transition from laboratory to small and mid scale testing?
QuoteBall valves that are reliable in steam service are very expensive because they use a special rubber like polymer to survive the heat.
I'd believe just in Teflon instead of rubber in this case. You can carbonize the rubber inside the Teflon vessel - but not vice-versa.
Anyway, the steam conditions of A.Rossi reactors were so mild, that the valve stability issues have no merit there.
I see your point about it being low temperature steam. I do have a different perspective though. In a 350-400 day test, you want things to be as reliable as possible. Also, safety is part of the consideration too. In an emergency, you want to be sure you can shut off supply completely.
Alan - would you mind pointing to the 5 month mark internal corrosion discussion?
Thank you,
Dewey
Sorry Dewey, I don't keep an exhaustive log of this stuff and neither do I have the patience to track through JoNP - but I do remember AR saying that he had technical problems causing a shotdown related to corrosion. I remembered it being said because TBH I had been expected it - building steam boilers and hot water systems of any kind to be reliable in service requires quite a lot of experience and specialist know,ledge - which AFAIK nobody involved in the build had got. Try asking on ECW if no-one else here knows exactly when.
Rionaltry,
Confusing science and invention?
I am not familiar with any single "replication" of excess heat created by any nickel hydrogen based experiment.
"Replication"
Use the:
SAME bill of Materials
SAME build instruction
SAME testing protocols and procedures
SAME results
Roseland67,
I am on a quest for that information also. Here's the thing that bothers me, I would think that if you through enough energy at it you would overcome the coulumb barrier, in Nickel. But it would not produce any violation of CoE. So if you find anything interesting in your search let me know please. -thanks
We can just ask the direct question to A.Rossi, if the corrosion problems during test involved the valves used. I don't think, that his answer will be important for IH case, but it could terminate this thread of speculations.
The most credible so far, IMHO, is SRI's independent testing/replication of results of
Brillouin's NiH reactor system. For whatever reason (probably due to the ongoing dispute with Rossi), Dewey tends to minimize IH's involvement with Brillouin, but apparently they are an investor, and are involved.
IHFB,
Dewey already answered that IH gave them a small grant but no longer work with them. BEC regardless of SRI's involvement is within the noise bars. Do not get me wrong, I have hope with those 2.
I looked at SRI's calorimetery it is very well designed and sophisticated. It is what crushed my spirit when I started to even think about designing a flow reactor. Their small setup was over 50k. The one I just ball parked was a cytometry based and over 20k for the vessel alone. This is big funded science. LFH is about $300. I looked very hard at it, after that 
