Press Release: SRI Successfully Replicated Brillouin’s LENR Technology

Quote from JedRothwell

Defkalion was a fraud. See: lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GamberaleLfinaltechn.pdf

So I saw this:

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I show that the experimental protocol used by Defkalion Green Technologies (DGT) is not reliable to demonstrate the production of large amounts of energy with the use of the reactor R5.

How he showed it? By attempt for replication of experimental protocol of DGT? No way - just in the same way, in which the critics of EMDrive now doubt the first peer-reviewed results of NASA: simply by doubting the existing experimental procedures and their published results. No actual replication work has been done.

But which details the experimental protocol of DGT actually contains for example about ignition circuits? Actually none of them, so that these details still remain the industrial secret of Defkalion. The incompleteness of experimental protocol therefore cannot serve as an evidence, that the Defkalion's technology doesn't work - only as the evidence, that it cannot be replicated according to this protocol.

The supporters of academical research like you have it simple: what cannot be replicated simply doesn't work and it doesn't exist at all. But most of industrial research cannot be easily replicated because the lack of published data. This doesn't mean, that these technologies don't actually work - it just means that their results aren't available for public.

Quote from kirkshanahan

(1) There is *NO* error discussion.

This was the first thing I looked for, and I couldn't find anything in a quick review. (Now reading more closely.)

Quote from Zephir_AWT

How he showed it? By attempt for replication of experimental protocol of DGT?

He was there, working with the Defkalion machine. He showed that the flow rate was wrong by measuring it with a bucket and stopwatch. That method is 100% reliable, and it is written into every mandated boiler test protocol (when the boiler is small enough for this technique). He measured the actual flow rate and showed that there was no excess heat.

Why would he need to replicate when he conclusively proved the thing was not working?

He showed that the people at Defkalion deliberately set up the equipment to give the wrong flow rate. When he and others from DE tried to install the correct equipment, the Defkalion people removed it overnight, and forbade the use of it. That's blatant fraud! As bad as Rossi. I cannot imagine how it could be anything else.

Rossi's flow rate was also wrong, and Rossi also deliberately installed the wrong instruments, configured incorrectly, to give the wrong flow rate. That was obvious to all observers.

There is not much discussion of errors or the margin of error in the SRI report, but there is some. Those people are diligent, so I expect they have that issued wired. The only concern I have heard is from Brian Ahern, who worries that they may not be measuring the input power correctly. I don't know about that.

The method of using a flowing water envelope to ensure a stable background is very good. The kind of lab cooler they are using will maintain the water temperature to within a hundredth of a degree. There will be no noise from temperature fluctuations in the room. That and the rest of the isoperibolic calorimetry looks good to me. I also like the blank experiments and calibrations.

The method of using a compensation heater and backing off the power as excess heat develops is conventional, conservative, and well established. This is how the SRI flow calorimeters work. The problem with the flow calorimeters was that they held the temperature too low for Pd-D cold fusion, according to Martin Fleischmann. This one holds it at 300 to 600 deg C, which is where it should be.

People should read this report carefully several times before jumping to conclusions.

Re the role of hydrogen and helium — I was unable to confirm that a COP of >1 was seen only with hydrogen, and not with helium, as one might naively assume. There is this statement at the end which touches on the matter but leaves some doubt as to interpretation: "Low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) can produce thermal power when Ni, and other metal, coated tubes are stimulated using fast rise-time pulses. These experiments operated in H2 or He gas from 200°C – 600°C. The exact same procedure was performed in each gas. Comparative thermal measurements were performed between heater-only power and heater and pulse power." This statement might be read to imply that >1 COP runs were seen with both H2 and He, although that might not be what was intended.

At one point in time, SRI corroborated Yuri Geller's spoon bending deception. Not saying SRI is bad, but anyone can be had.

That was paranormal, not spoon-bending or calorimetry : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller

Quote from Alan Smith

Quote from Norris Roark: “Hasn't Godes been claiming a COP around 4, meaning excess heat 3 times input.

This result is more like excess heat 0.3 times input.

Is a result 10 times smaller accurately called a replication?”

You are confusing 'investment grade' measurements with 'scientific grade' ones. That is often a problem in this field of research...

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Presumably the different standards required for investment and for science explains why there are so many successful "free" energy scams, and so few successful "free" energy solutions.

Quote from JedRothwell

Also, the tests at SRI were not "demos." They were not 1-time, limited duration tests for audiences. They were conducted for months with the best instruments available. The SRI tests were not done "outside their labs" -- they were done in another lab. Again, the demos you refer to were not conducted in a laboratory, and not repeated many times over many months. The SRI tests were.

We don't really know that they used the best instruments available. The calorimetry system is most probably first rate. I still have doubts about the input power measure until fully described. For all we know, SRI simply used Brillouin's measurement techniques rather than adopting different or multiple input power measurements. It would be an easy potential mistake to make to trust Godes' input power measurement technique since he is an EE.

Of course it depends too on how the calibration was done. Did they calibrate with inert gas or air at the full range of input power, pulse widths, duty cycles, and temperatures? That would be fairly convincing if they did.

Quote from Shane D.

SRI does not seem to be getting it's due respect as the fine research institution it is. Yes, even the LENR branch of SRI, formerly headed up by Dr. McKubre. By some of the comments here, even among'st LENR believers, one might think that they do not know what they are doing. But they do. Actually, they were, and still are the gold standard, go to agency, used for at least 20 years to vet the many LENR claims. Even DARPA sponsored them to test the various LENR claims floating about over the years. And they (SRI) confirmed 6...yes 6, were legitimate. That does not include Piantelli 3 years ago.

I believe that they know what they are doing--probably more than anyone else on calorimetry for LENR. I'm just saying that I'm going to remain skeptical until the data force a supportive conclusion. They really don't talk about any steps they took to rule out artifacts (consider for example the long list of things that the Eagleworks researchers did with the EM drive test--and they still may have missed something). The SRI report is not really intended to be a scientific report, so maybe they have done all these things. I'm hopeful, but also skeptical. SRI's reputation is reason for hope, but it does not substitute for data.

The problem is that Tanzella's entire career appears to be in LENR research, so if it's not vindicated, it will be a sad retirement.

As for SRI, it would be nice to see some solid support from the *company*. Yes, there's a tweet that announces the press release. But their web site does not acknowledge it, or even that SRI has a LENR program. And Tanzella does not appear to be high enough in the ranks to be listed as an employee (and the employee list is long).

ETA: I you search for LENR or Tanzella on the SRI site, it does generate an automated list of links to all mentions of SRI in the press with those search terms, including the press release. But neither appear on an SRI hosted page, that I could find.

Quote from Shane D.

Now, 24 years later, SRI is again being questioned about the thoroughness of their findings, but this time with BE. I would think their techniques, and equipment are even better refined and trustworthy nowadays? Of course, the old political saying: "Trust but verify" applies to science too, so no one should give SRI a pass.

As you say, there's no free pass. Each report and each investigation must be considered on its merits. It is unsafe to assume that techniques developed and insights gained during earlier investigations and earlier efforts at tightening up calorimetry at SRI were applied in the new investigation. What we know is described in the new report. The report is either solid, or it leaves out important details in its description that will help to assess its conclusions, or it suffers from a weakness that might be tightened up in a future pass, or it suffers from a critical flaw that invalidates its conclusions. Gradually which of these situations is the case will become apparent. The best writeups are ones that include sufficient detail about experimental methodology, data analysis and actual data to answer such questions as they come up.

I've not had time to look at this report properly. One trouble is that it is not self-contained. A PR from a prelim report should not be held to the standards of a publishable paper, of course, but therefore it is also more difficult to draw conclusions.

My main concern with Brillouin has been EMC issues. The pulses stimulating the reaction will generate RFI that stimulates all sorts of other electronic equipment and can therefore result in offsets in TC data. This effect is bound to happen to some extent, and also bound to be variable with any physical change in the apparatus (for example replacing the contents of the reactor).

That makes it very difficult to distinguish in principle between apparent LENR signal and the stimulus altering the values of TC measurements.

I also take on the comments above about input power. These spiky waveforms are difficult to measure directly because you need very high sample rate integration of V*I and both measurements can suffer inductive error issues. Approximations here are based on scope traces are just not safe.

So I judge this work by how carefully they have controlled or otherwise measured these two obvious error sources.

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Since its reconstruction and calibration, I have been able to corroborate that the IPB HHT system moved to SRI continues to produce similar LENR Reaction Heat that it produced up in its Berkeley laboratory at Brillouin. Together with my prior data review, it is now clear that these very similar results are independent of the system’s location (Berkeley or Menlo Park) or operator (Brillouin’s or SRI’s personnel). This transportable and reproducible reactor system is extremely important and extremely rare. These two characteristics, coupled with the ability to start and stop the reaction at will are, to my knowledge, unique in the LENR field to date.

It is helpful to have such a system. But, if (as I believe is the case) the system included all the calorimetry and instrumentation that in no way helps with the experimental issues above. This type of replication deals with one-off errors or operator error, but not with artifacts of the equipment. Similarly, having multiple identical systems does not deal with equipment artifacts.

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We feel that the calorimetry was studied exhaustively and validated to an extremely high level of accuracy (see further discussion and test data review below).

I trust SRI with the calorimetry, but not with identifying RFI issues, since there is no discussion of these and what steps have been taken to measure or control them. Maybe there are no such issues, but no-one can know that without a check, not described here. I'd expect, if they had extensively checked RFI issues, that there would be a comment at least on that in the discussion.

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COP = (output power delta - heater power delta) / stimulus power

They use compensation calorimetry, in which a heater keeps temperature constant as the stimulus power is varied. The change in heater power thus must be added to the change in measured output power to get the real output change.

That is good, in that the compensation reduces most calorimetry artifacts. Bad, because COP is not referenced to the total input power to the heater. Any artifact in that, or in the temperature measurement, therefore has an amplified effect on this differential COP. Specifically, TC drift due to RFI will be amplified by this.

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Q pulses are 1% duty cycle and (usually but not always) asymmetric.

This is optimal for getting rectified RFI in amplifiers. It is clear that they are optimising Q-pulse parameters for affect on the output. Unfortunate that this could be optimising RFI effects rather than LENR effects and there is no discussion of how to distinguish the two or even of whether RFI effects could exist. I'd like to see such a discussion.

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m factor analysis

The compensation calorimetry is imperfect, in the sense that the controlled power only includes half of the stimulus power - the rest if lost. This must therefore be calibrated and compensated for. There is then another source of error, if anything alters the m factor - how much of the stimulus power is compensated. I have not analysed this properly and would expect SRI to be safe in doing this - but would like to point out that this is an extra layer of interpretation needed to generate the COP and therefore an extra thing that could have artifacts. Especially, it could interact with other artifacts to make an artifact obscure. I don't know this, but without a deeper analysis I must flag the additional complexity as a possible issue.

Overall: this is still a very long way away from anything that could be conceivably commercial. You don't need these complex measurement systems if you really have COP=1.4. The headline figure here however is not exactly a COP=1.4 and therefore should be treated with extreme caution. Personally, I think it most likely that Brillouin are dealing with Q-pulse related artifacts - since there system seems highly susceptible - you might even say highly optimised for - the possibility, and they do not discuss how these are eliminated. But it is complex enough that even without that they can have artifacts that generate this apparent figure from small errors in total power measurement.

I don't in any way think anyone is dishonest in their work here. But I do think that they are not (as I read here) seriously dealing with potential artifacts, which makes the work of little interest until they do.