Display More(This quote is from one of several posts above buried in this Rossi thread. These posts are really about the Mitchell Swartz Phusor devices connected to Stirling engines.)
Last summer at ICCF-21, I was sitting with Dr. Swartz at lunch and asked him about his COP and the possibility of closing the loop (deriving input power from the excess heat output). My notes of that conversation say that he was then reaching a COP as high as 1000 and would try again soon to close the loop. With a COP that high, it should be easy to close the loop with either a Stirling engine generator or Peltier devices.
He was probably talking about the latest tests of his NANOR devices. See:
Swartz M. R., Hagelstein P.I., Demonstration of Energy Gain from a Preloaded ZrO2–PdD Nanostructured CF/LANR Quantum Electronic Device at MIT, J. Cond.Matter Nucl. Sci. 13, (2014), 516
http://www.iscmns.org/CMNS/JCMNS-Vol13.pdf
It will be interesting to hear what he has to say at the upcoming LANR/CF Colloquium at MIT.
I wanted to reply to KevMo but his link did not work.
Schwartz has said that his devices have a relationship between output power and lifetime such that the high power ones do not have high COP. Looking at his data, most of the papers (including the results you reference) show temperature of a tiny device enclosed in a bulb, and take this as a proxy for heat by comparing with temperature of a resistive heating element.
The problem with this control is that in this system (to make it sensitive to very small output powers) the system thermal resistance is deliberately engineered high. That however mean that various aritfact that change thermal resistance: surface changes, gas changes in bulb, or more likely to be significant.
I don't doubt his results, I doubt his interpretation of the results. I see two artifact sources:
(1) Transient: chemical release of energy from a highly loaded electrode (whether this is D -> D2O or something else)
(2) All-time: issues due to differences between control and active system in inherently difficult to prove safe glass bulb calorimetry.
As for his integrity (KevMo's issue) I think in such things you don't have to be a liar to insist that your positive results are sufficiently validated by the validation you have done, when in fact that validation is not enough and errors remain. These experiments would appear cherry picked (by reality, not humans) never to yield definitive results. Difficult to get these when the only times you see sustained high COP power production are when the output power is very small.
His contention, that these restrictions are a characteristic of the system that generates the power, not the artifact, could be right. As a skeptic who would like LENR to exist, but who has a long memory and sees continued lack of clear evidence as negative evidence for an effect that should, if it exists, be relatively easy to fine, I see the way that scaling his stuff up makes the COP lower as evidence - not compelling but real - for artifacts.
Back to the Stirling engine topic. He mentions this here, but not what precisely where the results (peak COP in this case is irrelevant since power generation transients can occur for all sorts of reasons in highly loaded reducing chemical systems, and system heat storage can lead to apparent peaks in COP when in fact no excess power is generated.
Whoever said he was dishonest might have been frsutrated by the continual positive gloss put on a whole series of results (like the Stirling Engine reference) that seem more designed to generate positive PR than scientific clarity. Better IMHO not to bandy such words around, especially because those accused of dishonesty when wrong can easily be genuinely convinced that they are right.
The moral (as in - what should scientists do) issue is: when does positive interpretation of results that could be artifact become dishonest?
Those here will say skeptics can always find possible artifacts, and that the various artifact sources have been well covered by the various controls in these experiment
Skeptics will say, while the effects stay elusive as this one, capable of various lab demos on a very small scale but resisting anything useful, that those generating the small scale positives have inevitably an interest in seeing positiev results and this will color their interpretations and prevent them doing the cross-validation that would confirm or deny a whole set of possible artifacts.
The thing is this: Schwartz has demos that appear totally replicable. They could be subjected to black box testing by skeptical third parties designed to generate much stronger results. Then, his commercial efforts would receive enormous and large funding, the value of his company would become stratospheric on hope alone. So why does he not spend a good deal of money and get such genuinely critical indpendent tessting done?
