Ask questions to the Working Group - ECAT long-term test

When the reactor was opened almost all Ni has been converted to Ni-62 and almost all Li has been converted to Li-6. If the energy produced was orginated in that nuclear reactions, how would explain not have noticed a decrease in reactor performance as the original isotopes were disappearing?

Dear scientists,

thanks for your work and for your courage to deal with all those pseudo-intelligent sophists who have blinkers on.
You are like a modern Sokrates. Hopefully the combined idiocy of half-witted ignorance will not succed in trying to bring the same fate to you as back then they did to the father of philosophy!

Quote from gdaigle

Your summary states that the reaction was primed by heating and some electro-magnetic stimulation. It appears that the electro-magnetic stimulation mentioned was due to the current flow supplied to the system and not induced separately. Is that correct?

Secondly, what do you surmise is the suggested role (if any) that electro-magnetic stimulation alone might play in this process?

I wanna expand on this topic: the current, and a term I was missing: Plasma.

1. Could the Elecrons flow outside of the cables? Could Electrons have interacted directly with the fuel? More precisely: Would it have been possible that Electrons from the current remained in the reactor? Would it have been possible to measure it (the loss of Electrons in the current)?
2. Could the fuel or other parts of the reactor have turned into Plasma?
3. Could there have been Electron Captures?
(Plasma physics is somewhat undetermined. Maybe the combination of high temperature, electric current and oscillating electro-magnetic fields creates a special form of Plasma where Electron Capture (or other nuclear reactions) happen more easily.)
4. Was there an attempt to measure Neutrinos?
(I guess not. If they were not measured / detected than there could have been nuclear reactions with radioactive activity as in the case of Electron Capture.)

Yours,
Pyrphoros.

PS:
Maybe in this reactor a free proton is able to merge with an electron to create a free neutron (which would then join other atoms)...

Dear Testers:

I have referred to Appendix 4 on page 53 of the ECAT Report dealing with the ICP-MS and ICP-AES analysis of the fuel and the ash. The last paragraph on this page states that the fuel contained high concentrations of the elements C, Ca, Cl, Fe, Mg, Mn but these were not found in the ash. As I'm sure you are aware Inductively Coupled Mass Spectrometry is very sensitive being able to detect metals as well as some non metals down to 1 part per trillion. (One part in 10 to the minus 12).

Do you have any explanation why these elements were totally absent in the ash. Is it possible that the sample size was too small?

Can you reply to this comment made by Barry Kort, a scientist (not sure) at MIT ?

"Analysis of the Assumption of an Ideal Isothermal Black Body Radiation Model In the iconic photo of the device under test, one can see the apparatus with the red-hot glowing wires visible through the translucent 3mm thick alumina casing.This is a significant observation, because it's the principle source of evidence that the thin alumina shell is translucent and not 100% opaque.Why does that matter? It matters because the IR camera equipment that is used to reckon the heat coming out of the device assumes that the alumina shell is an isothermal black body radiator operating at the emissivity of alumina at a specific temperature. But that conveniently simple energy budget model breaks down if the alumina casing is not 100% opaque. As can be seen in the photograph, some of the photons from the interior apparatus are being transmitted through the translucent shell, rather than being absorbed by it. When those directly transmitted photons impinge upon the IR camera, which is calibrated for the emissivity of alumina, the calculation model incorrectly assumes the alumina shell itself is glowing red hot in accordance with a black body radiation model. This results in a sizable systematic error in reckoning the heat being produced by the device.

Imagine looking at an ordinary household light fixture with a typical translucent shade around the bulb. The filament inside the bulb is at an incandescent temperature, but it also has a very small surface area. When you look at the light fixture with the translucent shade in place, you see those same photons, but now they appear to come from the large surface of the translucent shade. If you imagine the shade to be the originating source of those photons, in accordance with a black body radiation model, you (incorrectly) deduce that the shade itself is glowing at that same incandescent temperature. Since the shade has orders of magnitude more surface area than the filament inside the light bulb, you end up concluding (incorrectly) that an enormous amount of heat is being produced.

In short, the experimenters have to reckon the translucency of the 3mm alumina shell that encases the apparatus, and adopt a corresponding energy budget model. Since that's probably not practical in their laboratory setup, they instead could encase the entire apparatus in a fully opaque isothermal shell, so as to be able to properly apply their isothermal black body radiation measurement technique to the system."

Thank you!!

Did you check for the presence of Tritium?
Were any Co59 and Cu65 present in the Ash?
What was exactly the input current spectrum. In particular: was the kHz range used?

I'd like know how the reactor was opened and how the ash was extracted. Is it a coincidence that the reactor is double ended and symmetrical, thus allowing the old trick of inserting one thing in one end (fuel) and removing something completely different from the other (ash). This would of course require some sort of partial or complete obstruction half way down the tube depending of whether the fuel was inserted in powder form or in some sort of enclosure.
My other concern is the calibration of the power meters. I note they were checked for voltage accuracy, but how about current. If the meters were interfered with, the obvious approach would be placing attenuators on the current clamp inputs since voltage input is fixed and would be easy to spot.
Were these meters supplied from the same source as the previous test?
The issue raised by Mith about the translucency of the alumina shell could be easily checked by powering up an empty reactor tube. It would not be an unreasonable request to test an empty reactor.

Would it be at all possible to have the report peer-reviewer and published in a legitmiate scientific journal?
If so, do you have any such plans?

(copied from vortexL)
Inconel metal resistance wires can only survive a maximum of about 1350°C without melting (actually probably lower than that over a month long period), so we know the temperature is actually well below the 1400°C that the thermography reported.

Appears that there was an inner reactor vessel wrapped with helical resistance wires (hence shadows) from size of wires and necessary wall thicknesses this inner vessel is likely around 12-14mm diameter. Given high temperature most likely Alumina as was the outer finned tube. Assuming inner ID of outer finned tube is Ø18mm and 200mm long get area of .0113m²

From photo 12a/12b the wires appear to be about 2mm diameter wound helically around inner reactor core, but covering less than half of the core reactor vessel, giving them an area of (estimate) .005m² (this is only a guess) We know that they dissipate 900W of electricity, probably predominantly through radiation to outer fined tube, and slightly by conduction to inner tube. Inconel has emissivity of around 0.7.

In order for finned tube inner wall to absorb 900W from the wires at a maximum of 1350°C via radiative heat transfer the finned tube could be a maximum of around 1000°C. At that temperature the finned tube would also transfer approximately 800-1000W to the external environment via radiation and convection.

That leaves no room for any heat being evolved from LENR reaction at all - without melting the inconel resistance wires.

If the inner reactor was any hotter or adding any heat to the system then it would necessarily increase the finned tube wall temperature to increase dissipation to environment, that would in turn increase the wire temperature greatly, including a further bump from the radiative heat transfer from reactor to resistance wires, increasing their temperature to far above the point of failure.

These numbers are only approximate (this is a crude calculation only) as we are lacking a lot of constructional detail, but I think that quantitatively at least it appears that there is a strong possibility that this demo was producing little if any power, based on pretty simple physical constraints. And most certainly not the 3.8 COP claimed.

As to the explanation for the high temp readings - I suspect the IR camera was picking up the colour of the resistance wires and inner reactor vessel body through the partially transparent alumina to give an artificially high temperature reading.

Looking closely at the photos it would seem construction is a tube with the heater wires wrapped around in a triple helix (3 phases). This assembly seems to have been covered by an Alumina paste applied in much the same way as tiling adhesive hence the ridges caused by the plastic applicator. Whilst testing and especially during the removal (by cutting) of the 'ash' you must have gained a great deal of insight as to the physical construction of the reactor casing and heater. It would benifit the report by including at least a simplified diagram of the physical construction and how the 'fuel' was loaded, ie was it in a container or just poured into the tube.

I also think it important that the resistance of the heater elements be known. Was this measured and if not, can it be calculated from logged data?

Association: "Open Power":
hydrobetatron.org

Two question:

1)
In your opinion, what magnetic and electrodynamic effects may be induced in the
reacting material by the varying waveforms of electric triphase feeding ?

2) according to the strong depletion of both 7Li and 58Ni in the
ashes, should not the reaction be near its natural stopping because of the lack
of fuel ?

Tanks

Some commentary on transmittance (again from vortexL)
http://www.eurotherm2008.tue.n…apers/Radiation/RAD_6.pdf
fig 6 has alumina transmittance at 1050K.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2…article/ncomms3630-f4.jpg
black-body radiation for 1400°C

Assume that the finned tube is at 1000°C and the wires+reactor core are at 1350°C so that the wires don't melt - (little or no lenr heat possible without melting wires). The blackbody radiation of the wires + reactor core is nearly 5x as intense as powerful as from the finned tube, so even with only 10% transmittance about 1/3rd of radiant emissions from finned body could be due to hot wires+reactor core behind it.

Worryingly the transmittance drops off at longer wavelengths so the power transmitted will be mostly at shorter wavelengths and will thus naturally skew the resulting spectrum to look like a hotter black body than it actually is, the camera will be seeing what looks like a much hotter surface and will therefore (I assume) produce serious over-reading in thermographically determined temperature.

The system is way too complex for simple thermography to be able to deal with.

The caption on Fig 12 says that the resistors are shading the light from an inner reaction. That this is problematic must have been realised, as evidenced by the twisting explanation that follows. It seems much more likely that the bright stripes are due to the resistor wire, which are not only being heated by the reaction, but also provide their own heat. What convincing evidence do you have that the resistor wires are actually shading an internal reaction? Do you have pictures showing that the wires are hot at low temperature (say, in the calibration run, no reaction), but in-between the wires is hotter at higher temperature (during the live run, with reaction)? Just saying that the brightness increased by a greater factor than the increase in electrical consumption is not convincing, as both the input and output power calculations are under question! If the bright stripes are due to the resistor wire, then it seems there is no inner reaction, due to the lack of candescence in the darker regions. That the bright stripes are due to the resistor wire seems obvious, by comparison to the glow in the rods outside the reactor.

On JONP Dr Rossi stated you had three reactors to work with, you state only the one which you were afraid to break...please explain....Thanks

(Some of these questions may roughly coincide with the ones asked by "Raman", only partly leaked on the Cobraf forum, and hastily answered to by Rossi on JONP, however I believe they deserve a more careful reply).

The TPR2 on page 14 computes thermal dissipation of the copper wires by Joule effect during the dummy run as 6.7W when the power input is 486W.
This dissipation is computed starting from measured "average current" and from estimated resistance of the copper wires, as R*(I^2).
Q1.: "Average current" is understood to be a "Average root mean square current". Please acknowledge.

Then during the actual run, the copper wires dissipation is stated in table 7 in page 22 to be around 37W for total input power around 800W, and increasing to around 42W for total input power around 920 W.
Throughout the ten recording files the ratio of Joule heating of wires (in W) to total consumption (in W) is 4.6% and remains exactly the same in the two phases at 1250°C and 1400°C.
The ratio during the dummy run is instead 1.4%.
This is a very notable finding in that the Inconel resistors seem to undergo a huge shift in reactance from the dummy test to the active run.
However the reactance stays then exactly the same over 1250 to 1400°C and over 786W to 924W.
This seems an artefact of calculations rather than a real measurement, but the authors can probably better explain.
Q2.: Please confirm that total consumption is a direct reading of the PCE-830 instrument, or else explain how it is computed.
Q3.: Please confirm that Joule heating is computed from rms current measured directly by the PCE-830, or else explain how it is computed.
If both the above are confirmed, the shift in reactance is a phenomenon to be understood and explained.
Q4.:Do you expect sudden drop in Inconel ohmic resistance due to temperature close to melting point ?
Q5.:Do you hypotize magnetic coupling to elements in the reactor (though hard to imagine interaction with proton dynamics at 50Hz and few tens of Ampere) ?

On page 1 it is stated "In addition, the resistor coils are fed with some specific electromagnetic pulses".
Q6.: Is this an information given by Rossi, and/or have you detected such pulses, expectedly at much higher frequency than the PCE can measure?
Q7.: Do you believe the electromagnetic pulses fed to the resistor coils draw a substantial portion of the 360W consumed by the control box ?

Finally, on page 6 fig. 5 the PCE-830 reading is OL as in "overload".
Q8.: Please explain why the instrument was in this condition and why you chose to publish it as such, considering the obvious suspicions it would raise.
Q9.: Please publish a reading of the downstream and upstream PCE-830s in representative phases of the test, with readable scales, or if not available please justify the validity of recordings in overload condition.

Thank you,

Respectfully,

Andrea S