Yes, I think that if you take a spontaneous endothermic reaction, like dissolving NaCl in water, the temperature of the solution decreases. If you want the solution to stay at the same temperature you must supply heat. I don't see the Carnot efficiency appearing anywhere here.
Of course I am not proposing anything here, just discussing priniciples.
This was quite an interesting discussion! As always I think THH sounds pretty convincing, especially if you consider raising the electrostatic potential as some kind of work being carried out. Can we come up with some concrete example (with numbers) so we can see more clearly what happens here? One thing that I wonder about is the "waste heat". What is that, and in what way is it wasted? Does it need to leave the system and be ventilated out for example?
Hi @Ascoli65
Now I see from your graphs that you indeed have a rapidly declining energy output by steam (Efflusso gassoso) during the SSM period, predicted by your model. You further say that the peaks of the delta T in the secondary circuit correlate to changes (or features) of the "efflusso". One could perhaps see a problem that in the end of the SSM perdiod, when the energy output is zero (no steam), there is still a deltaT of 5 degrees in the secondary circuit confirmed by several measurements (looks like about 30 minutes). How do you explain that? Another thing I wonder about is that the inlet TC of the secondary seems to be rather constant throughout the test, while you (if I got it right) assume that the outlet TC is affected by the leaking heat from the heat exchanger. What is the explanation for that?
Regards,
Urban
I don't think the hot core model looks very likely even though it seems that the core (under certain assumptions) could be charged with a large amount of energy (30MJ). I would expect the heat transfer across the air gap to be highly dependent on the delta temperature between the water (100C) and the hot core, and the core must sureley decrease its temperature over time when it delivers heat. I would then expect to see the delta T of the secondary circuit to become significantly smaller at the end of the SSM, but that does not seem to be the case.
I know CF is real - I've witnessed multiple working experiments. The key is characterization and verification that will withstand all scrutiny.
Can you tell us more about these experiments? Have they been published in some way, or were they made behind closed doors?
@AlainCo,
Let me just start by saying I am in now way an expert in this field, but I also wondered about the same part in the report. My interpretation is as follows: Let's assume that the emissivity is changing with temperature within the measurement band of the Optris. For alumina that is perhaps not so important since the emissivity for the wavelength range of the Optris is rather constant and above 0.9, but in the report they use "Plot 1" on page 9 to relate the emissivity to temperature. Then it becomes a problem when you are about to measure the temperature because the temperature from the camera is dependent on which emissivity you enter, which you don't know before you measured it. So let T=f( emissivity ), but the emissity is also dependent on the temperature, like this: emissivity = g( T ), see the Plot 1. Then if you combine those two equations you get that emissivity = g( f( emissivity ) ). This equation can be solved by iteration if the derivative is smaller than one, and the solution is called a "fixed point". You can for instance try with the equations x = 0.5x + 1 and x = 2x +1 and see that it converges for the case with 0.5x +1 and diverges for the case with 2x + 1.
i actually did my own validation of Thomas's calculations in the beginning of this thread and I found them to be ok. I can recommend it to anyone who is interested - when you do it you can get an understanding for what was done wrong in the Lugano report. For me it was a minor shock to find out that the team of professors had made a mistake in an area that is so central to the report. I guess it is fair to say that it is likely that the Lugano test showed no excess heat based on this analysis. On the other hand I learnt a little later in this thread that there are two competing theories nullifying the Lugano test, which in my opinion is one too many. One thing is for sure and that is that the last word has not yet been said in this matter, and I enjoy following this "story".
Urban
Thomas,
I am becoming a bit confused of what your are saying.
t IR cam wavelengths we know anything inside the alumina will be scattered by alumina and so the temperature can be obtained accurately subject only to the band emissivity
The temperature talked about here is measured by the camera and is that of the alumina surface, since the camera operates at wavelengths that do not "see through" alumina. If high temperature black body radiation is created within the alumina body it can partly be transmitted through the alumina. If it is passing straight through or if it is scattered on its way through does not make a difference if absorption is not involved. An analogy here would be a matte light bulb which has a scattering layer on the inside of the glass. Measuring with a heat camera on a matte light bulb would give a correct value for the temerature of the glass bulb. Still more power is radiated from within the lamp to the surroundings than would be anticipated if one would calculate the radiated power based on the temperature of the glass bulb.
Paradigmnoia,
I agree with you that a heat source internal to the alumnina tube can transmit heat through the alumina without the optris camera detecting it (which btw starts at 7.5 micron, not 750nm). That is in analogy with a traditional light bulb where the filament transmits heat through the glass bulb. If you meausre with a heat camera on the light bulb you will get the temperature of the glass bulb, which is not directly related to the heat produced by the filament. Thomas' analysis I believe is correct for the alumina tube temperature. However the Lugano report is not correct on that point (which also gives an error in the subsequent radiated power calculation). I personally would find it a weird coincidence if the device anyway, undetected, produced excess heat, but I guess that in principle you cannot rule that out.
Hej H-G,
About the joule heating issue, perhaps you are going too fast into the details? If we look at Table 7 in the Lugano report we can see the power consumption of the reactor in column two. I assume that has been measured with the PCE-830 power analyser by connecting the current and voltage probes to the outputs from the control box. Then we have the joule heating in column 7. You say that has been calculated with help of the current readings from the PCE-830, and the resistance values from the dummy run. Then we see that the dummy run, column 7 and column 2 together does not give a coherent picture. Therefore we assume there is something wrong with column 2. It is this final conclusion that I don't understand (or seem very likely given the measurement setup).
H-G,
I like your analysis, and it is most certainly good for me as a person to work through the details. I need a little bit more time to grasp the details. However, I will already now ask one question, and that is about the Table 7. I would think that the "Consumption" column is a measured quantity by the PCE-830 and can thus be trusted (with the risk of being called "wildly gullible"). Would it then not be more natural to assume that Joule heating has been wrongly calculated insad of the other way around?
I went through Thomas' analysis and if you boil it down there are simple and good reasons to believe that the reactor was colder than stated in the report. The short version is like this (from memory):
1. The optris camera is sensitive between 7 and 14 micron.
2. The emissivity of alumina in that wavelength range is close to 1 instead of 0.4 used in the report
3. Adjusting for the emissivity gives a much cooler reactor.
Thomas prefers another explanation. Probably the truth is somewhere in between.
H-G,
I don't think that Thomas' error margins allows for very much of a compromise. It seems to me that we will have too choose explanation model. Question is then what to choose. I worked through the details of Thomas criticism of the Lugano report and to me it looked reasonable. This Joule heating issue I am not so familiar with, but perhaps that is a very strong argument also? Are there any sources of uncertainty for that case?
Eric,
Could you perhaps let us know more about what you think is the Stefan-Boltzmann problem?
Brian,
Perhaps you should try to track down one of the other devices mentioned in the article provided by Mary? They were probably wired up in the same way as your device..
It is fun to read about these stories, and it is amazing how rich they are on peculiar details. For instance in the video, there was a measurement curve with dips that were said to correlate with the aurora borealis. Who would have expected that?
Thomas,
I found a reference in the Hagelstein summary:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetr.pdf
It looks very detailed at a glance. Maybe the references in that document will point you to the original papers.
If you can make any statement about it that would of course be of interest.
@MY
So flow calorimetry (actually the configuration of your referenced article and the device presented in the poster looked rather similar) is your preferred method of mesaurement? Are there any other possibilites to enhance credibility of the measurements (thermocouples etc.) or is a good calibration key to obtaining credible data? How about the electrical input? What is your preferred method or instrumentation?
Does anybody know why there are three wires in the figures of the reactors? I just get a feeling that they are deliberately excited 120 degrees out of phase to create some travelling wave or other funny looking electromagnetic field. Or is it just to make things simple when using 3-phase input?
So, I would like to share my new findings for to the "lightbulb" question that we discussed briefly before the pollution entered the thread. This is related to the Lugano test, but maybe replicators could also find it interesting. Maybe this is obvious for someone trained in the field but it news to me.
Question: Can an internal heat source in e.g. an alumina tube produce more energy than what is actually estimated by using a thermal camera?
I said earlier that a light bulb was an example of such a device, and given that alumina is rather transparent in the visible and in the near infared region it could very well be so for an alumina tube also. Actually I got the opportunity to test a FLIR heat camera on Friday evening, and I used it to look at a halogene larg size (r=3cm) light bulb. My impression was that you could see nothing of the filament inside the lamp on the display of the camera because the glass of the light bulb was not transparent for the wavelengths the camera used. Instead what you could see was the surface temperature of the light bulb and the temperature ranged from 80C to 100C (this was a lamp had been on for a long time).
To make a crude (over) estimation of the power radiated from the lamp we can assume a sphere with r=3cm, T=373K, sigma=5.67e-8, emissivity=1,
Radiated power = 4*pi*0.03^2*(373)^4*5.67e-8W = 12.4W
The lamp had a specified power of 46W
The conclusion is that it is indeed possible to underestimate the internally generated power if there is a partially transmittive shell and a heat camera is used to estimate the radiated power.
It makes me wonder even more why this device configuration and measurement method was chosen for the Lugano test.
@Thomas Clarke
Maybe not a very exotic effect after all. I would guess that if you take a thermal camera and measure on an old style light bulb you would significantly underestimate the radiated power.
However, this does not have anything to do with the fact that the Lugano report contains a severe error in the thermal analysis, as you explained earlier. But it can provide a possible explanation for those who like to think that the Lugano test did contain LENR after all. I think though that one has to take into account that these types of double coincidences or double errors are very rare.
Paradigmnoia,
Yes, I think that is possible. Energy in form of radiation can have many different spectral distributions. Just think about laser light as an extreme example of that. But given that the "inner source" has a black body type of radiation, I think that a further condition has to be met, and that is that there has to be some divergence of the radiated field between the inner source and the outer shell. That's what I think, but I'm out on a limb here because I have very little experience in the area, and furthermore this inner source and outer shell configuration may not be applicable to the device in question.
