Posts by Paradigmnoia

Quote from Robert Horst

The most common problem with RS232 is needing to switch Tx and Rx. Tx of the sender needs to go to Rx of the receiver. Some cables have Rx and Tx internally swapped, some do not. Murphy's law says you always have the wrong one.

Other possible problems are the handshake signals. RTS must be asserted, sometimes requiring an extra jumper on the interface even if you are using only a 2-wire cable.

I have seen some examples where several of the DB9 pins are linked in the cable end, (6 to 1 and 4, etc.). Which I think fakes out the handshakes. I may try that. It seems like there is no buffer on the RS232 data logger end. It just spits out 16 characters every 2 seconds, and whatever reads them on the receiving end has to be ready for them. Serial2.available() doesn’t work at all. It is never available. Something shows up on the Arduino end, since the RS232 to TTL level shifter lights up the Tx out LED. I think maybe the data logger feeds out End Word characters nonstop until a New Word begins(?). I will see if the manufacturer of the data logger has some better documentation. The manual has the bare minimum of information.

See page 15 if interested: http://www.reedinstruments.com…/manual/sd-947-manual.pdf

Quote from Director

Lanthanum and Cerium were transmutation products found on the electrode.

La and Ce (oxides) are excellent for reducing the work function, and are usually contaminated with each other.

Quote from anonymous

If you hate the IDE see if you can program using a conventional text editor like Emacs or VIM and then run the results in a separate console window. If you are running Linux or Mac, I find that most open source IDE tools can copy and paste, but sometimes I have to resort to guerrilla tactics.

I don’t mind the IDE. For some strange reason it is like there is a separate clipboard for the IDE, so one can cut and paste within the IDE, but try and copy from another page and paste to the IDE and whatever was copied or cut from the IDE last time pastes instead.

Anyways everything was working smoothly until I tried to read the RS232 signal (2 wire only!) from my usual data logger, in order to incorporate that into the sketch data log. I have an RS232 to TTL level shifter, wired everything thing up, checked the Tx and Rx wires end to end, and nothing happens. There should be a 16 bits-long word but nothing comes out in either single bits or strings and with only two wires (Tx and ground), there is no way to poke the RS232 side into action. It is possible that the level shifter doesn’t like only one signal wire. So today’s diagnostics involves plugging in an RS232 to USB cable and seeing if the laptop can see it working...

Quote from JohnO

Paradigmnoia I've done some Arduino and Raspberry programming for my own projects. I would not recommend Raspberry for what you are doing. Which Arduino are you playing with? Which logging shield? Where are you located? (I'm in Seattle area.)

I am using an Arduino Mega2560 with an Adafruit data logging shield.
Starting to get the hang of it. I was able to put zeros in front of the time single digits, and work out proper incremental time samples based on Unix ms timing (rather than just a delay). The most annoying part is that stuff copied from off IDE won’t paste into IDE.

I know nothing of Arduino or Raspberry programming and haven’t programmed anything since maybe 35 years (raw hexadecimal) but yesterday I spent about 3 hours wrestling with new parts to get the serial monitor of a Arduino and data logging shield to “print” a time stamp every two seconds. Still getting some random extra characters in the time, so looking at that today.

Quote from JedRothwell

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2651100 is 96 more than you need, I think. 2 on inlet, and 2 on outlet is sufficient. Check them against alcohol thermometers.

Ideally two on the outlet, two on the inlet, one ambient nearby, and one for the inside box lid for emergency notice (like acrylic box in danger of melting), one for the heater/inside reactor, one for outside of the heater/reactor...

Also there is a nice Bosch air pressure (in hPa, +/- 1 hPa accuracy), temperature, and humidity sensor, all in one. The air pressure sensor is good enough to be used as an altimeter. I think one in the calorimeter box and one in the outlet should be good enough to verify the outlet velocity. (Used as a manometer). I’ll have get one working first.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2652

The Cobraf Blackout (cold fusion, Andra Rossi..) forum subject has been closed, apparently permanently.

I shall miss this morning coffee reading material.

Plot from new power supply data, below, with a section with electrical tape 12 mm wide on Inlet TC, non-sticky side facing out, perpendicular to airflow.

(This part was cut off the earlier test due to accidentally turning off the data logger).

The heater temperature now stays dead flat, so I call that a huge improvement. Now I can test outlet air velocity etc. with confidence.

Also, I switched the heater TC to one installed between the bubble foil and the acrylic box, on the RH side of the lid, just to see how hot that gets.

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Quote from anonymous

Why run a 48V power supply at 50.0, i.e. past its rated operating voltage? Might burn it out or be unstable. Why not run it at 48V?

The power supply is only running 200 W out of the 350 W capacity and 4 A out of the 7.5 A capacity. It comes with a little trim pot for V right next to the wire connection header. I think it is normally used for big LED systems that are run in 4 banks of 12 V.

The 48 V DC 350 W power supply arrived early today, a nice surprise. Wired it up, installed it, set it to 50.0 V (it is adjustable +/- about 4 V). And three hours later, still 50.0 V. AC ripple 0.0076 V. Awesome.

Now I am assembling an Arduino data logger to (eventually) get all calorimeter sensors onto the same time stamp.
Apparently I can have 100 thermocouples logging simultaneously (offset by a few ms for each one) but I doubt I will try it.

And so, perhaps lost in the up and downs (above) is that when the calorimeter inlet TC is working normally, the open resistor, at 450+ C, glowing dull red wires inside the box has the same delta T as the 20 x 50 cm SS cylinder with the resistor sealed inside it, and an outside T of about 100 C, at the same 210 W (ish) input power.

So there you go. A normal range of size and shape differences of the heat source at the same input power makes no difference to the calorimeter at steady state.

Anyways, in the spirit of science, I opened up the SSVR box and installed a choke and caps assy from a microwave to clean up the noise on the line from the triacs. Hoping to stabilize the heater input better. The “set” output voltage inevitably wanders around after a while and it is annoying. I have a 48 V DC 350 W power supply coming to simply plug in for the 200 W runs for voltage stability.

So, while testing that out, I also just added a 13 mm wide piece of black electrical tape to the inlet thermocouple to sort-of simulate the former bubble cover (about 5 cm long). The tape is flat with the thermocouple centred in the length, and the not sticky side is facing the inside of the calorimeter box. After cooling down from touching it, it looks like a solid 3 C increase in inlet temperature. I’ll turn it 90 degrees in a while (to align it with the airflow instead of against it). Then I’ll try to aim it at the heater, like a fat antenna.

Edit: Fantastic! I turned the tape stuck to the inlet TC 90 degrees, (so it is aligned with the airflow), and it went right back to ambient (down 3 C), and fairly quickly, too.

.....

Surprise #2: Aiming the tape at the heater coil seems to get an inlet temperature between the perpendicular and the parallel to air flow positions (it is roughly 45 degrees to airflow). Maybe it makes a back-eddy that pulls heated calorimeter air towards it when it is non-parallel to airflow?

And after taking the tape strip off to cool the TC to ambient again, I stuck the strip back on, this time with the tape non-sticky side facing out, perpendicular to flow (TC exposed facing into the box), the inlet temperature jumped up 5 C.

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The spikes in inlet temperature (below) are from touching the TC while adding tape.

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Quote from JedRothwell

Yes. I did that, here in this forum and in Slide 19:

https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTincreasedea.pdf

QUOTE:

We also know the air is well mixed because the Reynolds number is computed at ~18,000, and
any number over 2,300 indicates a turbulent flow, with well mixed air.

We also know this is correct because we can compute the flow rate from the other three
parameters. With a low power calibration, losses from the walls are negligible, so the weight of
air equals energy divided by temperature times specific heat. It is within 2% of what the
instruments measure. Those other three parameters have been checked with numerous
instruments so we are sure they are correct.

Display More

It may be easy for you to do, but the rest of us have only bits and pieces to work with.

Quote from JedRothwell

It was not a parameter. In some cases atmospheric pressure was included, but the effects from that were tiny, and there was really no point to it.

You can run the numbers and see that humidity could not affect this data measurably. It would be lost in the noise. Look at the sensitivity and the error bars for this instrument. Also, there is no clean data from this lab. Look at the variation in ambient temperatures. The noise from that translates to a ~2 W error. Mizuno made heroic efforts to reduce this, but it is still very noisy.

The humidity itself has a small effect, but if humidity is not being used, then perhaps a standard condition is being used, which also specifies the temperature of the air, which has another effect, if say for example velocity was read in NTP units but being used in STP calculations without a commensurate adjustment.

But my original point was that excess heat and calibration heat information from the same calorimeter, same blower speed, etc., for even several different power ranges, should allow reversing some calculations in order to spit out a velocity value, and that value, even when wrong (skewed really), for whatever reason, will end up with almost the same velocity result for each example from that calorimeter.

Quote from JedRothwell

Yes. You noticed the problem almost immediately, and so would anyone else who compares the inlet to ambient temperature. It is impossible to miss. You might say, "but suppose we don't compare the inlet to ambient?" I think that only a person who has never done experiments and has no common sense and no feel for how they should be done would make that mistake. In our recipe, Mizuno and I did not mention this step, because we assumed everyone who does the experiment knows to do this -- along with many other things.

I am glad you mentioned this. But I think you should acknowledge that it is a trivial issue that will never be a problem, because it surely be discovered immediately.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

If it were not for the obvious increase in inlet temperature correlating to the heater and outlet temperatures and sudden drop back to ambient, it might look like ~100 W of excess heat.

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Quote from JedRothwell

Elsewhere, you mentioned the effect of changing humidity on the experiment. It is okay to list that, but I think you should have said, "we know that humidity cannot be a problem because it does not vary much in Sapporo, it hardly varies at all indoors, and even at the extremes it is too small to have a significant effect." I think that when you mention that but you do not say it has no significant impact, you do a disservice to the discussion here. You give the impression there may be a problem where there isn't.

I only meant that if the data were particularly clean, it would be possible to determine if humidity was used as a parameter. Does that matter? Maybe not much, but what it probably means that Standard Conditions were not used, which requires some different constants for heat calculations than Actual Conditions. Which only matters if you want the right answer.

Quote from JedRothwell

The inlet TC must equal the ambient temperature. If it does not, something is wrong. You should always monitor both.

This problem would never cause a mistake, because you would always see that the inlet does not equal ambient, so you would know there is something wrong. You measure ambient with another TC and with an alcohol thermometer. In other words, with an instrument based on a different physical principle. Problems that affect a TC cannot affect an alcohol thermometer.

You also verify the outlet temperature and air speed with multiple instruments based on different physical principles, so there is no possibility they will be wrong. They cannot go wrong to the exact same extent.

I noticed the problem almost immediately after installing what I thought would work as an IR blocker. I was surprised at how much the effect was. The effect was increased (I think) due to the high radiant power of the open resistor. Now it is back to normal. The Swan/Crane thing was just for fun after a late night messing with it. A little extra tape... I am also an artist...

Move over little ducky,

Black Swan (or Crane?) is movin' in...

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Quote from Cipolla

@Paradigmoia
did you put the inlet TC following as much as possible Mizuno position?
can you please post a photo of it position?

The inlet TC comes down from the top, ending roughly in the center of the inlet hole, and is held on by two bits of electrical tape and otherwise way out in the ambient air. The TC cover was a strip of bubbles cut from the bubble foil barely 1 cm wide. The TC was just poked through maybe 6 consecutive bubbles and installed in the usual position. I noticed the inlet TC climb during the experiment, and falling after, as soon as the cover was installed but decided to leave it on and be sure the bubble cover was worse. Which it is.

It seems that it did the opposite of block the IR. I could paint it black and stick it back on to confirm IR or maybe conduction from the box through the outside bubbles. I wonder if my radiometer can see the coil through the inlet hole?

I have before-and-after photos I will put here.

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Here one can clearly see the effect of the the TC bubbles in the inlet trace. They were so flat before this.

https://www.lenr-forum.com/att…6-test-8-100-w-boost-jpg/

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This is an old photo but the TC set up is basically the same.

https://www.lenr-forum.com/att…imeter-insulated-web-jpg/

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Anyways, the 345 and 500 W input Saito data, including excess, hangs together really well.

Quote from JedRothwell

The heat capacity of air hardly changes at the extremes of humidity. The humidity in a closed room in Sapporo does not change measurably from day to day. This experiment is not being conducted in a jungle.

Such things cannot explain a 60% change. I am sure you know that. Stop grasping at straws.

Right. And if a string of 1.005 or 1.006’s falls out of the equations run backwards from dT data then you are an experiment hero.

Never said or meant that.