Quote from Dan21: “Quote from Alan Smith: “In fact, due to the array of errors that could have affected the experiment.....”
Just to be clear, it wasn't me that said that, it was Brice Cassenti, an expert in advanced propulsion systems at the…
Actually, I was agreeing with Jed in that the thrust should be easy to measure without the expense of going to orbit.
Quote from Alan Smith: “In fact, due to the array of errors that could have affected the experiment, he says the only way we can actually know the truth is to test the EM Drive in space.”
That is absurd. If the thing works, there has to be a way to…
I agree. If you can measure the gravitational constant G with a torsion pendulum, measuring this would be easier. My personal view on how this effect might work is that the quantum vacuum continuously creates anti-particle pairs that travel a short distance before recombining. It is these particles against which the EM drive reacts. The E and B fields inside the cavity need to be assymetrical, but the force is developed in exactly that; an assymetrical cavity. The fact that a vacuum has an electrostatic permittivity that is easily measured between parallel capacitor plates supports this view.
If you're looking for ceramic sleeving, try these folks:
http://css.coorstek.com/scripts/css512.wsc/op/op_indexB2C.html?inp_site=30&searchMode=drill
They have a large product line of various rigid ceramic sleeves including 3 grades of alumina that go to 1750C. These are available in double hole tubes for making thermocouple wells. I think they ship worldwide, but they do have a $150 minimum order.
Dan
Finely divided steel will burn in air if you get it hot enough. Steel wool and Iron FilingsW offer a good example. Because the steel ball is very hard chrome steel it stores a lot of energy before it fractures, and the elestic deformation and rebound…
Facepalm. Duh. It's been weeks since I have had a piece of steel on a grind wheel and saw the sparks. I've even had formal education in determining the amount of carbon in the steel by judging the rate of repeating sprigs..... a long time ago.
Argon: A lot more energy is stored crushing a steel ball than in crushing a ceramic ball before exploding. The ceramic ball stores energy equal to the area under just the elastic part of the stress-strain curve. The steel ball also stores the far greater energy of the area under the plastic region of the stress-strain curve. Ceramics are perfectly elastic materials that break at roughly 1% strain. High strength steel will go beyond 10% strain before breaking. Softer alloys can go several times that, but at a lower stress. Here's a more detailed explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93strain_curve
Argon, That's an interesting video. All samples other than the bearing are flattened without visible energy release, probably by uniformly heating the items. But the ball obviously releases significant energy. First, I would calculate the energy stored in the elastic energy of deforming not just the ball, but also the press. You can see the dents in the press plates, and you know the modulus of steel (I assume the plates are some alloy of steel). But just as obviously, the plastic energy needed to deform the plate is not released, and so not added to the energy used to deform the ball.
As a check, you can estimate the Ultimate Tensile Stress of the ball material, estimate the amount of deformation and integrated force to get the entire ball to that state, then estimate the temperature (from the color of the sparks) of the flying pieces, and compare them. If they don't agree within a large factor, there's something else contributing to the total energy.
Another check would be to record the press ram pressure X diameter (if you can get that data) and integrate as a function of the distance traveled. Then subtract the energy that went into deforming the press plates. I'm sure I got some details wrong, but a check on units is always in order.
I could just as easily say: "Burning high octane gasoline is not observed in nature. Therefore burning high octane gasoline is not real"
Or even sillier: "Wheels with pneumatic tires are not observed in nature. Therefore wheels with pneumatic tires are not real" Well, OK, maybe not real in Britain where they have tyres. 
I had forgotten about that example. More recently, DARPA used a version of this called MIPCC or Mass Injection Pre Compressor Cooling to be used to increase thrust at altitude of a turbojet engine. The main purpose was as an air-launching platform to loft an upper stage that deliver a small payload to low orbit. Here's a small contract summary. https://sbirsource.com/sbir/aw…mospheric-turbojet-engine Both water and liquid oxygen were to be injected with spray bars just ahead of the first compressor section.
In small air cooled airplane piston engines (<500 kW where turbines have the market), the engines run rich for takeoff and climb, then go lean after reaching cruise conditions. Pilots are taught to do this because of the needed additional engine cooling. Water injection would be better than rich fuel, but nobody wants to increase complexity or lower reliability of airplane engines.
To stay in the spirit of the thread I started, I would ask one or two questions:
Suppose a tycoon is one of the readers of this forum, fascinated by research on LENR wants to give an important economic contribution, let's say 10 million USD
[What could…
This is similar to what Rob Duncan did at the University of Missouri with the SKINR lab. Rob was a skeptic until he looked into the state of the art. I think it was a definite step in a good direction.
I am intrigued by this video:
<a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wENFciq1-Q&feature=youtu.be&a=" class="externalURL" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wENFciq1-Q&feature=youtu.be&a=</a>
It is a very simple way of making a high electron density at a tungsten rod, giving a COP > 10 (!) over 30 minutes and with enough error margin to use simple garage…
Mats002:
There are several places where the results in that video can be incorrect. First, the dissimilar metal electrodes (tungsten and stainless steel) with a NaOH electrolyte become a battery. That energy input is not accounted. Second, 12V Pb-acid batteries are not exactly 12V. Their voltage is nominal, with 13.2V at full charge and 10.8V discharged. The actual voltage was not measured, at least in the video. Third, the rectified AC voltage still had a substantial AC component. The hand held meter probably did not measure true RMS voltage, so that measurement could have been off by as much as 40%. Fourth, the amount of water loss was measured with good precision, but how much water was lost pouring from one container to another? How much wetted the container wall? Calculated energy output is very sensitive to the amount of water loss. Fifth, how accurate is that thermometer? Just because it indicates +/- 0,1C doesn't mean it is accurate to that precision.
If you try to replicate this demonstration, I recommend you quantify the error bars associated with each step in the process and each measurement.
Do keep up! That was three weeks ago in between the Masons and the NSA.[/quote]
If the Masons had their own Marine Corps, would they be known as the Mason Jar Heads?
From the flowmeter manufacturer's web site, here is a copy of the type approval per the Slovak Institute of Metrology.
http://www.apator.com/uploads/…/type-approval-mwn130.pdf
It shows 1.575 m^3/hr as the minimum flow rate for that model.
Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax: “Divining rods work with users with certain skills. and in certain contexts, they are entirely user-dependent. They are not magic, but sometimes humans know more than is known consciously.”
Yes. People who are good at…
I've built 4 houses in the past 40 years and all of them were on well water. One each in Maryland, Florida, Alabama, and recently in West Texas. All had good water, including the one on Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay. The one in Florida was only 10 meters deep. In every case, the driller asked me where I wanted the well. "How about over there?" "OK" was the invariable answer. The only legal code requirement was that they be at least 30 meters from any septic system or drain field. At least in my experience, a person with divining rod would have 100% reliability; no special skills or sensitivity needed.
Jed, Thank you for the link. Sorry but I have no time just now to go through the whole doc.
Maybe tomorrow, but it would help if you could repeat once again most important pages (I know you have done that million times already, but I have lost track on…
I just read that report. There are several aspects of this test that have large potential errors. First, the wattmeter did not agree with the voltmeter and ammeter, so they chose to ignore the wattmeter. There was no investigation into *why* the instruments disagreed, or by how much. There is also no report on whether the instruments could have been fooled by high frequency noise, such as from a chopper-type controller. I've had personal experience with a high quality DC-AC inverter that correctly claimed it put out very little high frequency noise. But what the manufacturer didn't say because most people don't care, was that it put a lot of crap back into the batteries powering it. Second, there was no calibration run to measure actual IR intensity vs Joule heating. That would have been both simple and far more robust than the practice of calculating heat radiated by measuring temperature. Call that no pre calibration and no post calibration. Third, they allowed the IR sensor to move before and during the test. Even if they had calibrated the sensor, their primary heat-indicating instrument, this would have introduced unknowable errors. Fourth, they did not quantitatively include heat lost by convection. At that size and temperature, convection could account for a few hundred Watts.
But it's the heat measuring *concept* that is the biggest problem. Only someone without real-world experience could believe you can measure heat loss to better than a factor of two using this methodology. Maybe if the object were a perfect sphere made of high conductivity material (certainly not 316 stainless steel), that methodology might stand a chance, but still would not include large uncertainties from convection. Trying to determine heat lost by calculating the theoretical radiation from an irregular body in a convecting ambient is just .... wrong.
I've used some flowmeters based on coriolis effects, specifically from Micro-Motion. They are expensive (about $5k each) but I have had good luck buying used from ebay for under $200. and sending them to factory authorized calibration shops. The advantage is that they work with 2-phase flow as long as the quality is reasonable. Liquid with gas bubbles is OK, as is gas with some droplets. They don't handle slug flow very well. That was needed in my application measuring flow of liquid oxygen just a few degrees below saturation. They are legal for trade, but the problem is that you have to trust them, as there is no corollary to filling a known cup and dumping it.
The US military may or may not be doing classified LENR research, but they certainly have been sponsoring organizations that report publicly. Frank Gordon's group at SPAWAR in San Diego has done a lot of experiments and published a lot of papers. Melvin Miles did his work at the Navy's China Lake laboratories in the California desert and Louis DeChiaro of the Naval Research lab is currently working on theoretical aspects. Then, there was DARPA sponsoring McKubre at SRI International, which is a commercial lab being paid with military money. I think I can safely say that the US Military has done good things toward advancing LENR research. Certainly more than the Department of Energy, the civilian agency that is *supposed* to be doing this research. About the only DoE related research that I can think of was Ed Storms at Los Alamos, but as I understand it, there was never an officially funded effort. I'm sure there are folks on this forum who can name more.
It looked to me that the rotating chamber lid had holes punched, and that the atmosphere was air. Charcoal burns in air when heated above its ignition temperature. It also combines with face centered nonmagnetic alloys (Austinitic steel for example) to form body centered magnetic alloys.
Other than Rossi's actions, what topics lead to flame wars? I submit there are few or none. Therefore the problem will go away when more actual information on Rossi comes out. My proposal is to stop all comments on the worst threads and let people start new threads that are clearly marked as Rossi related. Personally, I would not read a thread with 'Rossi' in the title until verifiable test results emerge.
More moderation is too much to ask from the moderators. I am guessing that the mods are here because they are interested in LENR, not because they enjoy being parents to little children.
Nah, I'm not near Houston or any big city. A mushroom cloud here would only take out a few hundred oil wells. The reason I asked was because of the tendency for chemical companies to only sell to well established customers. Thanks.
