One problem that Mills hasn't solved yet is keeping his tungsten electrodes from vaporizing. The SunCell does not run long before it melts down.
Near the end of the video, during the Q&A, he talks about this problem and says they have a solution that is based on the halogen cycle. Here is a link to a site that talks about how this keeps a halogen bulb's filament from burning out too quickly.
Jed wrote ..."if someone points out to the P.O. that the invention was in the public domain already, the P.O. will invalidate the patent/"
The process of filing an IPR (inter partes review) to invalidate a patent is much more than just sending a letter to the patent office. They are actually trials in front of three patent judges and involve multiple rounds of documents prepared by attorneys as well as expert reports and depositions. IPR's are still very costly and not something that a lone inventor or small company can usually afford to take on. See: http://www.uspto.gov/patents-a…rials/inter-partes-review
The patent office does not, on their own, cancel patents that have already been issued. Patents may be invalidated through a patent office procedure known as an inter partes review, or validity may be challenged in litigation. In both cases, it is costly to challenge a patent. Challenges usually make sense only when the amount of money expected to be recovered from damages greatly exceeds the legal costs.
So far, no one has made any money selling a LENR device and there are no damages to recover from patent infringement. A company will probably need to approach $100M in LENR-derived revenue before it would make economic sense for someone to sue them for patent infringement.
In the early days of computers, IBM faced a similar problem, and in 1958 they created the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin where they published ideas they decided not to patent. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…nical_Disclosure_Bulletin
Today you do not need to create a new journal, but can publish anywhere in a journal or online in a place that is archived and has a verifiable publication date. In patent litigation, publication dates are often verified using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. As long as you publish on a site that is crawled by the Internet Archive, the date can be verified and the content will be archived.
If you want to disclose instead of patenting, your writeup still needs to be complete enough to enable one of ordinary skill to replicate your results. If not, someone else could patent a key missing step. A good way to ensure an enabling disclosure is to get someone else to use your disclosure to replicate your results, say via the MFMP.
And here is another paper describing a plasma torch:
Goch, Marcin, Mariusz Jasinski, and Jerzy Mizeraczyk. "Microwave microplasma generator based on coaxial line." Przegląd Elektrotechniczny 84.3 (2008): 80-82.
http://www.plasmacenter.pl/use…5-P.Elekttrotech.2008.pdf
This all reminds me of the early days after the P+F press conference in 1989. A usenet group called alt.physics.fusion was first filled with interesting first-hand information from groups trying to replicate the experiment. It gradually became dominated by non-scientific arguments and name calling. Those trying to replicate were called "True Believers" and the other side were the Skeptics. That is about the time that I, and many others, checked out.
I like the idea of better curating the names of the threads. As suggested above, I like the idea of Rossi-tech and Rossi-IH, for instance where I would read the first one and free to ignore the second one. The up/down voting could help to keep the discussions in the appropriate thread. I would also read me365-tech, Miszuno-tech, etc. That way, no one is censored, but those of us that just want to read about the science and technology can find it without wading through all of the other stuff.
The Miley 2015 paper showed how sintering of the nanoparticles reduced the power by an order of magnitude.
http://cobraf.com/forum/immagini/R_123597739_1.pdf
"Both suffered a significant reduction in performance, e.g. gains reduce roughly an order of magnitude. This is attributed to sintering effects caused in the initial run, even though it was fairly short. However, results from run three suggest that the sintering problem seems solvable. In this run, particles from run 2 were treated by reheating in the air for two hours. When these particles were run they were able to release energy of 426 J/gram, only 3% less than that achieved by the fresh particles in run #1. This is very encouraging, plus we are continuing studies of ways to treat (added coatings, etc.) the nanoparticles to achieve longer initial runs prior to their re-treatment. "
Figure 7 of the paper shows before and after SEM images of the nanoparticles. He speculates that "the sintering of the layer may be blocking the deuterium gas from effectively going further into nanoparticles below the top layer."
I wonder if this effect could be an important factor in reproducabiltiy problems in many other experiments.
This patent will take a while to fully digest, but here is an interesting passage about the first embodiment of Fig. 1 (from paragraph 60):
"Incidentally, the electric current which flowed in the electrode pair at this time was 30 [mA]. In other words, an electric power becomes 30 [W]. The amount of heat generated by the above input became 1 [kW], and the heating value with respect to the input reached 33 times."
If someone does the engineering work to figure out how to make a marketable LENR device, they will be in a great position and will not be stopped by early patents filed by Rossi or others. If the Rossi patents do not disclose the secret sauce required to make it work, then those patents will either not be issued or will later be invalidated for lack of enablement. Even if the prior patents are later issued and valid, the patent holder would likely still have a strong incentive to cross license with the company making the useful device. The early IBM computer patents did not prevent others from entering the computer market, they just represented a tax on the later successful computer companies.
New to this thread, but I saw several inaccuracies from the previous posts.
Power measurements cannot use the average (mean) for current or voltage unless it is DC or a perfect square wave. Only RMS values can be used because power is I-squared * R or Vsquared/R.
For instance, the average of a triangle wave is .5, but the RMS value is 1/sqrt3 = .577. Using .5 instead of .577 to compute power input would give you 15% apparent excess power. The apparent excess depends on the actual waveform.
The best way to measure is to simultaneously measure V and I, and then average the V*I samples. That is what the power meters do. But the sample rate must be much higher than the highest frequency you are measuring.
It is also not correct to multiply RMS voltage times RMS current unless the load is purely resistive. If the load is inductive, the current and voltage are out of phase and Vrms*Irms does not equal the actual power delivered.
The Spice model shows some series inductance, but is not accurate because it assumes that resistance remains constant. The resistance of a heater element changes by a large amount as it heats or cools and you cannot use the cold resistance alone to determine power.
Also, for a heater, the resistance of the leads to the heater element should not be neglected. The voltage should be measured with a separate set of test leads connect at the ends of the heater element. This effect also makes measurement of wall outlet power inaccurate, although at least this error is in the right (conservative) direction - it will overestimate input power by the amount of power delivered to the heater leads and the electronics.
It looks to me that these are some of Miley's hot fusion patents, not his LENR patents. I did not look through all of his patents, but at least one LENR patent is still assigned to Lattice Energy (Larsen's company). That is the '782 patent, ELECTRICAL CELLS, COMPONENTS AND METHODS, originally filed back in 2000. See:
