Posts by BruceInKonstanz

Forgive me for being a Jonny-one-note, but isn't Rossi using the same lame 50MHz oscilloscope that I saw in another demonstration? If so, is it not possible that his power supply is simply pumping in a lot of energy in at some high frequency that won't show up here? That would certainly be the simplest explanation for the dissipation of the power-supply (plus high-frequency power amplifier). For someone of his ambitions, a 400 MHz scope shouldn't be out of range, and would be a lot more convincing, to me at least.

@JonnyFive + Longview: Have you tried a non-porous insulator, e.g., acetate sheet? I can't see why the porous structure would make a difference if static discharge is involved. Some sort of reaction with O2, N2, CO2? What happens if you try to discharge the paper by folding a piece of, say, Al-foil around it and press for a moment?

I'm just now catching up on the E cat QX from Nov. 2017. This demonstration looks pretty hoaky to me. Rossi's black box is evidently drawing enough power to account for all of the measured "LENR" power. If the black box is sending high voltage pulses of, say, 2ns width to the reactor, who would notice? The oscilloscope has only 50 MHz bandwidth. The plasma most likely presents a complex and frequency dependent impedance, but it might present significant resistance at just these high frequencies, so as to be able to absorb 71W from the black box. When it sees a predominantly resistive load in the comparison test, the black box could stop producing such pulses. With the instrumentation shown, Rossi may not even know how his black box really behaves. I want to see (filtered!) AC power in to the black box minus its measured dissipation compared to power out from the reactor; anything else can easily be a hat trick.

Dearest Axil, thanks for all the info. Please straighten out "frequency" and "wavelength".

The emphasis in the report seems to be on careful measurement of output power, but the input power measurement is far from trivial. From Fig. 6 in the report it's evident that the input power calculation depends on accurate measurements of voltage, current and -- especially -- phase over a bandwidth of at least 200 MHz. It's not just the bandwidth of the measuring instruments that matters; there are potential problems with impedance matching, reflections and reactance in the measurement wires and in the heater. Just a little kink in a wire can make such measurements look much different.

I don't doubt that SRI and Godes know what they're doing, but people with experience in this area are going to be pretty skeptical of such measurements, and if I were a Brillouin investor, I wouldn't trust the measurements without much more well documented validation. It appears that calibration of input power was done using Q pulse signals having spectral distributions much different from those supposedly producing LENR, and the load will almost certainly absorb varying amounts of power at various frequencies. ("[C]alibration runs used Q pulse parameters that were known not to produce LENR heat (low voltage pulses) but impart the same power to the core as parameters expected to show LENR heat (high voltage pulses)".) Thus, this procedure doesn't exclude the possibility that the LENR-producing input power measurement using high voltage pulses (thus, narrow width and higher power density in the high frequencies) is too low -- maybe even by 60%. Godes must know all this; he's an electrical engineer. You'd think these objections would have been addressed more explicitly in the report.