I've not had time to look at this report properly. One trouble is that it is not self-contained. A PR from a prelim report should not be held to the standards of a publishable paper, of course, but therefore it is also more difficult to draw conclusions.
My main concern with Brillouin has been EMC issues. The pulses stimulating the reaction will generate RFI that stimulates all sorts of other electronic equipment and can therefore result in offsets in TC data. This effect is bound to happen to some extent, and also bound to be variable with any physical change in the apparatus (for example replacing the contents of the reactor).
That makes it very difficult to distinguish in principle between apparent LENR signal and the stimulus altering the values of TC measurements.
I also take on the comments above about input power. These spiky waveforms are difficult to measure directly because you need very high sample rate integration of V*I and both measurements can suffer inductive error issues. Approximations here are based on scope traces are just not safe.
So I judge this work by how carefully they have controlled or otherwise measured these two obvious error sources.
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Since its reconstruction and calibration, I have been able to corroborate that the IPB HHT system moved to SRI continues to produce similar LENR Reaction Heat that it produced up in its Berkeley laboratory at Brillouin. Together with my prior data review, it is now clear that these very similar results are independent of the system’s location (Berkeley or Menlo Park) or operator (Brillouin’s or SRI’s personnel). This transportable and reproducible reactor system is extremely important and extremely rare. These two characteristics, coupled with the ability to start and stop the reaction at will are, to my knowledge, unique in the LENR field to date.
It is helpful to have such a system. But, if (as I believe is the case) the system included all the calorimetry and instrumentation that in no way helps with the experimental issues above. This type of replication deals with one-off errors or operator error, but not with artifacts of the equipment. Similarly, having multiple identical systems does not deal with equipment artifacts.
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We feel that the calorimetry was studied exhaustively and validated to an extremely high level of accuracy (see further discussion and test data review below).
I trust SRI with the calorimetry, but not with identifying RFI issues, since there is no discussion of these and what steps have been taken to measure or control them. Maybe there are no such issues, but no-one can know that without a check, not described here. I'd expect, if they had extensively checked RFI issues, that there would be a comment at least on that in the discussion.
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COP = (output power delta - heater power delta) / stimulus power
They use compensation calorimetry, in which a heater keeps temperature constant as the stimulus power is varied. The change in heater power thus must be added to the change in measured output power to get the real output change.
That is good, in that the compensation reduces most calorimetry artifacts. Bad, because COP is not referenced to the total input power to the heater. Any artifact in that, or in the temperature measurement, therefore has an amplified effect on this differential COP. Specifically, TC drift due to RFI will be amplified by this.
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Q pulses are 1% duty cycle and (usually but not always) asymmetric.
This is optimal for getting rectified RFI in amplifiers. It is clear that they are optimising Q-pulse parameters for affect on the output. Unfortunate that this could be optimising RFI effects rather than LENR effects and there is no discussion of how to distinguish the two or even of whether RFI effects could exist. I'd like to see such a discussion.
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The compensation calorimetry is imperfect, in the sense that the controlled power only includes half of the stimulus power - the rest if lost. This must therefore be calibrated and compensated for. There is then another source of error, if anything alters the m factor - how much of the stimulus power is compensated. I have not analysed this properly and would expect SRI to be safe in doing this - but would like to point out that this is an extra layer of interpretation needed to generate the COP and therefore an extra thing that could have artifacts. Especially, it could interact with other artifacts to make an artifact obscure. I don't know this, but without a deeper analysis I must flag the additional complexity as a possible issue.
Overall: this is still a very long way away from anything that could be conceivably commercial. You don't need these complex measurement systems if you really have COP=1.4. The headline figure here however is not exactly a COP=1.4 and therefore should be treated with extreme caution. Personally, I think it most likely that Brillouin are dealing with Q-pulse related artifacts - since there system seems highly susceptible - you might even say highly optimised for - the possibility, and they do not discuss how these are eliminated. But it is complex enough that even without that they can have artifacts that generate this apparent figure from small errors in total power measurement.
I don't in any way think anyone is dishonest in their work here. But I do think that they are not (as I read here) seriously dealing with potential artifacts, which makes the work of little interest until they do.