Posts by THHuxley

Quote from AlainCo

if it is not fraud, lenr science is thus real...
all argument on extraordinary claims are thus void, it is proven phenomenon.

If you reckon Rossi switching samples, as he has done before, is fraud, yes.

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huge systematic errors of 3.6 are not easy to obtain ...

I disagree. For example misreading a 3 phase power analyser (easy to do) gives systematic error of 3. You need a decent EE person to get it right.

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there is a long road between some % of systematic errors, and 260% of error.

see above

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the trick is often just to say "there is errors" and not to measure them.

I think you have the burden of proof the wrong way round. What Rossi claims is extraordinary, and many sole inventors have such wild ideas with devices that apparently break some physical law. It is Rossi's job to prove that he is really breaking physical laws if he wants others to believe. Without such solid proof a rational person would disbelieve. They don't have to work out precisely what combination of experimental error, misunderstanding, or possibly fraud causes this.

That may seem tough but the claims Rossi makes are actually very easily proved.

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another trick is to me unclear whether one support reality of LENR (if no one deny science), or support general fraud (which is impossible if the reactor was tested without rossi and with PCE380 set up independently of him)...

For this current experiment there is clear evidence, documented elsewhere on this site, that the power in was mismeasured by a factor of 3.
For the first "independent" test there was the (easy) possibility of "loopback spoofing" to make the supply power seem smaller. The (equally easy0 test to eliminate that was not done. Generally however these tests from Rossi's friends with him present and intervening are not independent and therefore cannot be trusted. That is what scientists would say of any new and surprising phenomena. You need independent replication.

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in fact all claim or "error" are either tiny and without impact (realist but not important), or on the myth of lenr then e-cat fraud (conspiracy of evil), or on incredibly improbable mistakes (conspiracy of errors). a mix of the 3 is made to fool the innocent, some real imprecisions, some innuendo of fraud and presenting incredible fraud as incredible errors.

There are a number of explanations of the apparent anomalies. Rossi being prepared to lie to testers (perhaps in what he considers a good cause, to get enough money to continue development) covers all of them. Some, like the wet steam calculated as dry, are obvious from external evidence. In principle you would not expect such things always to emerge.

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about theory, I don't see why it have any impact on whether LENR is real or not. current theories are weak, unproven, and sometime even disproven by experiments. independent work in progress.

Nuclear theory is on the contrary very strong, making a vast number of spot on predictions. That is why it is held. LENR could be random magic obeying no simple physical laws, but if so it would be a first such phenomena in our experience. Other claimed random phenomena, miracles, paranormal stuff, etc, have turned out to have mundane explanations.

Rossi has proved himself inaccurate in information he gives independent testers. For example, the Cu mixed in with the ash in an early experiment was thought to be a nuclear transmutation product until more subtle analysis showed it could not be. During the initial period when there were speculations about nuclear origin Rossi remained silent about the fact that his handling had introduced Cu to the ash after it left the reactor. Certainly he did not make the possibility of such major contamination clear to the testers.

I'm happy to advance deliberate deception (which might or might nor be technically fraudulent) as the reson for some of these test results because the Ni-62 result shows either Rossi does this or there is LENR. If not for that I would leave open the psosibility of other errors since they remain.

The main difficulty (other than lack of independence) with the current and previous independent test is a lack of cross-checking and control that would eliminate potential possibly large error sources. That is the stuff of experimental science. You never trust your first results. In this case the second test is actually less well controlled than the first one was!

The lack of radioactivity does not make sense, I know. However the people here mostly view nuclear physicists as incompetent, or at least unable to research novel phenomena, and think that a lack of understanding of nuclear physics is the best starting point from which to make new extraordinary discoveries.

So they are more likely to be interested in the internal inconsistencies in the tests than in arguments like this. they would reply that the lack of sense is because we are bound by conventional theory.

The flip side of this is that there is no unconventional hypothesis that explains these phenomena - they continue to make no sense, with no correct novel predictions from any hypothesis. That is a subtle argument and does not I think cut much ice here where people do not care about Popper.

I'm making some cavalier assumptions about others here - they are probably generalisations so I'm sorry, and willing to be corrected, if they offend anyone.

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The “Joule heating” calculation for the Cu wire for the dummy run on pages 13-14 seems to be fairly straight forward. The “Joule heating” is simply the resistance of the wire times the current squared flowing through that wire. Sum the Joule heating in the 3 Cu wires from the controller and the 6 Cu wires to the device and you have the power that comes out of controller, but doesn’t participate in heating the Inconel coils. This is such a simple calculation, that it seems unlikely that an error would be made in other calculations of Joule heating. However, the “Joule heating” in the Cu wires for the active run has been calculated in Table 7, page 22 as about 37W for the input power at 800W and about 42W for the operation at 920W. These “Joule heating” calculations imply that the current in the Cu wires was 2.35 times as high in the 800W active run as it was in the dummy run (SQRT(37/6.7) = 2.35). The only way for this to be possible is for the Inconel resistors to have a very large negative temperature coefficient of resistance. Although the report did not specify what type of Inconel was used in the coils, the data sheets for various Inconels show well less than 10% variation in resistivity over a wide temperature range. For example, Inconel 625 has a resistivity of 135.9 microohm-cm at 427 oC and 133.9 microohm-cm at 1093 oC. Other Inconels have a slightly increasing resistivity as the temperature increases. Also it should be pointed out that if the Inconel used in the coils in this experiment had a large negative TCR, then the Joule heating as calculated in Table 7 would have been much higher than 42W for the 900W portion of the test. The calculated “Joule heating” powers are directly proportional to the “consumption” powers, indicating no change in resistivity of the Inconel coils as the temperature increases from about 1260 oC to 1400 oC in the two portions of the active runs. Questions for the authors: 1. What is the source of the error in the “Joule heating” calculation for the active run? 2. What type of Inconel was used in the resistor coils? 3. What was the current flowing through the resistors for each of the active power levels?

I agree with much of this, except:

(1) the implicit assumption that power in is measured identically in the dummy and active tests. It is entirely possible that a change in the PCE settings could move from total power to phase power therefore making a X 1/3 change which would match the anomaly. Power in 3 phase systems is slippery - it is easy to make mistakes. We don't know how the supplied figure was derived so can only guess.

(2) the evidence that the resistance measures within 1% for a temperature chnage from 1250C to 1400C effectively makes a 300% change in resistance (that is a change to 1/3rd) from 500C to 1250C impossible. Quite independently of the known characteristics of the wires.

BTW the highest melting point I can find for any Inconel alloy is 1430C, so it is possible the wires were a higher nickel content alloy.

The calculations are confusing in the report, and i may have got it wrong, but here is my understanding.
The power flux dissipated overall is measured as:
Q_o = radiation from rods + convection from rods + radiation from reactor + convection from reactor

The measured input power power to in the system is equal to:
Q_i = joule heating from wires (Q_jw) + joule heating in heater (Q_jh)

the authors then take
Q_x = Q_o - Q_i + Q_jw

as the supposed LENR reactor power.

Now, practically the wire joule heating Q_jw is not significant, it is much smaller than the other components. But it provides a cross-check of Qi. That is because they calculate Q_jw independently of anything else from the wire current - measured independently of the input power by clamp ammeters - and an estimate of the wire resistance based on wire composition and dimensions. So whatever is their wire resistance estimate (it need not be correct) the stated Q_jw for each of the three tests, calculated from what they call average current but must be average RMS current, must have a ratio the same as the ratio of Q_i for these same tests. Unfortunately this ratio is 3.3X different from the stated measured ratio using the power analyser:
Qjh(active) / Qjh(dummy) = 5.7
Qi(active) / Qi(dummy) = 1.86

The difference, 3.1X is the anomaly. (I've calculated ratios a different way round from above, averaging the two active test powers - but the result is the same).

Sorry for repeating what is maybe obvious but I need to make sure that you understand my assumptions here.

Then, from the report, the power figure of 6.7W is clearly Joule heating, calculated from the stated measured currents in the dummy run.

I get my Joule heating powers for the active tests from Table 7 p22 which is described as:

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Tables 6 and 7 report all the E-Cat test results relevant to the days of testing, approximately two days for each file.
The first table shows the average temperature of each cap and of the entire body of the E-Cat for each of the 16 files analyzed. It should be mentioned that, as in the case of the dummy reactor, analysis on the E-Cat was again performed by dividing the thermal images into 10 areas along the length of the reactor, and into three areas for each cap. In the table, however, the results relevant to each area are further averaged out, in order to facilitate reading.
In the second table, mean power consumption, watts produced and watts dissipated by Joule heating are shown for each file. Uncertainty associated to the result is on average 5% for power consumption and 3% for watts emitted. The last two columns record COP and net production. COP is the ratio of the sum of the mean power, emitted by radiation and convection by both the E-Cat and the rods, to mean power consumption of the reactor minus watts dissipated by the cables through Joule heating.

Therefore I think the "Joule Heating" column of Table 7 is the resistive heating of the cables and therefore must match (as a near constant ratio between joule heating in cables, and total power in) the power in as calculated by the PCE 3 phase analysers.

I take this column as a proxy for the measured current values used to calculate it. That, at least, is what the authors say they do and it makes sense.

What does not make sense is the stated measured input power which is highly inconsistent between the dummy and active tests. I further think it must be wrong for the active test because the dummy test is validated by the output power measurement which matches.

I realise that I'm not commenting on the thermal aspects of this - because the inconsistency I'm highlighting does not depend on that. It depends only on the stated power measurements. Those are, I believe, the powers calculated from wire currents as the report states.

I agree that the temperature of the wires will be affected also by heat conducted from the reactor, and therefore the total rod dissipated power (given in the Rods column of Table 6) will be much higher than the Joule heating power. It is around 300W in the active tests.

Thermal imaging has pros and cons. It is more indirect, relying on a lot of calculations. I don't mind this, they can be checked. The big problem is the emissivity which has to be calibrated via a control or input as a theoretical number.

You can get round this:
(1) by using material which behaves well near to a black body with emissivity that does not change with temperature
(2) making control measurements with a thermocouple at close to the measured temperature

The first thermal imaging e-cat test did this stuff quite well.

The current test does not do it, and has some issues:
(1) Al2O3 has a variable emissivity with temperature
(2) Al2O3 has a variable transparency with wavelength (if transparent the emissivity becomes that of whatever is opaque beneath).
(3) Al2O3 has a variable transparency with crystalline structure
(4) the calibration was done at a much lower temperature than the test, no thermocouple calibration of the test.

So the result may still be fine, but it is very difficult to prove that it is fine. In this case the assumption is the Al2O3 has an emissivity of approx 0.4 at working temperature for the active tests is difficult to prove. The emissivity could be as high as 1 and that would result in a large over-estimation of the COP. The previous test assumed emissivity 1 so did not have this problem.

Another problem is convective loss, because you do not ahve a closed system. This, again, does not matter if you can safely ignore it and then get a lower bound on the output power. If you try to include it, as done in the second e-cat report, it is not safe because you are making assumptions about the type of flow (turbulent, laminar) etc which are difficult to be sure about. However in the seconmd e-cat report the convective compoent of the output power is relatively small so uncertainty about this does not invalidate the overall results.

The "no radioactivity" problem is more severe than this.

It is well established that LENR effects, if they exist, require some stimulus. They don't go on forever. To make an LENR hypothesis fit the facts you need some reason why the end results of LENR transmutation are always stable nuclei, rather than nuclei with half-lives in the range of minutes to years that would be detected, through radioactive emission, long after the LENR effect is switched off.

To my mind this is the single most difficult to explain characteristic of the evidence under any "LENR works" hypothesis. After all, whether a nucleus is stable or not depends on many factors, not just the binding energy of the nucleus. So the idea that LENR can only work when the target nucleus is high binding energy does not properly hold water.

There are many phenomena which considered individually provide some support, or at least consistency with, some of the various, different, LENR hypotheses. You cannot however take this volume of evidence as adding credibility. You need a single hypothesis that explains (and far preferably predicts) the whole range of different anomalous experimental data. That so far is missing.

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Yet even with very significant and wide spread replications of excess heat, transmutations, He & Tritium production, main stream physics fights to deny the evidence. Claiming as this is outside known physics, it must be fraud. Fraud it is but not by the LENR researchers. The fraud is committed by those who deny the validity of the evidence and refuse to allow LENR researchers to be accepted as valid research and part of the growing understanding and evolution of physics.

There are not many claims that those working in LENR are fraudulent. A very few perhaps, people are imperfect and fraud happens. The issue is that, at least for all of the cases I've looked at, careful examination of the experiments that have been replicated shows that they have very significant possible systematic errors. others, that seem to provide strong evidence, cannot be replicated. Further more the LENR hypothesis does not yet have strong status as a scientific theory. Alain quotes Kuhn but his co-irrationalist Popper makes the strong point that hypotheses that cannot be disproved do not have a strong position. To my knowledge Kim had an LENR hypothesis that made clear experimental predictions (BEC collapse at higher temperatures makes LENR more likely at lower temperatures). He set about to validate these with new experiments and discovered that they were worng. I believe he has since modified his ideas. For scientists, the epistemological strength of a hypothesis which makes correct predictions about unknown phenomena has a power I think many LENR researchers do not acknowledge.

On the other hand, to dismiss those arguing that the evidence for LENR is not strong enough to bear the weight of new physics, with no scientifically disprovable hypothesis to back it, as fraudulent in behaviour or motives, is unsubstantiated and in my view most improper.

Just to put the other side. The Lugano report describes quite extraordinary measurements of nuclear transmutation that defeat any known scientific hypothesis (including LENR ideas) to explain.

However the claimed COP of > 3 is I'm afraid not justified by the report's own measurements. These, inconsistently, show the active test COP at around either 1 or >3 according to which of the reported measurements you use to determine power in. Since these measurements should match there is a clear measurement inconsistency that needs to be resolved before any conclusion can be made from the power measurements. I'm hoping the report authors will be able to resolve this.

Also, previous measurements of what was stated as ash from Rossi have shown contamination by Cu which Rossi has afterwards said could be due to his handling techniques. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Rossi will indicate that the surprising 62Ni results have some such similar explanation and are not in fact difficult to explain evidence of LENR transmutation inside the reactor. After all, it is not easy to see how that 99% pure 62Ni comes from LENR given the apparent constant power out over the period of the test.

History is full of lone inventors convinced they have discovered some new physical effect. Often they are wrong. It is no disgrace for Rossi to be one of this band.

I don't find all of Pomp's points convincing. Many of them are suggestive, which is not helpful.

Arguing that Pomp is biassed and therefore his points should be rejected is wrong: points can be considered on their own merits regardless of who articulated them.

This latest test is interesting in that there are various ways in which it is not as rigorous as any scientist would require to back a new and not yet hypothesised theory. In this case we don't even have a viable LENR theory to explain the presumed set of nuclear reactions that could so completely transform Ni to 62Ni while emitting constant power.

it is even more interesting because it contains internal inconsistencies that appear to explain the high apparent COP on the hypothesis that Rossi's reactor is an electric heater and nothing else.

So if we look only at this latest test we would have to say there is no evidence in it for Rossi having LENR other than the astonishing 62Ni ash.

Still, after the test with measured Cu contaminated ash Rossi did afterwards say that he thought the contamination was due to him, and not from the reaction. In this case perhaps he will do the same?

It is possible for people with no strong views about psychology to look at the facts relating to tests of rossi's e-cat and reach conclusions.

In the case of this latest test the facts do not show the claimed COP of > 3 because there is a significant internal inconsistency in the published data that relates to input power. It has the input power for active tests is inconsistent by a factor of 3.

Of course, the mistake may be resolved in some other way and the recalculated figures still show some interesting COP. But until that happens you do not need to have any agenda or prejudice, nor to speculate about motives, to consider this test as negative.

Please comment on any assumptions in my calculations that you feel could be wrong?

Dear authors,

Please explain the X3 inconsistency between your power in measurements between dummy and active tests as output by the power analyser and as determined from the measured input currents. There would appear to be a X3 (approximately) undermeasurement of power consumption on the active tests, if, as you convincingly argue, the dummy test input power is correctly measured.

Full description with technical details here.

I think this is partially a duplicate of the questions here but maybe more focussed on what is a certain anomaly in the published data.

You might want to check my thread on power measurements in the report. This was inspired by a comment on Pomp's page which seems mostly to have been dismissed. I've written it out without any of the (generally unhelpful) speculation about probity and motives that tends to obscure the hard facts.

While probity etc is an issue when claims are made that appear extraordinary, if, on examination, the claimed extraordinary phenomena is in fact merely mundane that is a stronger argument for not agreeing with extraordinary claims. That seems the case here.

Rossi's tests are unusual in usually having mundane explanations. However the 62Ni measurement of the sample removed by Rossi (and inserted by him) into the reactor has no such mundane explanation. Either Rossi has real cold fusion, or he deliberately substituted the sample for some bought 99% pure 62Ni either on insertion or removal from the reactor. No middle ground is possible.

Rossi has previously (the ash containing copper) admitted to changing the composition of material published by testers as ash from his reactors. In that case the admixture of copper might naively be considered a sure sign of nuclear activity but in reality, because the isotope ratios were natural, that could not be. In this new case the isotope ratio is very far from natural, so far that it is again difficult to see how it could result from LENR with power out that actually increases slightly with time, showing no sign of fuel depletion. After all, 58Ni->62Ni is a highly exothermic reaction and any change in reaction rate would be visible as changed power out.

I'm going to draw some conclusions from the published data in the Lugano Report. I know that others have done similar calculations, but maybe not laid them out with care and clarity.

The measurements I'm going to look at are those for Joule heating in the wires feeding the reactor, and those for total power delivered to the reactor from the control unit. Both sets of measurements are made by the same instrument - a 3 phase power analyser. The Joule heating is calculated from the feed wire (mostly copper) resistivity and the measured RMS current in the wires. The total input power is derived from the power meter. The report authors do not state exactly how this is done but the instrument is very capable and can internally calculate and display many powers. Of particular relevance here it can calculate the total power, and the phase power, which differ by a factor of 3.

The report contains the following measurements for the three cases of dummy test, 1250C test, and 1400C test.

The point is that these measurements are all made by the same equipment, and although assumptions such as the resistivity of the leads etc may be incorrect, the ratio of these powers will always indicate the ratio in resistance of the leads and the Inconel wire heating element. We know the leads are mostly copper and also don't vary much in temperature, so there would seem to be a change in resistivity of the heating element by a factor of 3.3 between the dummy tests and the two active tests.

Interestingly the hotter active test (an extra 150C) does not change the resistivity, as shown by this ratio, by more than 1%. So we have an anomalous 300% change from 500C to 1250C, and a 1% change from 1250C to 1400C.

That is inconceivable, especially because data on Inconel 625 (a high temperature Inconel alloy such as was presumably used) shows less than 5% change over the range 20C to 1090C. See data here.

So we have a X3.3 anomaly in the two methods of measuring power. Either the dummy is wrong or the active test is wrong. We know the dummy is correct (to within 10%) because it matched measured power out. Therefore the dummy ratio is approximately correct, 75, and the correct input power for the active runs is some 3.3X larger than the report power measurement for these cases.

That would make the correct measured COP around 1

Only the report authors can explain how this anomaly came about, but I have a suggestion. Three phase power meters can display phase power or total power. If the equipment was set to total power for the dummy measurement, and set to phase power for the active measurements, it would make a typically X3 difference in the data which would leave an anomaly of only 10%. This could be a result of a small resistivity change and other errors, such as asymmetry of power between the three phases caused by resistance variations causing phase power for a given phase to be different from the typical 1/3 of total power.

The comments above are based solely on the information contained in the published report. I am making no inferences or assumptions about the likelihood or not of LENR, or any matters relating to the probity of the testers or Rossi.

I hope that those who believe this test adds to the evidence for Rossi's e-cat actually having nuclear-level power production will suggest a hypothesis that explains this data in some way consistent with that. I also hope that the authors of the report will identify the error and rewrite the report with consistent data. I note that they have said they may change the report to reflect comment on questions. Perhaps the change in this case could include a description of why the original measurements were inconsistent by a factor of approximately 3 as well as the corrected measurements.

My question, for the authors of the report, would be to explain the above anomaly. In that context it might help to have more information about how the power measurements were taken from the power meter, and whether any checks were made that the measurements taken were in fact identical in the dummy and active run cases. If stored data from the power meter is available this should help to elucidate the matter. Precise information on measurements (are reported currents RMS or average) would also help.

Best wishes, Tom