Posts by Nigel Appleton

It seems to me that the least controlled/controllable aspect of attempts to replicate Mizuno's results is indeed the Ni/Pd nexus. Different meshes, different physical and elemental compositions; different compositions of Pd; compounded by the inherent and inevitable variations of manual rubbing and scraping.

We can hope that SEM and other analytical techniques can shed some light, but that may not happen until more "working" meshes can be looked at. Will there be any chance of eventually comparing existing ones with that being used at the University of Science in Sapporo?

Quote from axil

Andrea Rossi

November 23, 2019 at 9:43 PM

Dear Readers of the JoNP:

We did it.

Obtained permanent self sustaining mode with production of strong excess of electricity, generating more excess of electricity than of heat.

It is a revolution.

We did not violate unity, we just discovered an energy that had not been exploited before.

I am very tired.

Independent parties tests will follow, eventually we will make a presentation.

I think we made something that will make a revolution.

My team colleagues are saying to me ” Andrea, stay calm, be humble”. They are right. Now I am tired, must reorganize the ideas. The work in these last 2 weeks has been very hard, but we did it. This morning, late, we got more electric energy that the electric energy necessary to make the Cat work. The increase is strong.

Too big to be true, but it is true.

If you are reading this message, means I am not dreaming: our Readers are independent parties that can convince me I am not sleeping and I am really writing this.

The merit is of my fantastic Team, without them this could not have been done.

Warm Regards,

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The only sensible response is "Oh, that's nice , dear. And will your imaginary friends be coming to tea this afternoon?"

It's difficult to take seriously anyone who can't be bothered to spell "fluorescent" correctly

With respect to the cited paper

"The astonishing 63Ni radioactivity reduction in radioactive wastes
by means of ultrasounds application"
Alberto Rosada1
· Fabio Cardone2,3 · Pasquale Avino4

Having done a lot of ultrasonication, I would like to see the before/after sonication elemental analysis of sample of various corrosivities NOT containing radionuclides. In my experience sonotrode erosion is common (nay, inevitable), and would possibly account for a good deal of the observed increases in the concentrations of many elements in sonicated material vs unsonicated.

This is out of interest, not to decry interesting results found in other cavitation experiments

Quote from Alan Smith

Nigel Appleton

Jed has said he will find out precisely hos the heater is bent to fit inside the reactor. Re your other queries, the ends of the reactor are precision-machined high-vacuum sealing flanges, Possibly with soft copper gaskets for this temperature range, As for the cable pass-throughs, I'm sure they are sealed, but have no other details.

Thanks, Alan. All this kind of detail will make it easier for would-be replicators.

All quite encouraging, I must say; and with this amount of detail, how different from the "Rossifuscation" we are used to!

A couple of questions, if I may...

Was the query about the length of the sheath heater resolved? (It seemed that the one specified was longer than the reactor, so there was a question about whether it was bent for use)

I see that the reactor is closed at each end with a plate bolted to the flange of the reactor body. Is this a gas-tight, metal-to-metal seal, or is any form of sealant or gasket used?

In the same vein, how are the entries of the heater and the gas-loading/deloading pipe made gas-tight? Is any sealant used?

Quote from THHuxleynew

As a long-term Rossi watcher his breathtaking bragadoccio always amazes me.

My best understanding if it is that he lives in a land far from reality where little details like using the correct measuring equipment to get real results, having the correct certification to be legal, dumping pollutants only when you have permission to do so, actually having stuff that works for his customers, just do not register. He does what he wants and assumes other people will end up agreeing with him as long as he ignores critics.

What amazes me is how successful this strategy has been for him.

At the age of 71, I am no longer amazed by how gullible they can be who want to believe. Even in this age of vast swathes of information available at the click of a mouse, confidence tricksters of all stripes , from psychics to priests, still flourish. It seems to matter not one jot to the faithful that the things they promise never materialise. I am both baffled, and thankful that I have some sense of self-preservation - even though (I admit) I was briefly a Rossi-believer.

I think it's true that most have moved on. Many of that most have come to, or continue to, classify Rossi supporters along with anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, and young earth creationists. That is to say, along with people who can NEVER be convinced by any overwhelming consensus of evidence and data because it doesn't comport with their own ideas and who can NEVER admit to having been wrong.

Such is life. And the planet rolls on, whilst competently done science and engineering continue to yield huge benefits, without recourse to secretive fantasising charlatans.

Well, if anyone thinks IH were the real villains, they'll be glad it cost them millions of dollars!

IMO, they were just gullible and somewhat incompetent.

I'll be writing to Woodford - and others-, pointing out that they could do with a scientifically competent skeptic among their advisors and analysts. I'll do it for a few hundred K a pop, and potentially save them millions! (actually I might take myself seriously - my track record in rejecting dodgy inventors is rather good, and the couple I thought would do pretty well actually did so, although the price was too high for us at the time)

Quote from Paradigmnoia

It took a while, but here is... peak output is at 405 nm, so it must be about 7150 K.

The containment has a surface area of about 70 cm². You can work out the radiant power if you like.

Yes, - but WHAT is it a picture of, exactly?

Quote from Wyttenbach

Nigel Appleton You make some simple mistakes:

Modern arc lamps have an current/light conversion efficiency above 50%. Thus 50% -the light! - passes the quartz without heating it. If somebody claims the peek of the radiation is in the UV range then even more passes without directly heating the quartz device. Such (street-) lamps are rated a some 100 Watts and need no active cooling if the surface is large enough.

But as we know AR being an Italian that always multiplies his real device output/size by a factor of 2-4... With much much goodwill may be 4-5 keV could work out for a plasma tube of his tubes size.

Indeed. My post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Nevertheless, the basis of Rossi's SK "claims" and of the "maths" "supporting" them is this arc-like doodad wherein he calculated the temperature of c. 8000K.

Whatever magic elements he may be cooking up in there, whatever radiation-free transmutations he may in the future claim, starts with a radiating flapdoodle at 8000K.

Now, IF he is getting 20+kW out of it, a question is how he is capturing all that radiated energy. Much of it would seem to be in UV and visible light at wavelengths passing through the envelope, and I'm willing to accept that there would be a whole lot more at longer wavelengths.

He has, I think, hinted at a super-efficient heat exchanger ( well, he's an expert, innit?), but no details.

The fact remains, we can easily produce an arc or body whose temperature calculated by the Rossi method is ~8000K, and which is maintained at that temperature by a few watts of electricity, (and this can be done with off-the shelf components). It should be almost as trivial to whop up an enclosure for it which is also a heat exchanger - say a water-jacket made of a lovely black anodised aluminium- which would capture (virtually) ALL the wavelengths. Then if water is made to flow through the device we can oh! so easily measure inlet and outlet temperatures, and do the calculations.

Or - why is the production of an arc with a temperature of ~8000K NOT a reproduction of the ecatSK?

Well, I can reproduce some at least of Rossi's claims.

I take an arc lamp - for the sake of argument, a deuterium lamp - and its appropriate power supply.

I turn it on - after a brief warm-up, high power is temporarily supplied, and the arc is struck. After that, the arc is maintained by a relatively small current - tens to low hundreds mA.

From the subjective colour of that arc (NOT that I'm looking at t with the naked eye! - I value my eyesight), Wit's a bluish white. With spectrometry, and treating that arc as a black body, I can determine that its temperature, based on its peak spectral output, appears to be, yes, something over 7,000 K. (conventionally known as "cool white")

It gets better. If I (or a non-too-bright assistant) touches the quartz envelope of that lamp, there is badly burnt skin - it is very hot! It is not, however anything like as hot as the arc APPEARS to be, or the quartz would melt.

So far so good. I have a hot-looking arc, and a hot-feeling lamp, running on a low maintenance current

What I will NOT be able to do, however, is to confirm the "mathematical claim" of 22 kW heat output by heat flow measurements.

I could leave that lamp burning in a cold warehouse for as long as it lasted. No-one would begin to feel warm.

OTOH, I could ship in my domestic 24kW condensing gas-fired boiler, some pipes and radiators, and things would probably warm up a bit ( depending on warehouse dimensions, temperature differential between inside and outside, insulation, and draughtproofing.)

So far, so good. I, like Rossi have a hot arc (temperature calculated from known physics); the arc running at a few watts power measured; and a hot envelope around that arc.

This is where the problems begin. The arc must be in thermal equilibrium with its surroundings - it is burning steadily. The envelope containing that arc,is with, say 1 cm of the arc itself. Now, I think I'm right in saying that the most refractory transparent material known is fused quartz, which softens at c. 1680 deg C

Since the amp envelope is not turning to a molten blob, we know that the effective temperature of the whole device is less than 1680 deg C.

"Ah" you say. "But these devices are cooled - the heat is removed"

"Right!" I say. "But you can buy off the shelf an arc lamp with an arc of around the same temperature as Rossi's, calculated in the same way, and the only cooling is air-cooling, possibly fan-assisted. In no way can tens of kW of heat be removed"

So there's the challenge for Rossi-Replicators. Crowd fund whatever arc lamp and power supply you deem fit, and you will easily get an arc maintained by a few watts of power, which you will be able to show by Rossi's calculations to have a temperature of 6-8,000 K

Your challenge is to extract 22 kW heat from it, using whatever method of heat exchange you can find or invent.

Forza ragazzi!!

Quote from THHuxleynew

Wow: I just watched the "demo" video. Why are we even dicussing this?

A warped sense of fun? Nothing else to do? A genuine scientific enquiry into just how much crap some people will believe?

You choose.

Quote from Dewey Weaver

Nigel - you forgot something regarding R's greatest invention to date......

massive, invisible and silent heat exchanger.

Thanks, Dewey!

I'd forgotten the full extent of that particular magnificence

Quote from robwoudenberg

I just wonder whether a plasma core of approx 1.1 cm (long) x 0.3 cm (diameter) with a heat capacity of 22 KW can be easily converted into a steam / hot water stream.
E.g. my home central natural gas heater also has a heat capacity of around 22 KW, but the combustion chamber has a much larger volume.

Easy! You just install a massive, but invisible, heat exchanger.

Rossi knows how!

There is also the knotty problem of how to contain a plasma or arc that has a supposed real temperature of thousands of degrees.

Envelopes of fused quartz, magnesium fluoride and so on won't cut it.

But maybe Rossi has invented a brand spanking new super-refractory transparent material! That on its own could be worth a fortune.

I should perhaps make it clear that although I am quite sure that the ecat and all its manifestations are fraudulent, I am agnostic on LENR in general. There seem to be enough reports from actual scientists of anomalous heat and/or unexpected products to warrant continued investigation by those capable of doing it properly; but my own knowledge of physics is far too limited to make a useful judgement.

But at least I know my limitations!

Although I am (was) a mere microbiologist, my bullcrap detector is active in other fields.

Lots of people are ignoring the facts that a) Rossi, in his first equation is calculating COLOUR TEMPERATURE, and b) that colour temperature is in no way correlated to actual temperature unless one is dealing with a perfect black body OR one knows the emissivity of the source.

Empirically, one can test this by putting the tip of one's pinkie on a lit blue LED. The Colour Temperature of that LED treated mathematically as a black body, will be in the range of mebbe 6,000 + deg K. Your pinkie, however, whilst it may detect warmth, even heat, will not be incinerated - as it would be if you were foolish enough to place it on similarly-sized mass of iron at the same colour temperature.

Try it and see!

Oh, and I see that there's a lot of rubbish about thermalising UV light over at The Other Place. Talk about post hoc rationalisation!

Amongst the many other things I'm dubious about, one is that I can't help wondering if a 20% saving on heating bills is going to be sufficiently attractive to the discerning customer. Even assuming minimal disruption and cost in installing the SKBeast, I can easily imagine a fair proportion of potential customers, once they look closely at their existing arrangements, find that it is relatively simple to save close to that by conventional means (more efficient boilers, better insulation, etc). And all without risking installing a mystery magic machine operating on unknown principles with no firm data or user recommendations to back up the decision.

In my working life, I was offered 2 technologies said to be game-changers (in biology rather than in engineering)

When I enquired about lack of controls in experiments used to generate (supporting) data, I got the "this is so good it needs no controls" schtick. When I pointed out obvious flaws in theory or practice, people got angry. When I asked to try them out in our own laboratory with our own materials, I was met in one case with outright refusal and in the other with a demand for a large non-refundable deposit.

Cheap energy is not the only field beset from time to time by those who range from self-deluded to outright attempted fraudsters. Rossi is not the first, nor will he be the last - the only surprise to me is how he has lasted so long.

And I write as one who was at first intrigued and inclined to believe in the ecat, until I took the trouble to re-educate myself in physics and engineering. (The lack of well-constructed experiments with controls was always a big red flag, though)