Posted on 10/30/2011 3:34:51 PM PDT by Kevmo
1MW eCat Post Mortem
admin on October 30, 2011 — 99 Comments
The 1MW test is complete. When you cut through the clutter, we are told that the device ran for around five and a half hours in self-sustain mode at a rate approaching half a megawatt. On the surface, it appears to have been highly successful .
As expected, we do not know the identity of the customer and much rests on this. According to Dr Rossi, they have accepted the machine and he will now be paid. It appears that the customer was in charge; its own engineers selecting the location of thermocouples, the test criteria and how long the run should last to satisfy them. They had free access and appeared to be more than happy at the end of the day. Since the requirements of science and business do not always meet, it will be some time before sceptics believe this is true. For business, the financial markets and governments to take notice, all we need to know is that this customer was competent and independent of the eCat team .
eCatNews followed the event throughout the day. That post and those that followed provide a good snapshot and will link you to the parts of the Net important to the 28 Oct test .
My confidence has been raised – but until we know the identity of the customer, I am not ready to jump with both feet. Rossi had the following to say about that:
Andrea Rossi
October 29th, 2011 at 12:14 PM
Dear Max: The Customer is of a category that usually maintains secret all they do. I do not know if and when they will want to make public statements and I am bound to a strict non disclosure agreement. Warm Regards, A.R .
This is not suspicious but neatly skirts the hope of nailing this thing down so that it continually frustrates our grasp at certainty .
A genuine company, having taken delivery of such a thing, now belongs to the rare club that knows for a fact if this is real or not. If it is real then that knowledge on its own is extraordinarily valuable – either as a means to invest in the tech while confusion confounds potential competitors or as intelligence to inform playing the markets (assuming it is not a Government body or NGO). Shorting (for instance) a sector dominated by high-risk energy projects like the Canadian Tar Sands (or any other project where the value depends on high oil prices well into the future) would not be considered insider trading because all of this information is out there on the Net and because that information is about potentially competing technology and not the target companies themselves .
Unfortunately, if Rossi hired a bunch of actors to pretend to be the customer reps, created an elaborate year-long special-effects-derived series of demos, bribed, hypnotised or otherwise fooled Focardi, Levi, Kullander, Essen, Bianchini, Stremmenos and convinced a bunch of Greek crooks to set up a dummy company called Defkalion to pretend to fight with him over the non-existent eCat, to perpetuate the illusion and spin it off into a competing mirror-scam and convinced his former partners to set up another company called Ampenergo to pretend that they had a contract for The Americas for a substantial sum or that they just did this with no proof because they have worked with Rossi and trust him because he’s such a fine fellow, arranged for Piantelli, Miley and a host of others to try to fool the world into thinking that cold fusion was real, got NASA, SPAWAR, The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and The Defense Intelligence Agency to say nice things about the field, got Bushnell to make a fool of himself, sold his profitable company to his ex-partners in order to spend that wealth on a multi-million dollar scam; certain that once he got all the above ducks in a row he would pretend to sell the first device and then reel in the true target of his dastardly plan – the second (this time genuine) buyer of a 1MW plant that will net him $2 million dollars until they want their money back or sucker a $100 million dollar deal under the table because he has experience in pulling the wool over all these idiotic eyes and knows that they will just take his word for it and not want to test if his 1MW plant can heat a small village without truckloads of coal or oil or a big fat electric cable coming into the container from beneath the floor (no you can’t lift the carpet!) and that, in order to pull this off, Rossi had to risk discovery by interviewing all the people he subsequently fooled so that he could only invite the gullible Professors and not the brilliant anonymous posters on the Internet who surely would have found him out – then all bets are off and I’m with the guys who think that Rossi is an idiot and they are all geniuses .
[If you wish to put some flesh on the outline above, eCatNews Brief 1 summarises the cold fusion story, while eCatNews Brief 2 looks at Andrea Rossi's eCat
How are they getting financing? Is this a public company that is developing this?
***It’s all done privately, and Rossi claimed he wasn’t seeking investors. There was an article a few months back that said he had attracted 400M in euros but it seems impossible to track.
A one-day test proves something?
***For this particular customer, yes. For those of us who have been following LENR, this customer got a bargain basement deal.
When I was a kid, a new kid showed up on our block. His dad was a famous baseball player for the SF Giants. I basically didn’t like him. I thought I was prejudiced or something, because this was the first black family in the neighborhood and since I didn’t like him, something was wrong with me.
He grew up to be a very famous baseball player himself. It turns out that many people did not like him. He’s facing a grand jury right now for lying about steroid usage, even though he retired a couple of years back. People really do not like him, even though he holds pretty much the most coveted records in baseball history.
Both your story and my story show that character shows up early, when we were kids.
I believe that the customer is actually known now. Apparently the customer name was inadvertently left in one of the spreadsheets that were released after the test.
It is reportedly Manutencoop Facility Management. Here is some info on them:
Manutencoop Facility Management S.p.A. provides management services for real estate, building, and equipment. Its services include management and maintenance of heat conditioning, air conditioning and refrigerating systems, antifire systems, electric and lighting systems, buildings, real estate, and technological equipments. The company also provides cleaning and pest control, hospital laundry and sterilization, office support, accessorial, catering and canteen, security, and night watch services; and real estate property services.
This is exactly what the climate-change hoaxers do; the science is settled, but no you can’t reproduce the results independently and you are a racist for even asking.
I’m skeptical. Why don’t they hire an independent testing lab to operate and evaluate the thing. I assume they have a users manual or set of operating instructions that a lab could use.
That last paragraph is a keeper. ;-)
This is exactly what the climate-change hoaxers do
***No, it isn’t. If some climate-change do-gooder built a box that he said could remove greenhouse gases really cheap, then demo’d it and sold it to some undisclosed company, then that would be the proper parallel.
If you think I’m racist for even asking then you’ll enjoy my story just a little bit upthread.
Why don’t they hire an independent testing lab to operate and evaluate the thing.
***In effect, that’s what a paying customer is. If it passes their testing, you get paid. Rossi claims he is getting paid.
If you say they can't, then it ain't science and you are just like the climate-fraudsters.
Manutencoop Facility Management
***They are less than a $100M company. I would expect that they are the Facility Management team for the actual customer, who is likely to be a multi-$B company.
So, how can the results be reproduced independently?
***Rossi is just the latest in a long line of LENR researchers who are investigating the Pons-Fleischmann effect, which has been replicated more than 14,700 times.
If you say they can’t, then it ain’t science
***What Rossi is doing ain’t science; it’s business. He developed a catalyzing process that makes the P-F effect easier to replicate, so much so that it is now a newly commercializable product.
and you are just like the climate-fraudsters.
***This is starting to sound like a boogey-man thing, like Godwyn’s Law for science nonsense.
unfortunately, reality lies between option 1 and 2.
Both Mr Rossi and Mr Mills have been focusing on a process in which 2 (not 1) chemical reactions occur. One of the reactions is not a reaction in the conventional sense and is more accurately a physico-chemical process. Mr Mills ‘’discovered’’ this process at least 2 years before Mr Rossi. Where Mr Mills attributes the Ni/H process as a hydrino process, Mr Rossi attributes the same process as Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reaction (LENR). Mr Mills (BlackLight Power) has built a various prototypes (1 kW to 1 MW) Ni/H at least 2 years before Mr Rossi and these prototype performed well below expectations. Just like this weekend test of Mr Rossi was very much underwhelming: one can get the same results from a shorted conventional Ni/H battery.
I am very sure that - at least in the beginning - Mills and Rossi were very sincere.
When a freshly-made reactor was used, the initial - keyword: initial - energy output per unit mass of hydrogen is about 20 to 60 times the energy output of a typical chemical reaction.
What excitement!!! This 20 to 60 ratio was the basis of the Rossi fanboys’ ‘’proof’’ that what one is seeing is indeed LENR and the basis of Mills’ fanboys’ ‘’proof’’ of hydrino reactions.
Now is where the sense of dread kicks in for the fanboys: as more hydrogen is fed into the reactor, the energy output per unit mass of hydrogen decreases eventually to 1 time the energy output of a typical chemical reaction. If one sum up the total energy output of the Rossi/Mills reactor, the average energy output per unit mass of hydrogen is about 2 times that of 1 typical chemical reaction. Rossi’s fanboys are not divulging everything and they need to - somehow - account to whoever is/are the investor(s). Mills’ fanboys have been a little bit more honest.
Rossi’s tests are short-lived (3-6) hrs because the excess energy ratio drops from, say, 20, to 1 rapidly. So the demo stops when the excess ratio is, say, 2.
I am sure the following conversation is taking place:
Mr A: The excess ratio has dropped to 2, when just 1 hour ago it was at 20.
Mr B: That is because the Ni substrate has been ‘’deactivated’’ from the LENR process.
Mr A: So all we have to do is to ‘’reactivate’’ the Ni substrate for further LENR to continue.
And what they will find out is that the energy spent in ‘’reactivating’’ the Ni substrate is at least greater (well, no process is 100% efficient) that the energy collected from the subsequent ‘’LENR’’ reaction (put LENR in quotes since it is not an actual LENR). Mr A and Mr B will say to the investors that they need to ‘’tweek’’ the Ni reactivation process.
Neither Rossi nor Mills have published a complete energy audit of the fuel-product cycle. From what I gather the demos were incomplete (purposefully?) so the observers are lead - inadvertently?- to the incorrect hydrino/LENR hypothesis.
The test need to be complete (at least 72 straight hours, preferably 240 hours). For it to be practicable - utilitywise - the steam output needs to be at least 375oC (critical temp of water) so there is no issue of different coexisting phases: steam at 100oC can be easily of the “wet” variety. No such ambiguity with supercritical steam.
What Rossi has done this weekend is no way comparable to the Wright Brothers’ first mechanized flight. With the case of aviation, any village idiot can see the Wright Brothers’ flight was real: there were no suspended cables keeping it afloat.
Where for Rossi’s latest test, all the results can be duplicated by a shorted conventional Ni/H battery. And the village idiot will say the same thing.
Oh, and Mr Mills (BlackLight Power) has at least 40 engineers in NJ working on the same contraption and got stuck quick quick and deep. And these engineers are not dummies. And - unlike Rossi - the engineers are at least publishing in reputable periodical their experiments in the extreme-UV region: but these results can be explained with conventional electrodynamics and the hydrino hypothesis is not needed. The hydrino fanboys’ also make the false and inapplicable comparison with the Wright Brothers.
What was the state of the art at the time of the Wright Brothers? The aerodynamics was worked out. What was left was propulsion and reliable control. The issue of control was worked out by others before the Wright Brothers. The genius of the Wright Brothers was to put a gasoline engine on an airframe. The roadblock was to find a engine with a high enough power density. Have you ever seen a steam-powered airplane? With no internal combustion engine, the would be no aviation.
I think they are the actual customer. Looking to use this to heat buildings, which is about all you could do with it in its current state of development (assuming it isn’t an outright scam).
But I suppose we’ll see.
Energy is not created, anymore than your car's engine 'magically' makes you go bye-bye. Hydrogen and Nickel are the fuel - energy is the outcome. In a nuclear reaction (which this claims to be a part of - and all evidence so far substanciates) the waste product is Copper and lots of heat.
Fusion reactions above iron absorb energy.
Hmmm.
BTW, it seems a little convenient that the name of a company was inadvertantly left in a spreadsheet.
I agree. The whole thing looks sloppy to me.
Why would you short it?
They use such batteries in the wind power business ~ they try NOT to short them.
Rossi's device uses a standard size a bit shorter ~ 20 ft maybe ~ weighs much less, and has essentially the same racks and facings ~ prewired to handle all sorts of stuff AND has pipes for water.
No doubt the standard equipment is serviceable for all sorts of things.
Did you ever "short" one of these suckers? I've seen a substation full of transformers slag out but "short"?
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