Posted on 06/15/2011 10:47:24 PM PDT by Kevmo
LENR: Is It Real Or Fake?
Wednesday | June 15, 2011
Alan Fletcher has been closely following developments with the Rossi-Focard E-Catalyst process, including attempts to verify its veracity, one approach being to find ways it can be faked. Here, with his permission, is what he has learned so far.
Can Rossi and Focardi Be Faking Low Energy Nuclear Reaction? Italian engineer Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi recently announced a Cold Fusion device, the Energy Catalyzer or eCAT. Its heart is a fist-sized reactor chamber, containing Nickel and a secret ingredient, which is loaded with Hydrogen. The reactor is heated with resistors, and at some critical temperature it ignites, producing copious power, (ranging in these tests from 2.6 kW to 130 kW), which can be used to heat or boil water. Modules can be combined in series and parallel: Rossi is manufacturing a 1 MW water-heating system for a factory in Greece. He plans to market domestic units in 2012.
As NASA Langleys Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell said, this is capable of, by itself, completely changing geo-economics, geo-politics and of solving .. energy.
Rossi demonstrated the eCAT as a black box. The experimenters couldnt look inside, but they chose and provided all the instrumentation. They measured the inputs electrical power, hydrogen, input water (volume and temperature), and the output water (temperature) or steam (temperature and dryness). From these they calculated the power. Four tests were performed, by three different teams of scientists, ranging from 30 minutes to 18 hours.
So is it Real? Or Fake? If it is a fake, how might it be made, and how could we detect it without looking inside the Black Box?
The first type of fake has a Fixed Energy Content such as chemicals or batteries. To detect these, we make it run out of gas. How long would that take? To be very, very conservative, assume that the ENTIRE volume of the eCAT contains Fakium, that NO space is taken by tanks or burners, and that it is 100% efficient. Calculate the Fakes Energy by multiplying the Volume by the Energy Density of the Fakium and divide by the observed Power, giving the Fake Run Time.
If the Fakes Run Time it SHORTER than the actual experiment then the Fake is ELIMINATED. If the Fake runs LONGER then the experiment, then it is NOT eliminated. (This does not prove that it IS a Fake.)
The easiest Fake uses batteries. The most efficient are Lithium-Ion, with an Energy Density of 1 kWH per Liter. If the volume of the eCAT is 10 Liters, it contains at most 10 kWH. If the power is 2 kW then the Fake could run for 5 hours.
This Fake Run Time can be calculated for all known chemicals. Obvious ones are hydrogen and oxygen with an energy density of 2.8 kWH/L (easy to make, and the steam can be hidden in the output). Diesel burned with air is efficient (10.4 kWH/L), and feasible, but it is hard to hide, because it requires an intake of air, and produces fumes. One of the highest energy densities is Boron burned with Air (38.3 kWH/L) but that is neither feasible nor concealable. Beryllium is better, but it is extremely poisonous. Surprisingly, explosives have a much lower density 10 kWH/L -- they just release their energy quickly.
The second class of Unlimited Energy fakes could run forever. For example, there might be hidden wires or microwave beams supplying power. Most interesting is a Tarallo Water Diversion Fake : as the name implies, only part of the input water is heated, and the rest is diverted to the output. These types of fake can be eliminated by carefully inspecting the eCAT and designing the tests correctly.
The third class of fake would pass ALL the black box tests. They would not, in fact, be Fakes, but would be equally important scientific breakthroughs.
So if one can eliminate ALL known Fakes then, as Sherlock Holmes famously and repeatedly said, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, and the eCAT must be REAL.
Unfortunately the four tests didnt measure everything, or werent run long enough, so although EVERY type of fake was eliminated by ONE experiment, no ONE experiment eliminated ALL possible fakes.
Using these criteria, the eCAT is judged to be real by a preponderance of evidence, but not yet beyond all reasonable doubt.
These fakes, and many more, are analyzed in detail by Alan Fletcher, who has been following these developments on the web. You can see his report at lenr.qumbu.com.
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How to Prove that the Rossi/Focardi eCAT LENR is Real
LENR.QUMBO.com ^ | April 6, 2011 | Alan Fletcher
Posted on Sunday, June 05, 2011 7:52:15 PM by Kevmo
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2730401/posts
LOL. All this talk about eliminating fakes and I scroll down and there’s a picture of Romney.
Thanks for posting this, Kev. The E-Cat is one of the few breakthroughs in alternative energy that shows real promise.
The articles I see posted here seem to be taking on a more and more positive tone. I think that’s a very good indicator.
There are some pretty respectable labs still working on LENR and they still haven't figured out the anomalies. The know the reaction is real, but it's still somewhat rare and they don't exactly know why.
Hopefully, I am wrong because if this is real, it has to potential of destroying the Arabs and freeing economies across the globe... it's that big of a deal.
Well, it won't be the first time in technology where a complete outsider jumps in and makes a completely revolutionary discovery or has a completely revolutionary insight. A couple of quick examples....amorphous silicon semiconductors (thought to be impossible....now commonplace), and the recent discovery of a way to make steel more than 7% stronger, yet still ductile (steelmaking was considered a "mature technology", with very few secrets still to come....yet "there you are").
LOTS of "very respectable labs" had worked for many years, nay decades even, and in the case of steel....centuries....,yet these insights eluded them. It took an outsider to recognize...."hey, there are TREES in that forest".
I'm cautiously optimistic about the E-Cat. Still waiting for October/November though.
Remember that big to-do, maybe 25 years ago, about some guy out in the boonies who had discovered that carbon dioxide could be used to make super-tough concrete? He cured the concrete, under pressure, submerged in liquid CO2, and the results were said to be amazing.
He was all over the news for a week or so, and then... nothing.
I was working at a US Government facility last year; while I was there they built a big new addition with all the latest blast-proof construction features. I didn’t see a single CO2 tank, or tanker truck, or pressure-curing vessel.
Sometimes these flash-in-the-pan technologies look great during the “hype” phase, but don’t work out for a variety of reasons. Doesn’t have to be fraud involved, either.
That said, I think that some sort of LENR or cold fusion phenomonenon will be developed eventually.
If this device is real and performs as expected, it won’t take the EPA very long to write regulations that will effectively ban its use.
One thing that has impressed me has been the reliability of the E-cats in the demonstrations. There has been no tinkering, no “Hold on, we’ll have it working in another hour” kind of stuff. That’s surprising given the prototype stage of development even if it was ‘old-school’ technology. So if it is not a fraud, it appears to be decently reliable (and would only get more so as it is commercialized).
. So very true. Sometimes technically novel approaches simply aren't economically feasible, or run into problems in mass production.
And in fact, Rossi had run into the same problem with a previous innovation. He had developed a highly efficient approach to direct generation of electricity from heat. His lab prototypes were independently tested, and worked exactly as claimed. But attempts to scale up to mass production were unsuccessful. A lot of folks are using this technical failure to paint Rossi as "a scammer", when, in fact, the tech worked, but production capabilities were inadquate to the task.
Here’s a link to an article claiming replication of Rossi’s experiment but the comments are far more informative than the article.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/06/brian-ahern-getting-8-watts-in-low.html
Its heart is a fist-sized reactor chamber, containing Nickel and a secret ingredient, which is loaded with Hydrogen.
.........AND TODAY'S SECRET INGREDIENT IS........................UNOBTANIUM!!!!!!!...........................
Firefly battery technology...........
LOL......"Sturgeon's Law"
Your percentage is right on target.
Try Sarah Palin's tanning bed....... ;^)
Good find, there. Hadn’t seen that one yet.
Must be hidden in a black box? Well, I would trust that. When I was in New York City, this guy on the sidewalk had a black box that would turn dollar bills into $20 bills. I bought it for only $1000.
“”There are some pretty respectable labs still working on LENR and they still haven’t figured out the anomalies. The know the reaction is real, but it’s still somewhat rare and they don’t exactly know why.””
Perhaps they need Rossi’s secret reagent to obtain a reliable and predictable reaction.
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