Our friends at NyTeknik report: Swedish investment in E-cat halted after test
They state (through Google Translate):
Investors would invest 65 million in the UK company Hydro Fusion driven by four Swedes. The Company has a commercial license agreement with the inventor of E-cat, Italian Andrea Rossi.
The condition was a new measure that could verify the function of Rossi’s E-cat – an energy invention of Rossi’s loaded with small amounts of nickel powder, hydrogen gas, and a number of secret catalysts.
The idea is that more energy will be developed than is entered via electric heating elements. Rossi’s hypothesis is that it is done by a hitherto unknown type of nuclear reaction.
When investors measuring 6 September in Bologna, however, could no heat energy is found beyond the input electrical power.
Investor Group had instructed the SP Swedish National Testing and Research Institute , to monitor the measurement, and the researchers who attended measuring an input electrical power that was two to three times higher than Rossi himself measured (the measurement used the SP called True RMS Instruments ).
IOW, They found that there was three times to power going into Rossi’s device than Rossi was claiming. They continue to state that the COP was no longer over unity. This is the second piece of evidence that I have seen that Rossi may be pulling a fraud. (The other being, of course, the disappointing Krivit video.)
However, the details of this event, especially the scope of the event (is this what is going on with all of Rossi’s versions of the e-cat) has not been established. Further, as I have stated while blogging a hundred times or more — Rossi is unnecessary in establishing the validity of the LENR technology. This does, however, cause one to wonder whether we are looking at 1 year or 10 before a commercial product is available.
(Thanks to Iggy Dalrymple for sourcing this news)
September 10, 2012 at 1:49 pm |
It seems the story is less sad, but quite ridicule.
both team make measure on current only, and because of high frequency, the best tool (swedish) get the most errors…
should have used wattmeter, and also competent technicians.
I got furious about an hypothetical fraud, until I realise that what I could not even imagine, not using a wattmeter, was a reality…
( gathered data there http://www.lenrforum.eu/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=562&p=2261#p2261 )
I’m more surprised about Swedish team looseness… For rossi I’m used.
September 10, 2012 at 2:08 pm |
SP is the organization that made the measurement. It is a well known and respected organization in Sweden. Take a look on their web site sp.se. You will probably realise that your comments about their measuring skills are totaly without substance. They have to make measurments with a quality that meets the requiremnts for a notified body.
September 11, 2012 at 10:19 am |
I would behave like you at first sight. But using a simple RMS meter is loose, especially if you know that there is a Triac variator on the line… Not recognizing the problem is even more loose, after Rossi show the anomaly with
If SP is serious, then either it hired the bad guys (like an nfra red expert for electric power metering), or the protocol is not the one expressed by NyTeknik, letting room for more real problems…
note also that it mean that rossi is using badly filtered variator. normal variator don’t have so huge pulses
September 10, 2012 at 3:24 pm |
I am not discourage because my hope and enthusiasm has been invested elsewhere. We could see a commercial product in a month or two with Brillouin Energy Corp.
But I do confess that I am pulling for Rossi also. Being a chump or a crook is no fun. I want him to succeed, for his sake at least.
September 10, 2012 at 3:56 pm |
I agree with Roger. Anybody who has been pinning their hopes solely on Rossi since October of last year was bound to be disappointed. Rossi’s business plan is a mystery and he seems to be his own worst enemy. But one also needs to remember that the test in question was on the “Hot Cat,” which is still in the early stages of development, not the older technology of the 1MW plants. Apparently the Swedish investment group was ready to plop down $65 million in investment for a positive test on the Hot Cat. That’s a lot of scratch. I would be interested to know if the test will be repeated. As always, we shall see.
September 10, 2012 at 4:17 pm |
Most of the guys at vortex seem disgusted with Rossi, however Jed Rothwell has some amusing left-handed complements:
September 11, 2012 at 2:14 am |
I am shocked by a blindspot. If LENR reactions are exothermic, and only heat goes in and out, then COP (after initial heating) should be infinite. If reaction both use and produce heat, then it obviously could be driven by its own heat. Some heating/cooling is then needed only to balance the reaction and keep it in safe margins. That should mean that real COP depends on good engineering, and that there is nothing intrinsic in it, as Rossi claims.
However, in published demonstation there were no instabilties, no balancing, and COP was roughly equal on any temperature. That stikes me as strange. If reaction is exothermic, under some temperature it would die off, and over some other it would gone berserk.
September 13, 2012 at 3:14 am |
Praos – IMHO you’re absolutely right. Look at the curve of energy in versus energy out, and if it works you should see an exponential superposed on the straight-line once it hits ignition temperature. I can’t see that.
If the reaction is solely driven by heat, then the COP will be infinite in the same way as burning a wood-fire is. Control would be by cooling, not by heating.
There’s just too much attempt to cover up what’s happening here by bad measurements. I see no reaction happening at all in hot-cat, from the data released.
Defkalion’s released data shows evidence of reaction, and since their reaction is driven electrically and not by heat the COP is validly not infinite. They are trying to keep the problems hidden, and it’ll take more experimentation to get it reliable, but I reckon it works. I also reckon Rossi’s earlier systems worked sometimes but were very unreliable, which is why he built arrays of them – increases the chances that one was working at the required time.
September 11, 2012 at 12:32 pm |
This is the response from my facebook friend, a former member of the astronaut corps and currently employed by Siemens.
September 11, 2012 at 2:11 pm |
His reply:
September 12, 2012 at 6:43 am
September 13, 2012 at 3:21 am
Iggy – the heat in a P+F-type electrolysis is correlated with Helium production by quite a few experiments. Not enough of them, it’s true, but it’s a difficult and expensive measurement to make. Problems of fast rise/fall times in the supplied current can be eliminated by using a capacitor on the input, and measuring what is supplied to that – no spikes, no problems measuring. I accept that P+F got things mostly right and that the reaction is well-enough attested to be working.
September 11, 2012 at 9:43 pm |
“We could see a commercial product in a month or two with Brillouin Energy Corp.” Dear God, Roger! Will you NEVER learn?
September 12, 2012 at 3:49 am |
Oh, you’re speaking to Roger Bird. For a moment I thought it was an irreverent prayer using airplane lingo.
September 12, 2012 at 7:06 pm |
Iggy
If you want to see a commercial product from Brillouin, then prayer is the only way!
September 12, 2012 at 7:58 pm |
I’m patient. This is cheap (free) entertainment.
September 13, 2012 at 3:24 am |
Craig – I think it’ll be a few years yet before Brillouin get a commercial product out, but they do seem to be getting credible results. Like Iggy, I’m patient on this. If it was easy, it would have been done a long time ago.
September 14, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Proverbs 23:9
“Do not speak to fools,
for they will scorn your prudent words.”
September 14, 2012 at 9:15 pm
Simon
People who are “patient” for ever get conned for ever! Is Rossi patient? Not he! He’s impatiently selling licences as fast as ever he can.
Iggy
I’m not a bible believer, so don’t worry – I won’t take that advice. I’ll keep on talking to you.
September 15, 2012 at 3:43 am
Craig – Currently I think Rossi’s hot-cat is a crock, and his measurements are wrong. It doesn’t work, IMHO. I’m not worried about investors losing money on it, though – not my money, and they should know the risks. It’s best not to get too excited about Rossi (though people do) but he may at some point pull the cat out of the bag.
Until someone (probably Celani first) gets a working device on the market, we’ll keep on burning oil for our energy. We’ve been doing it a long time, and we know the way to do it. Shale gas seems pretty good, too. There’s no shortage of fuel or energy, just some limitations in the market that could be quite easily fixed given the political will.
Although Patience is a virtue (and I’m feeling virtuous) I’m also exploring various crackpot ways of producing energy. Some of them might actually work…. The more people do this rather than just talk about it, the more chance there are of someone finding something useful.
September 15, 2012 at 4:08 am
Well, Simon, I’ll admit my faith in Rossi has been shaken by his loss of the Swedes but like Jed Rothwell, nothing Rossi pulls off will surprise me. He’s a bull-headed dynamo so, like Edison, he might strike the winning formula.
Craig, while I’m a proud christian, I know I sometimes quote the Bible out of context, but I love words of wisdom where ever you find them. Much of the Bible I cannot understand but a gem I recently stumbled over is “The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.” – Ecclesiastes 10:2
Words of encouragement from ‘New Scientist’ – #13
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html?full=true
September 15, 2012 at 8:01 am
Iggy – I agree on Rossi. We can’t write him off, and I think he believes that he’s got good results. He may stumble on the fix for his earlier devices, too, and end up with a reliable heater. Don’t hold your breath, though.
The New Scientist article has an interesting thing on tetraneutrons. This could be related to the LENR puzzle.
September 13, 2012 at 7:58 am |
Simon, in this latest Bob Rohner video, is the twirling motor recharging the capacitor sufficiently to fire the next stroke?
September 13, 2012 at 8:06 am |
And what drives the motor?
September 13, 2012 at 9:21 am |
Iggy – that little motor is taking excess energy recovered from the electrodes. It’s stored in the black capacitor first, then the motor discharges the capacitor. In the two-cylinder version that energy would be recovered and used as part of the next cylinder firing process.
Bob says that the glitches on the video are because he keeps blowing USB ports on the computers, so he buys old ones that haven’t the performance but are cheap to replace. There’s a fair EMP pulse when the popper fires.
When I first looked at this I’d only seen John Rohner (Plasmerg, Inteligentry) and I saw it as a scam. Bob, on the other hand, actually worked with Papp on getting the original motors built. Unless Papp fooled Bob and a lot of other people, there’s a real physical process at work here. Having seen Bob on video and had some emails with him, I read him as genuine and only claiming what he knows is true. He’s not yet claiming to have got the over-unity performance that Papp did (or appeared to) but if he does I’ll believe him.
December 31, 2012 at 8:34 pm |
This sounds plausible, assuming it’s really overunity (a big assumption). Instead of hooking a Papp piston to a rod and crank, use a “flying piston”, with arcing electrodes on both ends of the cylinder. The “flying piston” would consist of a permanent magnet and the cylinder would be wrapped with a conductive coil. The oscillating piston should generate electricity. Regardless of what the Pappers claim, I believe this would also generate heat from all the air compression and friction.
Watch this video via COLDFUSIONNOW.
December 31, 2012 at 9:08 pm
Seems like there would be a huge vibration problem. An opposing twin piston motor could possibly solve that. Or you could have the cylinder and the piston weigh the same and let both oscillate (like an artillery gun recoils). I also think you could get by with an arc generator on just one end of the cylinder, with the compressed air at the other end sending the piston back for another arc.
January 1, 2013 at 2:28 am
Iggy – I did a frame-by-frame analysis of the video of the piston being fired into the box. I’d estimate flight path around 1.6m, and it took almost exactly 2 frames to do that or about 0.16 seconds, so the piston travels at around 10m/s. This gives an energy of around 25 Joules (in the range 15-40 Joules, since the measurements are not accurate), but took 1122 Joules to fire it. There’s a severe mismatch here in what’s expected/claimed and what we see.
A single double-ended cylinder would give some vibration problems, but put 4 of them together and get the timings right you can get over that. If it can produce more energy than it consumes, then the rest is just engineering and there are a lot of examples of ways people have invented to get round those sorts of problems. Before building an engine to use the effect, it’s a good idea to make sure the effect is well-measured.
January 1, 2013 at 6:29 am
Simon, wouldn’t this enable a Papp-Pulse Jet powered aircraft?
January 1, 2013 at 6:48 am
Iggy – if we could get an over-unity result from normal air at various pressures, this would indeed be good to make a jet-propulsion system. NASA have experimented with plasma drives in space, using little puffs of Xenon as the fuel. Nasa have not seen over unity operation.
The problem is getting to over unity, though. I’ll tell you when I’ve got some auspicious figures. At the moment, where I can estimate figures, the result is not even 100% efficient. It seems Papp got a COP of around 80 but no-one knows whether this is really true or was fudged somehow. It’s worth the effort to find out, though, since if it is possible then like LENR it will change the world for the better.
January 1, 2013 at 7:03 am
Even without overunity, it might be more efficient than a conventional turbojet. With a ramjet, there would be no moving parts, except in the generator.
January 1, 2013 at 9:04 pm
Sounds like adding a small amount of water to the air might significantly increase the energy of the plasma induced expansion. http://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/P4.pdf
January 2, 2013 at 1:51 am
Iggy – that should work, but you’d get really heavy con-trails all the time and not just when climatic conditions were right. This would have a very distinct cooling effect on the world if widely used, as it would be because it would be cheap to run. If we’re hovering on the brink of another ice-age as it seems, then this would not be a good idea.
Some versions of free energy could end up being more costly in other ways.
January 2, 2013 at 1:39 pm
It would still be a worthy experiment. It might not add enough con-trails to be a problem…..or you might use the plasma as a temporary booster, like old-time JATO.
January 2, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Iggy – There’s some reasonable research that shows that cloud-cover is causing the temperature variations, and that cosmic rays may be involved in cloud formation. See http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/interesting-cosmic-rays-paper/ which serendipitously was put up today.
Just after 9/11 there was a total fly-ban in the States. The lack of con-trails gave a significant difference in day/night temperature intervals (3°C IIRC). If we are heading in to a higher cosmic-ray, lower temperature regime, then extra-thick con-trails will be a problem and will reduce the farming yield. Could be a high price to pay for cheap flights.
For ground-based systems, where you can absorb the mist produced and not let it out, this would probably work, and especially for individual-sized generators could be good. Fill the tank with water and get electricity.
I haven’t yet seen replications of that research yet, though, so could be a mistake in measurements. Worth a test.
January 2, 2013 at 3:24 pm
Yes, I’ve always believed that nature’s climate trigger and regulator was water (in all its forms, liquid, ice, & vapor). Plus possibly solar activity. CO2 matters but is dwarfed by the effect of water.
September 14, 2012 at 4:54 pm |
“You picked a fine brine to leave me, Saline.”
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=733&cpage=2#comment-322934
September 14, 2012 at 4:57 pm |
September 14, 2012 at 5:04 pm
September 15, 2012 at 8:16 am
Iggy – that’s a bad enough pun to be English. But yes, it makes no difference to the salt that’s removed. Desalination is only useful near the sea, though.
September 15, 2012 at 3:24 pm |
OK, brave new world, what happens after a thousand years or so of desalinating seawater? Assuming we dump the salt back into the ocean, won’t the sea become too salty for sea life?
September 15, 2012 at 3:33 pm
Iggy – no problems. The water stays on the earth somewhere and will evaporate back into the air. Rain will fall in the oceans – really no difference.
Having said that, the oceans have gradually become saltier. I remember reading that the reason our cells have the salt-level they do is that that was the salinity of the oceans when the cells came to be. Gradually the rain washed salts from the earth and rocks into the oceans, so it became more concentrated. That’s going to happen just the same.