The Physics of why the e-Cat's Cold Fusion Claims Collapse

"Starts with A Bang!" Blog ^ | 12/5/2011 | Dr. Ethan Siegel, Dr. Peter Thieberger

[Lx]

Are you looking for investors for this incredible device? I don’t need to see it work, just tell me some scienc-y sounding words, gets some past their sell-by date scientists to confirm it works and I’ll invest and convince my friends to as well.

What, you had a past prior conviction for fraud? OH I see, the mob was framing you. I understand, you were innocent, great!

Well that certainly doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm for your remarkable device or you.

When can I tour your fifth floor apartment manufacturing facility?

[Greysard]

but what if they never turned it off as I suspect they did?

Where would you get a 0.5 MW diesel generator that doesn't have a meter of output power? Where would you get a customer who for the duration of several hours not even once looks at the control panel of that generator? Is there even one person alive on this planet who can't tell apart the sound of the diesel idling and the sound of the same diesel running at a 1,000 horsepower?

The only possibility of the generator running and producing power is attached to the scenario where the customer is working for Rossi. But then it doesn't matter what the generator is doing. If the customer was fake then it would be far better for Rossi to run the experiment for 24 hours and to turn the generator off. His "pocket customer" would tell whatever they wanted to hear anyway.

This doesn't preclude the possibility of the fake, but it makes the circumstances strange and worse for Rossi if he was in control.

With regard to the schematic, indeed differential pairs cancel the magnetic field. However I am unsure if that's how they measured the current. It would be impossibly dumb to do it this way because to measure power you need access to the voltage as well. Because of that an AC power meter just gives you an outlet, and whatever you plug into that outlet is measured. Wiring of your cord doesn't matter. The schematic seems to be a strawman until someone shows that it's exactly how they measured the power.

[dinodino]

Well, we will never know exactly how they measured power, because Rossi restricted access to the test. Rossi’s loosey-goosey test “methodology” intentionally omits annoying details like this.

[Johnny B.]

This doesn't preclude the possibility of the fake, but it makes the circumstances strange and worse for Rossi if he was in control.

As long as we're asking questions about the October 28th test, why would an organization so concerned with secrecy and supposedly in control of the test allow Rossi to invite a bunch of strangers (including an Associated Press reporter) to the multi-million dollar acceptance test?

Rossi certainly could have allowed his own demonstration of the "Megawatt E-Cat" either before or after the acceptance test, and if he had done so, he could have allowed his observers to actually observe elements of the test, instead of just having them stand at a distance and watch absolutely nothing of interest.

The only way this makes any sense is if it wasn't actually an acceptance test from a publicity-shy organization, but rather a publicity stunt by Rossi.

Wiring of your cord doesn't matter. The schematic seems to be a strawman until someone shows that it's exactly how they measured the power.

Here is a picture of how they measured the electric power in to the E-Cat in one of the early tests (LINK):

[Johnny B.]

Sorry, the original site won't let me link directly to the photo of Rossi measuring current to the E-Cat.

The picture is HERE, between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way down. It shows the wires broken out of their sheath, with an induction amp meter reading one wire.

[Johnny B.]

It shows the wires broken out of their sheath, with an induction amp meter reading one wire.

According to THIS post on the Vortex mailing list, a reporter friendly to Rossi, Mats Lewan, build the section of power cord in the picture and took the measurements.

I believe that Lewan has been insufficiently diligent in covering this story, but I have no reason to assume that he is lying about this, or that Jed Rothwell is being less than honest about passing along the information.

[exDemMom]

As one of the comments at the blog says, Rossi hasn't cost us even a cent, so why to bother?

According to the Google translation of the Italian wikipedia entry on PetrolDragon (Rossi's scam "fuel from waste" company), the toxic waste clean-up resulting from Rossi's scam has cost millions of euros and billions of pounds. So, Rossi's "eCat" may not have cost anyone except gullible investors a cent, but Rossi's previous scams cost everyone a LOT. I'm not sure why Rossi isn't currently in prison for that. For that kind of environmental damage, he does not deserve to be running around free to commit other scams.

[Greysard]

The picture is HERE, between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way down.

All photos on their site say "Don't steal our bandwidth." I have no idea what are they thinking or doing :-)

Anyway, there is a description that they used a single clamp AC current meter on a single wire. That only tells you the RMS current that flows through this one wire. If the setup is grounded (as it better be) then the other wire can carry much more power, and this one could be just a return current from a fake load. The measurement of phase of that current would tell you the whole story. A modern GE electric power meter has a DSP inside to take care of all the complexities.

Unfortunately every measurement in those experiments is done in most amateurish way, and different experiments are not building confidence (one proving the other) but are unreliable data points all over the place, unconnected and proving little.

I don't know what kind of scientific advice Rossi is getting. But if I were in charge I would simply build a demo system in a Lexan box and hang the box in the air with a detachable Nylon rope. The box would have four wires coming into it. One pair would go into the wall outlet, and another pair would connect to an obvious load - a large light, for example. Then everyone could clearly see what power is coming in and what power is coming out, and they can lift the box, lower the box, remove the rope to be sure that nothing else connects to the box.

This of course would require to build some sort of a steam engine to convert thermal power to electric power. I'm sure any designer of car engines can easily lend a hand here, and Italy shouldn't have shortage of those engineers. This method would be comparing apples to apples, and it would be very difficult to debate whether the machine works if it is set up this way and operates for weeks non-stop. Since it produces electric power, it should be possible to completely disconnect it from external power, making the demo even better. This is the basics, this is something that anyone who ever made a demo of a technology should know.

[Greysard]

According to THIS post on the Vortex mailing list, a reporter friendly to Rossi, Mats Lewan, build the section of power cord in the picture and took the measurements.

The method that Lewan describes is reasonable:

I made my own connection cord which I put in series, both at the main power supply and between the blue control box and the resistor in the Ecat. The connection cord was a standard 2 phase + ground, with the three single wires uncovered to be able to use the clamps ampere meter. I measured the current through all three wires regularly.

He measured the worst case, such as the current and the voltage are in phase, which they should be if the load is resistive. In reality, though, the load is slightly inductive, and his proper measurements should have shown that. A cheap Kill-A-Watt meter would be sufficient to measure these effects. Those guys are amateurs.

There is one potential problem with this measurement, though. Imagine that the wall socket is rewired to have both contacts "hot" and none are "neutral." Then the device, measured this way, would be able to draw double the power, with return current going through the ground connection that is done via pipes (if there is such a connection.) The reason for this is that Lewan didn't measure the direction of current flow in all wires. In a properly functioning outlet current flows out of the hot terminal, goes through the load, and returns through the neutral terminal. The sum of both currents should be zero, and that can be checked by clamping the meter on both hot and neutral wires. Did he do that? In a rigged system both terminals would be hot, and the current would flow in the same direction over both wires. The clamp over them together would show double the current. The drawback of this rigging is that a regular load wouldn't work in that outlet.

[Greysard]

I found one more bit of troubling news on that Web site with "Don't steal our bandwidth" photos. They say there:

Deactivation

In his report on the experiment dated March 29, 2011, Professor Sven Kullander wrote the reaction was stopped by switching off the heater and increasing the cooling water flow to a maximum of 30 litres per hour.

I wonder how do I terminate the reaction if the external power is lost? This happens all the time. Will the reactor melt down? Explode? What exactly will happen if the coolant flow is reduced or stopped? Those are not idle questions to ask; cooling problems caused Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents.

[Kevmo]

Thanks for the ping. From the article: In fact, the entire “observed” effect of having your system continue to generate heat even after it’s been turned off is remarkably simple to rig.
***In fact, it was exactly this kind of ‘hidden wire’ trick that several observers such as Levi were looking for.

[Kevmo]

Re: [Vo]:a long paper about and mainly against the E-cat

http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex- href=”mailto:l@eskimo.com”>l@eskimo.com/msg58245.html

Jed Rothwell
Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:18:30 -0800

Here is a comment from Lewan Mats about this topic:

Hi Mary and Ahsoka,

Saw your discussion about power cords on Vortex. You can rule them out.

I made my own connection cord which I put in series, both at the main power
supply and between the blue control box and the resistor in the Ecat.

The connection cord was a standard 2 phase + ground, with the three single
wires uncovered to be able to use the clamps ampere meter. I measured the
current through all three wires regularly.

Another scam suggestion is having a hidden rectifier and using whole wave
rectified current, which would then be measured as lower than it really was
by a clamps ampere meter in AC position. The idea would be to use this at a
moment when you pretend to decrease the input current, but in reality you
don’t.

To rule that out I measured both current and tension in both AC and DC
position, regularly throughout the experiment.

To put it short – there’s no cheating at the input.

Feel free to share this on Vortex.

Mats

[Johnny B.]

Sorry you're having trouble with the pictures on that site. When I tried to post just the picture in question, they returned their "obnoxious" picture. However, when I go to the web site, the pictures do appear for me.

I wonder how do I terminate the reaction if the external power is lost? This happens all the time. Will the reactor melt down?

Rossi claims that if the system gets too hot, it shuts itself down. As with almost everything about this story, we have to rely on Rossi's unsubstantiated claims on this.

[Johnny B.]

The only possibility of the generator running and producing power is attached to the scenario where the customer is working for Rossi. But then it doesn't matter what the generator is doing. If the customer was fake then it would be far better for Rossi to run the experiment for 24 hours and to turn the generator off. His "pocket customer" would tell whatever they wanted to hear anyway.

The purpose of this dog & pony show was to convince the outside world that something was going on. That's why an alleged customer that was so concerned about secrecy nevertheless allowed Rossi to bring in a bunch of outside observers including an A.P. reporter.

When you consider what the outsiders actually saw, it's not at all impressive. They saw a cargo container, filled with boxes covered with foil and some plumbing connecting those boxes. They saw a diesel generator running the whole time. And, they saw a very brief and unprofessional "report" written up at the end of the test. That's all they saw.

No one was allowed to take a close look at any of the E-Cat devices. For all we know, they could have been cardboard moving boxes covered in tin foil. No one was allowed to get close to the heat exchanger to see if it was hot or not.

And no one was allowed to take any measurements of any part of the system.

Once you eliminate the "showmanship" there's nothing left.

[Johnny B.]

FYI, HERE is a newspaper report on a scammer with an alleged new process for sending high-quality video over ordinary telephone modems.

One interesting part is how he made a "fake" power strip, which included a video coax cable "hidden" inside the power cord. That, and a half-mile spool of coax, allowed him to fake sending his high-quality videos between two sites.

In spite of the fact that his device was nothing more than a VCR hidden in a computer chassis and a couple of modified power strips, he managed to get almost $10 Million from companies like Blockbuster and Intel.

[muawiyah]

Or, Rossi's whole large e-cat set-up was simply a recent vintage towable 1 MWh battery good for 5.5 hours.

That's much simpler than your scenario.

There are actual pictures on the net showing such batteries with equipment cabinets absolutely identical to those inside the e-cat.

[muawiyah]

"They" let him loose because it turned out he wasn't directly guilty of anything at all.

The Italians had/have EPA laws that follow a common standard in the EU, and they are pretty much in line with our own.

Initially (and that's even before Rossi's time) if you simply bought a piece of property that had been thoroughly polluted EPA could drag you into court and force you to clean it up ~ or imprison you for failure to do that.

The state of the law has been improved a bit since those heady times ~ but not all that much. For instance I'd never buy a private home owned by a jeweler or goldsmith who had a "gold recovery system" in his shop.

[Johnny B.]

"They" let him loose because it turned out he wasn't directly guilty of anything at all.

That's Rossi's big lie.

You're right that the dumping charges were later overturned. However, before, during and after that, he was convicted of a number of other financial crimes that were not overturned. None of these convictions had anything to do with dumping toxic waste.

The last one was bankruptcy fraud, for which he was convicted after his "toxic waste dump conviction was overturned. He was arrested in 2000 (after being a fugitive in the U.S. for a year), and sentenced to 8 years in prison.

The Rossi fanboys like to pretend that there was only the one conviction which was overturned, but that's nowhere near the truth.

LINK

[muawiyah]

Still didn’t go to jail.