ToMessage body22 October 2014
Dear Mr. Olofsson:
I am writing to express my concern about errors in recent and past tests of Andrea Rossi's "Energy Catalyzer" (ecat).
As you know, in the 2013 test by Levi, Essen, et al, the input power measurement was not done in a way which could rule out deception and wiring tricks. In addition, the blank or "dummy" run was not comparable to the active run. That makes it unclear whether or not the method used really measures the output heat correctly. It most likely did not.
The 2013 test was not independent because Dr. Levi, who directed it, is a confidante and long time personal friend of Andrea Rossi's and because the test was done with Rossi's power source, instruments and methods, in Rossi's laboratory!
Levi et al agreed to remedy these problems for the second test but they did not. It would have been easy for them to bring their own power cord or even an entire power supply to interpose between the mains and Rossi's experiment. This would have measured all the power supplied to the ecat. But they did not do this. Instead, they used the same type of easily fooled clamp on ammeters that they had used before!
A new problem was that the alumina container for the ecat was translucent, exposing the heater wires to the thermal camera. Because of this, the emissivity value and the surface area used to calculate the surface temperature and heat output were certainly incorrect, grossly overestimating the output. Again, the dummy run did not provide effective calibration because for no valid reason, it was limited to about half the temperature reached by the active run. This flaw also made it impossible to check the emissivity issue I just mentioned. This could have been deliberate deception by Andrea Rossi.
Error in measurements, either at the input or at the output, could account for all the excess heat claimed by the experimenters. Please note that this has been the case in every demonstration by Rossi and Levi. In early demos, Rossi calculated enthalpy based on the premise that the device produced dry steam but the steam was certainly wet. In other demos, the temperature sensors at the output end were misplaced so as to make them read hotter than they would have read if correctly placed. In the past, Rossi always refused blank and calibration runs which could have revealed these deficiencies. Now, although he allows blank runs, he deliberately cripples them.
If that were not enough, there is reason to doubt Andrea Rossi's integrity. He has been involved in a $50 million environmental disaster in Italy (Petroldragon) and has served jail time for his participation. And in the early 2000's, Rossi contracted with the US Department of Defense to furnish high efficiency thermoelectric converters for a total cost of $9 million. He delivered only useless junk and the department was so embarrassed when this was revealed on the internet that they removed their 154 page report from their web site.
Rossi has also claimed sales of his supposed megawatt thermal plant but has never named a single customer. It is also interesting that both the actual power and the output to input power ratio from Rossi's machines have sharply decreased rather than improved over the years. In 2007, Rossi wrote in a patent application that he had heated an entire factory in Bodena, using one ecat. In February 2011, Levi claimed that his testing showed that an ecat had produced 15kW average power and 130kW peak with a power ratio of 20. The current test, three years later, shows less than 4kW with a power ratio around 3! (The slow vanishing of the claimed effect as scrutiny increases is a feature of "pathological science" famously pointed out by the Nobelist Irving Langmuir)
There is reason to doubt all claims to high power LENR. Rossi's former partner and lately competitor Defkalion has closed most of its offices and their web site has been discontinued altogether. This is a company which claimed to have been tested by the seven largest companies in the world. They promised to reveal the results two years ago but they never did nor did they ever name those companies. Claims by Brillouin, Nanospire, and Miley (Lenuco) are similarly unsupported.
Should you wish to pursue further work with Andrea Rossi, I strongly suggest that you enlist an entirely new group of scientists. Levi and Rossi should be excluded from any direct participation. Their lab and measuring methods should not be used. Better yet, the test should be done by a government lab or by a university, officially rather than by only a few faculty members working on their own. The SP Technical Institute of Sweden might be a good choice. When they tested Rossi's ecat a year ago, they found no excess power and they discovered that Rossi had made a major measurement error. Rossi has never acknowledged nor said how he corrected the error.
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3535258.ece
Most important, you should ask specialists in heat transfer, fluid flow, and electrical engineering from your consulting staff to review all of Rossi's claims and results.
If you would like further assistance in examining claims to high power LENR, you or your assistants can contact me at [email protected]. If you prefer a phone conversation, I will provide a number. I have links and citations to support everything I said in this email. If you need them, just ask. While I am seemingly an anonymous internet name, in reality I have credentials in calorimetry and I was one of the group which helped prevent a wealthy investor from wasting a million or more of his personal funds on support for the now seemingly defunct Defkalion.
I commend your interest in LENR in general and I hope it continues but I urge extreme caution with claims to high power LENR and with Andrea Rossi in particular.
Sincerely,
Mary Yugo
- Mary Yugo <[email protected]>
- 10/22/14 at 4:54 PM
ToMessage body22 October 2014
Dear Mr. Olofsson:
I am writing to express my concern about errors in recent and past tests of Andrea Rossi's "Energy Catalyzer" (ecat).
As you know, in the 2013 test by Levi, Essen, et al, the input power measurement was not done in a way which could rule out deception and wiring tricks. In addition, the blank or "dummy" run was not comparable to the active run. That makes it unclear whether or not the method used really measures the output heat correctly. It most likely did not.
The 2013 test was not independent because Dr. Levi, who directed it, is a confidante and long time personal friend of Andrea Rossi's and because the test was done with Rossi's power source, instruments and methods, in Rossi's laboratory!
Levi et al agreed to remedy these problems for the second test but they did not. It would have been easy for them to bring their own power cord or even an entire power supply to interpose between the mains and Rossi's experiment. This would have measured all the power supplied to the ecat. But they did not do this. Instead, they used the same type of easily fooled clamp on ammeters that they had used before!
A new problem was that the alumina container for the ecat was translucent, exposing the heater wires to the thermal camera. Because of this, the emissivity value and the surface area used to calculate the surface temperature and heat output were certainly incorrect, grossly overestimating the output. Again, the dummy run did not provide effective calibration because for no valid reason, it was limited to about half the temperature reached by the active run. This flaw also made it impossible to check the emissivity issue I just mentioned. This could have been deliberate deception by Andrea Rossi.
Error in measurements, either at the input or at the output, could account for all the excess heat claimed by the experimenters. Please note that this has been the case in every demonstration by Rossi and Levi. In early demos, Rossi calculated enthalpy based on the premise that the device produced dry steam but the steam was certainly wet. In other demos, the temperature sensors at the output end were misplaced so as to make them read hotter than they would have read if correctly placed. In the past, Rossi always refused blank and calibration runs which could have revealed these deficiencies. Now, although he allows blank runs, he deliberately cripples them.
If that were not enough, there is reason to doubt Andrea Rossi's integrity. He has been involved in a $50 million environmental disaster in Italy (Petroldragon) and has served jail time for his participation. And in the early 2000's, Rossi contracted with the US Department of Defense to furnish high efficiency thermoelectric converters for a total cost of $9 million. He delivered only useless junk and the department was so embarrassed when this was revealed on the internet that they removed their 154 page report from their web site.
Rossi has also claimed sales of his supposed megawatt thermal plant but has never named a single customer. It is also interesting that both the actual power and the output to input power ratio from Rossi's machines have sharply decreased rather than improved over the years. In 2007, Rossi wrote in a patent application that he had heated an entire factory in Bodena, using one ecat. In February 2011, Levi claimed that his testing showed that an ecat had produced 15kW average power and 130kW peak with a power ratio of 20. The current test, three years later, shows less than 4kW with a power ratio around 3! (The slow vanishing of the claimed effect as scrutiny increases is a feature of "pathological science" famously pointed out by the Nobelist Irving Langmuir)
There is reason to doubt all claims to high power LENR. Rossi's former partner and lately competitor Defkalion has closed most of its offices and their web site has been discontinued altogether. This is a company which claimed to have been tested by the seven largest companies in the world. They promised to reveal the results two years ago but they never did nor did they ever name those companies. Claims by Brillouin, Nanospire, and Miley (Lenuco) are similarly unsupported.
Should you wish to pursue further work with Andrea Rossi, I strongly suggest that you enlist an entirely new group of scientists. Levi and Rossi should be excluded from any direct participation. Their lab and measuring methods should not be used. Better yet, the test should be done by a government lab or by a university, officially rather than by only a few faculty members working on their own. The SP Technical Institute of Sweden might be a good choice. When they tested Rossi's ecat a year ago, they found no excess power and they discovered that Rossi had made a major measurement error. Rossi has never acknowledged nor said how he corrected the error.
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3535258.ece
Most important, you should ask specialists in heat transfer, fluid flow, and electrical engineering from your consulting staff to review all of Rossi's claims and results.
If you would like further assistance in examining claims to high power LENR, you or your assistants can contact me at [email protected]. If you prefer a phone conversation, I will provide a number. I have links and citations to support everything I said in this email. If you need them, just ask. While I am seemingly an anonymous internet name, in reality I have credentials in calorimetry and I was one of the group which helped prevent a wealthy investor from wasting a million or more of his personal funds on support for the now seemingly defunct Defkalion.
I commend your interest in LENR in general and I hope it continues but I urge extreme caution with claims to high power LENR and with Andrea Rossi in particular.
Sincerely,
Mary Yugo