On 01/31/2011 05:37 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: > I asked Rossi to clarify where the steam goes. I heard it went out of > the window but someone else told me no, the hose went int a bathroom. > > Here is my message to Rossi and his response: > > Jed Rothwell > January 31st, 2011 at 2:31 PM > > A person who attended the January 14 test told me that the steam hose > from the machine went to a bathroom. Was the end of the hose pushed > outside of a window? Was it placed underwater in a sink? [...] > > - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > Andrea Rossi > January 31st, 2011 at 4:30 PM > > Dear Dr Rothwell: > > The steam pipe was not going to a bathroom, but to a sink in the wall > besise the test room; the sink was sealed to avoid exit of steam ans, > as you said, a collective sauna. [...] > [My [Jed's] response, not published yet. This refers to the > Hydrodynamics factory, in Rome, GA] > > Jed Rothwell > Your comment is awaiting moderation. > January 31st, 2011 at 5:29 PM > > You wrote: "The steam pipe was not going to a bathroom, but to a sink > in the wall besise the test room; the sink was sealed to avoid exit of > steam ans, as you said, a collective sauna." > > Ah, I see. So the steam condensed into the sink and the water ran down > the drain.
OK, I see where the water went. But where did the *heat* go? 10 kW for a half an hour is a lot of heat to dump into a sink. Let's see if this can work out. First, it seems like it must have been a fairly large sink. Most sinks hold, perhaps, a few gallons of water, which wouldn't have the heat capacity to condense more than a fraction of the steam. I don't understand how you "seal" a sink so I'll ignore that statement for now; I think we can come up with a plausible scenario without any "sealing" going on. (Maybe they did something other than what I'm describing here, but all I'm looking for here is an "existence proof" of at least one way the assertions could make sense.) Let's suppose it was a large wash tub type sink, holding, say, 10 gallons, or 40 liters, or 40,000 CC of water, with capacity of about 80 degrees C rise before the whole sink is at boiling. And let's suppose it was filled with 20 C water to start with. That gives you enough capacity to recondense about six liters of water which had been boiled into steam. If I've read the papers right, they actually would have had to condense about 9 liters of water, or half again our hypothetical sink's "carrying capacity" -- so, it must have been a 15 gallon sink that was used. And of course this depends on our imaginary sink having space for an extra gallon or two of water to appear in it during the test, since the drain must necessarily be plugged throughout, else your "condenser" runs down the drain along with the steam. But all of this is clearly possible. So, OK, it's within the realm of possibility for a largish sink in a utility closet, which is about the most we can expect to conclude from my sloppy calculation here. It would have left the closet pretty steamy afterwards, I think, but unless somebody explicitly checked out the state of the area around the sink and reported on it, we wouldn't know. This scenario, by the way, puts an upper bound on how long the test could run for. Once the water in the sink gets up to boiling the "condenser" has failed, and the area around the sink is going to be pretty unpleasant to work in, so nobody's going to want to empty it and refill it. For one thing, if it's an ordinary sink you may need to reach into it to pull the plug, which won't be easy until the water in it cools down. So, the reason the test was as short as it was may simply have been that they didn't have a larger sink handy. (Personally I'd have used a water-cooled condenser and just hooked it to the spigot, which I would have left running throughout the test, but whatever... OTOH maybe that's what was actually done. Rossi's statements don't rule it out.)
