At 06:44 PM 6/19/2011, mix...@bigpond.com wrote:
If one were trying to reach the operating temperature of the device,
wouldn't it
make sense to have no water flowing until it was reached (or at least close)?
Consider the complications. For a reminder, there are two chambers in
the device, a reaction chamber, which needs to be raised to 450 C or
perhaps greater, for the reaction to be significant, and a water or
coolant chamber. If we have gravity feed of water to the coolant
chamber, and no water exit except as water vapor, then there is no
coolant flow until the coolant chamber water temperature reaches boiling.
Steady state, the reaction chamber is at, say, 450 C., and the
coolant chamber is at 100 C. The thermal resistance between them must
be such that the selected operating temperature is maintained, with
reaction heat plus (by their specifications), maybe 1/6 of that as
input electrical power.
That is actually a fairly high resistance. The only drag on reaching
operating temperature is through this, and it's just the energy to
heat the water from ambient to 100 C.
I'm way too lazy to do the math. It would be way fascinating, though,
to see how the generated energy varies with heat.
It's pretty obvious that more efficient designs can be done, but,
that's engineering, it could be much more complicated, and time is of
the essence for Rossi now. This seems quite simple, and cheap to
manufacture (except for the catalyst/fuel, about which we know little).
All you have to do is to keep the reaction chamber below runaway
temperature, and keep water in the coolant chamber. If you have done
this, with adequate safety margin, the device will not run away and
melt or explode. Rossi seems to have a PLC running this. The displays
of a single digit cannot be given any specific interpretation, for
all we know those could be the numbers of a series of operating
modes. The controller would monitor reaction chamber temperature and
maybe other variables, but the reaction temperature seems like the
only necessary parameter.
