At 10:01 AM 8/1/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Something that has not been clarified here is that the flow rate is rather slow; 120 ml/min. Before the water boils, when the liquid overflows, It would take a long time to fill up the hose. There would be a lot of water in there. Once it starts boiling the steam sparges in the slow moving water. I suppose it would cool down and condense by the time it reaches the end. In other words, the hose would radiate a lot of heat next to the machine, and less further on.
It should be understood that the demonstrations begin with flowing water, before the power is turned on. The hose is filled and water is running out the end. The water is initially cool. However, the water is being heated, and the temperature of the water in the chimney is what is recorded. So the water and the hose will gradually approach boiling temperature. When boiling begins, the water in the hose may be a little short of boiling, but both the continued flow of water, now at the boiling point, and the sparging of steam that may travel more rapidly throught the hose will quickly bring it all to boiling temperature.
Once the water is at boiling, sparging will no longer result in condensation of steam.
The water moves, from the pump, too slowly to accomodate the steam flow. Once boiling begins, the steam and water will start moving much more rapidly. Even a relatively small percentage of water being vaporized will create such high velocities that any standing water will be blown out of the hose, it will clear itself. Once there is high velocity steam flowing in the hose, any overflow water will be atomized into a mist, because it will flow over the hose opening as a thin trickle with high velocity steam flowing over it.
This is how the E-cat begins: first with water flowing out, then with very wet steam. If heat generation continues to increase, the steam will become dryer and dryer.
I don't know how much water being vaporized it would take until most water was being atomized, but it might be only a few percent or so, the volume of steam is so much larger than the same mass of water.
Thus the method of determining heat as set up by Rossi, produces the same apparent result over a wide range of energies. The temperature in the chimney will be the temperature of wet steam, fixed by the nature of the two-phase system. That temperature does not indicate the wetness of the steam, at all, until and unless it can be shown to be above boiling at the pressure in the chimney, which would, indeed, indicate dry steam. There could be dry steam in the chimney, and still the steam in the hose would be wet, from overflow water being atomized at the hose outlet.
And what would be coming out of the port, if you were to pull off the hose, would look like steam, wet steam, until and unless the energy was enough to completely vaporize the inflow. (Even then, with a long hose, cooling in the hose would condense some water. But this water, if there were true dry steam at the volumes necessary from the vaporization of the stated mass flow, would never stand, the steam velocity would be way too high, it would be swept along as mist.)
My original comments were thinking of liquid overflow, as has been shown in one of the diagrams in Krivit's report. In fact, if there is significant vaporization, there would no longer be liquid flow, the liquid would be atomized, I now think, by the nature of the physical arrangement.
It's looking like the Rossi reaction is designed such as to generate steam of very high wetness, once it really starts steaming. Before that, the hose is filled with water, that's how it starts. The transition has not been observed, as far as we know.
