Alan J Fletcher <a...@well.com> wrote: 4. Rossi purges the core, eg with air or Nitrogen, until there is a very > small chance of hydrogen being left. >
That can be hard to do, and really hard to know if you have succeeded. It might take a couple of weeks. Ed Storms devised automatic equipment to do something like this the Case experiment. It cycled through added gas, and then pulled a vacuum. I guess N would be okay but air may permanently contaminate it. My guess is that a vacuum would be your best bet. This seems like a pointless exercise to me. Of course I understand the necessity for blank runs and controls when you are trying to measure a fraction of a watt, or even ~10 W. But with kilowatt levels of heat that anyone can confirm by sense of touch, running a blank is ridiculous. We are talking about a heat release on the scale of everyday experience, like you get when you turn on your stove, or a room heater. When you see a steaming hot cooked turkey, do you ask yourself: "Could this really be cooked? Is it really hot? I'll need a frozen turkey as a control before I can be sure!" Ask a cook whether she can tell a frozen turkey from a cooked one. She will think you are crazy. And yes, that *is* the magnitude of the difference we are talking about. That is not hyperbole. Do you find that you must look at a parked car for reference before you can be sure that one driving past you at 20 miles an hour is moving or standing still? - Jed
