First, it the ends are closed with just putty then the system is operating at atmospheric pressure but that suggests that hydrogen gas can leak out and oxygen can leak in. I suppose such an arrangement could be used to allow the quick assembly and disassembly of units for testing but such an arrangement seems too feeble to hold up to the heat. There must be metal end closure that is more robust. I imagine a large washer welded to the outer tube and the inner tube able to be slipped into place or vise versa and putty used more sparingly to close the gaps.
The glow of the inner tube is due to the fact that it cannot convect heat away efficiently (only natural convection and radiation are at work in this test) and because any point on wall of that tube "sees" only the other parts of the wall that too are radiating heat to it at the same rate, so there is no net heat transfer and the temperature will rise to something close to the operating temperature of the core of the reactor. Of course, near the ends of the tube it partly "sees" the environment and the temps there are lower. My WAG is it is at a temperature a couple of hundred Celcius below the core temp. I am sure this test is run to test the ability of the core to operate at very high temperatures and is not being run at the maximum power ability that could only be achieved by flowing a coolant through it to carry away the energy. Any attempt to calculate the ouput of the displayed device using gestimates of the convection and radiation heat transfer rates will come up short of 14 kW. Also, if you come within 20% of the correct value with a natural convection heat transfer calculation, you are doing very, very well or got lucky. Such calcs are notoriously dicy. I sure hope were are not being strung along as I really want to believe in this E-Cat thingy. But I keep slapping myself and reminding myself: "If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." ----- Original Message ----- From: Andre Blum To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Monday, August 13, 2012 7:28 AM Subject: Re: [Vo]:1200 degrees E-cat operating at 1 bar? Does anyone know of a physical explanation why the inside would become so much hotter than the outside?
