TRIACS are too simple for mystery. But, yeah, could power mystery.
Regards filtering: When driving a resistor nobody would bother, takes too many pounds of inductors and big capacitors. Unless RFI was bothering other instruments, in which case a small L with a small C would do fine -but not produce DC, by a long shot.
Ol' Bab, who was an engineer. On 12/17/2012 12:09 AM, Jones Beene wrote:
Speaking of low duty cycles, mis-measurements and high efficiency ... it gets curiouser and curiouser. Having seen the fine movie "Limitless" this weekend ... the plot of which is based on several surreal premises, including the stimulating unused mental ability to suddenly find hidden meaning in large masses of disparate information (based on the 2001 novel "The Dark Fields" by Alan Glynn) ... I got a psychic hit, not from MDT-48, but from a flash of blue boxes in Rossi's demo, almost 2 years ago... but in the context of STMicro and the "dimmers". See what Glynn means when he talks about "disparate"? Remember Rossi's smaller blue box, the multiple PWM units in a power supply system which turned out to be basically a bunch of dimmers, instead of a sophisticated computer control system? Here's a weird key to the cross connection - the TRIAC and Elihu Thomson, one of whose firms became the original developer of that device. You can read about the international cross-germinations and corporate intrigue, if you have a few days ... but the executive summary for this scenario is that basically advanced triacs ended up with STMicro and now we find out this company is keenly interested in LENR technology, and have possibly backed Celani. Are there any hidden dots to connect here? Probably not, but the movie was good enough to make one wonder if the answer could be hiding in plain sight. Triacs are efficient, but have they ever been said to be OU in their own right? Actually, there has been such a claim, despite it seeming completely preposterous to almost every EE. There is an older but sophisticated TRIAC which can only switch in quadrants I, II, or III but cannot be triggered in quadrant IV, having improved commutation characteristics; and it doesn't need a snubber. This may not mean much, but the efficiency improvement is achieved at the expense of the ability to trigger the device in the 4th quadrant (negative voltage and positive gate current) but may have other benefits, especially when combined with particular loads. Anyway the first devices were produced by Thomson Semiconductors (now STMicroelectronics) under the name Alternistor, and promoted by the lovely name:"SNUBBERLESS". Geeks have a lovely sense of humor. This would only be relevant if some time in the past, STM realized that they had a possible anomaly on their hands. I doubt it, but they are big into black Defense projects in Europe, and are well-positioned to hear about any anomaly involving their products. Clear as mud? Well to put all of this into today's context- there was some talk, early-on in the Rossi saga, about the importance of pulse power for the Ni-H reaction, and specifically provided by square waves and PWM. Of course, these go to a resistance heater, and the pulses should have been strongly filtered-out and not felt by the reactants at all. And this is NOT high frequency, it is mundane. So the suggestion is pretty absurd on its face. I don't even know if Rossi still uses PWM, since there was no evidence of them with "big blue". But maybe it finally dawned on Rossi that his PS was providing some of the gain and he decided to hide the evidence. Quien sabe? Stranger things have happened. Jones