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In terms of overbuilding, EOS Energy have supposedly developed a new style of zinc-air battery which, if their claims are true, is going to absolutely revolutionise large-scale energy storage. The tech is scaleable down to about household level (so they won't be making cell phones out of it but you could have one in your garage to go with solar PV) and they've also supposedly developed a version for EVs that can get 350 km range for about $10,000. They're starting up a pilot program with Con Edison, which suggests to me this is a little more than just laboratory puff. If the battery turns out anywhere near as good as they're saying it is it's going to mean big things for renewables.
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May 9, 2013 03:11
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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altairnano has been leasing/pilot-programming similar spec units for a year or two now: http://www.altairnano.com/products/alti-ess-advantage/ http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012/09/altairnano-20120911.html http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012/10/altair-20121005.html however, I think they're about 3x more expensive than that jpg claims so did a123 before they bit the farm: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012/07/a123-20120720.html http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/12/a123gbs-20111220.html edit: actually its not clear, maybe the altair/a123 lto ones are only 500kWh? in which case this would be 12x the capacity for 1/3rd the price, that'd be a BFD
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May 9, 2013 04:20
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Supposedly EOS have done a complete redesign of how the system works, but I can't really comment on that, my electrochemistry's woeful.
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May 9, 2013 11:18
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"$1000/kW or $160/kWh"? I also want to know how they are running the inverters. Can they take a 1000kW package and run it with a maximum of 750kW with N+1 redundancy on the inverters and under 10ms failover time? I'd also want to see a curve of the inverter efficiency from 0% to 100% of rated load to see how well it performs at low loads. I'd like to see what voltage they propose to operate at. 480V at a maximum phase current of 1200A (would require busbars and paralleled cabling) or a more manageable 4160V at a maximum of 138A. Assuming 1.0 power factor, of course. Speaking of which I'm a little surprised they don't rate the inverters in KVA rather than KW. They could always integrated a static VAR compensator package to provide leading VARs, but making sure they don't cause nasty transients when capacitors are switched in and out. There's a lot of important technical details I'd be interested in seeing. Three-Phase fucked around with this message at 03:31 on May 11, 2013 |
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May 11, 2013 03:15
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Out of interest, why is kW rather than kVA an issue? Just an industry standard thing?
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May 13, 2013 13:43
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Gimby posted:Out of interest, why is kW rather than kVA an issue? Just an industry standard thing? Wikipedia has a decent article on the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power#Real.2C_reactive.2C_and_apparent_power If its confusing don't worry, a typical EE undergrad will spend two semesters on the subject. Basically in AC power voltage and current are both sin waves that can be out of phase with each other. "Real" power measured in kW is the real component of multiplying voltage and current. For a purely resistive load voltage and current are in phase. If there are any inductive or capacitive loads in the system (motors are inductive) voltage and current will out of phase. When voltage and current are out of phase you will get a complex voltage (VA) which has both real (useful) and imaginary (not useful) components. The imaginary component is measured in VARs (volt*amp reactive). Power factor is the ratio of real power to complex power, ideally this is unity or 1. As you can only really use real power you want this ratio to be as close to 1 as possible, so if there are a bunch of inductive loads (called "lagging" VARs) on a line you need to balance that with an equal amount of capacitive loads (leading VARs). If you are running at a power factor of 0.9 you are wasting 10% of the energy produced. Batteries are inherently DC. So you have to convert between AC-DC-AC for these things to be useful. DC is only real power (kW). The question is how efficient is the AC-DC-AC process. Uh, someone else might be able to explain that better than me, its been a while. hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 14:17 on May 13, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 14:10
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Quantum Mechanic posted:In terms of overbuilding, EOS Energy have supposedly developed a new style of zinc-air battery which, if their claims are true, is going to absolutely revolutionise large-scale energy storage. That is MW per MW, still more expensive than connecting High-Sea Offshore Windparks - if those numbers would actually work on that kind of scale. It will in practice be more expensive. And it still doesn't keep you from building up more capacity than you'd ideally need. It's the right direction but it still doesn't make it currently affordable to go 100% renewable for most countries imo.
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May 13, 2013 14:46
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Besides the inverter supplying VARs itself (I need to check my own megathread about this!), you can always add two things to an installation to provide VARs: 1. Capacitor banks - very simple, but the problem is switching them in and out can cause transients and stress the electrical system 2. Synchronous condenser - this is a synchronous motor run without a load. It essentially uses watts to generate leading VARs. For something like the battery bank, I'd probably go with something like a capacitor bank with SCRs switching the caps in and out (solid state switching) as they zero-cross.
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May 13, 2013 23:47
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Do you work in the field? Is there any site that chronicles all sorts of energy storage technologies including up and coming ones I could check out?
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May 13, 2013 23:53
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Metal-air batteries have been in use for decades, and are basically fuel cells. The theoretical predictions are fantastic, but until they show off a working model that a) can actually cycle, without gigantic drops in efficiency b) is actually anywhere near as cheap as they claim it will be this is nothing to get excited about.
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May 13, 2013 23:57
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Boner Slam posted:That is MW per MW, still more expensive than connecting High-Sea Offshore Windparks - if those numbers would actually work on that kind of scale. It will in practice be more expensive. And it still doesn't keep you from building up more capacity than you'd ideally need. I'm really curious where you got your costing on offshore wind. If the costs in the jpeg are correct, which they almost certainly aren't, those things would make sense as peak lopping supplies to defer spending on the fringes of the distribution network and in some cases subtransmission network even without renewable energy.
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May 16, 2013 10:08
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I'd like to see a storage system using supercapacitors (electric double-layer capacitor) rather than batteries or fuel cells. Prices are high right now - I saw a 500F, 16V pack on Digikey for $600. For a grid that has a combination of renewable energy, small generators, and large generators, you could use this as a buffer to give you more flexibility, with rapid power absorb/discharge ability. My home UPS clicked on for a second when writing this. Probably just a transient it's responding to, or the electricity's becoming sentient... 
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May 16, 2013 10:58
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One of my classmates' senior design projects was designing a rapid-charge system for cars based off of supercapacitors. Spoiler alert: Turns out a charging system for electric cars is probably a problem mostly for electrical engineers, not mechanical engineers.
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May 16, 2013 12:30
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slorb posted:I'm really curious where you got your costing on offshore wind. Connecting, not building offshore wind. I can not tell you the specifics of the costs though because ~~Trade SeCrEts~~
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May 16, 2013 13:10
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Solid-phase systems like Li-ion or lithium-air are simply not meant for this kind of stuff. They have high energy densities but literally nobody cares about that when it comes to anything stationary. Instead we look at their cost and reliability. Do they rip themselves apart when we try to cycle them too deeply or too quickly? If we hook them up in a series and one of the middle ones fail, limiting the rest of the series, will it be an easy fix? Do they explode/catch fire when they do fail? And so on. Anything that uses lithium has a propensity to be either super expensive or super fragile, or both. We use lead-acid batteries right now because they're low-cost and can withstand more than 10,000 cycles, and, well, that's about it. They can also cycle very rapidly which is why cars use them to start their engines. However, their cell potential and capacities are atrocious, which is why they don't get much use otherwise.
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May 16, 2013 15:50
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Fun battery factoid: substations have control houses that, among other things like protective relays monitoring power, have big banks of batteries. The mechanisms that trip (turn off) and close (turn on) connections in those circuit breakers run off of DC. So if there's a grid failure, you still have power from the battery bank to operate the breakers. If you don't have that DC control power, you cannot close or open the circuit breakers, and they'd just be stuck in whatever position they were in unless they had a manual trip operator and someone went out and manually tripped the breaker. If you're ever in a bind, you could potentially steal twelve car batteries if it's a 125VDC system to open and close breakers. 
Three-Phase fucked around with this message at 22:46 on May 17, 2013 |
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May 17, 2013 22:44
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Office Thug posted:Solid-phase systems like Li-ion or lithium-air are simply not meant for this kind of stuff. They have high energy densities but literally nobody cares about that when it comes to anything stationary. Instead we look at their cost and reliability. Do they rip themselves apart when we try to cycle them too deeply or too quickly? If we hook them up in a series and one of the middle ones fail, limiting the rest of the series, will it be an easy fix? Do they explode/catch fire when they do fail? And so on. Anything that uses lithium has a propensity to be either super expensive or super fragile, or both. Is anyone looking seriously at nickel-iron cells? I remember reading that they're useful for some off-grid type applications, but that they're otherwise not great- any room for improvement?
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May 18, 2013 07:34
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Paper Mac posted:Is anyone looking seriously at nickel-iron cells? I remember reading that they're useful for some off-grid type applications, but that they're otherwise not great- any room for improvement? Nickel-iron is kind of done in terms of improvement. We could make minor advances in terms of self-discharge prevention, making the non-active cell systems with lighter/cheaper materials, etc., but that's about it. Their nominal capacity and cell voltages are reachable at acceptably high cycle rates and with deep cycling. We've essentially reached what is conventionally possible with them in terms of theoretical capacity/cell voltage, so that's that. Lithium systems, flow cells, and liquid cells, in contrast, still have a long way to go before we've reached their limits at high rates and near-ideal cell voltages. Theoretically, they are vastly better than lead-acid and metal-hydroxide cells in terms of capacity and voltage.
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May 18, 2013 20:00
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Office Thug posted:Nickel-iron is kind of done in terms of improvement. We could make minor advances in terms of self-discharge prevention, making the non-active cell systems with lighter/cheaper materials, etc., but that's about it. Their nominal capacity and cell voltages are reachable at acceptably high cycle rates and with deep cycling. We've essentially reached what is conventionally possible with them in terms of theoretical capacity/cell voltage, so that's that. Gotcha, thanks.
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May 19, 2013 04:01
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Andrea Rossi's E-Cat might not be a scam after all The report about the third-party tests from December and March is out: http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3913. They ran the device for 96 resp. 116 hours and measured "anomalous heat production". Some highlights (numbers are from the most conservative measurements):
I didn't read the whole paper because I'm not a physicist and thus can't judge their experimental setup. Some of the researchers have worked with Rossi before, but I doubt they would all risk their careers by publishing bullshit. They cite Wikipedia, but only for the graph comparing the various fuel sources. For the past two years, I've grown more and more convinced that Rossi is a scam. Now I'm very cautiously optimistic.
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May 24, 2013 08:43
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Yeah, I've been kinda coming around to thinking LENR might be actually something worth investigating. At this point, I'm wondering where we'd be if the cold fusion name hadn't ever been applied to it. In any case, NASA is investigating the phenomenon too, last I checked, but just to see what's going on, not for the purpose of energy.
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May 24, 2013 08:58
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CombatInformatiker posted:Andrea Rossi's E-Cat might not be a scam after all I find it disturbing that they make no effort to describe any changes to the material in the tube. The entire paper is about energy analysis. What's actually going on in the tube is more important than anything else, as their procedure may be laughably inefficient once we know what's driving it. All they say is that it's a mixture of nickel and hydrogen, with no effort to isolate or identify any reaction products after it's done. That they show no interest in demonstrating what's actually going on still makes it smell of scam to me. Deteriorata fucked around with this message at 14:44 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 14:41
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CombatInformatiker posted:Andrea Rossi's E-Cat might not be a scam after all Rossi has a history of badly conducting experiments, continuously sidestepping calls for proper review and outside attempts to replicate his claims, and weird experimental secrecy that rightly makes him a scam-artist rather than a scientist to his peers: http://phys.org/news/2011-08-controversial-energy-generating-lacking-credibility-video.html Also, he is not conducting the right experiments to substantiate his claims. Again. The single most solid evidence for a nuclear reaction is isotopic analysis of the reaction products. It's piss easy to do, literally anyone can send a sample off for analysis at a mass spectrometry lab for a fee and it will tell you exactly what elements you have and their isotope ratios. If the ratios are not natural, congratulations, you now have evidence that this sample was subjected to a nuclear reaction of some sort. Rossi has repeatedly dodged doing things like this and instead based his entire argument on extremely poorly-conducted calorimetry experiments. There are also valid reasons to be skeptical of cold fusion. Nuclear reactions have tremendous energy barriers many orders of magnitude higher than any of the interactions we're used to seeing in chemistry. Trying to use some sort of chemical interaction to cause a fusion reaction is like trying to knock down the empire state building with a mosquito.
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May 24, 2013 17:25
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Someone listed this as a source of unlimited clean energy on a fission discussion. Free Energy Nitinol Heat Machines invented in the early 1970 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKmYqUSDch8 Of course since 'there's no money in it' no one on the planet has tried to use it. 
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May 24, 2013 19:54
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Well at least it looks cool, right?
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May 24, 2013 19:59
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Herv posted:Someone listed this as a source of unlimited clean energy on a fission discussion. How is it "unlimited free energy"? It operates on a temperature differential like any other heat engine. You have to supply the heat to the hot side of it. They describe it as free energy because it can use small temperature differentials that would otherwise be waste heat. It makes perfect sense that "there's no money in it", because it probably costs more to run than it's worth.
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May 24, 2013 20:32
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Deteriorata posted:How is it "unlimited free energy"? It operates on a temperature differential like any other heat engine. You have to supply the heat to the hot side of it. They describe it as free energy because it can use small temperature differentials that would otherwise be waste heat. Yep, I asked him what's keeping the power company from turning up a plant and charging per KWh like everything else.
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May 24, 2013 20:49
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Deteriorata posted:I find it disturbing that they make no effort to describe any changes to the material in the tube. The entire paper is about energy analysis. What's actually going on in the tube is more important than anything else, as their procedure may be laughably inefficient once we know what's driving it. All they say is that it's a mixture of nickel and hydrogen, with no effort to isolate or identify any reaction products after it's done. Office Thug posted:Rossi has a history of badly conducting experiments, continuously sidestepping calls for proper review and outside attempts to replicate his claims, and weird experimental secrecy that rightly makes him a scam-artist rather than a scientist to his peers: http://phys.org/news/2011-08-controversial-energy-generating-lacking-credibility-video.html Office Thug posted:Also, he is not conducting the right experiments to substantiate his claims. Again. Office Thug posted:The single most solid evidence for a nuclear reaction is isotopic analysis of the reaction products. It's piss easy to do, literally anyone can send a sample off for analysis at a mass spectrometry lab for a fee and it will tell you exactly what elements you have and their isotope ratios. If the ratios are not natural, congratulations, you now have evidence that this sample was subjected to a nuclear reaction of some sort. Office Thug posted:Rossi has repeatedly dodged doing things like this and instead based his entire argument on extremely poorly-conducted calorimetry experiments. It is entirely possible that they made an error during the experiment. Maybe Rossi manipulated the setup when they weren't looking. But I also think that the scientists who conducted the experiment are not dumb, and at least one of the should have noticed it if something was amiss––except if they're all in on the scam... Do you have a problem with the experimental setup or the measurements? Do you have a justified reason to believe Rossi manipulated the experiment? If yes, please tell us. If not, spare us the  "it is a scam because we don't know how it works/it can't work". That's not how science progresses.vvvvvvvvvv Thank you. So do you think the results are off by a factor, or are they completely bogus? CombatInformatiker fucked around with this message at 06:56 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 06:13
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I can tell you straight off that the method they used to calculate h for the convective heat transfer off the cylinder is dumb as hell; they should have calculated it experimentally for a dummy cylinder. Also, an IR camera is a stupid way to determine surface temperature for something like this. They should have used actual temperature probes. e: basically, trying to perform an energy analysis on a cylinder just set up out in the open in a random apparently uncontrolled room is pretty loving stupid if you want to be at all rigorous John McCain fucked around with this message at 06:46 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 06:32
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CombatInformatiker posted:You didn't understand the purpose of this experiment. It wasn't about "demonstrating cold fusion/LENR/whatever", it was about showing that the device outputs more power than it can conceivably store using chemical fuels. Assuming they made no errors during measurement, it was a full success. Until we know what's in the tube and what sort of reactions are happening, it's not a demonstration of anything. It could be (and probably is) an elaborate con. If he wants to be taken seriously, he needs to describe the entire system, inside and out, in a way that someone else in another lab could set it up and do it. It isn't "science" if no one can reproduce your results.
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May 25, 2013 14:43
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Deteriorata posted:Until we know what's in the tube and what sort of reactions are happening, it's not a demonstration of anything. It could be (and probably is) an elaborate con. Deteriorata posted:If he wants to be taken seriously, he needs to describe the entire system, inside and out, in a way that someone else in another lab could set it up and do it. It isn't "science" if no one can reproduce your results.
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May 25, 2013 14:58
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CombatInformatiker posted:Fun fact: physical processes can be reality even if we don't understand what is happening. No one knowing what happens exactly inside the device does not, by itself, imply it being a scam. If the measurements from the experiment are correct (and if the experiment has not been tampered with), then it is not a scam. One way to ensure it is not a scam is to tell us what's going on inside, so that everything is on the up and up. I am disinclined to believe his energy measurements due to his evasiveness. There very well may be extra wires or pipes, for example, that we don't know about and are hidden in the pictures that are actually supplying the supposed extra energy. His energy measurements appear to show energy being generated above what appears to be energy input, but there is no way of verifying if it's legitimate without more information.
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May 25, 2013 16:27
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CombatInformatiker posted:Do you have reasons to believe that this experiment was conducted poorly? I'd love to know if they made an error! Too bad they don't provide sufficient amounts of control data to even figure out whether they can read their instruments correctly. CombatInformatiker posted:Do you have a problem with the experimental setup or the measurements? Do you have a justified reason to believe Rossi manipulated the experiment? If yes, please tell us. If not, spare us the As a regular user of differential scanning calorimetry I have a lot of problems with their measurements, actually. Follow along: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1305/1305.3913.pdf Starting on page 3. quote:The E-Cat HT-type device in this experiment was a cylinder having a silicon nitride ceramic outer shell, 33 cm in length, and 10 cm in diameter. A second cylinder made of a different ceramic material (corundum) was located within the shell, and housed three delta-connected spiral-wire resistor coils. Resistors were laid out horizontally, parallel to and equidistant from the cylinder axis, and were as long as the cylinder itself. They were fed by a TRIAC power regulator device which interrupted each phase periodically, in order to modulate power input with an industrial trade secret waveform. This procedure, needed to properly activate the E-Cat HT charge, had no bearing whatsoever on the power consumption of the device, which remained constant throughout the test. This is what's called a "closed-system", meaning that energy can go in and come out of the system. They're saying that they supply a specific amount of AC current electrical power to the device through internal resistors in order to activate the device. That's going to be important to keep track of because if they don't whose to say they aren't just mistakenly heating the tar out of it with electrical current? To substantiate the underlined claim and to demonstrate that they know what they're doing, they would monitor the input or at the very least conduct a blank test to refer against, and report that data alongside their other runs. Moving on to see what they did on page 5 quote:Electrical measurements were performed by a PCE-830 Power and Harmonics Analyzer by PCE Instruments with a nominal accuracy of 1%. This instrument continuously monitors on an LCD display the values of instantaneous electrical power (active, reactive, and apparent) supplied to the resistor coils, as well as energy consumption expressed in kWh. Of these parameters, only the last one was of interest for the purposes of the test, which was designed to evaluate the ratio of thermal energy produced by the E-Cat HT to electrical power consumption for the number of hours subject to evaluation. The instrument was connected directly to the E-Cat HT cables by means of three clamp ammeters, and three probes for voltage measurement. They're only measuring kWh and voltage, which is fair if they monitor it throughout the experiment and report it alongside their other calorimetry measurements. Unfortunately, all they really say about that whole affair in regards to the December test is strewn here and there throughout the first 15 or so pages. Here's a bit on page 6: quote:Upon conclusion of the test, the recordings from the video camera were examined. By reading the images reproducing the PCE-830's LCD display at regular intervals, it was possible to make a note of the number of kWh absorbed by the resistor coils. Subsequently, the E-Cat HT's average hourly power consumption was calculated, and determined to be = 360 W. The average consumption is 360 W. The next incidence that mentions input power is on page 13. There we find the chart "Produced vs Consumed Power". Except for thermal energy production, there is no sign of where anything else is coming from. Here's their description: quote:Plot 2 shows produced vs. consumed energy. Radiated energy is actually measured energy; total energy also takes into account the evaluation of natural convection. Data are fit with a linear function, and COP is obtained by the slope. I assume the extra 7.5 or so kWh of energy they get at 32.5 kWh electrical input in their Total energy is natural convection, which they evaluated to be 41 watts (I think, from their air temperature calculation on page 10). It comes out to 4 kWh, so they're missing another 3.5 kWh to explain the 32.5 (electrical input) + 7.5 (unaccountable extra energy) kWh gap between total energy and thermal energy in that graph. They chalked it up to random error which they just assumed is 10%. I finally found another number for electrical input and it was, again, just a single number: 360 watts over 96 hours. quote:The device subject to testing was powered by 360 W for a total of 96 hours, and produced in all 2034 W thermal. This value was reached by calculating the power transferred by the E-Cat HT to the environment by convection and power irradiated by the device. So far, there is no way of telling whether they can even run a calorimetry experiment without messing it up. There's no control. We have no idea what their input is really like other than it's an average 360 W. The fact that we can't tell whether they know what they're doing or not is several magnitudes more damning than knowing that they did mess up, because at the very least peers would be able to tell them how to run it better next time. Here, we can't even tell if they know how to measure electrical input into a couple of heating elements correctly because there's simply no data, no control, nothing. Now the March test. Here they actually do run a blank or "dummy". Unfortunately they don't actually run their dummy the exact same way as the loaded system (which ran on a "self-sustaining mode" of ON/OFF electrical input, while the dummy ran on continuous input). They ran it to calibrate their actual experiment. There's nothing interesting to talk about other than the data they bother to report being difficult to follow. Eventually we get to page 22 where things rapidly deteriorate thereafter: quote:Ragone Chart It really grinds my gears when people fail to report the mass of their reactants and products in their chemistry papers, leading me to somehow elucidate what the gently caress they even did, and then have some bullshit reason for not doing it. I realize this isn't a chemistry paper, but this is still one hell of a bullshit reason not to take the time to figure out how much stuff was even involved in their amazing cold fusion reactor. The manufacturer took it to their secret factory and won't give it back. That's amazing. When I build and test a battery I don't just throw whatever quantity of electroactive material in it, cycle it, and send it back to a manufacturer to remove the internals and then weigh the empty casings I get back to figure out how much poo poo I put in the battery in the first place. And consequently, realize the mass I get is so far off that I just make up a number for reporting. But that's exactly what these guys did apparently. They didn't even bother to collect and weigh their product, of course, so it's no wonder they never get this stuff properly analyzed to substantiate their claims of nuclear reactions. Or maybe it's because the group learned their lesson the last time they tried to gently caress with nuclear physicists. There are some things you just can't fake. Unnatural isotopic ratios happens to be one of them. Same page, the next paragraph is even worse: quote:According to the data available from the PCE-830 analyzer, the overall power consumption of the E-Cat HT2 and the control box combined was 37.58 kWh. The associated instantaneous power varied between 910 and 930 W during the test, so it may be averaged at 920±10 W. In order to determine the power consumption of the E-Cat HT2 alone, one must subtract from this value the contributive factor of the control box power consumption. As it was not possible to measure the latter while the test on the E-Cat HT2 was in progress, one may refer to the power consumption of the box measured during the dummy test. This value would in all likelihood be higher in the case of operative E-Cat HT2, due to the electronic circuits controlling the self-sustaining mode: so, as usual, we shall adopt the more conservative parameter. We finally find out the other reason for why they ran that dummy test, and it was to avoid having to measure the electrical input for the real test for reasons I have yet to determine. I am extremely skeptical of their claim that they couldn't possibly measure the control box consumption while this thing was running. What I can say is that they're stating they never bothered to properly measure the electrical input for this test, and that just won't work here. Not with calorimetry. This is precisely what I mean with "poorly-run". It just keeps getting worse quote:Let us further assume an error of 10%, in order to include any possible unknown source. 10% error is, indeed, passable for calorimetry of this scale. Unfortunately, 10% error is still 10% error. It's still gigantic and that's the sole thing they're basing their claims on, and they don't even know if it really is 10%. Sometimes it can get as high as 30% in non-isolated calorimetry like this. They should not fool around with this stuff and just assume it's 10%. From here on there's more assumptions and comparisons to chemical systems. Ending off with the concluding remark on page 28: quote:The March test is to be considered an improvement over the one performed in December, in that various problems encountered in the first experiment were addressed and solved in the second one. In the next test experiment which is expected to start in the summer of 2013, and will last about six months, a long term performance of the E-Cat HT2 will be tested. This test will be crucial for further attempts to unveil the origin of the heat phenomenon observed so far. Except these people have made absolutely no attempt to unveil the origin of the heat phenomenon they've been observing. Far from it, they keep dodging actual recommendations from their peers on how to do it. They have not substantiated their experiments with control runs, proper monitoring data, and so on, and what's more have a very bad history of refusing to cooperate with their peers because they seem to think everyone's out to get them. Of course I don't trust anything coming out of this group. Until they start taking science seriously, I cannot take them seriously as a scientist.
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May 25, 2013 22:07
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CombatInformatiker posted:Fun fact: physical processes can be reality even if we don't understand what is happening. No one knowing what happens exactly inside the device does not, by itself, imply it being a scam. If the measurements from the experiment are correct (and if the experiment has not been tampered with), then it is not a scam. If I put a bunch of kerosene in a lamp, light it, and put that lamp in a box, then that box will appear to be emitting energy. This experiment that I have just described is equivalent to the experiments in the paper. If I claimed that the box was a cold fusion reactor, and my proof was a few energy measurements plus some IR photography, would you find my claims dubious? quote:Rossi is not a scientist, he's either an inventor or a scam artist. Either way, he doesn't care about being taken seriously as a scientist, he cares about making a lot of money. As for science: science often progresses by someone noticing an effect which can't be explained by current theories. If the device works and goes into production, others can reproduce the results, or take it apart and study how it works. You have this backwards. Rossi didn't "notice an effect", he built this device specifically because he thought that it should produce energy. This is a heavily engineered device. You're falling for a con artist. e: Also, don't be fooled just because there's a paper on arXiv. Literally anyone can put papers on arXiv. For example, there's Taking a shower in Youth Hostels: risks and delights of heterogeneity and Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard, both of which have way more validity and are way more interesting than the Rossi paper. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 06:57 on May 26, 2013 |
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May 26, 2013 06:43
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Deteriorata posted:One way to ensure it is not a scam is to tell us what's going on inside, so that everything is on the up and up. Thank you for this thorough analysis. I suppose when this blows up in their face, it won't reflect on their careers too kindly. QuarkJets posted:If I put a bunch of kerosene in a lamp, light it, and put that lamp in a box, then that box will appear to be emitting energy. This experiment that I have just described is equivalent to the experiments in the paper. If I claimed that the box was a cold fusion reactor, and my proof was a few energy measurements plus some IR photography, would you find my claims dubious? Also, the paper doesn't make any claims regarding cold fusion. QuarkJets posted:You have this backwards. Rossi didn't "notice an effect", he built this device specifically because he thought that it should produce energy. This is a heavily engineered device. QuarkJets posted:You're falling for a con artist. QuarkJets posted:e: Also, don't be fooled just because there's a paper on arXiv. QuarkJets posted:the Rossi paper. Deteriorata posted:his energy measurements It's not Rossi's experiment, it's not Rossi's measurements, and it's not Rossi's paper. At least get your facts straight. If you claim that the experiment and the paper was not done by the authors, please say so explicitly.
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May 26, 2013 13:36
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CombatInformatiker posted:I never said that it is Rossi who is advancing/will advance science. I also never said that Rossi was the first to notice such an effect (if it should actually occur in his device). CombatInformatiker posted:For comparison: energy density of diesel is 1.3e4 Wh/kg, that of hydrogen is 4e4 Wh/kg. The energy densities are at least an order of magnitude higher than all known chemical sources, so either Rossi discovered a new chemical process, or there are nuclear reactions going on in that 30cm x 10cm cylinder. Either way, if the experiments are valid, this is groundbreaking. You're cheerleading the energy-generation invention equivalent of "I invented a way to use a common microwave to cure cancer". It's tiring to repeat "it's really fishy that a supposedly scientific process is being both publicized and kept secret," when you keep replying "but if it WORKS..." You caveat "okay they worked with a bullshitter in the past, but this time..." and then claim ignorance of the nitty gritty details even as you nitpick people getting into the nitty gritty? Bullshit. Wait for it to pass rigorous trials and peer reviews. Or at LEAST until it gives the information necessary for repeated trials. Then it could conceivably be a candidate for discussion in a thread about energy generation rather than venture capital generation from gullible people. If only hope were an energy source, you'd be a human power plant CombatInformatiker.
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May 26, 2013 15:54
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Pander posted:You're cheerleading the energy-generation invention equivalent of "I invented a way to use a common microwave to cure cancer". Pander posted:It's tiring Pander posted:when you keep replying "but if it WORKS..." Pander posted:You caveat "okay they worked with a bullshitter in the past, but this time..." and then claim ignorance of the nitty gritty details even as you nitpick people getting into the nitty gritty? Bullshit. Pander posted:Wait for it to pass rigorous trials and peer reviews. Or at LEAST until it gives the information necessary for repeated trials. Then it could conceivably be a candidate for discussion in a thread about energy generation rather than venture capital generation from gullible people. Pander posted:If only hope were an energy source, you'd be a human power plant CombatInformatiker.
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May 26, 2013 17:34
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CombatInformatiker posted:I'm not cheerleading anything. Please show me where I cheerleaded anything. quote:I'm sorry, I must have missed the part where you're tiring yourself out. quote:I've never said that in the way you're implying. quote:I genuinely do not understand the point you're trying to make with that sentence. CombatInformatiker posted:I didn't read the whole paper because I'm not a physicist and thus can't judge their experimental setup. CombatInformatiker posted:Fun fact: physical processes can be reality even if we don't understand what is happening. CombatInformatiker posted:That's not how science progresses  quote:As for science: science often progresses by someone noticing an effect which can't be explained by current theories  that this device will never see any sort of large-scale production, because I don't think it'll ever be more than a cash/attention grab.quote:No one knowing what happens exactly inside the device does not, by itself, imply it being a scam. quote:Oooh, yes, I forgot about the high standards required for posts in the Energy Generation thread, where Goons discuss how to save the world. This thread is for ~elite posts~ only!
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May 26, 2013 18:46
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http://100percent.org.au This has already been posted, and I think it's great. While I don't think I'll see (globally) 100% in my lifetime, they do show that some cities are generating more energy than they need through renewable energy sources. Obviously certain regions have big rivers for hydroelectric, lots of wind, etc. and others don't, but I think Denmark's goal of being 100% renewable isn't as crazy as it first sounds. Is there any trend akin to Moore's Law for PV efficiency? I know there have been some good increases, but not sure if anyone's been bold enough to predict when we'll get to 60/70% efficiency. And it goes without saying that we're running out of time and can't wait for the best solution to be "profitable"; it will require a lot of government investment. Nationalizing all oil fields would be a great way to generate enough money to research and build good renewable infrastructure (with nuclear taking over from fossil fuels for the interim). OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 19:01 on May 26, 2013 |
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May 26, 2013 18:58
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Obviously certain regions have big rivers for hydroelectric, lots of wind, etc. and others don't, but I think Denmark's goal of being 100% renewable isn't as crazy as it first sounds. Denmark is able to tap into the whole Europe-wide electrical infrastructure in cases of local insuffciency, so having Denmark's goal of local generation be 100% renewable is quite sound. 100% renewable all the time for them however? Yeah not so much, but then they don't plan that last I heard.
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May 26, 2013 19:08
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