Cold Fusion

[tbourner]

From my post in the fuel thread, has anyone heard of the E-Cat?

 

http://ecat.com/

 

All very secretive, if I wasn't so open minded and trusting I'd think he was trying to fleece $1.5M out of unsuspecting organisations, before doing a runner before their 6 months of fuel runs out.

 

Don't know much about transferring heat to electricity apart from using thermocouples, but if a small unit could be put into a plug in EV car it should be able to boost the range massively! It's use in homes for hot water and eventually electricity as well would put those thieving energy companies out of business. Sounds too good to be true? Why so secretive? why no publicity? Isn't cold fusion a bit of a holy grail to physics?

[Wez]

Looks interesting enough, I suspect as with most advances in tech like this that it will be purchased by a large energy company and then shelved

[stevie_b]

There are lots of FAQs on that site, but the first few seem concerned with how to buy shares in the company or asking for photos of the Chief Exec in the factory: how odd. A better set of FAQs would surely be, "What is an Ecat?", "What fuel does it need?", etc etc.

 

As a consequence, I don't know if this Ecat thing claims to have achieved cold fusion or not. But yes, cold fusion is one of physics' holy grails. Nuclear fusion produces huge amounts of energy, and it's clean too (no nasty radioactive by-products IIRC). The problem: it takes mind-boggling quantities of energy to make it occur (e.g. you'd need to heat up the fuel to some crazy temperature). Now, if it could be achieved without the huge energy input (with "cold" inputs), then you'd get all that energy out without having to put stupid amounts of energy in.

 

It's never been successfully demonstrated on Earth. The Sun is a fusion reactor, but that is super-hot and is under huge pressure too.

[stevie_b]

PS if I was speaking to someone who had recently made cold fusion happen, I would think of better questions to ask than for a photo of them gurning outside whatever warehouse they did it in.

[Digsy]

Going by the specs for the 1MW unit here http://ecat.com/ecat-products/ecat-1-mw/ecat-1mw-technical-data the thing must be hideously inefficient at getting the heat from the reaction into the water.

 

It states water pump ranges from 30 to 1500 kg/hour (0.5 to 25 litres per minute) and output temperatures between 35 and 116 degrees above the input temperature. I would expect the maximum temperature rise to correspond to the minimum flow rate and vice-versa, however the maths says that you can get 0.5 lpm to rise 116 degrees C with only 3.5 kW and 25 lpm to rise 35 degrees with only 54 kW.

 

In fact raising the maximum 25lpm by the maximum 116degrees would take well under 200kW - only slightly more than the electrical energy you are supplying to run it.

 

So its only between 0.35% and 5.4% efficient in terms of thermal transfer, or up to 32% efficient compared to the average amount of electrical energy you have to put in?

 

There's probably a lot more to it than that but for now I'll stick to my kettle if I want to boil water, I think.

[Thorin]

From http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success

 

Secondly, observers apart from the customer were only allowed to view the test for a few minutes at a time and during the entire test the E-Cat remained connected to a power supply by a cable. The external power was supposedly turned off;

 

I say it's a load of codswallop.

[tbourner]

Well I'm not going to be buying shares, asking to be kept up to date or gurning, but I would like to keep an eye on it to see what happens. I was linked to that site from some other fusion related information site I was reading, where it said the 'fusion' is catalysed by a secret ingredient of some kind. I get the impression the 'proper' science community is largely ignoring the claims, based on the secrecy of it all, so I'll go back to waiting patiently for news from ITER .