Energi
TV: Half a megawatt E-cat in Bologna
UPDATED. Half a megawatt thermal power in self sustained mode, for over five hours. That’s what Andrea Rossi obtained with his E-cat plant on Friday, according to his customer. The question now is who the customer was.
(Swedish version here).
At about quarter past ten on Friday October 28, the test of Andrea Rossi’s heat plant, potentially producing one megawatt, was initiated in an industrial hangar in Bologna.
The plant consisted of more than 100 'energy catalyzers' – Rossi’s invention that possibly produces heat from a hitherto unknown nuclear reaction – connected in parallel.
Already in January 2011 when the E-cat was demonstrated publicly for the first time before a group of invited scientists and journalists in Bologna, Rossi promised the launch of a one megawatt plant in October.
The test was supposed to be performed together with the Greek company Defkalion, and later, after a breach of contract in August, in the US. Finally, as the US agreement was never put in place, the test was performed in Bologna under the control of a yet unknown customer to Rossi.
According to the customer’s controller, Domenico Fioravanti, the plant released 2,635 kWh during five and a half hours of self sustained mode, which is equivalent to an average power of 479 kilowatts – just under half the promised power of one megawatt.
Rossi explained this with the customer’s priority to achieve self sustained mode, which supposedly makes the process more difficult to control than when electrical power is supplied to support the reaction.
“We had to decrease the power during self sustained mode as the temperature rose too much”, Rossi said after the test.
Neither Ny Teknik nor any other of the guests had any possibility to check the measurements made. The invitees could only observe the plant in operation for a few brief moments.
Assuming that the report is correct (the report can be downloaded here, the temperature data here), a substantial amount of energy was released, which is difficult to explain by anything other than heat being developed inside the E-cat, even if you subtract the power input during pre-heating.
UPDATE: There are two minor errors in the report. Se below.
According to the report the test was approved and the plant would now be transported to the customer where it supposedly will be part of an agreement on further tests in order to develop the technology.
It remains unclear who the customer is. Rossi has only indicated that it belongs to a particular category of organizations. One possibility is that it’s a military organization given that the title of the controller Fioravanti in the report is “colonel”, however, scored out with a pen.
Rossi stated that an agreed contract research at the University of Bologna can now be initiated and that discussions on collaboration with Uppsala University can get started.
There’s still no clear indication of when a test performed by independent experts can be done, although this is still what both readers of Ny Teknik and most experts Ny Teknik has spoken to demand.
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READ MORE: Our complete coverage on Rossi's E-cat can be found here.
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More details on the test here below.
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UPDATE: David Roberson who made one of three analyses that Ny Teknik published last week on the October 6 test , has made an updated analysis here, which he claims contains proof that the E-cat generated a large amount of excess energy. On Nov 2 he made a third analysis which he claims contains further proof.
Also Horace Heffner's analysis has been updated.
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UPDATE 2: There are two minor errors in the customer's report:
1. The weight of the hydrogen bottle should be in grams, not kg as indicated.
2. The indicated flow rate of the pumps at the end of the report should be 350 kg/hour, not 750 kg/hour, giving a total of 700 kg/h, not 1,500 kg/h, for the two pumps.
(The measured average flow rate of 675.6 l/h in the first part of the report should be correct).
According to the report the plant consisted of 107 modules. Ny Teknik, however, counted 52 modules inside the container, and 64 additional modules mounted on the container roof – a total of 116.
Two pumps supplied the modules with cooling water which was heated to boiling and the steam was led out to four large fan-cooled heat dissipators. The water was then returned to the pumps through a water tank.
The customer’s controller, Domenico Fioravanti, measured the temperature of the steam at the outlet outside the container and the inlet water temperature. Andrea Rossi measured in addition to this temperature of a large number of the modules.
According to the controller Fioravanti, power from the genset was switched on to the heating resistors in the modules around 10.30, with an initial power of 120 kW, which was gradually increased to 180 kW.
At 12.30 began self sustained mode, which means that the power to the resistors which are used to "ignite" the process was shut down. The plant then ran without any energy input other than the fans and the pumps for five and a half hours.
The total energy released between 12:30 and 18:00 was calculated from the amount of water heated and evaporated. The water flow was measured with two water meters, and according to the controller’s report the energy amounted to a total of 2635 kWh.
Subtracting the energy for pumps and fans, amounting to 66 kWh, this equals a net energy of 2569 kWh, which corresponds to an average power of 467 kW.
Subtracting the energy supplied during startup, about 320 kWh at an average power of 160 kW, the net energy would still be 2249 kWh. In this case the energy output during startup should also be estimated and added.
According to measurements of radiation made by David Bianchini from the University of Bologna no radiation above background level was registered.
