UPDATE: Live Stream of E-CAT Conference in Zurich

Here is a link for a Live Stream of the E-Cat-Hot Honeycomb Zurich conference taking place — (EDIT) September 8-9. (sorry, original post had Sept.7th)

http://www.ecat-deutschland.org/index.php/live-stream

Here’s a program pdf of the entire conference breakdown, schedule, etc. in English –
http://www.borderlands.de/Links/Kongress080912M-e.pdf

Live streaming is here from UStream:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/z%C3%BCrich-09-2012-live

Here’s the recorded video that was posted from Day 1, with many thanks to steverybak:



Video streaming by Ustream



Video streaming by Ustream



Video streaming by Ustream

E-cat World has published three associated files about the Hot Cat for this event.

Hot Cat data

Hot Cat Corrections Powerpoint

This file documents a test of the Hot Cat by Fabio Penon and David Bianchini: Penon4-1

Some points from Andrea Rossi’s talk on Day 1 are listed. (The list is not comprehensive due to loss of stream):

  • The E-cat Congress was organized in part by Adolf and Inge Schneider from TransAltec Inc. in Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Andrea Rossi spoke in the evening and announced that the industrial version of the E-cat has been certified from SGS, limited to the safety features. SGS is a company that provides inspections, testing, certification and training for scientific research and consumer products.
  • The 10 kilowatt consumer steam generator has been more difficult to certify due to the safety considerations when utilizing a hydrogen tank.
  • The new Hot Cat reactor can withstand up to 1200 Celsius degrees and a special paint was invented specifically for use in the E-cat. Internal temperature can reach 1250 Celsius degrees while external surface can reach 1050 C.
  • Inner core has dimensions length 33 cm, outer diameter 9 cm, inner diameter 3 cm made of AISI 310 steel to withstand higher temperatures.
  • .
  • David Bianchini, a physicist from the University of Bologna made radiation measurements outside of the reactor that was crucial to the certification. Rossi has said he has been “just a spectator” during those measurements.
    .

    These measurements are extremely important because of safety, “no radiations should go outside the reactor” says Rossi. Bianchini’s report concludes there is no significant radiation above background, summarized here:

  • .
  • One charge of hydrogen fuel is 1 gram for six months of 10 kilowatt power continual operation.
  • A prototype Hot Cat generator appears to have a minimum COP of 2.5. Planned commercial product has COP of 6.
  • Energy density measured and calculated by Penon resulted in these values:
  • .
  • A full report on Hot Cat specifications will be released in two months time after repeated tests of a similar nature.
.

Day 2 of Ecat Conference had a number of panels. Recorded video posted follows:



Video streaming by Ustream



Video streaming by Ustream



Video streaming by Ustream



Video streaming by Ustream

Here is a partial transcription of Roger Green’s presentation panel:

Use Ecat to make ethanol, says Roger Green. “Food is for people.”

Green of E-cat Australia and Eco Global Fuels describes the hydroxy method, which takes seawater to make ethanol, and how Ecat can power the process.

“Industrial heat is a commodity to start with. We’re talking about developing it down the line for desalination and transportation.”

“It’s no longer research and development”, Green says of the applications for the Ecat technology. “It’s actually a scale-up.”

“When you run the hydroxy generators, you have iron as a by-product. We know exactly how much, and the iron goes into creating algae. We decided to use a bit of the excess energy to make bio-char.”

“I love solar, but it’s expensive. With the Ecat“, Green says, “we can sequester CO2 and make a renewable fuel.”

William Donavan [contact] who has been investigating various free energy systems and providing consulting services for energy and propulsion for years, is Green’s Chief Technical Advisor. He described how the Ecat can assist in desalination for clean water.

Conventional desalination is energy intensive and requires huge boilers. “The biggest problem is the heat of vaporization and the heat loss to the environment.” Reverse osmosis wastes huge amounts of water, despite being the most popular method of desalination.

“Low-pressure distillation currently uses petroleum to run generators that run 24-7. This is potentially an application for LENR.”

Donavan listed a number of desalination methods with their pros and cons. Energy and Environmental Science issue #10 highlights Capacitive Desalination, which is on the horizon, and researchers at MIT are working on Graphene Desalination.

“Though the global recession has put a dent into the contracted capacity, demand is still outstripping what can be done now.”

He cites statistics from Global Water Intelligence that, in 2012, “the global desal market will add 6.4 million cubic meters per day (1,690 Million Gallons per Day) of capacity valued at $9 billion,” including both “brackish and seawater desal”, and “equipment sales could surpass $18 billion by 2016”.

“They’ve got the equipment; what they haven’t got is the energy to do it, which I think, we can supply that for them,” said Donavan.

The oil industry is also looking for water recycling for fracking operations. They are contaminating the aquifers, and this requires remediation.

The Ecat technology offers a solution for clean-up.

“There are literally millions of square kilometers that are contaminated, and the aquifers are no longer useful.” LENR is “a good fit” to solve these problems, and being green, “it’s acceptable to the environmental community.”

And for business interests, Donavan says, “billions are to made in global profits.”

Sitting in the audience was Andrea Rossi, who had previously considered desalination as an application of Ecat technology himself, but turned away from it due to the cost-effectiveness compared to osmosis, was impressed with Donovan’s ideas. “This is a dramatic game-changer”, he said of the newer technologies.

Rossi asked, “Have you made a comparative economic analysis between the cost of desalination of water made with the Ecat and made with reverse osmosis?”

In answering, Donavan cited “Waste to water: a low-energy water distillation method” [.pdf], a study by Florida Atlantic University researchers led by Brandon Moore, along with two other studies done by and Israeli group and a Russian group, where the average consensus was, “a 40% reduction in energy” use with the Ecat over osmosis, though Roger Green admitted they are still getting benchmarks in the R&D program and “don’t have it down to that number yet – that’s what’s possible.”

Moving into the “heat to electricity” portion of the talk, Donavan began by stating that “Conventional turbine to hydrogen, and then to electricity, is the worst efficiency of all.”

“24% efficiency power generation into 20% efficiency electrolysis yields an overall efficiency of 4.8%”, using a conventional turbine, with “95.2% of heat wasted”.

“Though politically correct, the so-called ‘hydrogen economy’ is uneconomical and environmentally disastrous.”

“Only on-site generation is practical.”

Now a conventional turbine has a 30% efficiency, and with an 80% efficient alternator, the combined efficiency yield is only 24%, leaving 76% of the heat wasted.

This type of system is only feasible when you can use that wasted heat. But this is how conventional power plants operate – using the wasted heat as “environmental heaters”, i.e. heating the environment.

A Tesla turbine has a high efficiency, from 50-80%. Using the lowest efficiency with an 80% efficiency alternator yields an overall efficiency for electrical power of 40%.

This mature technology was proven in 1911!

Thermoelectrics is another robust technology to provide electrical power generation known since the 1950s that provides a comparable efficiency to photovoltaic electricity generation, costing $10 per watt with 200 Watt units costing $1919.00.

Devices available now [visit] are solid state with no parts to wear out, can work by convection, and can be used for co-generation with temperature over 270 degrees Celsius are typical.

These units are highly adaptable to LENR though not as price competitive as the turbine and alternator combination. Thermoelectric generators have been used on for spacecraft power for decades, but the true life expectancy of these devices have yet to be determined. They also need an inverter to turn output into AC as well as high-temperatures to operate, around 1226-1726 degrees Celsius.

Stirling engines, originally designed by Robert Stirling in 1816, can reach efficiencies of 50% if configured correctly, and gas can be looped through a LENR reactor as a primary method of cooling.

On the downside, these types of engines need higher temperatures to be more efficient, between 500-1000 degrees Celsius and the high pressures are more difficult to “seal in” over time. It also has more moving parts than other methods of converting heat to electricity.

Variants of the Stirling engine include the free piston engine design, of which Siemens uses the Alpha (three to six cylinder) version, the Beta configuration, a high-output and stable version, and a new 10-year-old technology called a Quasiturbine Stirling, which may hold the most promise teamed up with LENR.

Research at the NASA Glenn Research Center is being done on a Stirling Radioisotope generator which puts out 12.5 kilowatts per cylinder, a close match for the 10 kilowatt output of the small Ecat.

There are Rotary Stirling system, some of which are even more efficient than the other alpha, beta, or gamma, Stirling designs. This technology was abandoned to pursue “cheaper” engines, but is “begging to be repurposed for LENR.”

Stirling Engine Forum http://www.stirlingengineforum.com/

For converting heat to electricity, there are several horizon technologies. One is Quantum Well technology. Operating at a relatively low 450 degree Celsius temperature differential, they can run as high as 800 degrees, providing efficiencies as high as 32.5%, and higher in the future. Future efficiency if 50% or more then compete with turboelectric conversion systems.

These high efficiencies utilize capton substrates, as well as other engineered plastics, act as a “heat funnel”.

This technology is being used by military on Abrams tanks as a 5 kW energy conversion system, and we need civilian use!

Efficiencies as high as 92% come from experimental IR (Nano) Antennas, where infrared radiation is directly converted to electricity. First proposed by Steve Elzwick in the 1980s, the development was stymied by the lack of teraherz diodes not fast enough to operate, but they are on the market now, which makes this thermoelectric technology “begging to be developed.”

Applications being researched at the Idaho National Laboratory include solar cells that work at night.

Interestingly, you can cut these types of nanoantennas to 1/4 wavelength of your blackbody temperature. This means that when the infrared radiation (heat) approaches that temperature, the nanoantennas begins to converge and acts like a self-regulating thermostat.

Wrapping up his talk, Donavan listed a number of applications for LENR technology: adsorption type refrigeration and HVAC systems, hybrid cars and trucks, substitutes for diesel-electric locomotives, turbine-driven ships and submarines, replacements for spacecraft power currently using radiothermalisotope generators (RTG), exotic propulsion systems for space planes, and locally-generated power not connected to a grid.

Many of these applications have already been proposed and are actively being pursued. For instance, the Navy is interested in replacing their reactors on their nuclear submarines.

In conclusion, while almost all thermoelectric conversion technologies have merit, when nanoantennas are available, that one will be the most efficient.

Bot Stirling and Tesla turbines are close competitors in cost as well as efficiency to mechanical power conversion, but the only ones that do NOT measure up are the conventional power conversion systems in use now.

Roger Green closed the talk with a business proposal for their R&D efforts at e-Cat Australia. Their research efforts are based in labs located in the south of France and Sydney, Australia. The talk left out two or three proprietary products-in-development.

The company is focusing on two products in particular, a small prototype for the low-pressure desalination unit, as well as the most innovative heat-to-electricity technology, and they are looking for only about $200-300 thousand to do it.

Sourced from global search for talent, Green is thrilled to have William Donavan leading the R&D.

Hot, clean water from cold fusion means worldwide health revolution

In Potential Advantages and Impacts of LENR Generators of Thermal and Electrical Power and Energy published in May/June 2012 Infinite Energy #103 [.pdf version], Professor David J. Nagel describes the impact that clean drinking water produced by cold fusion, also called low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) would have on human health:

Production of Clean Water
Humans need water on a frequent basis to sustain life. Roughly one billion people on earth do not have good drinking water now. The possibility of being able to produce drinkable water from dirty rivers and the seas by using the heat from LENR would be momentous.” –David J. Nagel

Cleaning dirty water and de-salinization of ocean water on small and large scales both become possible with cold fusion technology, and hot, clean water produced from small, portable generators could affect the health of a billion people world-wide.

Nagel is a Professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and a founder of NuCat, a company that holds workshops and seminars on cold fusion for scientists, researchers, and potential investors. [visit] Making the case to businesses that they can profit with affordable LENR-based hot-water boilers, he goes on to say:

Favorable pricing of LENR generators for such countries could conceivably contribute significantly to world peace. The situation might be similar to the current sales of medicines for AIDS to poor countries at reduced prices. Rich countries will not soon give poor countries a large fraction of their wealth. However, they could provide some of the energy needed for development and local wealth production at discounted prices, while still making money from manufacturing LENR energy generators. This is an historic opportunity. –David J. Nagel

But the real winners are those suffering with conditions caused by dirty water:

Global Medical Impacts
The availability of water free of pathogens and parasites to a very large number of people should lead to dramatic reductions of the incidence of many diseases. The savings of lives, human suffering and costs of medical assistance, where it is available, might greatly outweigh the costs of buying and using LENR generators. The better availability of electricity would improve both the diagnostic and therapeutic sides of clinical medicine.” –David J. Nagel

Coal-mining company Massey Energy leaves behind dirty legacy for people and wildlife in the U.S.
That may be a policy of enlightened self-interest on the part of “rich countries”, but just who needs clean water? Just about everybody.

In the U.S., there are people whose water is combustible because of pollutants from nearby hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for gas. Suzy Williams wrote a song about it in response to Gasland which documents this atrocity.

But what kind of difference can clean water make in the lives of poor people around the world? The hardship that lack of access to clean water brings to one in seven around the globe forfeits a tremendous human capital. According to Water.org [visit],

Women around the world spend 200 million hours every day collecting water and every 20 seconds a child dies from a water-born pathogen.

Cold fusion commercial products for domestic use now in research and development phase are small and portable. A 10 kilowatt steam-heat generator has a core the size of a tin of mints, requiring only a few grams of nickel powder and pico-grams of hydrogen gas to operate. These relatively simple devices can be made affordably for communities in need.

The benefits of clean water from cold fusion was highlighted in another article published in the December 1996/January 1997 Infinite Energy magazine issue #11 [visit], this one written by researcher and author Jed Rothwell. In it, he commented on Everyday Killers, a series of articles in the New York Times about the myriad of problems created by lack of access to clean water and mosquito nets. [download .pdf]

Here are some excerpts from that article showing cold fusion researchers have been thinking about the revolutionary benefits of this newly emerging technology for a long time:

It is good to be reminded why cold fusion is so important. The New York Times recently published a two-part series on third world health problems titled “Everyday Killers,” by Nicholas D. Kristof:

Malaria Makes a Comeback. And is More Deadly Than Ever, January 8, 1997
For Third World, Water Is Still Deadly Drink, January 9, 1997

… Almost all of water borne diseases could be eliminated by boiling the water used for cooking and drinking and by cooking foods more thoroughly. Better hygiene would also eliminate them, but boiling will work. Unfortunately for a family of four in India, the kerosene required to boil the water costs about $4 per month. Many poor families earn less than $20 per month, so this is much more than they can afford.

The waters of the Niger River Delta are used for defecating, bathing, fishing and garbage. Oil companies have removed more than $400 billion of wealth out of the wetland, but local residents have little to show for it.
Oil companies have removed more than $400 billion of wealth out of the Niger River Delta, and the waters are still used for defecating, bathing, fishing and garbage.
Cold fusion might ameliorate this problem by giving people cheap energy to boil drinking water and cook food. If a high-temperature cold fusion device could be made as cheaply as a kerosene burner or electric stove, it could save millions of lives every year. Boiling water is a workaround. It is not as effective as proper sanitation. As the article explains, “billions of people in the third world don’t have access even to a decent pit latrine.” In other words, in many parts of the world shovels would do more good than either kerosene or cold fusion. Latrines or septic systems would be a great benefit on land with good drainage and percolation. Concrete lined cesspools can be effective. The next step — to water pipes, sewers, and waste treatment plants — costs far more than poor communities can afford.

The Times listed some statistics for the most common water borne diseases in the 1997 article:

Deaths per Year
Diarrhea 3,100,000
Schistosmiasis 200,000
Trypanosomiasis 130,000
Intestinal Helminth Infection 1001000
TOTAL 3,530.000

Sources: World Health Organization. American Medical Association, and the Encyclopedia of Medicine.

Whether you use kerosene or cold fusion, boiling drinking water is a stopgap solution to the problem. It depends on the initiative of individuals. A mother might conscientiously boil drinking water, but when she is not around the children may not bother. It is far better and more efficient to secure a source of pure water for the whole neighborhood or village, and to drain off sewage.

On the other hand, the ad-hoc one-at-a-time method of boiling water is good because it allows individuals to solve the problem on their own, immediately, without depending on community action. It fits in well with the “micro-loan” model third world assistance programs, which were pioneered by organizations like Oxfam.

Ignorance Is Often the Real Problem
Ignorance causes much of the suffering. Children have no idea that filth causes disease. The Times article opens with a scene familiar to anyone who has traveled in the third world, although it is unthinkable to Americans and Europeans
:

Children like the Bhagwani boys scamper about barefoot on the
narrow muddy paths that wind through the labyrinth of a slum here,
squatting and relieving themselves as the need arises, as casual about
the filth as the bedraggled rats that nose about in the raw sewage
trickling beside the paths.

Adults realize that this causes disease, but they are not convinced of the fact enough to discipline their children, or to dig proper latrines. In some urban slums there is not enough room, but that is not a problem in rural villages, yet in many of them water-born diseases are endemic. Many crowded Japanese towns and villages today have no running water or sewer systems. (At least, they still do not in rural Yamaguchi, where I often spend my summer vacation.) Houses are equipped with concrete cesspools only, which were emptied by hand until the 1950s. Yet there has been no water-born disease in these villages in modern times.

Cold Fusion No Panacea, but Better than Alternatives
…Technology does not help people automatically, just by existing.

..The biggest advantage would be that individual people will decide for themselves to buy the reactor. People will not have to wait for corrupt governments or power companies to serve their needs. They will be able to solve their own problems, just as they do today with micro-loans. –Jed Rothwell excerpts from Everyday Killers

Recently, I met with veteran cold fusion researcher Dr. Melvin Miles [visit] and his colleague Dr. Iraj Parchamazad, Chairman of the Chemistry Department at University of LaVerne in LaVerne, California [visit].

An electrochemist who worked for the Navy, as well as a professor of chemistry at University of LaVerne, the now “retired” Dr. Miles continues to work on palladium-deuterium (Pd-D) electrolytic cells as he has for twenty-three years. He was the first to correlate excess heat with the production of helium, confirming the nuclear origin of the reaction. He is an expert in measuring heat, called calorimetry, as well as measuring the tiny amounts of helium produced by these cells.

I wanted to ask Dr. Miles about what he’s learned about calorimetry over the past two decades and I was lucky enough to interview Dr. Parchamazad about his latest work using palladium nano-particles baked into zeolites and exposed to deuterium gas D2O, with which he’s had a 10 out of 10 success rate in generating excess heat.

And a slide from Miles’ presentation at the American Chemical Society Meeting in 2007, a calculation showing that if we took all the deuterium atoms in the ocean and fused them into helium, creating energy according to Albert Einstein’s E= mc2, the fuel would burn 13 billion years:

Slide from Miles' presentation at National Meeting American Chemical Society 2010

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