The E-Cat has been replicated?

https://animpossibleinvention.com/2016/02/24/breaking-the-e-cat-has-been-replicated-hers-the-recipe/

by pjkundert • 10 years ago

46 70 10 years ago

animpossibleinvention.com

brudgers4• 10 years ago

"E-Cat" is short for "Energy Catalyzation" which is more or less cold-fusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

clock_tower2• 10 years ago

Thanks. I was wondering what this was about; my best guess was the CueCat from one of Joel Spolsky's old columns...

emcrazyone• 10 years ago

hahaha, I was thinking the exact same thing, literally cue cat and all too. Even funnier is my undergrad degree was, originally, applied physics before switching to EE. I follow science when I can but boy do I feel out of the loop sometimes. Reading your post gave me a nice chuckle.

readams2• 10 years ago

Note that the "replication" seems to have been done by an organization that had set out specifically to produce this result and not by any sort of reputable scientists or lab. The announcement here is on the web site of a pro-E-cat book.

Needless to say, don't start celebrating the birth of the overunity era quite yet.

tankenmate• 10 years ago

What makes me most happy here is that they are releasing what they claim is a rather complete "recipe"; this should hopefully lead to independent replication, hopefully by sceptics and hopefully many more replications.

leaveyou3• 10 years ago

"It's impossible to replicate" especially if you don't want to. There always was and still is a very strange negative fervor around this topic on hacker news and if everything goes well I think we should probably dig up all those excessively negative and accusative posts and ask for a follow up. I still remember those "This is a scam ! Rossi is a fraud !" even if no one was asked to invest and no one complained of being defrauded and all the public demonstrations were "obviously flawed" and everyone knew how to measure excess heat better than Rossi.

clort• 10 years ago

In fact, if this is replicated by independent engineers and they just published the actual method required.. it seems that Rossi will have lost claim to any money he could have made by actually making these devices or patenting them. I guess that nobody will need him, nor will they need to pay him any money to use the idea.

paulhart• 10 years ago

He has a (US) patent already.

https://www.google.com/patents/US9115913

api4• 10 years ago

If they have patents, why don't they publish a real scientific article on this with all the information needed to replicate?

This stuff is permanently in my 'put up or shut up' category, and putting up means true independent open replication by more than one party.

anoonmoose• 10 years ago

Off-topic but related:

Lately I've been following the newest installment of the Steorn saga, and this E-Cat technology popped up in my travels. Some background: this company Steorn has been claiming to have made over-unity/free energy/whatever devices for some years now, but for some reason they never actually deliver. Well, this time, they took a bunch of pre-orders for, basically, a cell phone charger with unlimited life, and they even sent a few out.

The only confirmed delivered unit has been to the owner of an E-Cat news blog. It has been extremely amusing to watch the owner of the blog and the readers come up with justifications for why their unit doesn't work.

Funny stuff, if you think free energy idiocy is as funny as I do.

http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/02/24/ecw-ocube-testing-week-...

mikeash8• 10 years ago

Why is this so difficult? Isolate the machine in a box where the only connection to the outside world is two wires. Draw power from those wires until you've pulled more energy than any known storage system could possibly provide. Boom, done.

Of course, my question is rhetorical. The answer is obvious: it doesn't work. If it worked, it would be easy to demonstrate.

readams2• 10 years ago

That actually doesn't work, as there's a long history of people hiding batteries in their fake overunity devices. You can also have devices that might have other forms of stored energy that might be slowly depleted, such as mechanical strain being relieved, chemical reactions taking place, etc. You can also have devices that work by taking advantage of solar power in a subtle way or other external effects.

mikeash8• 10 years ago

This thing is supposedly a fusion device. Run it until you've drawn more energy than could possibly be provided by burning an equivalent mass of hydrogen, and then you know it must be a nuclear effect. If it can't provide that much energy, then it's a worthless fusion device.

I can accept that such a test may not be totally 100% definitive. But if the device is real then it could definitely pass. The fact that they're fucking around instead of just doing the obvious shows that they're full of it.

Edit: regarding potential external effects, these devices are supposed to put out a megawatt of power. There's no solar trickery that's going to let you fake that.

api4• 10 years ago

"More energy than can possibly be stored."

For it to be a real test you'd have to exceed the total energy output of any plausible chemical system. Calculate the total amount of energy of a stoichiometric mixture of, say, liquid oxygen and kerosene, and then draw power until you have exceeded that. At that point you can be pretty damn sure it's not a chemical battery.

zepto• 10 years ago

It seems like you are misunderstanding mikeash. He's saying it's ok for there to be a battery (or other store of energy) inside, because the test is only passed if the system produces more energy than could be stored inside the box.

pjkundert2• 10 years ago

They weren't actually performing calorimetry or energy extraction/measurement; the interesting effect was the repeatable, sustained burst of low-energy Gamma radiation at table-top temperatures and pressures.

mikeash8• 10 years ago

Right. My point is that if the device really works then they wouldn't need to screw around with all that. Just see if it produces more power than a chemical system could hold. If it actually worked, it could do this easily and would more or less prove that it works. That they have not done this screams "scam."

look_lookatme• 10 years ago

Isolate the machine in a box where the only connection to the outside world is two wires. Draw power from those wires until you've pulled more energy than any known storage system could possibly provide.

I believe a MacBook running Chrome, Atom, and Slack for a few hours will satisfy this requirement.

trhway• 10 years ago

even unrolling 3M tape generates X-rays.

https://youtu.be/LQBjRF9mX1Y?t=250

I as anybody want the cold fusion to work (and i believe that palladium experiment 20 years ago did work, and that there is something to their approach), yet "medical" X-rays from heated hydrogen gas/Li/Ni interface doesn't struck as something unexpected or pointing to any physics outside of chemistry and EM.

aetherson2• 10 years ago

I'm genuinely curious as to why HN so regularly has articles about various "wouldn't it be great if this worked but obviously it never will" scams/inventions/measurement errors on the front page.

Is it because there is a contingent of HN voters who are true believers in this stuff?

Is it "point at the silly people and laugh"?

Is it some kind of attempt to make a meta point about credulity or discuss scams or something?

pjkundert2• 10 years ago

I'm actually surprised at the "Hmph. Of course, it doesn't work" responses... I was quite intrigued by the Gamma signature from a device operating at bench-top temperatures/pressures, and with low energy inputs. I'm thinking that the mounting evidence for a set of previously undescribed low-energy nuclear pathways is quite interesting!

guscost4• 10 years ago

Maybe all of those are a factor. Personally, while I try to maintain skepticism about big claims like this, I don't like to dismiss an idea offhand just because most other people have previously dismissed it. Others are probably willing to extend the same courtesy even if the particular claim is unlikely to hold.

Just curious, would you put the EM drive[0] in the same category?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster

api4• 10 years ago

The EmDrive is actually less physically plausible than the E-Cat if you get into it, since reactionless propulsion is identical to perpetual motion and/or infinite energy. Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that. The only way the EmDrive could work is if either (a) we are really wrong about some fundamental stuff, or (b) it's not actually reactionless but is pushing against something "exotic" like dark matter or dark energy.

E-Cat or anything like it (LENR) would mean new nuclear physics -- some way of bypassing the Coulomb barrier at low energies via some novel probably quantum mechanism. But fundamentally it's not violating anything as foundational as a conservation law. We know the energy is there via E=mc^2 and all. We just don't currently know of any way to get at that energy at sub-plasma temperatures and pressures (and for the proposed fusion reaction in the E-Cat, by no known physical means). LENR would require new physics but would not break existing physics.

I do recall reading some interesting stuff about how some of the gas giant planets seem a bit warmer than they should be, and that if LENR were a thing it would provide a possible explanation for some anomalous heating observed in astronomical observations.

extrapickles• 10 years ago

The biggest problem I have with all of these claims is the rigor of the tests they conduct. They never seem to use standard equipment that is appropriate for the effect they are trying to measure. Always they have a device that needs 1kW that has a 50kW 3phase power meter hooked up to it, or other techniques that are odd and make you wonder what they are trying to hide (thermal camera measuring temp of 1 side, nothing for the other to ensure heating is uniform). If you can afford to point a thermal camera at it, you can afford the cheapest of thermocouples to help prove the other side isn't room temperature.

For the EM drive, I would be surprised if they didn't report some trust after dumping large amounts of power into a box due to the million different things that can produce a misleading result (metallurgical defect in cavity causes heating to not match model, etc). If they can convince someone to try it in orbit, it would be a different story. Thanks to cube sats, this wouldn't be that expensive, <$500k to give it a go (launch 2 1U cube sats, one with drive and one without, see if separation changes). The bonus for the EM Drive folks is that several Nasa sites offered to independently test it when they can produce enough thrust for them to measure accurately, so if they do see something, its worth it to give it a go in orbit. They have yet to deliver such a device though.

mikeash8• 10 years ago

At least the EmDrive is legitimately difficult to verify. It's claimed to produce tiny amounts of thrust. That requires extreme care to measure and makes it hard to see if it works as claimed.

The e-cat, on the other hand, is claimed to be a megawatt nuclear reactor. Verifying it should be easy: let it run and see if it produces power. Let it run long enough to rule out trickery like hidden batteries. If it does what the creator says it does, it should pass this test easily.

But for some reason they won't do this. They run all sorts of other weird tests but won't just demonstrate power production. To me, this makes it obvious that the "some reason" is because it doesn't work. If it worked there wouldn't be any question.

c3534l• 10 years ago

Well, for one I can't downvote threads. Seems what you need to get a page to stay on the front page is people willing to upvote it, not skeptics against the thing.

marshray• 10 years ago

Is it because there is a contingent of HN voters who are true believers in this stuff?

Why does the world have to be divided between "skeptics" and "true believers"?

I think a lot of us are in the "open minded but very cautious" category.

brudgers4• 10 years ago

In 1982, I read Herman Kahn's The Next 200 Years and got pumped about power from nuclear fusion. The tokamak was hot and the wisdom at the time was that it was 20 years away. I talked with my Dad, he said fusion power had been 20 years away since he was also 17. It's still looks like it's 20 years away.

My point isn't that practical fusion power is a scam. But to me it doesn't look appreciably closer to practicality than cold fusion and a whole lot more money has been spent on it [which as a metric of grift is probably among the better ones]. Which is to say that my point is that what constitutes a scam is in the eye of the beholder. We celebrate Charles Babbage.

drjesusphd3• 10 years ago

But to me it doesn't look appreciably closer to practicality than cold fusion

The figure of merit is Q, the fusion gain per input energy. For cold fusion, this figure is infintessimal; for lasers I think it's about 0.001; Tokamaks have reached Q=0.7. Not to mention, theoretical break-even ("effective Q">1) was achieved in Japan, but they do not have access to Tritium, which is the only reason it wasn't "real" breakeven.

Since your dad was a teenager, fusion efficiency has outpaced Moore's law for microelectronics. Real progress is being made.

tetraverse• 10 years ago

So, what happens if you disconnect the electrical power input and connect the output back into the input. The device should continue to run for a measurably period until the 'cold-fusion' fuel is expended.

"The measurements of electrical power input were performed with a large bandwidth three-phase power analyzer. Data were collected during 32 days of running in March 2014. The reactor operating point was set to about 1260 oC in the first half of the run, and at about 1400 °C in the second half. The measured energy balance between input and output heat yielded a COP factor of about 3.2 and 3.6 for the 1260 oC and 1400 oC runs, respectively."

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reacto...

maxxxxx• 10 years ago

The E-cat definitely triggers all my bullshit detectors. Has there ever been a case where somebody had this fantastic invention but never let anybody take a close look but the invention was actually legitimate?

The only one I can think of is the Wright brothers who didn't show their flyer for years until the patents were finished.

brudgers4• 10 years ago

Greek fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

SaberTail• 10 years ago

I'm not sure what they're trying to show with their gamma ray spectra. To me, they all look like a potassium-40 peak (at 1460 keV), with a bunch of Compton scattering at lower energies.

The E-Cat has been replicated?

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