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Re:The cold fusion race just heated up by Animats on Friday January 30, 2015 @02:01PM (#8973697)
Oh, the E-Cat again. The E-cat takes in electric power, and supposedly puts out more heat than would be expected. The electric power to resistance heaters is input in a "proprietary waveform", and is measured with a wattmeter.

This is a typical thing with "free energy" scams. The same thing was tried back in the "piezos" era, when putting resonant piezoelectric devices in an oscillating tank circuit was supposed to produce more power than went in. (But it did not, of course, run self-sustaining, without outside power).

Measuring wattage of unusual waveforms is hard. W = E*I, or watts equals current times voltage, but you have to integrate the instantaneous product over time. Many wattmeters don't do a full integration; they're mostly for sine waves, and may have frequency limitations. The E-Cat guy won't let observers use a scope to see that "proprietary waveform". All it's doing is driving a resistance heater, so the waveform should not matter to the heater.

A simple RF wattmeter, which has a resistor whose heat output is measured, would clear this up.

Re:The cold fusion race just heated up by dnautics on Friday January 30, 2015 @02:03PM (#8973710)
A better experiment is a double blind trial. Fill one hydrogen tank with standard hydrogen and another tank with deuterium. Code both of them with a scramble. The e-cat should fail with deuterium and should work with hydrogen.

This does not require any access to internals, and could even be done on the sly without alerting rossi.