The big questions are: Is the excess energy real?? And how much is real??

In short, YES , we are seeing excess energy as far as we can tell. There is still a chance that we are fooling ourselves, but that chance is getting smaller and smaller as we rule out potential error after error.

The amount of energy is AT LEAST 5 WATTS. We have reason to believe it may be more. Below is an explanation of how we arrived at the baselines we did.



This blog entry took a while to put together. It is worth noting that while our team was focused on working out some technical details to make the experiment happen and then focused on pulling the data together for ourselves and for Celani, our awesome core of followers has been providing us with as many insights as we could have hoped to come up with from weeks of our own work. The power of the crowd is working!



Below is the graph of all the calibration runs on the Euro Cell in terms of temperature rise for each power.





The first run was way below the others. The last tests, with the active wire in helium, fell close to this lowest curve.



Why are the other calibrations higher than the first?

Possibility 1: The oxide coated control wire started generating excess heat after taking on some loading during the first calibration. This is Celani's inclination. If this is the case, we can safely say that we are demonstrating approximately 5 watts more output energy than the oxide coated constantan wire did.

Possibility 2: T_Glass Out sensor was less thermally connected to glass than in later runs.







From all these calibration lines, we decided to use the highest as the most conservative number, and the lowest because that was closest to how the installed Celani Wire was working under Helium with the exact same T_glassout sensor location. See graph below.



These are the lines we fit the formulas for the P_Out from. Here are the curve fit data and resulting equation parameters.

This is another view of the same thing. Mathieu prepared this for Celani to include in a presentation in Rome this morning.





When we look at the equivalent power to achieve that Delta T_out according to each base line, we get the following:

This graph was provided by one of the commentators and shows that the total amount of radiated energy from the glass is only about 31 Watts. While it does not account for all the 48 W of input power to the cell, it is still an increase of energy output from before the very same wire was loaded with hydrogen. The remaining energy output is in the form of convection.

From Nic:



We still have a low and high estimate based on the calibration baseline we take as reference.

Low is Calib CuNi44 H2 1bar

High is Calib 360L He 1bar



Then the SB calculation gives us a Cell Coefficient (CC)

CC= Correction_Factor * BlackBodySurface * Emissivity * SB_Constant

Low: CC = 3.740958E-09

High: CC = 4.514090E-09



I took Emissivity = 1, since the Correction_Factor (CF) is modifying it anyway.

Low: CF = 1.500

High: CF = 1.810



Finally the Output Power is:

P_SB_out = CC * (T_glassout^4 - T_ambient^4)



This model work very well as the errors between the model and the calibration curves are very small. The calibration data fits perfectly with the SB model, once the correct factor is estimated correctly.





As we struggle with which baseline is really appropriate, perhaps we should extrapolate the pre-loading performance of the actual Celani Wire in which the wire location, emissivity, and sensor location are all exactly the same as during the loading and following live run. Below is an illustration of this approach.



.

According to this baseline, we are getting 64.9 Watts (64.9 - 48.0 = 16.9 Watts excess).





One more piece of data to contend with - Interestingly, the graph of T_Glassin does not show the first calibration run to be that much below the others. I (Ryan) believe this is a hint that the first run was lower because of a variation in thermal contact between the thermocouple and the glass.





The graph below is meant to illustrate how the temperatures from each run were interactive with the pressures and gas types. Each of these lines represents one of the calibration runs The power and temperature started out low. As the power stepped up, the temperature rose, which caused the gas pressure to rise also. The runs starting at higher pressure showed a larger pressure rise in bars (following the ideal gas law). The one perfectly vertical line was adjusted at each step to hold a constant pressure.

The effect we demonstrated on Cell 1 in the USA is not applicable to the current run in Cell 2 because the pressure is very close to constant at just over 1 bar.

We look forward to more advice and analysis by the many, many sharp individuals out there. We also look forward to more design suggestions for how to do the experiment in better ways. Similarly, if anyone else is interested in trying the experiment for themselves or at their institutions, let us know. Facilitating research into the New Fire is our goal.

Addendum: Mathieu has put together this nice summary of the early results in a PDF document:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9qCtGOFmvhmeFF2ZzNhX3JXUTQ

Update #1 - Calibration Basis Overview

This talk through was given in Rome to help delegates at the Coherence meeting understand the data coming from the EU cell.



Correction: Bob says "same source" that should be "same type"