The Greek company Defkalion has invited scientific and business organizations to test the core technology in its forthcoming energy products. The products are based on LENR – Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.
Read my report at Nyteknik.se here.
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Mats Lewan: The Biggest Shift Ever. 
“- How do you know that there is no reason to apply additional heating to the reactor? Do you know how this thing works? We don’t.”
I don’t know how this particular device is supposed to work but I know how basic physics and heat transfer work. If you make 20 times the power at the output that is needed for the input, there is no reason you can’t route heat back to the input to “self run” the device. The only possible explanation would be if the increase in temperature at the output vs the input were very small but that has never been claimed. In fact, Defkalion claims the potential for very high output temperatures.
Simple physics says that there is no reason some of the output heat can’t go back to the input, through, say for example, an insulated duct with a control valve in it, thus making the device self running. The heat transfer fluid could be a liquid or a gas — whichever works best at the temperature they select to run.
Flow calorimetry has always been the gold standard for measuring the energy output of a reactor. There is nothing difficult or complicated about it. Defkalion has claimed to have liquid cooled reactors under daily test since last June. All they need is a flow meter and two thermometers properly placed, one at the input and one at the output of the cooling system and they can calculate the energy transfer. It’s extremely simple and unless they plan to cheat somehow, it’s difficult to understand why they won’t allow this.
I can’t really argue with you on the heating arguments, as I don’t have the proper knowledge about physics. Your point sounds valid, though (IMHO). This is just a detail yet and I would love to see the final product. Then we can discuss, why it has been done the way that it seems that it has been done 😉
The problem is (as I understood it) that Defkalion can’t / won’t show the final product but only the reactor itself in order to demonstrate that LENR is real. By showing the bare reactor they have the advantage of keeping it simple and small (whereas the final product is much larger and would allow more tolerance towards skepticism).
However the bare reactor only seems to have this special cooling system in which a special liquid is flowing. And doing flow calorimetry would require some rework on this cooling system. Therefore they chose the other method. It might be a little bit more difficult to do but I hope that among those experts which test the reactors there are many which actually know how to do it properly, so I don’t see the real problem.
@Bertil Nilsson: The total time that the complete test of one reactor setup will take (according to DGT) is 96 hours (i.e., 48 hours with each of both reactors).
Flow calorimetry is not necessary, as is being explained in the following thread:
http://www.defkalion-energy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=926&p=5533#p5533
@M.Y.:
– The testers can provide the complete testing equipment (even the UPS). So its getting really difficult for Defkalion to fake anything.
– The testers are allowed to search every square inch of the room where the test takes place
– Regarding this “translation” (which dates back to September last year….): As I don’t understand it completely – What exactly does this state? That they never applied for a certification to build the 1MW plant? Why should they have, if they cancelled their agreement with Rossi in July / August? They started announcing their reactors in November 2011.
– How do you know that there is no reason to apply additional heating to the reactor? Do you know how this thing works? We don’t.
– As others have stated somewhere else: Not doing flow calorimetry doesn’t need to be a problem.
Again: We will see for sure as soon as the first results are being published.
“Regarding this “translation” (which dates back to September last year….): As I don’t understand it completely – What exactly does this state? That they never applied for a certification to build the 1MW plant? Why should they have, if they cancelled their agreement with Rossi in July / August? They started announcing their reactors in November 2011.”
As I understand it, the translation says that a member of Parliament from Xanthi, Defkalion’s home city, asked to be shown any application by Defkalion (any at all!) for regulatory approval. And no agency could say they had received such an application. You would think if such an application existed, it would be easy for a member of Parliament from the affected district to get a hold of it. After all, it may affect the safety of his constituents!
If Defkalion has applied for some sort of government testing, why don’t they simply say to which agency they applied and then someone from that agency can verify whether or not they received sample devices to test. That would not reveal any trade secrets.
When I raised this issue on Defkalion’s forum in an existing thread to which they had given a non-responsive and evasive answer, they not only deleted my post. They also deleted their original answer and everything in the message thread following it. They also banned me from the forum and blocked my ISP from accessing it. That’s not how honest people respond to polite questions, is it?
The question is if Defkalion ever wanted to show something or ever even started building something which had to be applied for certification until September 2011. It would however be much more interesting, what the current state regarding certification is. As I understand Defkalion, by now they are trying to get certification for the Hyperion product…
And why the thread has been deleted: I don’t know. Perhaps they were simply too annoyed of answering skeptics questions over and over again..? Or perhaps this got nothing do to with their current business? Who knows… I could think of many more reasons. But yes, they could probably have handled this differently.
I´m surprised that convincing calorimetry is avoided if Defkalion really has a working device. Some argue that this is a bit complicated to set up, but I can hardly see it would be. If input power is measured carefully to detect manipulated flow of energy into the device and temperature rise in an isolated output container is measured carefully Im sure it would be very convincing if device is run for a prolonged time, like 20 hrs. What might be hidden and uncontrolable in a setup like Defkalion´s seems impossible to detect and I can hardly see myself being convinced whatever results come from that test situation.
Hi Mats.
The test will not be truly independent until it is done in a location other than Defkalion’s lab, using equipment (other than the Hyperion) entirely supplied by the people performing the testing. They should also choose the method. If nothing more was learned from the circus surrounding testing of Rossi’s E-cat, that should have been it.
There is another issue with this as well. Defkalion said back in July 2011 that they had already tested many of their machines using a liquid coolant circuit. Such a circuit is perfect for performing calorimetry easily and accurately. There is no reason not to use it in the proposed tests.
Finally, with a claimed COP (ratio of output power over input power) of “more than 20” (I think they said much more), there is no reason or excuse to provide electrical heating to the Hyperion to keep it running. Instead, if it needs heat at the input, the heat should be provided by rerouting some of the output heat back to the input area. That would make the device self running.
A self running Hyperion with no power input that ran 48 hours in the tens of kilowatts would indeed be a convincing demonstration that a nuclear process was going on. Anything less will probably be arguable. How arguable will depend on who does the testing and how they go about it. The devil always seems to be in the details.
Defkalion claims they are seeking certification from the Greek authorities. But a member of the Greek Parliament from Xanthi, their home city, asked the regulatory authorities whether they had an application and they said that they did not. When I asked Defkalion, in their forum, to provide proof of such an application direct from the agency involved, they banned me from the forum and deleted most of the message string in which this was discussed including this link:
http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg51035.html
That is an English translation — the original link in Greek is in that post.
M. Y.
Jag tycker att du har en riktigt intressant blogg Mats!
Vilka vill du ta med dig om du får testa Hyperion?
Är det OK att kommentera på svenska?
Bäst att ta det på engelska också.
I think that you have a really interesting blog Mats!
Who would you take with you if you get to test Hyperion?
Goof question. I’d probably bring a reputable scientist and an experienced engineer. The engineer could potentially be better at looking for traps and fraud while scientists are used at evaluating data but mostly don’t expect manipulated experiments.
If it was a typical Rossi type demonstration or the Defkalion proposed test, you should take a physicist (or engineer) specializing in heat transfer and fluid flow (for sure **NOT** a nuclear physicist) with at least a PhD and several years of research experience in a laboratory. That’s because *how* the thing works is not important at all until it is *proven* to work. A heat transfer/fluid flow specialist can evaluate the test conditions better than a nuclear physicist.
In my opinion, you should also take a stage magician such as Banachek to look for trickery. Accomplished practitioners of magic are much better able to detect subterfuge and cheating than scientists are. This has been proven many times. Scientists tend to be much too polite, not suspicious, and not nearly observant enough of anomalies and unexpected findings.
Banachek is the administrator for the James Randi million dollar prize for demonstration of the paranormal. I do not know if this prize applies to cold fusion but I doubt it. Nonetheless, Banacheck would be an excellent person to include in a test of the E-cats and given that his fee and travel costs would be paid, he’d probably be happy to do it.
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/contact-the-jref/12-contacts/6-challenge-administrator.html
Also, LOL, I’m available at my usual exorbitant fee rate.