(This blog post was first published on Animpossibleinvention.com).
In just a few weeks, the whole landscape of cold fusion and LENR has changed significantly and, as many have noted, 2015 might bring a breakthrough for LENR in general, with increased public awareness, scientific acceptance and maybe even commercial applications. This is great news.
For those who haven’t followed the latest events, let me summarize.
Most important is the apparent replication of the E-Cat phenomenon by the Russian scientist Alexander Parkhomov. On December 25, 2014, Parkhomov, a respected and experienced physicist, published a short report on an experiment where he had used a reactor similar to the one used by the Swedish-Italian group in the Lugano experiment with Rossi’s E-Cat, and with similar materials in the fuel.
This kind of replication, based on the information in the Lugano report, was what I predicted in the second edition of my book.
Read more on Animpossibleinvention.com.
Mats Lewan: The Biggest Shift Ever. 
“A respected and experienced scientist”? Maybe so. But he obviously is a novice at calorimetry. Why is it people experimenting with cold fusion rarely if ever use a decent calorimeter when such designs (liquid cooled constant flow and envelope Seebeck effect) are available and well documented? A pot on an old couch is hardly a substitute.
And does a respected and experienced scientist write this?
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232419176_Remote_mental_influence_on_biological_and_physical_systems
“Describes experiments on the remote mental influence of a person on animate and inanimate systems with instrumental recording of the effects. In experiments with elephant fish generating orientation electric pulses, an increase in the intervals between the pulses was recorded, whereas a decrease in the interpulse intervals is usually observed in the response of the fish to external stimuli. Based on numerous tests with shielded microcalorimeters and ultra-low-frequency electric noise generators, located at distances of up to several thousand kilometers from the human operator, some conclusions regarding peculiarities of human “distant influence” are inferred. The method for the statistical processing of the data is described.”
Telekinesis is absolute nonsense, you know? What Parkhomov is describing in THAT article is measurement error and bad experimental methods. Isn’t it likely that this is what he is demonstrating (again!) in his LENR experiments?
I think he is determining steam mass from added water to reach same volume.
That has an error based on bubbles which will displace water and be variable.
Also, while steam calorimetry can be OK (not great, but good enough for this result to be meaningful) he does not seem to have tested this except by using the control runs. Thyere are not enough given that some use thyristor control and some variac control – with potential power in measurement errors between the two methods of control. There is not nearly enough info in this report to say.
MFMP should get to the bottom of this.
A couple of observations pertaining to my post below, referring to this video:
At time 3:20 Parkhomov can be seen filling up the water container using what looks like an electric water heater. Judging from the sound he stops pouring when the water level obstructs the funnel pipe.
At time 1:29:40 using a glass measuring cylinder he fills what seems to be a rather arbitrary volume of water into the water container. By the look of it it could be around 0.1 liter. He is not using the funnel so I fail to see how he could restore the starting water level. Of course he could do it at the end of the experiment but I cannot see that in the video.
Parkhomov talks a lot all the time and maybe I would understand the water measurement better if I new Russian. Perhaps somebody with this skill and plenty of spare time could provide a transcript?
It is, among other things, the same classic mistake again: the assumption that all steam is 100% dry. And as have been shown before, it very seldom is. This is really 19th century science, which seems to have been totally forgotten in the 20th century physics education.
I have read Parkhomov’s report and McKubre’s comments. Parkhomov writes:
“By measuring the decrease of water, and from the known heat of vaporization (2260 joules/kg), it is easy to calculate the heat generated.”
As far as I can see there is no mentioning of how the mass of the evaporated water was determined. The natural way to do this would be to use a balance, but no balance is mentioned. The reported masses are 0.2, 0.8 and 1.2 kg for three different runs of 38, 50 and 40 minutes respectively. If I got it right, after running the experiment during the indicated time intervals the water consumption was measured in some unspecified way. Then there is no reason why the weights should be 0.200, 0,800 and 1.200 kg and there is also no reason why the measuring accuracy would only be one significant digit. A good balance and flexible wires should have given much better accuracy. A method consistent with this inferior accuracy would be e. g. measuring the water level with a dipstick or refilling to a level indication mark.
So if we assume that this is the way that the water consumption was measured, we must ask the question: how do we know that all the missing water left the system? May it not be that part of the steam condensed on the outside of the reactor container? In this case the “recycled” heat of evaporation would help warming the water inside the water container. And there would be a puddle of hot water at the bottom of the insulating container. Was there?