Here is what's fun about steam, it currently comes in 6 radial cylinders for very low pressure steam and in one long long stroking single cylinder for high temperature steam.    Both ideas are fully engineered out right now with a hundred plus years of development time behind them.   Both systems can be bought today, from existing companies.

Tolerances are generous in steam, as things grow and contract a lot.   Modern stainless steel, everything teflon coated steam engines use water for their lubricant, they don't even need that stinky greasy steam oil any more.

No need for a transmission either just as long as the piston area is enough square inches to start the machine to rolling on an uphill lay.   If it can start rolling over (enough starting torque) it is good for any functional mph (up to well over 100 mph).

Steam cars were all direct drive long stroking single cylinder engines.

High temp high pressure steam can do cars and such much better than low temp steam, but not as efficiently as the newly invented gasoline engines could do the same jobs back in the 1930s when internal combustion engines took over all of steam's duties because gasoline was 19 cents a gallon.  

Fuel cost was the separator back then,  but with LENR now offering practically free fuel cost the equation swings back in the other direction back to high pressure steam being the most cost effective future pathway.

A steam engine is very cheap to build compared to an internal combustion engine (far fewer parts at much easier tolerances).

"Italo R. December 27th, 2015 at 11:38 AM

Dear Dr. Rossi, does the E-Cat-X produce electricity also during SSM periods?
Kind Regards, Italo R.

Andrea Rossi December 27th, 2015 at 1:01 PM
Italo R.: Yes.
Warm Regards, A.R."


You are looking at a steam car package and a remote living "power, heat, hot water" package .....

Roll them all into a steam RV and you got true mobile living (if you can get you a cold water hook up somehow).

Now LENR is beginning to be taken seriously the oil industry's "BLACK SWAN" effect is being predicted to hit any number of other industrial sectors starting as soon as this upcoming year.

Socio-economic historians are looking back at the electrical revolution as the predictor of what this paradigm shift effect will be like, except this time no wires have to be run all over the place to carry the power.

DE-CENTRALIZATION is the big buzz word now -- regional, co-op and city-wide power plants popping up all over instead of folks continuing to invest in large centralized plants.

The coal industry is the first to go, followed by heating oils and other petroleum products.   Natural gas will go last as it is already pretty much a regional power source and it is much cleaner, only making water vapor and CO² as its burn end products.

Canada will get filled up with people finally, as the cooler climate does not affect people settling there nearly as much whenever you can have all the power and heat you want for peanuts.  

Canada has clean water and lots of big empty places for people to be.    As Global warming continues, Canada will become more and more desirable as real estate.

PEOPLE in multiple new billions will cause more warming by stripping off tree cover, etc. etc.

Industry and industrial wastes causes global pollution that results in bio-death and more global warming.

Global warming will not stop until the planet dies off totally.

By then the smartest and best of our great-grandkids will have moved off planet to a variety of new venues, and the great Diaspora will have begun.

Scientists have opened their eyes now, and the newest theories that allow for LENR allow all sorts of new transformation effects and some are seeing potential temporal and gravitational effects in these new theories as well.

Justin, he just spent months sleeping on a cot inside a steel box in a secret location ...... I think folks not knowing where he is at any given time is a very good idea right now.

Smart folks can see lots of ways to make a profit out of the changes that are coming.  

Ragheads and radicals would be the ones shooting at various misc. steel containers scattered here and there with rocket grenades and tank killers.

People are asking Rossi to please hurry up and put an E Cat-X on sale as a demo unit so they can experiment with it.   They are impatient, very impatient.  

Rossi responds:

Akum:

You can’t imagine how impatient am I, but I must be patient all the way, working to make it happen as soon as possible. Sometime you can’t foresee: for example, I studied for years how to get out from an E-Cat directly electricity ( we had traces of it), but I have not been able and for those years no progress has been done…suddenly, during a night in the plant, I got an idea that arrived unexpected, and in few seconds we got a progress that we didn’t get in years.

Therefore, it is impossible to give an answer.

Warm Regards,

A.R.


I think Rossi is really saying that until he can tuck all his functional secrets and mix secrets into a flat matrix sealed component unit such that dissection for secrets isn't obvious or easy to do then no one will see or hold early examples of his newest tricks.

Certainly not until the controlling patents are firmly in hand, anyway, and real production and distribution has begun.

Rossi had promised a "revealing update" of his dreams on the E-Cat X for his New Year's ball dropping present to the world.   He did do this, but the amount of completely new information is minimal apart from a generalized $50 per killowatt construction cost.

The New Year's dream is for a large scale distributed creation of heat and light and electricity with the current Rossi dream system using the lighting portion as "street lights" ????? or exterior house lights ??????   Issue apparently is the very large amount of heat generated when run at electricity levels requires outside heat dumping if you want the large amounts of light and electricity as your primary uses.    You can tap part of the heat using circulating hot water systems as a freebee by product, but would have to use/pay for electricity to run hot water pumps, etc.

If you are after just heat (or steam) forget about the light, it stays inside the chamber and is turned into yet more heat inside the chamber itself.    These smaller units can be inside your house and more effectively placed at point of use.

In full temperature SSM mode, the E-Cat X is a net generator of electricity -- BUT in heat up mode it draws strongly more electricity than it produces and produces nothing much "in excess" unless it is a glowing blindingly white hot thing.

Here is an existing drawing of the Ecat X core construction.   At full temperature the thing glows at a brilliant white light level, emitting large amounts of usable light.   It is capable of being used as a room light source if run "exposed" at those high levels for either the making of heat or of electricity.   A very small unit in a light pole style light fixture could produce multi-room heat and single room constant on lighting in the winter time.

Issue becomes all the heat that gets generated at those "power and light generating" levels.  Something big enough to power your home would heat you out of it completely.

Light seems to be a function of the turned up intensity level the cell is run at, while the amount of heat or electricity seems to be a trade off function of electricity draw off from the plates which is removing reaction energy from the cell and tends to muffle the cell somewhat.

There is much that is insufficiently explained at this point in time but it is clear that the "little sun" test rod made by the MFMP people showed a real effect that Rossi's finished wafer device is also now showing.  

Rossi has intentionally spread his reactor out in a planar ribbon like fashion, layering the reactors on both sides of a ribbon heater so he can heat up to reaction temps quickly and also turn it down quickly in reaction to a changing steam generation load.

The drawing comes from the Rossi existing Patent, so it discloses no new information.   His words simply say the thing is capable of making lots of light, lots of heat and some electricity as a normal draw off of what is going on in the lithium transformation reactions.

Rossi's words (upon review and in light of his Patent drawing and the wording of his Patent) show that the long flat 1 megawatt reactor that has been running for the last year is somewhat akin to this design as well.



========================================



Nothing discussed so far seems to exclude construction of a Steam Car, but such might have to be connected to wall power to get it fired up after being off for a while.

The car steam chamber might have to be stored dry and very very hot during stop and go driving, so think of it as a flash steam chamber rather than a boiler system and you have a better fix on the resulting steam car idea.

Using an injector system to meter the input water and keeping the reactor chamber metered to be a uniform HOT TEMP means you can have instant accelerator action response with minimal to no lag.   The reactor will only have HOT and idle modes, so the control requirements of the reactor are not so severe.   "Keeping a head of steam up" all the time when on has some inherent benefits as far as buffering small rate changes goes ..... the reactor itself doesn't need to yo yo back and forth so much, it just needs to keep up with the overall demand level in general.

You need to develop a fast acting steam high temp /pressure injector to feed steam into the cylinder itself, (akin to the fuel injectors used today) to give the instant fine foot pedal control.  

This valve will require an upstream user changeable trash filter to keep the valve from getting fouled up with lime deposit trash.   Some early models may use mechanical poppet valves as are used in current cars, but would require some filtering as even a poppet valve cannot handle solid trash getting trapped on the seat.

The simpler lower temperature / pressure water injector to the reactor to keep the steam pressure constant and high is not as challenging a task as you will have a broader "good" range for that and a slower response requirement as you are just building and maintaining a good head of steam.

Periodic descaling of the flash chamber will be required, but that could be an additive put in with the water every week or so, with a purge cycle that you put the parked car into to high volume blow off mode to clean the steam chamber while you feed it the chemical water to dissolve the lime deposits.   This would go out a separate purge valve that would vent up and out at an angle, a purge valve with enough mechanical strength to crush lime deposit trash on cut off as it would certainly see some trash when it was used.



Andrea Rossi
January 1st, 2016 at 12:19 AM
ing
Dear Readers of the JoNP:

It’s 00.00.01″ of January 1st 2016.

Update: the 1 MW E-Cat is stable and in ssm, the E-Cat X is very promising and still operating and making heat, electricity.

The E-Cat X is very close to the design of the core of the apparatus described in the US Patent, I mean the wafer. It has been engineered to resist to very high temperatures. The electricity exits directly from the wafer.

As I said , several nights ago I had a dream. The E-Cat X had been produced in billions pieces, each of them assembled with others in various combinations to make public lamps: a town was totally illuminated by the E-Cat X and from every lamp a network of pipes and of wires was able to distribute heat and electricity to the houses.

In that town there were about 1 million lamps each of them of 500 watts, consuming about 50 watts; consequently, there were 450 MWh/h produced, of which about half were turned into heat distributed to the houses through a network of well insulated pipes, running inderground, like optic fibers, the other half was used to enlight the town and to distribute electricity to the households.

The cost of the E-Cat X was around 50 $/kW of power, due to the production of billions of pieces per year in all the world, with tens of thousands of jobs. Less taxes were paid by the people, due to the saves derived from low pollution and low energy cost for public services.

Millions of persons were also earning money selling E-Cats and every owner of E-Cats was saving money in utilities ( electricity, heat, light).

Then I heard the alarm clock: it was time to return to the factory, to make true the dream. F9.
Happy new year, I love you all.

I am drinking my cup of Korbel champagne, then i have to return to the gauges of the plant. She is good, tonight.

Again, Happy 2016, May God bless you all,

Andrea


Further refinements and down-sizing efforts will have to be made as Rossi is starting out at his 1 megawatt plant layered ribbons and working down towards toaster ovens and light bulbs.


     
Hey Rossi !!!  Build either one of these and I'd buy one ASAP !!!!

                     
Constant on light and multi-room heater --- multiple flat plates force room air intermix -- keeps "reasonable" temp levels above fixture




single/multi-room convection heater

I wouldn't be surprised if the next nuclear sub to be refueled isn't converted instead.  There are 18 and they are refitted every 15 years or so.

http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/01/08/some-new-e-cat-milestones-listed-on-ecat...

Some New E-Cat Milestones Listed on Ecat.com (Hot Cat Safety Certification, Patent Extendability, 60 Patents Pending)

Rossi, Industrial Heat and Woodford are marching forward with the 60 world-wide patents which tie down the E-Cat X (are all now firmly patents pending), having published a granted Hot Cat Safety Certification from the major European UL equivalent (Bureau Veritas) and are now getting ready to go into some form of limited production here in the USA and in Europe.

Hot Cat's real competition right now is the smaller class of molten salt thorium reactors which ARE BEING BUILT BY THE HUNDREDS in Canada and in China as we speak.   These will be simple shielded / insulated thick walled steel pots of self-heating molten thorium salt solutions which last approximately 20 years in full production and then get covered over with dirt and left alone for the next 100 years while they become stone cold and fairly non-radioactive.

Generating power in a remote, dry area makes sense as there is no ground water to get contaminated should a boo boo occur.   The plant's real life span is determined by corrosion, as molten thorium salts will eat up even specialty steels in less than 20 years.   The pot is backed up with thick fire brick walls, so even if the steel gets eaten the pot charge remains in one lump.  The charge does not ever get hot enough to ever try to do a China Syndrome and by its nature the reaction cannot "run away".

By using the simple "open top pot" type of reactor, the old steam piping can be lifted out and a new set of steam piping can be dropped into place using a remote controlled crane to keep the plant in production until the entire pot charge loses effective temperature and solidifies.

No special container dome is required, it is just a lidded pot of molten thorium ore that is kicked off with a molten salt transfer from the next reactor over, then extra ore rocks are gradually put into the pot to bring the pot up to a full level.  

And yes, a wiff of radioactive air gets released whenever you open the pot on one of these remote generation sites.

You don't even need to refine the ore, the raw ore melts and the stone slag gets skimmed off the top and tossed into a fire brick lined covered pit.   A crane mounted robot arm does the skimming and the crane also does the pulling and placing of the heat exchange piping when a steam piping change out is needed.

The ideal site is flat, remote, rocky dry open ground that has room for a long string of rail tracking for the big remote controlled crane which can then service the dozens of relatively small uncomplicated reactors as they each get brought on line in turn.   A building over the string of reactors is optional in very remote locations, but would be required in a populated area.  

Populated area uses of thorium reactors would by necessity be much more expensive to build and maintain, so none are being placed in populated areas.

       obviously the smaller "remote area" reactors to the left are much less expensive and a lot quicker to build

And yes, E-Cat technology will replace this thorium effort inside the next 10-20 years as it rolls out into distributed use all over the place.   But the harsh fact is you need something RIGHT NOW to keep the lights going or your general population will get very very angry with you ......  so thorium is still rolling along as a interim effort.    It is cheap, easy to control and has "containable" environmental impacts that self-absolve inside a 100 year time frame after you push dirt over the top of it.  No, not perfect, but better than the very very expensive traditional plutonium enriched nuclear power by a good long bit.  

(oh, say 10,000 years or so better)

There is 1 month and 19 days left in the 1 year 1 megawatt plant test period.    Two of the four reactors now show early signs of tapering off now, but are still making rate as individuals and the entire four reactor plant is still running at rate with "reserve to spare".