Apr
2
Will LENR Go Commercial Now?
April 2, 2012 | 4 Comments
Interviewer James Martinez spoke with Brillion Energy Chief Executive Officer Robert George and Chief Technical Officer Robert E. Godes on ‘Ca$h Flow’ last Tuesday, March 27, 2012. Here’s a summary and a few notes.
Mr. George said right at the start, “After ten years of work by Robert Godes, he’s designed a control system in the laboratory that is able to start and stop the reaction to get the boiler to run steady state and sometime later next month, we will be working with SRI International to do another version which will operate at a higher operating temperature.” That is key after getting a LENR device to run at all. Brillouin’s confidence continues to grow.
Assuming the firm can build replicable units that perform predictably – an assertion they imply is at hand in the lab, another dark horse form of energy production could be on the market in the coming months or years.
Brillouin’s idea is different than what we’ve come to learn of the Rossi E-Cat and the Defkalion device. In a Brillouin machine the electronics that Godes has designed sends the fuel charge “electro-magnetic pulses” to push the hydrogen from H1 to H2, H3 and H4 until Helium is expelled with the heat.
Brillouin Graphical Fusion Operating Principle. Click image for the largest view.
Godes explained, “Brillouin Energy designs all of its reaction systems based on the hypothesis that was published in Infinite Energy and is available on our website. But we’re actually driving the underlying physics, which gives you control over the reaction. Once you understand the physics, you can turn it on, you can turn it off, and to some extent you can control how much heat you’re getting out of the system.”
Another matter that bedevils the LENR field is the theory matter. Here Godes offers another view, “. . . the LENR reaction is a weak interaction. It’s a two-step reaction. The first step is actually endothermic, which means that it absorbs energy. The exothermic part, which is much more exothermic than the endothermic part, is when neutrons accumulate onto another nucleus within the lattice. Ideally you have them accumulate onto other hydrogen nuclei that are within the lattice, which is always an exothermic event, or it doesn’t matter whether it accumulates on a nickel or palladium, that’s also an exothermic event, it releases a lot of energy.” See the firm’s PowerPoint Slide Show.
Gode may be right, his further discussion explains, “What you do is you want to control the creation of the neutrons, and you generate a neutron by causing a proton to capture an electron.” This also harkens back to the Fermi dictum on neutrons and building atoms.
Martinez took the duo into the timeline for marketing with George leading saying, “We’re looking at 12 to 18 months to bring it to strategic partners. We don’t plan to become a manufacturer; we’re going to be a licensor. Obviously, the boiler manufacturers already have the ability to do the heat exchangers and so forth, and what we’ll be providing is a system that will be the new boiler, it’ll be the heat source, and they’ll do the heat exchangers, and heat your domestic hot water in your home, your commercial building, and the other systems should actually be capable of generating electric power out of some of the retiring coal-fired electric power plants.”
On the public relations front George offered, “ . . . we’ve been quiet because we wanted to get our system operational, we wanted to be able to show people a system that’s running, and we wanted to make sure our technology is sound. So we’re moving in that direction, we’re excited about it, and this next round will bring us, we believe, to the goalpost.”
For sales George explains, “There are any number of different sizes of pressure vessels which we use in our wet boiler, and so we expect that the commercial systems will probably be 20-30% (in price) more than a current boiler and about the same size. We’re talking about, for a residential application, a pressure tank about the size of a scuba tank, the electronics which Robert Godes has developed and patented through Patrick Townzend, basically a heat exchanger which the boiler manufacturers all over the country have the capability of doing, that’s why we don’t want to become a manufacturer, we won’t become a competitor. And they’ll be able to substitute Brillouin Boilers in where you now have a coal-fired, oil-fired, gas-fired, electric boilers providing the heat, and maybe you have additional heat exchangers to transfer to the building. But this system is basically going to be a one-on-one replacement.”
On the legal front Godes fills us in with, “Currently the patents are applied for. We have one large patent applied for and that initial application was actually granted in China. We’re in Japan right now. We recently filed an update with the USPTO to keep the US application alive.”
Many American’s know that the US Patent Office is a serious development problem for American technical leadership. Godes goes on with, “We actually just had a significant interaction with the examiner of the USPTO. The guy that’s examining our patent worked quite a bit in the plasma fusion arena for a number of years, and now is in semi-retirement working as a patent examiner, he’s kind of rooting for the cold fusion crowd, but the edict has been handed down from on high that they’re not to grant any patents in this field, which is a really sad state of affairs. The fiasco that happened in 1989 is still bogging us here in the United States.”
For Brillouin the attention has been useful and gratifying. Folks from the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC have come out to the lab to look at the system. Its expected they’ll come back in the next several months for additional tests with their analysis equipment. There’s a start of commercial interest with “a lot” of major corporations coming to meet with Brillion in the last couple of months.
The current production cost quote from George is, “The high-end system that will easily generate electricity, we’re looking at potentially, from our cost analysis, about 1 cent per kilowatt hour, but that’s on a commercial system.” Because Brillouin’s technology is a boiler making heat, a residential electrical generation system isn’t a technology they seem to be pursuing.
Much of the rest of the interview is a discussion on the LENR political challenges, patents and funding. George points out the electronics, for which the firm has a patent pending, is a decade long effort by Godes.
They expect that a boiler would cost about a third more than a conventional unit. The question isn’t especially on point, though. A Brillouin boiler may have unique electronics, something less complex than a cell phone. But a conventional boiler using say coal or heavy oil is going to come with a costly combustion control and effluent treatment for managing air pollution. Add fuel storage and the fuel handling investment could have Brillouin being much more competitive than they think they are now.
The interview winds up discussing the immediate future. Godes points out the Brillouin position that, “. . . the reality is, just a few million dollars could actually bring this technology to the point where OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturers) could start producing these in large numbers for general consumption.”
Sometimes it just a pity that securities law in the effort to protect people from unscrupulous stock sales have barricaded off investments into research and development for most people. Brillouin is the kind of example where a small number of small investors generating a few million dollars of financing could make a big difference.
The whole interview is a good read worth the click over for a few minutes. Commercial LENR energy production could be very close indeed.
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I want to believe but….
Why is it the fold fusion-LENR etc. guys are always talking future tense and always seeking capital? It seems like decades roll by and processes are prototypes are ever being tested, and capital is ever being sought.
Crickey! Has anybody ever considered they should put a model on the commercial market for sale, and then start bragging?
I remain skeptical, dubious, unbelieving, unconvinced, unpersuaded, unimpressed and a few more “uns.” Does the word “bogus” come to mind?
Actually, the word that comes to mind is “bullshit.” Everything that you say applies to “hot fusion,” except that it has had literally billions in public subsidies. So, let’s get real here for a change. Real research costs money. The most notable thing about cold fusion research is how much has already been accomplished, demonstrably for anyone who bothers to lift a finger to study the history of the technology, with so little money. From that point of view, there is no comparing the two types of fusion. One — the one with all the money and academic support — is a failure; the other is a remarkable success poised on the brink of major of an even more remarkable future.
PSI-
I think you are mistaken.
I am saying I am skeptical. The onus to prove one has a technology that is commercial feasible is on the promoters, not on a justifiably skeptical public.
How can it be “bullsh-t” to remain unconvinced—especially given the swelling ranks of fraudulent energy-sector cons and busts, and the repeated failure of LENR-cold fusion to develop commercially, or even pass replicable tests by independent third parties?
When the cold fusion crowd developer a commercial product I will be very impressed.
BTW, I dislike federal subsidies for any energy type. Let the market rule, although one may wish to tax fossil fuels to compensate for the costs of pollution, not captured in the price signal.
PSI –
There is no doubt hot fusion is possible and useful… there are constant reminders in the sky – day and night. That’s not to say that the money it is granted is spent well – I don’t know if it is.
Though LENR has had some convincing small-scale evidence, there’s not yet been proof that it is, or ever will be, useful. That’s not to say we shouldn’t invest money in investigation (we should), but it seems to me like hot fusion deserves more. We know it is possible, we just have to control it.