Independent Researchers Test Rossi's Alleged Cold Fusion Device For 32 Days

WheezyJoe (1168567) writes The E-Cat (or "Energy Catalyzer") is an alleged cold fusion device that produces heat from a low-energy nuclear reaction where nickel and hydrogen fuse into copper. Previous reports have tended to suggest the technology is a hoax, and the inventor Andrea Rossi's reluctance to share details of the device haven't helped the situation. ExtremeTech now reports that "six (reputable) researchers from Italy and Sweden" have "observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, "far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume."... "The researchers, analyzing the fuel before and after the 32-day burn, note that there is an isotope shift from a "natural" mix of Nickel-58/Nickel-60 to almost entirely Nickel-62 — a reaction that, the researchers say, cannot occur without nuclear reactions (i.e. fusion)." The paper (PDF) linked in the article concludes that the E-cat is "a device giving heat energy compatible with nuclear transformations, but it operates at low energy and gives neither nuclear radioactive waste nor emits radiation. From basic general knowledge in nuclear physics this should not be possible. Nevertheless we have to relate to the fact that the experimental results from our test show heat production beyond chemical burning, and that the E-Cat fuel undergoes nuclear transformations. It is certainly most unsatisfying that these results so far have no convincing theoretical explanation, but the experimental results cannot be dismissed or ignored just because of lack of theoretical understanding. Moreover, the E-Cat results are too conspicuous not to be followed up in detail. In addition, if proven sustainable in further tests the E-Cat invention has a large potential to become an important energy source." The observers understandably hedge a bit, though: The researchers are very careful about not actually saying that cold fusion/LENR is the source of the E-Cat’s energy, instead merely saying that an “unknown reaction” is at work. In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic. The paper is actually somewhat comical in this regard: The researchers really try to work out how the E-Cat produces so much darn energy — and they conclude that fusion is the only answer — but then they reel it all back in by adding: “The reaction speculation above should only be considered as an example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”

Comments

Hoax

[ls671]

Of course, everything is a hoax and scientifically impossible until the day it is proven to actually work.

Re:Hoax

[Teresita]

Everyone that says they have a box that makes energy from nothing, I say, phase match your box to the line current from the local utility, roll your meter backwards, and cash the ensuing checks. Then talk to me.

Re:Hoax

[ShanghaiBill]

Of course, everything is a hoax and scientifically impossible until the day it is proven to actually work.

But to "prove" it works, you don't just have researchers look at it. They are trained to find experimental flaws, not deliberate deception. You should have professional magicians look at it. These are people who know how to find the "trick".

Re:Hoax

[Teresita]

That's the difference between an inventor and a scientist, between an Edison and a Maxwell. Somehow Einstein didn't end up in a gutter even after someone else made the first commercial reactor.

Re:Hoax

[swillden]

Of course, everything is a hoax and scientifically impossible until the day it is proven to actually work.

Nonsense.

Most real inventions go the other direction... first the theory, then the gradual working-out of the engineering processes required to make it work, a a little, then more hard work to refine it into something really useful and usable.

Most claimed inventions without theoretical justification also go a different way... they're thought a hoax and then are proven to be a hoax. The reason they're thought to be a hoax is exactly because nearly all of them are.

It is looking more possible that the E-Cat may not be a hoax. Further study may gradually exclude all other explanations, and eventually we may start to see conjectured mechanisms, one of which may emerge as the best explanation. Perhaps along the way we'll learn some new physics.

Or, we may find that the E-Cat is a hoax. That will be the less surprising (but sadder) outcome. Time, and further study, will tell. But if it does turn out to be real, your snark will still be completely wrong. Most everything that is real is known to be real before it works, and most everything that is a hoax actually is a hoax.

Re:Hoax

[timholman]

Everyone that says they have a box that makes energy from nothing, I say, phase match your box to the line current from the local utility, roll your meter backwards, and cash the ensuing checks. Then talk to me.

This, a thousand times over. Having a "free energy" machine, if it existed, would be like owning a machine that printed money.

Rossi claims he has constructed 1 MW reactors. Assuming this was true, and assuming Rossi could sell that power for just $0.10 USD per kW-hr, then he has a machine that effectively generates income at the rate of $100 / hour. Use half of that income for operating costs and personal expenses, and Rossi makes a net profit of $36,000 a month if the machine runs 24/7.

In a year Rossi has $432,000. Long before then, he would be able to build a second generator, doubling his income. Assuming one generator could "double" itself every six months, in five years he has a profit of $18.4M USD each month. In less than a decade, he is the wealthiest man on the planet.

So why isn't Rossi doing that, instead of trying to get investors to write checks? Because he can't, of course. Like all frauds and pseudoscientists, he is utterly incapable of actually doing anything useful with his so-called "invention".

Re:Hoax

[radtea]

Their measurements indicate more power is output than was input.

These measurements indicate the researchers have created an almost cartoonishly bad "open calorimeter" that they do not calibrate at anywhere near the operating temperature despite their estimate of heat balance being acutely dependent on making multiple temperature-dependent corrections accurately.

If a fourth year engineering student handed this experimental setup in as a design project, and included the low-temperature "calibration" as part of the design, I would fail them.

Re:Hoax

[peragrin]

Right and how do you keep it secret? once you start passing them out(even if you are just selling the power) someone will cut it up and duplicate it. Look at the number of cheap iPhone knockoffs that appeared a year after the iPhone came out. He doesn't have apple's lawyers to defend him.

Re:Hoax

[gweihir]

Here is also a nice analysis by some real scientists: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/pap...

Re:Hoax

[alexgieg]

Yes, and Special Relativity is a minor antecedent to Einsten's real contribution, General Relativity. SR was a nice sum up of what was known until then, but not fundamentally novel, which is why he didn't earn his Nobel for it. Now, GR on the other hand was the kind of stuff that only happens once a millennium.

The usual way for something like GR to be developed would be by scientists noticing slight problems in measurements, then doing more experiments, then trying to generalize from those perceived mismatches, then testing again and again and again etc. It'd have taken several decades. Einstein took a different approach. He went on to think very hard on the fundamentals of Physics for about 10 years, then noticed that things couldn't work any other way and so formulated GR entirely. And it was so well done that it's been confirmed since the very first experiment that went to test its specific, outrageous claims (and there are a lot of those). He nailed it all correctly the very first try.

This is why he's recognized. E=mc2 is minor. GR is the true genius part.

Re:Hoax

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

No, his case is not 100% different. There are ways to fool everyone, including physicists and other professional scientists. Heck, the physicists at CERN fooled themselves for quite a while when their experiments demonstrated that they had succeeded in sending information at greater than the speed of light.

If the inventor actually made a real patent with a full technical explanation, physicists would be in their prime and could actually pick apart the flaws in the design and figure out that it does not work and that the results cannot be reproduced.

However, experimental physicists operate under the presumption that everyone they work with is honest and doing science. That's how they are trained. In fact scientists might be the most open and honest professions. That's also why physicists and other scientists are easy to fool IF you exploit the fact that their skepticism is going to be largely directed toward your science and engineering, not your honesty.

You set up the device, break into the lab at night, charge it up, and there's a good chance they'll never notice. A magician or a cop might be more likely to figure it out because they've been trained to think skeptically about the honesty of others and have experience dealing with fraud and criminality.

Re:Hoax

[gl4ss]

it did affect it somewhat. not by too much, but at least a lot of people knew that Uri was just full of shit.

and nowadays Uri has gone to saying that he is not psychic or posses supernatural powers - though it took a long time after the expose to end up at that.

and I don't get whats so unscientific about randis skepticism, somehow his critics always believe in some sort of another magic, be it tesla-magic, spirit-magic or whatever(and consequently one conspiracy or another) - and always like "oh but his real psychic/inventor I know doesn't need the money"(but somehow they always need money from normal schlobs/investors).

Re:Hoax

[Jane Q. Public]

If he can show a working prototype, and show that it works, he can get a patent. That seems to be what he's aiming at here.

Howard Johnson couldn't get a patent for his "magnetic motor" at first, either, because the patent office claimed it was impossible. He had to actually build and demonstrate working demos before he got his patents.

It isn't like Rossi is claiming "perpetual motion" here. Or violating any other known laws of physics.

Any suffiently advanced tech...

[trims]

is indistinguishable from a Rigged Demo. Or in this case, Rossi is counting on the inverse.

We've long been down this road. Rossi refuses to let anyone see how the thing works. He refuses to allow input monitoring (i.e. the Ecat is always plugged into an external power source, and he refuses to allow an ampmeter to be run on it).

He's also never shown the interior of the Ecat, so there's no verification of the fuel being any different between start and finish of the run. In fact, the concentration of Copper isotopes after the run is suspiciously identical to naturally occurring copper.

He's also never explained why there are no gamma radiation dangers, despite the physics which say that if the reaction he claims is going on, anyone within 10 meters for more than a few minutes should die of radiation poisoning.

Really, folks, this nothing more than a charlatan peddling his wares to folks. Any "scientist" who values his reputation shouldn't come with 100 miles of this guy. And shame on Slashdot for even publishing this claim. What, we're next going to entertain claims of people who say they can transform Lead to Gold with only this special black-box machine?

Oh, and ExtremeTech is about as reliable for this kind of reporting as The Daily Mail.

-Erik

Re:Any suffiently advanced tech...

[Charliemopps]

They did run an amp meter on it. Also, they know the power supply he was using and it's standard. They were able to measure all inputs and outputs. It put out more than it took in, by a lot. More than could be accounted for given its mass.

I'm not saying this is real... but when they really do figure out how he tricked them it's going to be really clever I bet.

Re:Any suffiently advanced tech...

[bhlowe]

No, read the report (before spouting off.) The measuring equipment was not supplied by the inventor. The test was partly funded by the Swedish energy research consortium, Elforsk. The inventor may have had an opportunity to swap out the fuel--but it was running continously at 1100- then 14000C, so it would have difficult to do without causing a blip in the temperature data. The reactor was also a welded closed system and was cut open at the end of the 32 days with all team members present, including Rossi. Yes, maybe he pulled a sleight of hand trick at that moment.. but that doesn't make much sense if it was already agreed that the reaction was beyond chemical.... and could not have happened, even if its entire weight was made out of gasoline, Lithium ion batteries, or TNT.

Re:Any suffiently advanced tech...

[Solozerk]

But the "inventor" hooked up the meter, no?

No. The entire experiment was setup by the researchers themselves; the lab has no connection to Rossi, and none of the equipment came or was set-up by him. His only implication was to be here for the initial "fuel" insertion and the ash retrieval at the end, while being monitored (though that's more than enough to be suspicious of the alleged transmutation and suspect some sort of swap - still, it doesn't explain the excess energy).

I would love this to be true.

[Chocolate Teapot]

Two reasons really. First because the thought of a group of sceptical experts scratching their heads in disbelief is too delicious to resist, but mainly because it would mean that the undesirable element who spend so much time stealing copper wire to sell on the black market would be stymied by the drop in the value of copper. I guess they would resort to stealing nickel.

Can someone else build one?

[tomhath]

Reproducible results means someone else can build the device and get the same results. Unless that happens it's a hoax.

Re:He tried patenting it...

[ShanghaiBill]

But you contradict yourself. If (as you said yourself) that he could not get a patent, then trade secret is his only real protection.

He didn't get the patent because he didn't actually describe how the device works. You can't patent a secret, and keep it a secret. The reason he didn't describe how it works is almost certainly because IT DOESN'T WORK. If it is a hoax, everything he is doing would make complete sense. If it is real, then nothing that he is doing makes sense. So someone who is behaving like a fraud, claims to be able to violate the known laws of physics. If anyone wants to bet that this is real, I'll give you 100 to 1 odds that it is not.

Re:No contradiction at all

[Anonymous Coward]

A week before the Wright Brothers first flight, most respectable physicists were deeply skeptical about manned flight. Langley had just dumped his attempt in the Potomac. The Writght Brothers were also very secretive and frightened their invention would be stolen by others, which it eventually was. Until they flew, I doubt they could have gotten a patent. They weren't physicists and I doubt they could have produced a scientific paper to describe how their invention worked, but it did.

Re:No contradiction at all

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, according to this very article, it has passed a very high level of scrutiny. Bottom line is that patent officials are not physicists, and are no more qualified to determine whether the magic box represents cold fusion than you or I; they simply have instructions to deny patents of this type because the working knowledge is that anything along these lines is a scam.

Re:He tried patenting it...

[ShanghaiBill]

the guy has developed a device that can store and regurgitate energy with a far greater energy density than gasoline.

There are plenty of other explanations:
1. There is a hidden power cable
2. He recharges the battery while the researchers go to the toilet
3. He is feeding in power through inductive coupling.
4. Something else I didn't think of.

Look, I went to a magic show in Las Vegas, and I saw a guy make an ELEPHANT appear out of thin air on a raised platform. The audience was in a horse shoe layout, and was viewing the raised platform from 270 degrees. I have absolutely NO IDEA how he made that elephant appear. Yet there is no question in my mind that he didn't really materialize an elephant out of thin air. If someone can pull off that elephant illusion, then faking cold fusion well enough to fool a few researchers should be easy. I don't know exactly how the researchers were fooled, but there should be little doubt that they were.

Re:No contradiction at all

[xQx]

Yeah, except that this "scam" works. A Nigerian 419 scam ceases to be a scam if you get paid by the Nigerian.

The patent office is denying the patent because it seems to violate the laws of physics.
The scientists who tested the thing agree that it seems to violate the laws of physics, but that it does, in fact, work.

To put it another way, here we have someone who has circumnavigated the earth and is trying to get intellectual property protection over the map that he's just made which features a round world.
But the various patent offices are denying this protection because they know the world is flat.

Forgive me for not accepting the US Patent Office as the definitive authority on the limits of nuclear physics when we suddenly have a team of scientists saying “These values place the [device provided by the man who keeps ranting and raving about cold fusion] beyond any other known conventional source of energy.”

It appears this charlatan with his impossible device may cause us to redefine what is possible.

Since you are using occam's razor

[aepervius]

occam's razor is that just as with the first "independent" check this was actually not independent at all, was in Rossi lab with Rossi condition, and Rossi could have simply ordered some specific isotope and mixed it to make it looks like the ratio changed.
 
A true independent test is made in a lab own premise, with a machine they can watch and look for, and rossi not getting his finger on it at any point. THAT is an independent test. What we got is a second circus show. Oh sorry I meant "independent test". With big scary quotes.

Re:He tried patenting it...

[hairykrishna]

I am a physicist. I strongly disagree with your view that the methodology is sound.

The measurement methodology for the 'power out' was not the way I would do it. It effectively comes down to measuring the temperature of the 'reactor', in air, and applying calculations. Temperature is measured via an IR camera. It is filled with many ways that they could mislead themselves. I have personally used such a camera to measure surface temperatures in a high power density accelerator target and it is far from a straightforward enterprise. Why not just load the whole thing into a bomb calorimeter? That's the immediately obvious way to measure what they want to measure.

They do not adequately describe their power input. They start out with 3 phase. There's some kind of power supply box in the chain before the resistors. Who supplied this box? More details on what's actually measured as 'input power' is required. Is a circuit diagram too much to ask for?

The isotope data would be compelling. However, it's clear from the paper that Rossi handled the fuel at loading, removal and possibly at points in between. Substitution would have been trivial.

No radiation was observed. LENR, cold fusion, whatever you want to call it where no radiation is emitted is completely incompatible with all known nuclear physics. The idea that it doesn't violate any known physical laws is nonsense.

Re:He tried patenting it...

[tomhath]

NONE of those explain the change in isotope species described in the article

That is the easiest part of all to explain. Rossi himself put the fuel into the device, and Rossi himself removed the "ashes". Why did he need to be the only one who handled the material? That by itself invalidates the entire test.