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

Not so much, maybe.

[luna69]

Please see: http://www.science20.com/a_qua...

Not quite as clean a confirmation as one would like: " It would be like if I asked you to believe that by putting a dollar bill in a special laundry machine and spinning it for half an hour with some special detergent the dollar turns into a $1000 note. You are allowed to watch the machine as it does its work, but it is me who opens it and extracts the bill when it has finished its magic conversion. I doubt you would buy it."

If it sounds too good to be true...

Re:Hoax

[Charliemopps]

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.

But that's the thing. That sort of stunt would be chump change compared to inventing cold fusion. If the inventor really has figured something out, and I'll grant you that's unlikely, it would behoove him to keep a tight lid on it until he has pretty much the entire eastern seaboards worth of lawyers under his belt. History is littered with scientists and inventors that have ended up living in a gutter after discovering some of the most life altering technologies. If he really does have something, he'll be the target of every shifty technology company on the planet, who will steal it, and will patent it on their own.

He tried patenting it...

[trims]

He's tried patenting it in three different jurisdictions:

Italy, the EU, and the US.

The latter two rejected the claim outright, with choice phrases like "seems to violate the understanding of basic physical processes" and "fails to provided enough of a concrete implementation to judge for patentablity", and "application does not describe a workable device".

It got the Italian one, simply because he applied for a non-technical patent, and it was reviewed by someone who merely looked at the form, and didn't analyze the device. It's well-known in Italy that this form of patent is called "God's Gifts", because they're pretty much indistinguishable from miracles in terms of reproducability.

Relying on Trade Secrets for this kind of invention is the #1 indicator of fraud. A proper patent would make him rich beyond his imagination. A Trade Secret is only good for fleecing investors.

-Erik

Re:He tried patenting it...

[geoskd]

The reason he didn't describe how it works is almost certainly because IT DOESN'T WORK.

Funny but FTFA:

The researchers observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, or âoefar more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.â

That pretty much puts an end to the "doesnt work" crap. As they stated, if it is a hoax, the guy has developed a device that can store and regurgitate energy with a far greater energy density than gasoline. If all it is, is a battery, then by itself it would be worth almost as much as cold fusion, as it can store and produce 600+ horsepower for an hour (1.5MW hours). Thats enough to move a typical passenger vehicle 300+ miles on a power supply the size of a stick of dynamite. If the guy had created a device, of any kind, that can do this, then he has no reason to try to swindle investors in a cold fusion scam, he going to be Elon Musks new best friend for life.

Re:He tried patenting it...

[wierd_w]

NONE of those explain the change in isotope species described in the article. Unless you mean he is somehow beaming concentrated neutrons through some unknown means into the device somehow, or that he is able to somehow completely replace the device with progressively more concentrated populations of heavier isotopes miraculously every time the researchers check.

Occam's razor sometimes shows that the seemingly improbable is actually the most likely explanation.

The actual definition of that particular by-rule, is that the explanation with the least complications (read, elaborate conjectures and weasel wording) is the most likely to be correct.

This device appears to produce power with an energy density many times greater than dynamite, and produces a change in isotope species of the test sample.

At this point, the test for fraud is to determine if the calculated energy released is congruent with the change in the mass energy potential of the sample before and after the experiment. Conservation of energy says that if this device used fusion, or any other nuclear power based reaction to achieve its outcome, then that energy came from mass.

They measured the energy released. Measure the difference in the mass of the sample after the 32day observation period, and compare it against the mass of the sample before the observation period. If the calculated mass value for the energy released + current mass == mass of sample before observation, we have a very difficult thing to account for, because it means the device is plausible.

If they dont match, it means the man is a fraud.

This is a testable point of data that would make fraud detection very easy, and would make people that are quick to point the fraud finger very uncomfortable if found to be true.

If the researchers did not collect this measurement, KNOWING that this device was 'supposed' to produce power via a nuclear energy process, then you have a very good grounds to seriously torpedo their published paper, and recommend additional experiment due to improper testing process. Especially since they have the equipment to measure statistical isotope species in the sample, and knew to test for it.

Granted, the difference in weight for a 140mwh value would be in the picograms or less. That just means that smaller samples with the same reaction process need to be studied so that tinier and more sensitive aparatus can measure any changes-- which would also make the "he switched the samples!" argument more convoluted in such latter experiments.

Of course, the NOT SCIENTIFIC AT ALL approach is to just say "There is no need to conduct that experiment, because it is clearly a fraud!"-- That's the not-science-at-all version of begging the question in a wrapper of appeal to authority fallacy, DRESSED as science.

Science is about observation, and recording data about observation, and making hypotheses that predict future observation. In science, REALITY IS KING. If the experiment has shown that energy was generated, and specific features were measured, but the experiment itself is in question-- the proper course of action is to repeat the experimental protocol in additional laboratories to eliminate the conjectured disqualifying uncontrolled variables cited.

In this case:

Were there any spurrious or anomalous EM readings near the device? (Any "beamed" energy delivered to the device would have to be of this type to interact reliably with electrical energy metering equipment.)

Was the sample ever tampered with? (Repeating the protocol simultaneously in multiple labs around the world to verify the results would exclude this, discounting some brilliantly absurd conspiracy.)

Were the researchers involved in any lucrative scam tactics with the inventor? (again, more independent testing would reveal this.)

So, in all cased, the prescribed course of action to verify definitively that this device is a fraud IS TO DO THE DAMN EXPERIMENT, REPEATEDLY.

THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT KILLED THE ORIG

Re:He tried patenting it...

[delt0r]

That's what people said about 2 years ago when this device was first announced. It's later now, and things have changed.

No it hasn't. These "reputable" scientist are the same scientist that were claiming it works 2 years ago. And they still didn't do anything to improve the experiment. They didn't do any calorimetry, this is not published and would not last an hour in peer review, and its almost exactly what they said last time. Which is "look its hot, its more energy than we put in".

They are soo sloppy in the experimental approach i would give this a fail at high school level. Errors are stated at .01, with no justification or calculation, its just made up! I didn't find details of the power supply, but i guess its a special one from the inventor, another black box if you will, and no mention of checking things like power factor, balance and perhaps a choke or two in case some higher frequency energy is pumped in.

I am going to call it. They are party to the fraud.

Re:He tried patenting it...

[Sqr(twg)]

Here's how I think it was done:

Looking at Figure 4 in the report, we see that input power (current) was measured independently in two places. PCE 830 A meaures current going in to the control system, and PCE 830 B measures current going from the control system to the E-Cat. (Thease mesurements are in agreement, and both show less than 1 kW going in while other measurements show more than 2 kW of heat being generated.)

The placements both PCE 830 units are strange. PCE 830 A doesn't sit directly on the 380 V input from the lab, but instead sits between the control system and a "switch" (dentoted "SW"). Similarly, PCE 830 B doesn't sit directly on the three cables going into the E-Cat. Instead it sits between the control system and "connection boxes" (denoted "C").

Anybody who has used a current clamp knows that you must measure around a single conductor. If you measure around two conductors you get the sum, which can be zero even when a large amount of power is tranferred through the cable. So if any of the wires going from the control system to the "switch" contains two conductors instead of just one, then it is possible to feed current through without it regestering on PCE 830 A. Similarly, if any of the cables going from the control system to a "connection box" contains two conductors, it is possible to send power through without it registering on PCE 830 B. (The cables that come after the connection boxes would be much harder to fake, because they connect to high-temperature Inconel conductors at the end.)

So my guess is that the "control system" contains two separate units. One works exactly as advertised. The other is powered using an extra conductor in one of the cables to the "switch". Its ouput corrent is similarly hidden using extra conductors in the wires coning to the connection boxes.

This second unit is designed to only output power under specific circumstances. (Which is why Rossi himself was controling the experiment.) For example, I found it strange that the temperature of the "dummy" reactor was always much lower than the temperature of the "working" reactor. Maybe that is the trigger.

Re:Hoax

[Jane Q. Public]

But that's the thing. That sort of stunt would be chump change compared to inventing cold fusion. If the inventor really has figured something out, and I'll grant you that's unlikely, it would behoove him to keep a tight lid on it until he has pretty much the entire eastern seaboards worth of lawyers under his belt.

That's the classic paradox, and it has plagued REAL inventions and inventors since the dawn of time.

The Wright brothers were so afraid that the secrets of their invention would get out before they could profit from it, that they only gave staged, pre-arranged demonstrations to limited audiences. So much so that Scientific American claimed they were fraudsters, and credited manned flight to somebody else, for something like 8 years after the Wright brothers' first announcement.

It wasn't until a later demonstration (in France, IIRC) which was widely witnessed and written about that SciAm retracted their recognition of the other guy and admitted that they were wrong about the Wrights (no pun intended).

Re:Hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

The device has to be plugged in to run the "fans" and "pumps". Since nobody was allowed to look inside or analyse the wire, it's pretty obvious there was a hidden wire inside that was providing the juice. They didn't even check it with a Kill O Watt, just some shitty little tool run over the line that is easily fooled into thinking the device was receiving less power than it really was.

Andrea Rossi is notorious for his scams. He once founded a company that was going to convert industrial waste into oil, yet in all of the years that company was a around, they didn't produce anything. Instead, he got busted for dumping 70,000 tonnes of toxic waste and tax fraud, for which he spent 4 years in prison. Following that, he founded another company that was supposed to generate 1000 watts each. Out of 27 devices, 19 didn't do anything and the rest couldn't even manage to put out 1 watt.

The E-Cat is just his latest scam.

Re:Hoax

[PopeRatzo]

Just sell the power

In which jurisdiction can you "just sell power"? I dare you, try generate and sell electricity and see how long it takes before you're locked in a cell or buried under it.

I used to live in a little Missouri town that generated its own municipal electricity, economically and without any fuss, since the end of WWII. The energy companies spent the equivalent of 25 years worth of the revenue they would receive from taking over that franchise to get town officers elected who would eventually shut down the facility and contract with them. Eventually, when enough of these captive town officials had been elected, there was a controversial vote to stop self-generating. There was good evidence that the mayor and several town council members had been directly paid by energy PACs. Within 8 months, electricity costs in this town doubled. This was 7 years ago, and it's gone up and up since then. The new electric company uses the same generating facility that the town used to use. Every single town official who had voted to stop self-generating was eventually thrown out of office, but now there are contractual arrangements which prevent them from self-generating again for half a century.

Energy is one of those things that you are not allowed to produce. Look at the money the Kochs are spending to try to get localities to put taxes and surcharges on the sun, in order to kill solar energy initiatives by individuals. I'm convinced that energy is a major method of controlling people lives. It's economic control, and it's political control, and it's environmental control and it's control over how you live. And by the way,

http://www.nationaljournal.com...

and

http://www.nbcnews.com/busines...