e-Cat is a fraud, not worth spending time on.
This is going on too long to be a fraud.
Perhaps the most startling (and most controversial) report is by an Italian-American engineer-entrepreneur
named Andrea Rossi. Rossi claims that he has developed a tabletop reactor that produces heat by an
as-yet-not-fully-understood LENR process.
Rossi has gone well beyond laboratory demonstration; he claims that he and the private firm Industrial Heat,
LLC of Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, have actually installed a working system at an (undisclosed) commercial
customer's site.
According to Rossi and a handful of others who have observed the system in operation, it is producing
1 MWatt continuous net output power, in the form of heat, from a few grams of "fuel" in each of a set
of modest-sized reactors in a network. The system has now been operating for approximately six months,
as part of a one-year acceptance test. Rossi and IH LLC are in talks with Chinese firms for large-scale
commercial manufacture.
Several "reliable sources" have visited Rossi's commercial site, and have verified that the system is
working as claimed, as evidenced, for example, by the customer's significantly reduced electric bills.
On the downside, from a scientific point view, Rossi's work leaves much to be desired, to say the least.
Rossi remains tight-lipped as to technical details, preferring to protect his company's intellectual
property through silence.
However, a few details have now come to light. For example, Rossi was just granted a patent by the
U.S. Patent Office. The patent includes some heretofore unknown details, such as the contents of the
"fuel" in Rossi's reactors: it is a powder of 50% nickel, 20% lithium and 30% lithium aluminum hydride.
Given that Rossi has been unwilling to divulge many details, several other research teams have been
working largely independently with similar experimental designs.
In October 2014, a team of Italian and Swedish researchers released a paper entitled Observation of
abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel. This paper claimed
substantial power output, with a "coefficient of performance" (ratio of output heat to input power) of
up to 3.6. The experiment was performed at an independent laboratory in Lugano, Switzerland.
The most intriguing results in the 2014 Lugano paper are the before-and-after analyses of the "fuel,"
which found an "isotopic shift" had occurred in this material. In particular, the team found that
lithium-7 had changed into lithium-6, and that nickel-58 and nickel-60 had changed to nickel-62.
This is based on two different types of mass spectrometry measurements, using state-of-the-art equipment.
These changes can only be due to nuclear reactions of some sort -- not conventional chemistry.
The Lugano team is reportedly working on a new experiment, independent of Rossi, but as yet no
details are known.
Another research team performing Rossi-type experiments is headed by the Russian physicist Alexander
Parkhomov. He and others working with him report observing excess heat with a Rossi-type reactor
running at 1347 degrees Celsius, with a coefficient of performance of 3.0. They also report observing
excess heat in at least ten other experiments of this type to date.
The present authors are as perplexed as anyone by these developments. As we observed in an earlier
HuffPost article, Rossi's work in particular leaves us with three stark choices:
(a) Rossi and those working with him or independently have made some fundamental and
far-reaching blunder in their experimental work;
(b) Rossi is leading a conspiracy of sorts to cover dishonest scientific behavior;
or
(c) Rossi has made an important discovery with sweeping potential impact.
With each passing month, and with more researchers finding similar results, (a) and (b) look less likely.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-h-bailey/post_10010_b_8052326.html
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