How does rossi cold fusion work

Fusion occurs in the center of the sun, other stars, and a hydrogen bomb, yet this device operates on a bench at room temperature. If it worked as claimed, it would require the rewriting of most physics textbooks.

The inventor hopes for a Nobel Prize but lacks any science qualifications and has been incarcerated several times for previous energy schemes that were found not to work. Earlier cold fusion claims reported twenty-six milliwatts of power, but this one claims one megawatt.

The evidence strongly suggests that the inventor was smuggling power in past the metering through a retasked earth lead. Who could possibly fall for this claim? Many respected nuclear scientists from around the world it seems, some involved in awarding Nobel Prizes.

Not only leading skeptics but some NASA officials and investors who poured in tens of millions of dollars and still are and promised hundreds of millions more have fallen for it. It outlines the efforts of Australian Skeptics and philanthropist Dick Smith to expose the episode and reports on new developments. He also claimed an engineering degree from the University of Kensington in California, but this was exposed as a diploma mill.

Rossi was and is an enthusiastic and accomplished long-distance runner. Through working in family businesses, the young Rossi became adept at building industrial plants. He traveled frequently, especially to Sweden and the United States. He now lives and works in Florida. This was a plant intended to convert industrial waste into useable fuel oil. This is a known technology of very low efficiency, around 2 percent, but Rossi claimed to have achieved 20 percent.

He installed them in various diesel generators he was making and selling in Italy as a background business of Leonardo Corporation. Twenty-seven units were tested by the U. Army Corps of Engineers Meanwhile, Rossi was being prosecuted in Italy for many other matters, including bankruptcy, accounting fraud, money laundering, and dumping toxic waste.

Some charges were dropped, on some he was acquitted, and on others he was fined. He spent a year in jail in Italy again from — Lewan , Rossi had heard of the Fleischmann and Pons claims of cold fusion. In anticipation of its thirtieth anniversary this spring, cold fusion was recently described and recounted in these pages Ball Rossi used his time in jail to study this topic and decided this would be his next project.

Department of Energy DoE , and the Department of Defense DoD further details of these and other tests and demonstrations is given in supporting documentation online. Of more significance was a demonstration in October in Bologna for a group of eminent Greeks, including Christos Stremenos, a retired professor of physical chemistry and Greek ambassador in Italy.

No results are available for this demonstration, but they must have been impressive because the group went on to form an alliance called Defkalion. They became deeply entangled with Rossi before splitting amid acrimony and hundred-million-euro lawsuits—more on this later.

Rossi had his marketing machine in gear by then and held a rapid series of demonstrations. These included one in December for a team of scientists, in January for the press, and on March 29 of that same year for some Swedish scientists. There were more tests in May, June, September, and October The invited observers gave generally glowing reports. These were all with one type of device and with similar results.

I am going to focus on the March 29, , test, which was the best documented and the one I exposed. But first let me introduce the main players. Mats Lewan was a writer for Swedish technology magazine Ny Teknik.

He was immediately convinced by Rossi and became his most loyal supporter. He introduced several relevant parties to Rossi.

His book An Impossible Invention Lewan reads like a Rossi love letter but contains useful detail on events. Chickens, when starved of calcium, are claimed to transmute the element potassium into calcium to make their egg shells!

Sven Kullander d. As professors of nuclear physics, these two were invited by Rossi via Lewan to view an E-Cat demonstration on March 29, Given the backgrounds of both Rossi and his claims, one wonders why they became involved at all. They could see no hidden pipes or wires that could explain the ongoing energy production. Rossi started offering franchises for licensing around the world. To properly evaluate the measurements and to investigate the theory, they set up an informal reference group at a meeting in Sweden on July 4, Lewan , It seems they were blind to the fact that scientists can be fooled.

This involved Widom-Larson theory but never achieved any credibility. Yet in all demonstrations, Rossi, his assistants, and his audience have always walked freely around the equipment with no sign of dropping dead. Attendees at key demonstrations are named in a longer list of tests Bryce a.

One would-be investor was Sol Millin, a retired technician in the hippie center Byron Bay. Can you send me a copy of this and I will send off the cheque? The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production. Smith approached the Australian Skeptics, which he helped found in and of which he is still a patron and supporter. Thus, the matter came to my desk I have been chief investigator since its founding.

I attended an investors meeting held by Millin—the Byron Bay connection is a saga in its own right, as reported in Australian Skeptic magazine Bryce I also communicated with Rossi and wrote to the scientists. Josephson has also long been criticized by colleagues and scientific skeptics for supporting mysticism, ESP, and remote viewing.

Certain senior NASA scientists attended various presentations and demonstrations by Rossi and later gave glowing internal reports Zawodny ; Bushnell ; Nelson What next—flying carpets? Hopefully these scientists will reexamine the evidence and retract their statements supporting E-Cat, giving some closure to the investors I know who have run up huge debts, jeopardizing themselves and their families. What did the scientists see? We have detailed information from their report Kullander et al.

The small reactor sits on a tabletop. Rossi says there is an inner copper chamber containing nickel, hydrogen, and a secret catalyst, where cold fusion is claimed to occur. There is a port at the top for admitting hydrogen. This chamber is surrounded by a copper enclosure visible in a bare unit also on the table , which guides a flow of water.

In the operating unit, everything is wrapped in insulation. The reactor has about six wires running from a blue box that is plugged into a regular Italian V power outlet.

The power from the mains is monitored by voltmeter and ammeter and gives on this occasion watts of input electrical power. The blue box has been inspected and contains several power phase controllers the industrial equivalent of light dimmers controlled from an attached PC—certainly no significant batteries or other source of power.

Rossi calculated the power generated assuming only steam out, which gives 4. Several commentators have questioned this claim, but I calculate that even if only 10 percent of water is vaporized, the power is watts, giving a gain of 3. This situation prevailed for over six hours. This represents a large production of energy, which Rossi attributes to cold fusion. The Swedish scientists, and many other observers, including me, have estimated the volume and mass of the equipment and hence ruled out as the source of power hidden batteries, phase change materials, chemical reactants, etc.

A similar setup with some variations was used in at least seven tests up to April , with most showing a significant power production under the most pessimistic assumptions.

This resulted in all those observers supporting excess energy, which they attributed to a hitherto unknown source, such as cold fusion. With a world-changing energy revolution in sight, the blogosphere went wild in a search for other explanations.

Chemical and physical sources were postulated but ruled out. The tables had been searched for hidden wiring. One observer speculated that microwave power was being beamed into the reactor at gonad level from a powerful transmitter in the next room, even as the observers walked around! Meanwhile, I continued to investigate. The blue box, in particular, held my attention.

Was that concealing something? And the best place to hide something is in plain sight. In January , I reported to Smith that there were too many bad signs causing doubt that the invention is real.

Smith would not invest, and neither should others. Kirk Shanahan November 9, AM. Well, not really. I think you refer to the brouhaha that Taubes fostered which I discount. There are several problems in that arena. Probably not space here to discuss adequately. But Bockris did claim to do heavy metal transmutation in carbon arcs under D2O. I loved the result from Bhabba though, where they replicated him, then added a dust cover and cut their yield in half.

Again, lots of problems with what you suggest, not enough space here. Probably much better than sticking to LENR…. Mary Yugo November 7, PM. Search "Krivit Rossi Criminal" in Google no quotes. There are innumerable other reasons not to believe any of what Rossi says, including major deficiencies in each and every test of his claims, performed by Levi, Lewan, and a group of Swedish scientists. The main issue with the tests is a woeful lack of proper calibration and a complete lack of independent replication.

Rossi is also a prolific liar, making claims on his blog JONP of robotic factories, mysterious anonymous military customers and dozens of sales of megawatt devices starting in November , none of which have ever been heard from since.

Whatever you think about LENR and cold fusion, Rossi is a clear case of deception as was Defkalion, a company which tried to steal Rossi's non-existent technology, which lied to investors, and which disappeared without a trace about two years ago.

No investor money was ever recovered in the Defkalion case. As for Mills, he has been making the same grandiose claims for more than 20 years including claims that industrialization was within 2 years made repeatedly more than two decades ago. He has never had proper and complete independent replication. His current experiments seem to involve the dumping of huge amounts of electrical power into a small volume.

Of course it makes a bright flash! People need to be skeptical and require properly performed and carefully calibrated fully independent testing before giving people like Rossi, Hadjichristos and Xanthoulis Defkalion , and Mills millions of dollars! So far, many have been gullible and undiscriminating about what constitutes adequate due diligence for investments.

In my opinion anyway. Ed Wall November 8, AM. Mary, you are right about Rossi. There is generally a small group of people with scientific backgrounds who are willing to give anything the benefit of the doubt, at least at first, even a criminal like Rossi.

I've seen plenty of fraud in the "new energy" field, too. Krivit is to be commended for revealing it and other fraud, which is a thankless job, bringing much needed accountability to this stuff. You are wrong about Mills. He has not been making the same grandiose claims for 20 years.

He made the reasonable assumption that if scientists objectively studied his theory, and the evidence that supported it, the projections he made would be realized. Instead, he has been lumped in with people like Rossi and those scientists who have no actual theory to guide their experimental design.

He has progressed through experiments that consistently showed excess heat and anomalous spectroscopic data, which match his theoretical predictions. What you call "huge amounts of electrical power" is in the range of 10 kW, producing output light power measured in the MW range. This is not a carnival sideshow.

Of course, the issue is not power but energy, a common error among free energy crooks. I think this is indeed a carnival side show and a profitable one for Mills. And excess heat claims are often simply the result of bad measurements. Let me know when the device can be disconnected from power for extended periods.

And let someone independent of Mills inspect the equipment and set up. There are lots of ways to cheat in those types of demos.

Ed Wall November 15, PM. The cynical 'let me know when I can get one at WalMart, then I'll believe it' negates the whole impetus for curiosity. If Mills produces a unit running "closed loop", critics can simply say it is fake. Maybe power is beamed in by a maser, or the system overlords are messing with our heads.

If he gets 10 PhDs to sign affidavits attesting to the validity of the test, critics can say they were bought off with favors on Jeffrey Epstein's famous island. No facts required. Did you even look at Holverstott's accountability link above? Have you even studied chemistry or physics? If you are just trying to save people from their own gullibility, your work is like pushing on the tide. I worked for Eugene Mallove for 2 years.

I have a BSEE. I designed and built many calorimeters and ran many experiments with them. Although my first calorimeter was to investigate Mills' claims, the only thing I accomplished with it was to learn how difficult calorimetry tends to be. I also worked with Krivit. I considered Mills to be a medical student who wandered too far from school.

His lack of a degree in physics made me think he was way off track, particularly in condemning quantum mechanics.

I certainly no longer see things that way. I underestimated his intellect several times, and I do not intend to do that again. Mary Yugo November 28, PM. Until then, remember that he has been making the identical claims to marketability for more than twenty years without a shred of production. His current demo consists of dumping kilowatts into a tiny volume of fluid for short periods. Of course it causes a bright flash! That does not mean he produces energy from the claimed reaction. Show me proper calorimetry done by someone highly reputable and completely independent of Mills Steve Krivit was invited to Italy to see Rossi work.

He managed to get himself kicked out of A. Not too bright when he had a chance to do a better investigation of A. Barbara Emerson Ph. November 15, AM.

In , Dr. Robert Park, then the spokesperson for the American Physical Society, gave a talk and explained that "when a charlatan is exposed, the outrage of his victims is most frequently aimed at the one who strips away the mask. Krivit filmed Rossi's E-Cat in "action" and revealed the piddly amounts of steam trickling out of the black hose.

This was after Krivit made three requests for Rossi to pull the hose out of the wall. Krivit interviewed Rossi at the end of his second day there. But until Krivit began to publish the results of his investigation, Rossi was all warm and cheery with him. The videotaped interview concludes with Krivit asking "Any final comments you'd like to make? Very, very highly professional. Predictably, Rossi's attacks on the messenger began.

Krivit has done the LENR field a tremendous service by exposing this nonsense. Steve Ritter November 16, PM. I was there for two days. I did not need more than two days to do my investigation. I did not get kicked out of Rossi's garage.

I left when I was done, a few hours in advance of my scheduled train. I left on good terms with Rossi. At the end of my last interview, on the second day, Rossi thanked me for doing a very good and professional job. Christopher Calder November 9, PM. Mary Yugo, You make some very valid points, and there is no doubt that Andrea Rossi has a history of lying about his work, but then again so did architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who did accomplish a few positive things despite his growing Pinocchio noise.

I have never trusted what Rossi has said himself, but look at the odds of him fooling so many hands-on helpers and fellow scientists he sought for advice. Scientist Sergio Focardi was a wonderful and honest man who went to his grave stating that Rossi's device was real and had a actual top limit COP of He made those statements because of experiments he conducted himself, not just because of what Rossi told him.

What has happened with Rossi could mean that the entire E-Cat phenomena is a fraud, or it could mean that Rossi is withholding key informations from Industrial Heat to avoid Industrial Heat handing over his industrial secrets to his competitors.

After his break up with Defkalion, you could understand that fear. November 16, AM. There is no evidence that Sergio Focardi did those experiments himself. When Krivit interviewed Focardi, and asked him what his contribution had been to Rossi's work, he replied translated from Italian "I think the most important thing has been about the security.

I always made recommendations to Rossi about the problem of neutrons. Videos and photos of their early cells reveal that they were not instrumented with temperature or pressure sensors inside the chamber. Can you imagine a qualified scientist or engineer heating up a sealed metal vessel by several hundred degrees without such safety precautions? Rossi's own words about Forcardi, from Krivit's interview with Focardi: "I must emphasize that he does not know how the reactor is built No, the elderly and ailing Focardi did not do those experiments himself.

He went along for the ride, for the fame and to satisfy his pride. Rossi manipulated him, as the video shows, answering questions for Focardi who was fluent in English , and putting words in his mouth. It's called credibility by association and Rossi knew exactly what he was doing. Eric Hermanson November 7, PM. I'm a 4-year student of Mills' theory. It is well thought out, derived from first principles, and most importantly Brilliant Light's experimental data, which has been validated by Bucknell U, Rowan U, and University of North Carolina, matched what's predicted in the theory.

Mills' theory is correct, and the SunCell works. It's not their fault it took so long; changing the world isn't easy. Well, I am not a student of Mills, but I do know Mills has used calorimetric methods to bolster his claims in the past. However he makes the same mistakes the classic cold fusion people do, so I have very little.

Doesn't give me a lot of confidence in him. Mike Lynch November 7, PM. I liked this piece, but you could have included more about the history of Mills' efforts. Bing November 7, PM. If there are heat generated, why not simply heating up water to generate steam, which in turn powers a steam turbine?

What kind of efficiencies to convert heat to light and then from light to electricity? Francis Stillman November 8, AM. I believe the idea is to eliminate as many moving parts as possible thereby increasing the longevity of the device.

What is the best one can achieve with a spinning turbine and generator? Besides, when the input water vapor is basically free, who really cares about efficiency? You obviously have not any research into the SunCell at all.

Your question has been asked and answered many times and with good logic given the questionable assumptions of Mill's theories being right. Its probably worth the time to do a little research before commenting on relative Carnot Cycle vs.

CPV power generation efficiencies in this application. Kyle November 8, PM. What kind of efficiencies do you get from heating up water, then using the pressure to turn a gigantic turbine, which drives a generator for electricity. The way Mills is doing it requires no moving parts and no pressurized steam, and no gigantic turbine and generator. The way Mills is doing it is as efficient as the solar panels are, and those are increasing in efficiency all the time, i mean you could use a pressurized co2 turbine which is way more efficient and smaller than a typical turbine but its still much larger and more complex and more expensive than just turning the thing into a giant lightbulb and using non moving parts and panels.

When they start getting the 10, suns intensity capability solar panels with multiple junctions and reflect any light that escapes back into the blackbody radiator, again all with non moving parts, then we're laughing. Goodbye turbines. And its not just heat to light When it reaches blackbody temperatures and becomes incandescent it releases 5million watts per square meter in light energy depending on temp.

You're saying to at that point , heat water, drive turbine to drive generator, pump back to radiator to heat it up again Well the radiator is there Andrew Moore November 7, PM. Dr Randal Mill's Brilliant Light Power isn't producing hard to measure anomalous heat it's producing millions of watts and has contracts with significant engineering companies to produce a commercial product as well as multiple third party validation.

It's also nothing to do with cold fusion other than the very detailed theory produced by Dr Randall Mills can explain this phenomena. Melvin H. Miles November 7, PM. Despite the title of this article, cold fusion never died for those who found experimental evidence in their experiments. Various critics tried to initially kill this field with their faulty experiments and unscientific ridicule.

Classic cold fusion certainly did not die as Dr. Miles has correctly stated. What did happen is it went 'underground' so to speak. However, their participation in what would be called 'mainstream' science is minimal, and often fraught with errors see esp.

Their biggest problem is the apparent requirement that "it must be nuclear" to be considered valid by them. This adversely polarizes their behavior and fosters an "us vs. To be fair, the 'mainstream' does the same to them. For the record, my first paper in this field delineates what I think is the alternate explanation.

Unfortunately, if I am right, it isn't going to 'save the world', or even win a Nobel prize Shanahan, "A systematic error in mass flow calorimetry demonstrated", Thermochimica Acta, Joseph M.

Fine November 7, PM. Another possible explanations of the excess Heat produced by LENR, including Heat Generation within the Earth and a potential stucture of dark matter are the postulated composite particles - known as Tresinos - that were proposed by Dr. Frederick Mayer and the late Dr. John Reitz. These are not electrons in lower orbits of a Hydrogen or Helium atom, such as the Hydrinos of Dr.

Mills, but stable combinations of electrons and protons orbiting each other. It is extremely fortuitous that electrons don't randomly collide into protons and, poof, turn into neutrons - or the Universe, this magazine and your readers would never have come into existence. Rather, several of these electrons and protons can clump together into neutral or charged clusters and turn into charged Tresinos when composed of three particles or neutral Quattrinos when composed of 4 particles.

Due to the small size of this comment box, I'm constrained to leave several links. Thank you for your effort at reporting this story. Friedrich Menges November 8, PM. Whether you think Mills is right on Hydrinos or a total crackpot, there is a new book covering Mills' story and also giving a long list of published papers, artcless and books. Certainly worth a read and you might be better positioned to make up your mind about all this afterwards Good article, on an important topic. If LENR can be made to work reliably it has big economic consequences.

Because there is heat release beyond chemical, yet no controlled materials or dangerous radioactive waste or radiation. The LENR field in some ways is a battle between chemists and physicists, or between experimentalists and theoreticians. Excess heat is readily observable. The radiation is one million times below fusion. Unfortunately this story concentrated way too much time on the most flamboyant and less scientific researchers.

Randy Mills and Andre Rossi are both characters I try to not spend too much time studying as I evaluate the field because of the quality of their measurements and the lack of serious 3dr party evaluation let alone replication. There are plenty of patient researchers with solid data, who invite replications, and have been replicated. Solid repeatable results. Since then, there have been several reports of duplications by experimenters in Russia and China , guided by details in the report.

More recently, Rossi was granted a US patent for one of his devices, previously refused on the grounds that insufficient evidence had been provided that the technique worked as claimed. There are credible reports that a 1MW version of his device, producing many times the energy that it consumes, has been on trial in an industrial plant in North Carolina for months, with good results so far.

Yet these alternatives are becoming increasingly unlikely. Rossi is not even the only person claiming commercially relevant results from LENR. As several people have noticed, a new clean source of energy would be really, really useful right about now. And it is not only my stomach that has been increasingly preoccupied with this fascinating story.

That would be huge news. A s a question about sociology, the answer is obvious. In this case, the author of the article is blithely reproducing the orthodox view, even in the lead-in to his interview with Darden — who tells him a completely different story, and has certainly put his money where his mouth is. Ever since , in fact, the whole subject has been largely off-limits in mainstream scientific circles.

Authors who do put their head above the parapet are ignored or rebuked. Most recently, Lundin and Lidgren reported that they had submitted their paper to the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion , but that the editors declined to have it reviewed; and that even the non-reviewed preprint archive, arxiv. So, as a matter of sociology, it is easy to see why Rossi gets little serious attention; why an interview with Darden associates him with scientific chicanery; and why, I hope, some of you are having doubts about me for writing on the subject in a way that indicates that I am prepared to consider it seriously.

If so, hold that attitude. I want to explain why I take it to reflect a pathology in our present version of the scientific method. My task will be easier if you are still suffering from the symptoms. Sociology is one thing, but rational explanation another. It is very hard to extract from this history any satisfactory justification for ignoring recent work on LENR.

After all, the standard line is that the rejection of cold fusion in turned on the failure to replicate the claims of Fleischmann and Pons.

Yet if that were the real reason, then the rejection would have to be provisional. In that case, well-performed experiments claiming to overturn the failure to replicate would certainly be of great interest. What if we already knew, on theoretical grounds alone, that cold fusion was impossible? And in any case, it is simply not true. As I said at the beginning, what physicists actually say in my experience is that although LENR is highly unlikely, we cannot say that it is impossible.

We know that the energy is in there, after all. No doubt one could find some physicists who would claim it was impossible. This is not to deny that there is truth in the principle popularised by Carl Sagan, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We should certainly be very cautious about such surprising claims, unless and until we amass a great deal of evidence. But this is not a good reason for ignoring such evidence in the first place, or refusing to contemplate the possibility that it might exist.

They put their reputations at risk by doing so. Cold fusion is tainted, and the taint is contagious — anyone seen to take it seriously risks contamination. So the subject is stuck in a place that is largely inaccessible to reason — a reputation trap, we might call it. People inside the trap are already regarded as disreputable, an attitude that trumps any efforts that they might make to argue their way out, by reason and evidence.

O utsiders might be surprised to learn how well-populated the trap actually is, in the case of cold fusion and LENR. The field never entirely went away, nor vanished from the laboratories of respected institutions. To anyone willing to listen, the community will say that they have amassed a great deal of evidence of excess heat, not explicable in chemical terms, and of various markers of nuclear processes. Again, the explanation for ignoring these claims cannot be that other attempts failed 25 years ago.

That makes no sense at all. The reasoning is still entirely circular, but the reputation trap gives its conclusion a convincing mask of respectability.