Città del Capo Radio Metropolitana, a Bolognese radio station, recently interviewed Professors Giuseppe Levi and Loris Ferrari of the University of Bologna on their research contract with Andrea Rossi. A summary of the interview is here.
The contract is for €500,000 plus value-added tax, and Rossi will be providing the equipment necessary to run the experiments. The study will last for at least a year, and it will take at least another six months for the results to be published, so the earliest we can expect to see the final results of the study is the end of 2012. However, the University of Bologna group may release some preliminary results as early as December, 2011.
The scope of the study will be to measure the energy efficiency and any emissions of radiation from the device Rossi provides. Some aspects of the research may be subject to trade secret protections.
Professor Ferrari acknowledged the need for repeatable results to demonstrate that the energy catalyzer does, in fact, work. He also acknowledged that the internal mechanisms by which the energy catalyzer is able to produce energy are unknown and says this will be “one of the key aspects to be investigated”. Professor Levi, for his part, is already certain of the device’s repeatability:
“Every time I was witness to a start-up of e-cat that produced energy. I’ve seen it many times now: It seems to repeat itself with great regularity, but I want to be prudent …” –Giuseppe Levi
New research is always welcome, especially if it leads to a workable (and testable) hypothesis on the functioning of the Energy Catalyzer. The University of Bologna research is unlikely to do much to sway the online debates on the E-Cat, however, as even the preliminary results are not expected until after Andrea Rossi’s October surprise.
(The summary of the radio interview in the link above is an English machine translation of the original story in Italian, which can be found here. Any corrections or clarifications by speakers of Italian are welcome.)
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Query interviews Giuseppe Levi by Ivy Matt June 23, 2011
I watched entire series about cold fusion principles. I can understand and to some degree agree that it’s possible to create conditions where nickel will capture extra electron and energy spend would be less than energy gained when electron emitted from resulting copper. This is about as far as I can agree with Rossi’s claims. Then there are only questions…
1) Could anybody explain how there is no radiation when highly radioactive copper-58 emits electron and electron and positron are both annihilated? It seems to me that Rossi then invented apparatus that not only defeats classical physics and brings quantum mechanics theories to the level of real quantum physics, but also negates laws of radioactivity?
2) From what I understand entire process cannot be balanced in terms of chemical elements and naturally occurring isotopes in nickel in the beginning and the end of the process. Ni+H produce un-corresponding amounts of iron, nickel and copper after few hours of work. Chemists that were expressing their views on this said that entire process is nothing short of alchemy.
3) Steam production an all videos I saw (Krivit, Swedes) is very weak. Does anybody have hot mist humidifier at home? Mine produces huge steam beam at only 700W and evaporates around 1 liter of water in around 4-5 hours.Rossi claims that E-Cat evaporates 7 liters per hour? It’s like 28-35 times more than my humidifier and yet steam is much stronger in home appliance?
4) Why ampere-meter is only shown in the beginning of each presentation? Why cannot they put its results in computer so we see all parameters live on display when apparatus is on?
5) Can anybodu explain why on Swedes video no steam at all was coming out and only started to burp later and when camera returned back to first room Rossi was playing with control panel and had confused look when answering questions later with his eyes down?
In my personal opinion all this E-Cat story is too good to be true. And it probably is.
Hm, did you mean “where nickel will capture [an] extra *proton*”?
I don’t have many answers, sorry, and I too have a lot of questions. My main question is how likely it would be that the primary reaction in the E-Cat is p+Ni rather than p+p. From what I know about nuclear fusion (at least of the high-energy, plasma kind), side reactions are generally to be expected. I would expect p+p to be the primary reaction, and p+Ni to be more of a side reaction, but I’m not a nuclear physicist.