e-cat – Page 2 – COLD FUSION NOW!

October 12, 2014May 16, 2016

Status Report – Rossi Pending US Patent Application

Photo: New model E-Cat in operation from the report Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel [.pdf]

Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel [.pdf]

This is an update on the status of the above patent application. A previous comment on that US filing was made on ColdFusionNow – here.

This filing in the United States is descended from an original filing made in Italy on April 9, 2008. That Italian filing served as a priority filing for a PCT application, PCT/IT2008/000532, filed August 4, 2008, claiming the benefit of the earlier Italian filing date. (The original Italian filing resulted in the issuance of an Italian patent just before the Italian patent law was changed from a non-examination system to an examination system).

Following the procedures of the Patent Cooperation Treaty – PCT, the International PCT application was delivered to the US as a national entry filing on September 16, 2010. This application was duly published as serial number 12/736,193 and was placed in the queue for examination. As reported in the earlier ColdFusionNow article, a US Examiner’s Office Action issued on March 26, 2014. As is typical, this Office Action was an initial rejection, giving the applicant, 3 to 6 months to file a Response overcoming the Examiner’s objections. Such a Response, dated September 25, 2014, was filed on September 29, 2014. This posting reports on that Response.

Before addressing the Response in detail, the covering letter expresses thanks to the Examiner for the opportunity for Dr. Andrea Rossi and the attorney to have had a personal interview with the Examiner on April 22, 2014. Apparently no decisions were reached between the parties at that interview.

The Examiner’s Office Action of March 26, 2014 included a number of rejections:

Invention Inoperable

The Examiner asserted that “there is no evidence in the corpus of nuclear science to substantiate the claim that nickel will spontaneously ionize hydrogen gas and thereafter ‘absorb’ the resulting proton”. He went on to say that the nuclear conversion of nickel 58 into copper 59, while known, has only been observed experimentally “in the context of an accelerated (proton) beam into a nickel target. The element of acceleration is necessary in this matter as the only way for the proton to overcome the basic Coulomb repulsion between the proton and nickel nuclei.” The Examiner also observed that if the reaction were possible, as claimed by Rossi, it would also occur spontaneously in nature.

The Examiner also made a perfunctory further objection that, since the invention was inoperable, the disclosure that was provided was necessarily insufficient to enable workmen after the patent expired to reproduce the invention. The Examiner then requested evidence that the invention actually worked.

In the response by Rossi’s attorneys no evidence of operability was filed. Instead, the attorneys asserted that the Examiner had failed to establish a basis that would justify a request for evidence of operability. Citing In re Mitchell R Swartz, a year 2000 decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the attorneys submitted that the Examiner had failed to follow the Guidelines for Examination of Applications for Compliance with the Utility Requirement provided by the US Patent Office in its Manual of Practice and Examination Procedure. In particular, the attorneys asserted that the Examiner, in alleging that the utility described in the patent disclosure was not credible, had failed to:

a) provide support for factual findings relied upon by the Examiner in reaching this conclusion, and
b) provide an evaluation of all relevant evidence of record, including utilities taught in the closest prior art sufficient to support the basis for requiring proof of operability.

The attorneys referred to the description of the procedures provided in the patent disclosure for producing the described reaction, saying that no basis had been established for departing from the normal presumption that such descriptions are true and that the Examiner had not pointed out any deficiencies in that description.

Comment: Challenging the right of the Examiner to provide evidence of utility is an alternative to actually providing such evidence. Such a challenge provides grounds for objecting on appeal to the requirement by the Examiner that such evidence be filed. If the Board on appeal agrees that the Examiner’s requirement was legitimate and no evidence was filed, then the application will be rejected. If the Board concludes that the Examiner’s objection was unsupported, it’s unclear whether the application will be returned to examination with instructions for the Examiner to provide a better justification for such a requirement; or whether the application will be allowed to go forward on the basis that such evidence need not be filed, assuming that all other legitimate objections are overcome.

Citation of Prior Art

The Examiner had also issued a rejection based on the assertion that the invention as claimed by Rossi was “obvious” in view of the earlier technology described in a journal article authored by one Butler and others: Butler et al., “Radiative proton capture by Ni-58, and Co-59,” Phy. Rev. v.108 No. 6 pp. 1473-1495 [1957].

Butler describes a process for accelerating protons into a silver-plated nickel target. The attorneys for Rossi pointed out that Claims 1 and 7 as now pending (the only 2 independent claims) stipulated that nanometric nickel powder is exposed in a metal tube to hydrogen gas at high temperature and pressure. This, it was said, was sufficiently different from Butler that the rejection of Claims 1 and 7 on the basis of “obviousness” was not justified.

Claims 1 and 7 as amended and now pending read as follows:

1. A method for carrying out an exothermal reaction of nickel and hydrogen, characterized in that said method comprises the steps of providing a metal tube, introducing into said metal tube a nanometric particle nickel powder and injecting into said metal tube hydrogen gas having a temperature much greater than 150°C and a pressure much greater than 2 bars.

7. A modular apparatus for providing an exothermic reaction by carrying out the method according to claim 1, characterized in that said apparatus comprises a metal tube (2), including an nanometric particle nickel powder (3) and a hydrogen gas at high temperature and pressure.

Comment: If these two claims were valid the dependent claims otherwise present in the patent filing would be irrelevant. Further, apart from the objections of inoperability and obviousness both of these claims are indefinite. Claim 1 refers to: “hydrogen gas having a temperature much greater than 150°C and a pressure much greater than 2 bars”. The words “much greater than” make the claim indefinite. Similarly in Claim 7, the reference to “hydrogen gas at high temperature and pressure” is indefinite. This could easily be corrected in another Response, and the attorneys for Rossi are probably quite aware of this indefiniteness deficiency.

Additionally, both of these independent claims stipulate for the presence of a “metal tube”. In the absence of such a component, a competing construction would not infringe these claims. For example, if a ceramic tube were employed, it would not fall under the language of the claim. Neither would a metallic containment chamber if, for example, a cubic chamber were employed. These distinctions might be described as “loopholes”.

Loopholes cannot be closed by any of the dependent claims. Every dependent claim adopts the limitations of the independent claim to which the dependent claim refers back.

Unusually, the Response terminates by observing that the applicant has filed a petition to suspend prosecution of this application under the provisions of Rule 1.103 of the US Patent Rules. This reference occurs in the Response available at the US Patent Office website, but the documentation in support of this petition is not available over the Internet. This particular Rule provides as follows:

37 C.F.R. 1.103 Suspension of action by the Office.

a) Suspension for cause. On request of the applicant, the Office may grant a suspension of action by the Office under this paragraph for good and sufficient cause. The Office will not suspend action if a reply by applicant to an Office action is outstanding. Any petition for suspension of action under this paragraph must specify a period of suspension not exceeding six months. Any petition for suspension of action under this paragraph must also include:

(1) A showing of good and sufficient cause for suspension of action; and
(2) The fee set forth in § 1.17(g), unless such cause is the fault of the Office.

One can speculate as to reasons that might be provided in support of such a Petition.

Overall Commentary

This Response has the look of a buy-time initiative by the attorneys acting on behalf of Rossi. No attempt has been made to file evidence of operability as requested by the Examiner. If the Examiner simply reiterates his request for such evidence, possibly providing further observations in support, then Rossi will be able to file the evidence in response. If he fails to do so, it is likely that the Examiner will make his rejection of this application final. In such event, Rossi will have the option of filing an appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board or refiling the application as a “Continuation”. Either initiative will likely suspend disposition of this application for a period of 2 to 4 years.

Although not addressed by the attorneys filing this Response, this application may possibly also be defective for failing to provide a description of how to implement the invention sufficient to “enable” workmen to reproduce the results as claimed. If this were true, it would be fatal to the application, or any patent that might issue thereon in error. It is too late for Rossi to add any subsequently acquired information to this filing. Any further filings will be subject to any novelty limitations that have arisen since 2008.

August 24, 2013

E-cat South Asia Technology Update

Press Release from Ecat Australia and Ecat South Asia – August 2013

TOMORROWS ENERGY, TODAY

Since we last wrote, there continues to be important developments. The rest of the world is waking up that L.E.N.R. is serious. A recent Forbes article emphasized the maturing of the technology.

And OilPrice.com journalist Brian Westenhaus thinks the industry may have reached the turning point and perhaps the last stages before widespread acceptance. This is further supported by an influx of universities in the US and afield that are now including LENR or Cold Fusion studies in their syllabus.

The 18th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF-18) held last month also provided substantial details of the technology along with deepening understanding of the physics behind it. In practice no-one is yet able to match the COP that Rossi has attained: COP=6, but we hope that all parties do succeed because there is much need for more efficient and environmentally friendly energy sources.

Our focus has continued to be on working with interested parties, discussing their needs and recommending solutions. The following diagram shows the wide applicability of the Rossi E-Cat and Hot-Cat.

Many companies around the globe and in this region are starting to focus on co- and tri- generation, the situation where one heat source is used over and over again. To this end the actual effective COP can be much higher than 6, if one can re-use the heat. A typical co-generation use could be using the initial heat for a food manufacturing process, and the waste heat for a chilling/refrigeration process.

Consider a typical Co-Generation opportunity: Fruit and Veges industry.

Primary Application: Blanching. For this, typically they would be using grid electricity, or Gas. With the E-Cat they would enjoy a COP of 6 (i.e. for every unit of energy previously used, now they can consume just 1/6th of that energy, reducing their bill proportionately). Once used the energy they have consumed is typically wasted.

Secondary Application: By coupling the blanching process and its waste heat, to a chiller system, the company can convert this waste heat into chilling, allowing operation of cold rooms for holding vegetables, at almost no additional energy cost. Assuming a 70% efficiency on this leg, the company might be able to get an additional 50% re-use of the energy (allowing for inefficiencies).

Now the company may also consider that there is a third use for the same energy – output from the Chiller is hot water (approximately 50-70 degrees C). This is ideal for general use in bathrooms and kitchens for washing and cleaning.

Notice from the example table above, that there is substantial improvement of the facility’s energy use. Using the E-Cat, the company may be able to achieve upwards of 10 times the value of the input energy. (note this is a generalized example. Engineers will be able to estimate specific applications which depend on environmental conditions and other factors).

E-Cat Australia and South Asia is working with manufacturers and distributors of allied equipment to assist our clients get additional benefit when they implement an E-Cat or Hot-Cat.

Regards

Roy Wise, B.Chem.E, MBA
www.EcatSouthAsia.com

and Roger Green
www.E-catAustralia.com

E-Cat Australia launches new website July 16, 2012

June 10, 2013June 10, 2013

Swedish Pilot Customer wanted for E-Cat plant

According to a press release on their website, U.K.-based Hydro Fusion is looking for a Swedish Pilot Customer to participate in an E-Cat power production pilot-program.

HydroFusion is the North European Licensee Group Branch for Andrea Rossi‘s E-Cat and has an office in Sweden.

Energy produced by the E-Cat is in the form of steam from a nozzle on the unit. The pilot operator of the 1 MW thermal generator “will only pay for the energy produced by the ECAT, i.e. Hydro Fusion and Leonardo Corporation will take responsibility for all associated costs including: the plant itself, installation and any transportation costs.”

The customer must agree to install the unit by this fall 2013 and allow the showcasing of the plant for other would-be buyers.

The 1MW plant consists of 106 smaller 10-kilowatt units fitted together in parallel within a 6-meter shipping container. A valve in front of each smaller unit allows re-filling of hydrogen fuel, as well as access to the heater that starts the reaction. These smaller units each contain three core reactors, each 20 cm x 20 cm x 1 cm, holding a specially-treated nickel powder, the heart of the nickel-hydrogen exothermic reaction.

Hydro Fusion claims, “per unit of weight, this process is at least 100,000 more efficient than any known combustion process.” A recent third-party report by scientists who conducted a test on several versions of the core reactor confirmed energy density “off-the-chart”.

The E-Cat technology produces no CO2 emissions and no radioactive waste.

On their website, Hydro Fusion outlines the E-Cat 1MW specifications to which the customer must agree to append all applications:

Heat energy is produced according to specs.
- Heat energy 1 MW thermal at up to 120 C
- Heat exchanger from ECAT system to customer heat application.
Electricity is consumed according to specs.
- 250 kWe maximum power consumption
- 166 kWe average power consumption, i.e. COP=6

Hydro Fusion would like to receive quotations from Pilot Customers on both thermal MWh price and electric MWh price, based on an assumption of 7,000+ operating hours per year.

Current estimated delivery time for the E-Cat is four months with functionality warranted for two and years and an expected 30-year life span.

June 1, 2013June 2, 2013

The divine road ahead

I am a one- trick pony.

OK. A three-trick pony then.

I do not have the scary blades of Wolverine or Thor’s mighty Hammer.

And there is a lot of water between me and Igil Skallagrimson.

I am not even as good a poet. (You guessed that he was an exceptional Poet, right?)

However, I am not without my immodest strengths.

Mighty throbbing brain of Star Trek alien head. Source: Oil Drum

The Lesser of the three is a Mighty Throbbing Brain. This sort of effect.

If I am to survive I had better put my Superpower to use.

We (A cluster of exceptional survivors and me) need a few favors from the Gods.

The first is a miraculous and bounteous source of portable energy.

If you are not a Deist please insert your fingers in your ears at this point and sing “La La, La La. I can’t hear you”, at the top of your voice .

Apparently Atheism is losing ground as such a source is in the offing. Gail Tverberg and I doubt that it will come in good time to do you any favors. (Evolution is such a ruthless process).

Andrea Rossi’s eCat has been verified by an argument of professors in Sweden and at Cornell University. From the report:

“An experimental investigation of possible anomalous heat production in a special type of reactor tube named E-Cat HT is carried out. The reactor tube is charged with a small amount of hydrogen loaded nickel powder plus some additives. The reaction is primarily initiated by heat from resistor coils inside the reactor tube. Measurement of the produced heat was performed with high-resolution thermal imaging cameras, recording data every second from the hot reactor tube. The measurements of electrical power input were performed with a large bandwidth three-phase power analyzer. Data were collected in two experimental runs lasting 96 and 116 hours, respectively. An anomalous heat production was indicated in both experiments. The 116-hour experiment also included a calibration of the experimental set-up without the active charge present in the E-Cat HT. In this case, no extra heat was generated beyond the expected heat from the electric input. Computed volumetric and gravimetric energy densities were found to be far above those of any known chemical source. Even by the most conservative assumptions as to the errors in the measurements, the result is still one order of magnitude greater than conventional energy sources.”

Well. That will give us some breathing space. (Please do not be tempted to include yourselves in the pronoun “Us”).

The next issue to be addressed is the need for artificial intelligence and robotics. I see that we are making steady progress. You might like to observe Big Dog. Primitive, but it has possibilities.

The next thing that you we will need is a really smart way of building huge structures. And here another apple falls into our laps in the form of 3d printing.
And God just keeps giving.

What we also need is a lot of living space while we wrestle this urge to breed and it’s commensurate exponential function, to the ground.

“Space is Big. Really, really big. If you thought it was a long way to the pharmacy that is peanuts compared to space.” (Apologies to Douglass Adams)

At L4 alone there is enough room for several orders of magnitude more people than on the cramped two dimensional surface of this orb. Here is a graphic of what a Lagrange point looks like.

(You see that hole in the middle. That is the Gravity Well. You live at the bottom of it, poor thing.)

But how do we get there? We all “know” that it takes $$thousands of dollars to get even one pound out of the well, don’t we?

And just what will we find when we get there? The vacuum of space is no place for a trowel and mortar. But please- one issue at a time!!

How are we going to loft the remnants of humanity off the planet? Well there are several options available to us. Colossal Carbon Nano-tubes offer us a splendid means of taking the Elevator.

Or if a week of sitting around in a lift is just too boring, please consider orbital airships. At a cost of $1 per ton per vertical mile that might be within your our budget. (Wiki does fret about re-entry problems. There will be no re-entry. Unless you are a masochist of cause.)

But ponder this problem. Where are we going to get the materials? A hint: It will not be from the bottom of some gravity well. Gravity wells suck.

The God that gives, keeps giving.

The purpose of the Moon is not to help seduce maidens.

The purpose of the moon is to offer us the resources we need at just the right distance to encourage us into The Void.

“But,” we used to declare confidently “It has no water.”

When will we learn to keep our mouths shut? So now we have water at the poles. Someone else declared that the water at the poles was the greatest discovery of all time. He was right, because we now have run out of excuses.

What’s that I hear you think? We don’t have strong enough materials. See my point above about keeping our mouths shut. Only open them to give thanks.

Graphene, a layer of triple bonded atoms just one atom thick is capable of supporting an elephant. To get it to rip the elephant would need to stand on a pencil.

OK so now we have the Energy. Check.

We have the means to get into space in huge numbers. Checkᶩ (Did I mention the fact that the Orbital Airships are made of graphene? No? I did not think it necessary. Everything will be made of graphene.)

We are developing the robots to do the hard work on the moon and construct the habitat at the Lagrange points. Check

What are we still missing? Ah Yes. The Motivation. And here it is.

Standard run model from The Limits to Growth report.

Do you see that Black line? That is Deaths.

Do you see that little wobbly bit a few years into the 20th century? That was the combined effect of 1st and 2nd World Wars, the Spanish flu, Stalin’s pogroms and the famine in China and India.

Now look a little further along the line. Do you see a subtle change?

If you don’t see anything odd, do not be alarmed. It does not concern you.

The Limits to Growth report. [.pdf] Standard run. (Also known as the Business-As-Usual run)

To tell the truth I am getting bored spoon-feeding you. Talk about pulling teeth!

What I will do instead is to give you your homework. Here is a fictional story that I wrote for your amusement and pleasure. It is all about human relationships and sex, so there is something in it for the girls and the boys. (Sorry. No car chase.)

My story is called “The Breeding.” And if you are very good and read to the end there is a special treat.

Unconvinced? May I suggest you stare for a good half hour into your crystal ball.

Somebody please tell the Atheists they can take their fingers out their ears now.

May 30, 2013June 2, 2013

Pre-loaded hydrogen fuel an engineering answer for efficiency, ease and safety

Multiple independent labs are racing to produce a commercial product based on the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect (FPHE), most working quietly in their labs. But since the public demonstration of Andrea Rossi‘s E-Cat in January 2011, we’ve witnessed on the global theater the grueling process of actualizing a revolutionary technology.

Early prototype E-Cat had external hydrogen tank for fuel.

It has been amazing to watch. A thermal generator based on nickel-hydrogen exothermic reactions, E-Cat design changes have been guided by efforts to make an efficient, easy-to-use, and safe commercial product.

The earliest prototypes were fueled by hydrogen gas from a canister connected to the unit. For obvious reasons, the danger of hydrogen tanks in a domestic environment present a problem, and having the fuel pre-loaded inside the new E-Cat HT removes a huge liability.

But a pre-loaded fuel cartridge also makes a compact device easy to use.

Previous announcements have set the life for a single charge at six months, after which time the contents can be recycled and a new one installed. As this first generation of new-energy technology filters out to the public, we can expect much longer life-cycles in the future.

How is this fuel pre-loaded into the less-than-a-gram nickel-powder mixture? The answer is proprietary at the moment. But what is possible?

Perhaps a material that absorbs hydrogen and then releases it slowly is used. Metallic-hydrides can do exactly that. Could there be amongst the nickel-powder another transition metal that serves this function?

While we wait to see what’s next for the E-Cat, there are others in the field that have discovered the pre-loaded reactor benefits, each having different designs.

Pre-loaded solid wire works to make heat

Scanning Electron Microscope image of treated Celani wire by MFMP. — SEM image of treated Celani wire by MFMP.

Francesco Celani used a pre-loaded wire for his live demonstrations last year at ICCF-17 and NIWeek 2012. A very different design than Rossi’s, this solid-cathode type cell is being reproduced by the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project as an open-source enterprise with step-by-step activity documented and available online.

The group showed the results of loading hydrogen in their wire and how it affected resistivity and temperature. Stunning scanning electron microscope (SEM) images reveal close-up views of the metal and its bumpy surface.

Separating loading from activation for Pd-D systems solved by pre-loading

Pre-loading of hydrogen has also benefited palladium-deuterium (Pd-D) systems, helping to hasten initiation of the reaction, which can sometimes take weeks or even months to begin. Waiting so long for a reaction to occur makes data acquisition burdensome, and discoveries difficult.

Ideally, multiple cells would run at the same time, allowing several variables to be monitored and determined simultaneously. At one point, Drs. Fleischmann and Pons were running up to 32 cells, an expensive and still time-dependent undertaking.

SRI International experimented with pre-loading of hydrogen in fine wires as described in Calorimetric Studies of the Destructive Stimulation of Palladium and Nickel Fine Wires [.pdf]. From the paper, a description of how they did it:

SRI electrolytic cell with pre-loaded cathode.

1. Loading. When Pd wires were used as a substrate or as test objects these were pre-loaded electrolytically with either H or D in low molarity SrSO4 electrolytes (50μM) using procedures developed previously at SRI [8] and elsewhere [9].

2. Sealing. The atomic loading of H or D can be sealed inside the Pd lattice for extended periods (several hours or days) with the addition of very small concentrations of Hg2SO4 to the SrSO4 electrolyte and continued cathodic electrolysis [8,9]. The deposited Hg at monolayer coverage is a highly effective poison for hydrogen atom recombination, effectively preventing= desorption by inhibiting molecule formation.

The outcome?

The results show clearly that excess energy is generated both from Pd and Ni wires loaded either with deuterium or natural hydrogen5. However, data from Pd/D codeposited onto highly loaded Pd wires (solid triangles) sit on top of the plot, indicating that this category of wires generates the most excess heat. Interestingly, the Ni codeposited system also yields significant amounts of excess heat.

Pre-loaded NANOR devices can be electrically driven

Separating the long loading times from the activation of the reaction was achieved by Dr. Mitchell Swartz of JET Energy, Inc. with his nano-composite ZrO₂-PdNi-D cell that is pre-loaded with hydrogen fuel creating a “reproducible active nanostructured cold fusion/lattice-assisted nuclear reaction (CF/LANR) quantum electronic device.”

In the paper Energy Gain From Preloaded ZrO2-PdNi-D Nanostructured CF/LANR Quantum Electronic Components [.pdf] by Mitchell Swartz, Gayle Verner, and Jeffrey Tolleson, the authors write:

“The importance is they enable LANR devices and their integrated systems to now be fabricated, transported, and then activated. They are the future of clean, efficient energy production.”

A sixth-generation NANOR was publicly demonstrated in the office of Dr. Peter Hagelstein on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the 2012 IAP Cold Fusion 101 course, operating from January 30 to mid-May. Swartz also described the technology in the 2013 IAP short course captured on video by Jeremy Rys.

Designed to run at low-power due to safety considerations for a multi-month demonstration on a public campus, “over several weeks, the CF/LANR quantum device demonstrated more reproducible, controllable, energy gain which ranged generally from 5 to 16 [14.1 while the course was ongoing].”

With the core smaller than 2 centimeters containing less than a gram of active material, this device produced LANR excess power density “more than 19,500 watts/kilogram of nanostructured material.”

From the paper, Swartz describes the “proprietary self-contained CF/LANR quantum electronic component, called a two terminal NANOR™-type of LANR device”:

The NANOR represents the pre-loaded core of the reactor.

“At LANR’s nanostructured material “core” is an isotope of hydrogen, usually deuterons, which are tightly packed (“highly loaded”) into the binary metals, alloys, or in this case, nanostructured compounds, containing palladium or nickel, loaded by an applied electric field or elevated gas pressure which supply deuterons from heavy water or gaseous deuterium.”

“Loaded are isotopes of hydrogen -protons, protium, deuterons, deuterium, and hydrogenated organic compounds, deuterated organic compounds, D2, H2, deuterides and hydrides. Precisely for these NANOR-type LANR devices, the fuel for the nanostructured material in the core, is deuterium.”

“The preloaded nanostructured material is placed into the hermetically sealed enclosure which is specially designed to withstand pressure, minimize contamination, enable lock on of wires connecting to it. The enclosure is tightly fit with the electrodes.”

Described in the paper, the production of the preloaded core material involves “preparation, production, proprietary pretreatment, loading, post-loading treatment, activation, and then adding the final structural elements, including holder and electrodes.”

Fig. 2 – Series II and III two terminal NANOR™-type devices containing active ZrO2-PdNiD nanostructured material at their core.

Very pure materials are also required. “Contamination remains a major problem, with excess heat potentially devastatingly quenched,” the paper states.

The ratios of the NANOR’s composite elements are “in the range of Zr (~60-70%), Ni (0-30%), and Pd (0-30%) by weight, with the weights being before the oxidation step, and several later additional preparation steps. The additional D2 and H2 yield loadings (ratio to Pd) of up to more than 130% D/Pd.”

After several bakes, eventually an oxidized zirconia “surrounds, encapsulates, and separates the NiPd alloy into 7-10 nm sized ferromagnetic nanostructured islands located and dispersed within the electrically insulating zirconia dielectric.”

“Each nanostructured island acts as a short circuit element during electrical discharge. These allow deuterons to form a hyperdense state in each island, where the deuterons are able to be sufficiently close together.”

The latest Series VI NANORs have had energy gains beyond 30.

More than basic science, it’s an engineering development

Pre-loaded core reactors have “a decreased size, decreased response time, improved and dual diagnostics, and increased total output energy density.”

They are compact, portable and durable. Suitable for small power needs, they can respond on-demand with scalable power.

It’s a ragged course to a next-generation clean energy technology. Even as the science is still uncertain, the new pre-loaded hydrogen reactors are an engineering development that brings us closer to that goal.

May 27, 2013June 5, 2013

Nobel laureate Brian Josephson affirms reality of E-Cat HT

Dr. Brian Josephson discusses Andrea Rossi‘s E-Cat technology with Dr. Judith Driscoll in a video released in 2011. Published on the University of Cambridge website for Video and Audio Collections, the page is now amended to include the latest confirmation of heat-producing capability by the E-Cat HT.

“It is a very favorable report”, said Dr. Josephson.

The recently released third-party report by scientists conducting an independent test of three different E-Cat HT devices wrote that even in the most conservative estimates, the heat-producing capacity is “at least one order of magnitude greater than chemical energy sources”.

Josephson received the Nobel Prize for his work predicting the quantum tunneling of electrons in Cooper pairs which has had multiple applications in digital electronics. Driscoll is a Cambridge Professor of Materials Science also associated with Los Alamos National Lab in the U.S.

The video is available in several downloadable formats. A transcript is included and we reproduce that here:

PREAMBLE

The deafening silence of the scientific and other media, in regard to what may well be the most important technological advance of the century, was the main stimulus for the creation of this video.

Whereas the ITER thermonuclear project may lead to practical power generation some decades hence, generators based on the Rossi reactor, first demonstrated in January 2011, are already under construction.

In the following, we discuss a number of aspects of this controversial device.

——–

[Picture of Rossi and Levi with the reactor]

Dennis M. Bushnell, NASA Chief Scientist, Langley Research Center: “… this is capable of, by itself, completely changing geo-economics, geo-politics, and solving climate and energy”.*

Judith Driscoll: What’s this Rossi reactor then? Why do you consider it so important?

Brian Josephson: This picture shows Rossi with his device [being shown to Sven Kullander, chairman of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Energy Committee, and Hanno Essén, associate professor of theoretical physics and member of the board of the Swedish Skeptics Society, who carried out one of the investigations], which he calls the ‘Energy Catalyzer’, or E-cast for short. He says what’s happening is that there’s a nuclear reaction involving nickel and hydrogen. And since nuclear reactions produce so much more energy than ordinary chemical reactions, this means you can get a vast amount of energy with very little consumption of fuel. Furthermore, you won’t get any greenhouse gases produced.

JD: What’s the evidence that a nuclear process is involved?

BJ: Well, there’s some suggestion that copper is produced, that nickel has been transmuted into copper. But clear evidence is in regard to the amount of energy it produces. There’s a maximum amount of energy you can produce in a chemical reaction, so if the device produces vastly more energy than that, there must be something else going on, either a nuclear reaction or some unknown process. It’s been investigated a number of times, teams have come in to investigate it. For example, in February this year a test was carried out that ran for 18 hours. The amount of heat produced during that time was measured at 270 kWh. And that is the amount of energy you’d get from 25 kg of petrol. And since the size of the reaction chamber is only 50 ml, this rather rules out the idea of energy being generated by any conventional source. This appears to be pretty good evidence [various sources are mentioned at this point, repeated in subtitles. The Wikipedia article on the reactor is currently good, but is subject to the whims and prejudices of editors].

However, there are some problems with the idea that it is a nuclear reaction, because first of all conventional theory says that you need extremely high temperatures to get the reaction to go at a measurable rate, so people are sceptical on those grounds. On the other hand, there may be something wrong with the theory, because here we’ve got something happening in a solid; it’s not in a gas with isolated protons going round. It’s in a solid, so maybe many protons can cooperate and intensify the effect. So I think that’s not such strong grounds for rejecting it.

Another argument people have against this is to say not many gamma rays are produced — an extremely small amount of gamma rays [relative to what would be expected], and these fusion processes normally generate gamma rays. But then again we’ve got a very different kind of situation to what happens in thermonuclear processes. You can see what might happen in this slide. Imagine two different situations. One is a rock that is falling in air; it falls with a crash on some surface. The other situation is where it’s falling through water, and when it’s falling through water the energy is just gradually getting transferred to the water, there’s no big crash. That’s just an explanation [in general terms] of why you mightn’t get gamma rays. There’s really very little in the way of theory — actually lots of attempts have been made to explain it [cold fusion] but there isn’t enough evidence to show which is right. I think it’s not impossible that an explanation will be found.

JD: How is the amount of heat measured?

BJ: Well, this is really just school physics. You’re putting cold water in and you’re getting hot water or steam coming out, and if you know how much water’s going through you know how much heat is being produced, that’s all there is to it really[1].

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[1] In principle, but in practice one has to look carefully intoTo embed this video in a web page, use this code: what additional sources of heat there may be. Also, when steam is generated there are complications. The various investigations have attempted to address these issues.
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Also, there’s quite a big difference in temperature, in some experiments there’s [at least] a five degrees temperature rise; in other cases the water actually boiled. So you can’t say that errors in measuring the temperature are responsible for it.

JD: Why does energy need to be fed into the reactor to keep it going? Can’t the energy it generates be fed back into the reactor, so it can keep going with no energy input?

BJ: According to Rossi you can do that — he says it can be run in a mode where you aren’t feeding energy in, but you it’s then difficult to stabilise it; … in practical applications you want a reactor that can easily be stabilised. So the devices he’s building have energy being fed in, and you control it by altering how much current is being fed into the device.

JD: You say no greenhouse gases are involved, but what about radioactivity?

BJ: Well, Rossi says there are no radioactive residues. It’s not like ordinary reactors where you have radioactive residues that go on emitting radiation and heat as well for a very long time. And also he says should there be something like, say, and earthquake, then the hydrogen would escape and the reaction would stop. So he claims, at any rate, that it’s all very safe.

JD: Is it possible that Rossi’s just fooling people, he’s made it seem as if the reactor is heating up water, but he’s just trying to persuade people to invest in it, or to buy it, but it actually doesn’t really work.

BJ: Various people think that this is all a scam, but it’s not that plausible an idea because he allows people to investigate it; they can decide what to measure, how to measure it, they can also look inside, peer inside; the only thing they can’t look at is the reactor that contains his secret catalyst. But it doesn’t matter if you can’t look inside as what you’re trying to do is to see if it can produce this vast amount of heat which has been measured, and no matter what ordinary process it is you can’t produce more than a certain amount of energy in that amount of volume. So it doesn’t really matter if you can’t look inside. The reason he doesn’t want people to look inside is that they might discover how he does it and obviously, since it’s a commercial enterprise he doesn’t want other people to be able to make it so that he would lose what he gets back by selling the devices.

JD: Can’t he protect the invention by patenting the ideas?

BJ: Well, the trouble is, patenting is a rather tricky process if you really want to protect [your invention]. He has got some patents but it’s not fully protected.

JD: If this is as important as you believe it is, how is it we haven’t heard about it?

BJ: Well, that’s a very interesting question. One wonders about this. What isn’t Nature [Journal], say, writing this up, I mean, [this information] is available, but Nature doesn’t seem to be interested. However, if you were in Sweden you would know about it because there’s a Swedish technology journal called Ny Teknik, and someone there called Mats Lewan has been following it — somebody told him about it — and he at any rate was interested, he’s been following it and in fact he was responsible for [arranging] some of the setups. He’s written a great number of articles over that time.

It’s funny that people aren’t interested, but it has its historical precedents. One thing that was pretty similar was when the Wright brothers — they got their first flying machine and people had seen it, and you’d have thought this would be of tremendous interest, but very little was published. The publisher of the local journal [the Dayton Daily News] said, when he was asked about it later, “Frankly, we didn’t believe it.” And then there’s a typical account with scepticism was a newspaper which said “The Wrights have flown or they have not flown. They possess a machine or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It’s easy to say, ‘We have flown'”. So this shows … the sceptical mind at work, dismissing something in that way. So, in the case of the Rossi reactor, people are saying “it is easy to overlook something”. But the question is, what has been overlooked. It is such a simple measurement that it is not clear what could have been overlooked [by people who have looked carefully at the device.

But of course, part of the problem is the history of cold fusion. Pons and Fleischmann brought out their original spectacular claims in a press conference they were rather pushed into and there was a lot of scepticism, they were attacked. … People tried to reproduce the experiment … they thought it was a very easy experiment — you just [feed in] an electric current and lo and behold the reaction would go, but it wasn’t actually that simple. So the result was, a lot of people failed to get anything out and they denounced Pons and Fleischmann, and said ‘this is all incompetence’, and somehow their voice was heard more loudly than the other people, who were successful. The sceptics got in first. And so, the scepticism bandwaggon rolled, and somebody invented the phrease ‘fiasco of the century’ to describe it, and it had become the ‘well-estabTo embed this video in a web page, use this code:lished fact’ that cold fusion was a delusion. So Rossi had to fight against that general viewpoint.

But he’s really not so bothered about what the scientists think. In fact he wasn’t that keen on having scientists investigate it. His original plan had been simply to make a big reactor, producing so much power that people couldn’t say ‘nothing’s happening’. So that’s how it went.

JD: Is the reactor claim really so unbelievable?

BJ: Well, it looks unbelievable at first sight, but always in physics there are things you haven’t thought about, and I think here one possibility is that you’re getting energy concentrated into a point, as I said before. A familiar example of getting energy into a point is just hammering in a nail. The energy you have wouldn’t be able to get you into wood or whatever, but because it all gets concentrated into a point that forces its way in [SLIDE]. And so something like this may be happening, you may be pushing the hydrogen into nickel and there’s some obstruction or bottleneck, the [enhanced] flow of energy is produced at that point.

That’s one possibility. Another thing which is really quite similar, which people haven’t thought of in this context: someone called Seth Putterman — he and his colleagues got a device to work which actually produced nuclear reactions in a table-top experiment, and the way he did this was something called pyroelecticity. You heat up a substance and an electric field is produced. And that electric field he focussed on to a point, and there was a very strong electric field at that point. He had his crystal in deuterium gas, and that ionised the deuterium, and the electric field imparted so much energy to it that there were nuclear reactions and neutrons were produced. So … it shouldn’t really be thought so impossible. Fleischmann’s original idea was having a material where hydrogen was pushed in with high density with an electric current to see if anything happened, and lo and behold it did happen.

So, it’s been a gradual development. Rossi’s advance would appear to be to discover his secret catalyst, which makes the reaction go much faster, and make it a practical source of energy.

JD: So what do you think is going to happen?

BJ: Well, as I see it, there are two different worlds, there’s the world of the academic, and the world of the practical person. The academic is mired in theory, and wanting absolute proof, and says ‘this is nonsense’ — at least that’s the general view. Meanwhile Rossi is going ahead in the practical sphere, … he’s building these reactors and people will — one hopes — see that they’re producing lots of energy. His first reactor is due to be produced in October, and he has a buyer for it. People, by the way, don’t have to pay until they’re convinced it is working, which is not what fraudsters do. So I think gradually it will take off.

The unfortunate thing is there’s been a delay; there will be a delay in it getting going because the journals, and the media who follow the scientists, are refusing to publish anything. That delay will have consequences. It really does matter, from that point of view, that the scientists and the media are looking away.

* In the broadcast, this statement was preceded by the following: “I think this will go forward fairly rapidly now, and if it does …”.

END Transcript

Brian Josephson safeguards historic contribution by Martin Fleischmann

A Nobel laureate speaks out on the Energy Catalyzer

E-Cat enters the Wiki