In the wake of Saturday’s cold fusion conference in Viareggio, Italy, Roy Virgilio has released more details on the Piantelli group’s research on the Italian renewable energy forum EnergeticAmbiente. Virgilio is an administrator on the forum with the username eroyka. Akira Shirakawa has provided an English translation on the Vortex mailing list here and here. To summarize:
- Experiments are being performed in a lab near Siena, Italy.
- Older units worked continuously for months and produced 2× to 4× energy gain, but the actual energy balance was higher, as the cells reached self-sustaining mode.
- Several unnamed third parties have confirmed that the older units worked in self-sustaining mode for long periods of time.
- Several of these older units were recently reactivated. After some maintenance they turned on easily and produced 2× to 3× energy gain, but they haven’t yet been pushed to high excess energy levels.
- New units with new fuel should be completed in about two months, and are expected to produce 200× energy gain.
- The new units will be tested gradually in several steps of increasing power, beginning from a few hundred watts up to high levels of power on the order of kilowatts.
- The scale-up will take as long as is necessary. Smaller devices will be ready for sale first.
- No catalyst is necessary. The trick is in the preparation of the nickel.
- Piantelli has a theory that doesn’t require exotic reactions, but can be explained using known physics and mathematics. A semi-complete theory has been provided to the University of Siena and will be published shortly. The complete theory will probably be disclosed after the first commercial units have been sold.
- No Italian public institutions are involved in the current research, but a US government agency that has had the opportunity to review the research will probably validate and certify the reactor, as well as contribute to its development.
- Piantelli’s group is also in talks with several large industrial corporations to develop generators operating at certain power levels.
- The research is protected by three pending patents, the latest of which was filed last week.
- Piantelli’s group will create a supporters’ trust. In two to four months the public will be able to buy shares in the trust to support the research, to prevent the technology from suddenly disappearing, and to share in any future revenues. Piantelli’s group doesn’t need money: the aim is protect the technology by putting it under the control of a multitude of stakeholders and enthusiasts, but there is no guarantee the shares will make a profit. [Emphasis added. —Ivy Matt]
Thanks, Akira!
The three patents mentioned above probably do not include Piantelli’s 1995 patent application. The Piantelli group filed an Italian patent application, “Method for Producing Energy and Apparatus Therefor”, on November 24, 2008, which was published on May 25, 2010. More recently, on April 26, 2011 they filed an Italian patent application, “Method and Apparatus for Generating Energy through Nuclear Reactions of Hydrogen Adsorbed by Orbital Capture to a Metal Crystalline Nanostructure”, which is due to be published on October 27, 2012. And then last week they filed a third patent application, the title of which is not yet known, and which should be published in January of 2013.
It looks like 2011 will be the year cold fusion attempts to make it on the commercial stage, and with at least two competitors. Piantelli’s group appears to be starting off at a disadvantage to Rossi and Defkalion, as Defkalion claims to have already achieved a 6× to 30× energy gain. (See Section 3: “Product Status” in the white paper.) However, Piantelli professes to have a comprehensive theory of the hydrogen-nickel reaction, which may speed up his group’s research. Cold fusion is not exactly suffering from a lack of explanatory hypotheses, but if Piantelli’s hypothesis fits well with the available evidence and, more importantly, if it makes predictions that can be tested experimentally, it will be worthy of the notice even of detractors of cold fusion research.
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Viareggio Cold Fusion conference: science, politics, and an Italian competitor — Ivy Matt July 23, 2011