Is this the most important invention in the history of mankind…
Is this the most important invention in the history of mankind…
… or is it just the hoax of the decade?
Andrea Rossi, a previously convicted con artist, has been working on a device called E-Cat which is supposed to generate energy in a process commonly described as “cold fusion” or “LENR”. Now, what separates his “invention” from that of other esoteric oddballs is that a more-or-less independent experiment has been carried out with baffling, or rather absolutely incredible, results. A few scientists from the universities of Bologna (Italy) and Uppsala (Sweden) and the Swedish Institute of Technology have published their findings in a scientific paper.
Now, I know nothing of electro chemistry, but what these guys write in their paper is quite peculiar:
The measured energy balance between input and output heat yielded a coefficient of performance factor of about 3.2 and 3.6. […] This amount of energy is far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.
The isotope composition in Lithium and Nickel was found to agree with the natural composition before the run, while after the run it was found to have changed substantially. Nuclear reactions are herefore indicated to be present in the run process, which however is hard to reconcile with the fact that no radioactivity was detected outside the reactor during the run.
In summary, the performance of the E-Cat reactor is remarkable. We have a device giving heat energy compatible with nuclear transformations, but it operates at low energy and gives neither nuclear radioactive waste nor emits radiation. From basic general knowledge in nuclear physics this should not be possible.
Of course, this yields some interesting questions:
- In which way are the scientists (most of them already carried out a simpler test on the E-Cat earlier) related to Andrea Rossi?
- Is someone (who has read the whole paper and is proficient in chemistry/physics) able to come up with an explanation how Rossi could have manipulated the test setup?
- Can the experiment be repeated by a different team of (more prolific) scientists?
I’ll keep you updated about the issue.
UPDATE: A man called Barry Kort offered some criticism of the experiment on Breaking Energy that may be valid:
I assert there is an error in the energy budget model. It’s not an assumption, it’s an assertion based on a careful reading of the report.
The experimenters report their energy budget model, which can be seen to be at odds with the visible evidence and well-known physical properties of alumina.
The IR camera requires the assumption of an opaque isothermal black body radiator with known emissivity. But translucent alumina is not opaque. The IR camera is receiving photons from transmission through the translucent shell, photons emitted from a different material (Inconel) and at a different temperature from the alumina. The experimenters need to address this discrepancy in their energy budget model.
It’s a hoax. The guy basically controlled the conditions the experiment was run in during that latest paper.
Already disproven, unfortunately.
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.it/2012/03/sinking-of-e-cat.html?m=1
Hi! His name is Andrea, not Alberto.
Brody wrote:
Fixed it.
Updated the article with criticism from Barry Kort.
Here’s a comprehensive index of investigations regarding the e-cat and it’s inventor.
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/RossiECat/Andrea-Rossi-Energy-Catalyzer-Investigation-Index.shtml
Excuse me, but the name is Andrea Rossi
The name of the guy is Andrea, not Alberto. He is (in)famous in Italy for the “Petroldragon” affair. At high pressures and temperatures you can break down carbon compounds (plastic, rubber, organic waste) into oil, methane and coal, but it requires more energy than you get from the resulting byproducts. Andrea Rossi claimed that he made the process efficient.
in the ’80s the memory of the ’73 and ’79 oil (and economic) crisis was still fresh so he, and his company, was allowed to process right away large quantities of industrial waste. Even when the scientific report was published: “the poor quality of the liquid product, makes it hard to use without further and expensive treatments. Moreover the presence of chloride compounds makes it impossible the usage in industrial furnaces.” he kept going on. He made millions of € (billions in the old currency) by illegally disposing toxic waste (dispersing it in the nature or stoking in silos). Only when the pollution became apparent his activity was stopped.
I’ll believe in the E-Cat only when a third party builds and tests a working reactor or I have the working product in my hands. The paper linked by you is partially sponsored by Industrial Heat LLC and while the measurements were independent, the operations were supervised by Andrea Rossi, and to this date no demonstration was made without him handling the reactor.
There are two ways to manipulate the results. The power input and the power output. By using inadequate meters on the power input and using non-sine wave wave forms, it’s possible to greately underestimate the electrical power input to the system. Another commentator has suggested one way for the output power to be overestimated.
As for the transmutation – if you read the report carefully, you’ll find that Rossi is the one who put the powder in and took the powder out. I suspect that the sample of the powder coming out was completely unrelated to the sample of the powder coming out!
It would be great if it were true, but it’s just a money-making hoax.
Oh god, a ‘scientific’ paper weitten in Word? Yeah… No.
Andrea Rossi himself is a big hoaxer. He has messed up so much that nobody needs to take him serious ever again.
Or rather, he should be seriously taken as risk for other people’s finances, the environment and generally scientific credibility.
The key thing here is that Rossi is a known con-artist and he managed to persuade the investigators that he had to put the fuel into the device and take the expended fuel capsule out. Since the investigators are not stage magicians they failed to spot the swap that I would assume happened. To bad, we could use cheap energy
Anyone who reposted that should be embarrassed.
>previously convicted con artist
>formally broken paper written in Word (extra points for useless photos, insane characters per line, no citations, no auto-hyphenation, non-indented paragraphs broken by a return *right in the abstract*)
>mysterious source of energy
Each of these, on a paper, is a >99.9% bullshit indicator. All three at once? Seriously?
Any distrust can be fixed by an open test. Rossi can provide parts and assembly diagrams so one of his devices can be built by independents, perhaps undeer the guidance of Rossi’s own engineers. Then Rossi’s can add the fuel (which is claimed to be a trade secret) and away it should go.
Simple, right?
Now I understand the interest in this, and it is a topic worth debating, but is the Sandra and Woo blog the right place? I kinda feel like maybe a separate author blog, or even twitter, would be a better place for this. Of course, Novil decides how Novil runs Novil’s website.
The best part is, the bigger the proposed finding, the quicker others will be to try to debunk it. Just look at the STAP paper that caused so much controversy earlier this year. The more important the finding could potentially be, the more skeptical other scientists will be of the proposed findings. And if this group wants to try to scam money out of false findings, they’ll find that their scheme will be quite short lived I think…
I actually believe there is some truth. There is not a single good explanation otherwise (paper written in Word, is that a valid argument?).
The energy output is staggering. Basically more then 2 kW for a month or so. Even if you filled all that thing with kerosene you couldn’t produce that. I may be mistaken, but I see no way to fake this. The researchers used valid equipment that is not easily fooled by “not harmonic waveforms”.
And I would be really happy if someone pointed out to a *serious* argument that indicates a scam. I wouldn’t like to digest the fact that all the scientists were outwitted by some previous con-artist.
I am from Italy, and this guy is quite renowned as a hoaxer (is this a real word?) and a charlatan
I’d love if this was true. But I won’t be convinced until the gizmo is checked by engineers (not scientists) experienced in measuring heat and power and by someone like James Randi.
Look up “John Ernst Worrell Keely” in Wikipedia. Same “Unlimited power source. You can’t look inside but I guarantee that with a little more work anyone who invests now will make a fortune” spiel. Maybe Rossi has something, but his pitch sounds all too familiar.
Been following this for about two years now. Many, many broken promises about when they’d release a commercially viable product. (To be fair, “hot” fusion has been “20 years away” for 50 or 60 years now.)
For those wondering on the sciences involved:
I have 14 years of experience in nuclear power operations. This is an attempt to explain where this has obvious faults based upon the knowledge and experience I have acquired.
First, http://www.mpoweruk.com/nuclear_theory.htm is an excellent resource for this, especially in talking about Binding Energy, or how much available energy can be released in a nuclear reaction. It is important to note that chemistry cannot change the structure of an atom, it relies upon changing molecular bonds. Since there were described changes in atomic structure, then a nuclear reaction must have taken place. Mentioning Nickel (Ni -or- #21) is a rather poor bit of research, as it has relatively little binding energy change possible in a reaction (on the chart, the distance vertically going up is how much energy can be released, a distance down requires an energy input to be possible.) Lithium is a much better atom to pick, however it does nothing to address other flaws in the description.
Perhaps the most damaging statements are about no radiation seen. When changing the atomic structure, there are several things that happen. Stability is very important in the study of atomic structure, and when an atom does not meet a stable structure, it decays and releases radiation. This is the source of all radiation, exception that which occurs as a part of a nuclear reaction itself. See the decay section of the link above… The chart near the top of the next linked page, http://www.phy.ornl.gov/hribf/science/abc/ shows the stable isotope configurations. The black line is very narrow, and anything not on it decays and produces radiation. The problem is that as each element number goes up, so too does the number of Neutrons required to maintain a stable structure. This can be seen by the curve to the right on the stable isotope graph. This means any combination of the two elements involved will be unstable, excepting single combinations of Lithium as a possibility, and that radiation will occur. To expound: Lithium, element #4, is stable in a narrow range, notably atomic mass 6 and 7 (element # is protons, atomic mass is proton and neutron count.) Nickel is #21, stable at 58, 60, 61, 62, and 64. By using addition, and comparing stable isotopes, we can see the possible combinations. That is, any number of atoms combining to make another atom. After element #56 we would start gaining less energy, although Lithium would still give energy at almost any value. However, after 126 there are essentially no stable isotopes (some have very long decay times.) The problem is that as each element number goes up, so too does the number of Neutrons required to maintain a stable structure. This can be seen by the curve to the right on the stable isotope graph. This means any combination of the two elements involved will be unstable, excepting single combinations of Lithium as a possibility, and that radiation will occur.
Finally, radiation has a material thickness which reduces the amount of radiation seen, as well as a distance decay. The smallest thicknesses involved for a reduction from 10 to 1 are 2″ of very thick material, usually lead. The distances involved are much larger. From the shown device size and structure, neither is applicable.
Hopefully this helps anyone who was curious understand the sciences involved on the nuclear end. As for chemistry, well, that is a discussion for something which does not involve claimed nuclear changes.
You can see here a good comment: http://pesn.com/2014/10/10/9602543_Apocalypse-Revealed–The-Four-Horsemen_of_Andrea-Rossis_E-Cat/
The only obscure point for me is why the researchers let Rossi play a (albeit small) part in the experiment. If now the powder composition is known the researchers could to everything on their own.
However, definitely, this is something not to be treated with smugness. Schechtman when he theorized quasi-crystals, had to fight with all the skeptical science-textbook establishment. Serious physicists should look into the matter and then we will talk
Rossi is a skilled professional con artist, and not a physicist of any kind. I don’t think anyone disputes this fact anymore (except possibly him).
Here, he has produced a device whose apparent properties can be explained by either a moderately clever con or an extremely clever physics discovery.
Given Rossi’s profession, which of those two is most likely?
As James Randi has been loudly pointing out for decades, scientists tend to be notoriously gullible and very frequently fall for scams of any kind. Their area of expertise is trying to see the truths that the honest universe is trying to show them. They are not experienced at trying to see past the lies that a trickster is trying to show them. Professional tricksters such as magicians are the ones best qualified to evaluate claims such as these because they are the ones most likely to spot a simple trick that takes advantage of human trust and naivete.
Also, “most important invention in the history of humankind” is, I think, extremely hyperbolic. It wouldn’t be more important than tools, fire, language, or agriculture. Or, in my opinion, even a lot of modern inventions. All it would do is reduce the cost of post-carbon energy a bit versus solar and nuclear, and partially resolve the climate change issue, probably saving millions of lives. Plenty of inventions have saved millions of lives, and I doubt that expensive energy would be nearly as disastrous as people seem to think these days.
Xezlec wrote:
Ah, but INEXPENSIVE energy would change everything. What we call “civilization” is pretty much a measure of how many horsepower is available to each human. Originally, it was man’s own muscles. Then fire, horses and oxen, and steam engines. As Isaac Asimov once noted, “We’re trying to run down the solar energy stored in fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.”
All the minerals and elements we could ever use can be extracted from seawater and granite. It’s just that they’re too dilute to be recovered economically without a free (or nearly so) supply of energy.
I never thought I’d be discussing engineering economics beneath a comic about a talking raccoon.
A sentence in previous comment got clipped. I used brackets and it was taken as an HTML tag.
Add wind and water to the list of energy sources we’ve exploited.
Neutrino wrote:
No, I don’t agree with that at all. That’s a popular idea today only because of the climate change debate, not because energy really was historically that important. Beasts of burden and steam engines were useful because of the extra power they provided in those few special cases where an unusually large amount of power came in handy, but that doesn’t generalize to many other inventions. Agriculture, the wheel, language, steel, paper, money, television, computers, the internet, etc. Most major inventions I can think of have little or nothing to do with energy.
All cheap energy would do (aside from solving the CO2 problem) is make transportation, heating/cooling, and aluminum production a bit cheaper. I can’t think of any other big benefit in the modern world. Can you?
No, not at all. Energy is not a major part of the cost of extracting most raw materials. Labor and equipment are essentially all of it. For example:
http://businessmining.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/cost-breakdown.png
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zoCQ3cTiP8Y/VAtgMgJm0pI/AAAAAAAAA4w/uYeDk5GGA9M/s1600/Goldcorp%2Bcost%2Bbreakdown.GIF
What’s more, we already have essentially all the raw materials we could want. There aren’t any tight shortages constraining us right now that I know of. There’s no reason to go to seawater and granite right now since easier sources are still available.
The thing is, if energy were hypothetically completely free (meaning infinite) we all agree that everything would change… We could travel at the speed of light, for example…
Since we are discussing only of a finite gain, I agree with the position of xezlec .
However there are many accredited physicists that have been speaking for years of low energy nuclear reactions and cold fusion. The e-cat actually derived from the experiments of Focardi. There is no sound theoretical argument that strongly forbids these phenomena and there is plenty of evidence from many laboratories that they happen. There is some sort of weirdness associated to the topic and many suspects of fraud, but it is not just a case of a hoaxer vs gullible people..
Xezlec wrote:
Yes, agriculture CAN be done with minimal energy. It was so for most of history. And the majority of humanity worked at it. Now it requires fertilizer and combines and both take a great deal of energy. At the beginning of the 20th century it was said that the power of a nation could be measured by the amount of Sulfuric acid it produced (So many chemical processes start with it) and that takes energy. Plastics take energy, usually from the original hydrocarbon molecules.
Steel is melted and purified and tempered. And on and on and on. Or paper. Watch one of those “How it’s made” programs to see trees being felled, transported, macerated, sieved and dried.
I am not suggesting cheap energy would bring about utopia. As Xezlec notes, there are always capital costs. But literally NOTHING gets done without energy and its price determines standard of living to a large extent.
“Cold fusion” may or may not work. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for solar or OTEC or whatever. But we’ll need something to replace coal and oil at some point.
And, of course, even atomic energy isn’t “unlimited”. Not even total conversion of matter (say, dirt) to energy would enable near light-speed travel, even assuming insane mass-ratios. Robert Heinlein seriously overestimated the performance of his “torchships”.
Afterthoughts. Note that manufacturing IS moving back to the US. Asia may offer cheaper labor but, at the moment, the US has cheaper energy because of the fracking boom. That’s enough of an advantage to make capital investment here worthwhile.
The cost of energy matters a lot!
Nothing compares with the importance of language and writing. I think the jury is still out on whether television is a “great” invention. 😉
@”Physicist”: Paper written in word is a weak argument. Paper incompetently written in Word is a strong argument. So is con artist, and so is inventing an energy source out of nowhere. If we go through life taking every bullshit by every random dude seriously, we’ll waste our entire lives with that.
Scientific intelligence is, contrary to public opinion, a rather universal skill. I haven’t seen a good scientist who can’t write a proper paper. Even if such a scientist exists and needs to write a paper, then they will know others who will help them out. In result, groundbreaking papers by good scientists don’t reek of low-effort fakes.
If you believe “this time it’s different”, put up bet money. Bets are the market’s judges against nonsense. The only reason they’re not mentioned right away is that hoaxers get all dodgy when the amounts get serious.
@ Vandroiy:
Well we write our papers in word, and usually normaly the Journal people do the final tweaking (on the formate, the colours and so on – NOT on the results).
What usually happens before though is a process called peer review, which means that 2 or 3 scientists with experience on the field will read the paper and check for plausibility. If university researchers choose not to bother with that process, and try to puplish something like this in, say Nature or Science, or even the “Backwood Journal of Electronuclear Speculation”, it indicates, that they do not trust their “results” to withstand even a superficial review.
(Were the results reproducable and founded in a good theareticall understanding it would quite likely make it into Nature or Science, which for most researchers would be a big deal)
The fact that it has not been published in a peer reviewed journal fits well with everything the rest of the people mentioned about the con-artist.
So in conclusion, calling it a scientific paper is a stretch at best.
Neutrino wrote:
Ah, but the government would do exactly what it did when Nuclear first came out… regulate the cost to be comparable to other sources of energy. Of course, each type and source of energy has benefits and cost considerations, but nuclear was initially billed as ‘Too cheap to meter’ because the fuel does indeed cost very little (to this day, fuel costs for nuclear are tiny.)
Getting excited about low cost energy from any source, given the history there, is a counting chickens before they hatch scenario. The idea is nice, but the likelihood of the consumer actually ever seeing such a situation is extremely low, considering that the status quo provides a great deal of money to people in positions of power.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Scientific claims require replication and detailed analysis. Until they disclose it AND others have gotten the same result AND it has stood up to proper analysis, I’m going to assume that it’s a scam. Especially with a known scam artist involved.
For anybody that is looking for a good, scientific evaluation of the test procedure used for this independent e-cat test, I suggest reading this:
Short story is that the e-cat was continually hooked up to outside power, when a proper test would have had it powering itself, they used an “open calorimeter” method of measuring the output, which can be accurate but requires absolute certainty behind your assumptions, there was no radiation detected at any point in the setup or operation of the device, which violates known physics BUT is not itself damning evidence of fraud if in fact something new is happening, the data presented on the measuring of the products and reactants is incomplete as it talks about nickel composition, but mentions nothing of copper, iron or lithium, and there should be copper if this is a known nuclear reaction, BUT again this itself is not necessarily damning as it could be something new in theory, Andrea Rossi participated in the operation of the test, a big no-no for an “independent” test, and lastly the other members of the team all have previous associations with Rossi, further calling into question the independence of the test.
The only real conclusion that an engineer or scientist can draw from this experiment is that it does nothing to prove what it sets out to prove. As much as I wish there was a working source of cheap energy, this experiment is completely unable to convince me that the e-cat is such a thing.
@ Jorge Firebomb:
Er sorry, the link apparently didn’t work like I thought it would.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-e-cat-cold-fusion-or-scientific-fraud-624f15676f96
That is the article I am referencing.
Robert wrote:
well that is not technically true… You need muons to do it, (a heavy electron) but when you have sufficient amount of dense deuterons, (hydrogen plasma) it is possible that a muon will pair up two deuterons together and force the cores together.
but problem is that the only way we know of producing muons is by a pi mezon decay… and making pi mezons requires just a bit more energy than what you can get out of the catalized fusion (because of muon half-lifetime)
I CAN imagine that something like this could happen within suitable structure of heavier catalyst… but… well noone managed to reproduce those claims anywhere. And the guy claims he uses materials avaiable to almost anyone.
and btw…
http://www.cheniere.org/books/excalibur/moray.htm this seems much more reasonable device compared to Ecat…
And actualy – vacuum does exert some energy in overall state.
Place two plates next to each other in vacuum – the volume outside is infinitely bigger than inside… therefore there will be many more pairs of virtual particles emerging and hitting the plates from outside… (with their anti-charge counterparts beeing lost into the void… carrying also energy, a negative one (relative to the observer)
that to the amount that emerges inside…
the effect is negligable but can be actualy measured.
what needs to be stated is that overall energy and momentum of everything remains the SAME as far as universe is concerned… what you however end with is increase of entropy of observerd system.
@ Paeris Kiran:
And well… as is my favourite scene from stargate atlantis – “You can´t predict what is inheritly inpredictable!” (meaning that if we would force even 1J from the vacuum, anyhow, there would be absolutely no way how to predict what kind of particles and in which direction they will go.)
It could be a unpredictable radiation killer.
(It is from the SGA: Trinity… truth be told it was my top favourite scene from Sci-fi… closely followed by Defiant battling through Dominion lines in DS9 Sarcrifice of Angels… but well the 13 doctors together saving Gallifrey beated everything)
I do love stargate though… they at least aimed for things that do not conflict with reality science that much.
Physicist wrote:
they happen but they are so improbable that output can not be actualy measured.
a 1 in milion trilion of atoms fusing on some aluminum catalyst is a useless thing.
and well… there are concepts that allow an FTL propulsion. Namely alcubierre drive… which can not be either proven or disproven untill we finaly manage to get a decet quantum explanaition of gravity. (And what effect actualy has an “antigraviton” on space)
It is still perfectly possible that electricaly neutral antimatter will gravitacaly repulse normal matter.
Paeris Kiran wrote:
Except… they never mention Hydrogen at all, they list the changes for the elements I discussed, Lithium and Nickel. Muon based Hydrogen Fusion is indeed a well researched/discussed topic, and it requires either Deuterium and more Deuterium, or Deuterium and Tritium (Hydrogen isotopes with 2 or 3 neutrons.) However, the process still releases radiation, so if this was a similar event radiation would still be released.
Jorge Firebomb wrote:
The lack of radiation is damning when nuclear changes are mentioned, and the paper mentions nuclear changes to two elements, Lithium and Nickel.
Key point: Even if it were true, the device as described only operates at low temperatures (~130C) which is not efficient enough (Carnot) to generate USABLE energy. Also the device as described would generate some radioactive waste (low level, but still an OHS problem).
What really bothers me about the hype around the “e-cat” is that it is old technology (over 30 years) that he has stolen and claimed credit for “inventing”. Nothing about it is secret. I could whip one together in an afternoon. Making nuclear reactions occur is easy, so when someone says “I’ve acheived fusion”… meaningless. That’s been happening for over half a century. Making it happen efficiently enough to generate electric power is the challenge.
Show me a working power plant that is self sustaining and outputs excess electricity (not just heat): Then you’ll have something. This guy is just trying to scam money out of some gullible companies who dream of being on the next big thing: In that he has had a fair amount of success.
I’m just a poor IT person living in Florida, but it is my opinion the most important invention in the history of mankind is definitely air conditioning!
No. It’s a trap!