Andrea Rossi Energy Catalyzer fusion device

DBT85 · 7 Jul 2011 at 13:55

Meridian said:
Except for one teensie little problem:

(my emphasis).

In other words, it's a scam. It's just yet another perpetual motion machine but without anyone using that expression. I assume that any time now we'll see an extended attempt to get outside sponsorship to "develop a practical version for more extensive trials". Instead of just selling the -ing thing to GE which would be easier and pay better. But only if it worked, which it doesn't. The only interesting thing here is precisely how he is cheating.

M

If I invented something I sure as hell wouldn't let someone else poke around inside it until I had a patent on it. Since currently he only has the one in Italy it's hardly surprising that they were not allowed to look inside.

All 4 demonstrations have, if we assume the testing was indeed real and genuine, eliminated any possible fake. As yet no single test has eliminated all possible fakes in one go. By all accounts, that is the fault of the testers and not the guy providing the object to be tested.

If I bring you a football and ask you to try and puncture it and you don't bring a knife, it's hardly my fault that you didn't manage to open it.

And if you HAD invented something like this why would you sell it to one manufacturer? You'd license it out or build it yourself and make far more money while at the same time make sure that no one company is going to bury it as conspiracy nuts would have you believe happens all the time.

I'm not saying it IS real, but I wonder how many of those immediately crying fake have actually read anything about the demonstrations done, the theories about what could be powering the device and providing the heat that, if the tests are indeed true, the device undoubtedly produces.

Meridian · 7 Jul 2011 at 16:44

Todge said:
If I bring you a football and ask you to try and puncture it and you don't bring a knife, it's hardly my fault that you didn't manage to open it.

A much closer analogy would be if you gave me a heavy football and told me it contained a kilo of gold, and I could examine it any way I liked except open it. And if he hasn't patented it yet, why not?

M

Glaucus · 7 Jul 2011 at 16:47

Meridian said:
. And if he hasn't patented it yet, why not?

M

Anyone can acess patents, so if he tried to file anything, people would soon discover it was a complete scam.

DBT85 · 7 Jul 2011 at 16:53

Meridian said:
A much closer analogy would be if you gave me a heavy football and told me it contained a kilo of gold, and I could examine it any way I liked except open it. And if he hasn't patented it yet, why not?

M

It's in the process of going through apparently.

And that analogy doesn't fit what we have heard about this reactor since you would have no way of proving that there was gold inside. Since that is the claim I would be making its impossible to prove or disprove.

If he gave you one of these devices and said you are free to test this in any way you like, but you may not open it, you would be able to prove outright if it was real or fake without ever seeing how the magic works.

AcidHell2 said:
Anyone can acess patents, so if he tried to file anything, people would soon discover it was a complete scam.

it does already have a patent in Italy issued in April

Amp34 · 7 Jul 2011 at 22:17

Nice... Going round in circles again!

For those nay sayers (and I'm not suggesting he is telling the whole truth here) a question I asked but no one answered erlier on in the thread... What is in that 50cc box that can provide 15kw of energy? How much energy does a laptop battery provide for example, and how big?

Angilion · 8 Jul 2011 at 05:06

Amp34 said:
Nice... Going round in circles again!

For those nay sayers (and I'm not suggesting he is telling the whole truth here) a question I asked but no one answered erlier on in the thread... What is in that 50cc box that can provide 15kw of energy? How much energy does a laptop battery provide for example, and how big?

No battery is within orders of magnitude of the required charge to weight or charge to size ratio. You might be able to make a battery that size and weight that would output 15KW, but only very briefly.

The battery pack in a a Tesla contains 6831 cells of a very common size - 9mm radius, 65mm long. So that's ~16.54 cubic centimetres per cell, which is a total of ~113,000 cubic centimetres for all the cells (if they were all together without any gaps, somehow. It can store ~53KWh. Unsurprisingly, they're using Li-ion batteries because they have the highest energy density of commercially available batteries.

Rossi's little box apparently produced 25KWh. To do the same with the batteries used in the Tesla would require about 53,000 cc, even assuming you could build a collection of cells without any gaps in between.

If Rossi's box was a battery, it would be worth a fortune as that. It wouldn't make any sense to pass it off as something else.

I see only 4 explanations:

1) The test results are completely wrong and it produced about 1/1000th of the electricity they think it produced.

2) Conspiracy! They're all lying!

3) The energy was being supplied from something other than the box, i.e. it's a con and they were fooled.

4) There's a reaction of an unknown type happening inside the box.

I'm not sure yet, but it's definitely interesting. This is certainly not the run of the mill con jobs promising free energy, blah blah blah.

Meridian · 8 Jul 2011 at 07:19

I'll stick a fiver on option three please, croupier.

M

Glaucus · 8 Jul 2011 at 08:18

Why do you think it hasn't got all the hallmarks of a scam? That's exactly what it looks like.
No testing by others, no information on how it works. Exactly the same as many other devices that have had demos and just been a scam.

Angilion · 9 Jul 2011 at 10:50

AcidHell2 said:
Why do you think it hasn't got all the hallmarks of a scam? That's exactly what it looks like.
No testing by others, no information on how it works. Exactly the same as many other devices that have had demos and just been a scam.

How many of those other devices worked at all? Steorn comes to mind.

How many of those other devices were observed working by scientists who were able to examine the demonstration setup in some detail?

Scams generally involve obtaining money in some way. Rossi isn't asking for any money.

So no, it doesn't have all the hallmarks of a scam. It differs enough to be interesting.

Glaucus · 9 Jul 2011 at 10:55

A Lot do "working" demos

Not asking for money, I bet his reputation is going up and along with that his research grants and external offers, really it is no different at all to other scams.

As others have said, would be great if true, but the chances are that it isn't.

Meridian · 9 Jul 2011 at 16:59

I'll believe it when I see a peer-reviewed paper in a reputable journal and the work replicated in a reputable university. Until then it's a Perpetual Motion Machine in all but name.

M

SpeedFreak · 9 Jul 2011 at 23:17

did anyone point a Geiger counter at the box lol

Amp34 · 9 Jul 2011 at 23:18

Angilion said:
No battery is within orders of magnitude of the required charge to weight or charge to size ratio. You might be able to make a battery that size and weight that would output 15KW, but only very briefly.

The battery pack in a a Tesla contains 6831 cells of a very common size - 9mm radius, 65mm long. So that's ~16.54 cubic centimetres per cell, which is a total of ~113,000 cubic centimetres for all the cells (if they were all together without any gaps, somehow. It can store ~53KWh. Unsurprisingly, they're using Li-ion batteries because they have the highest energy density of commercially available batteries.

Rossi's little box apparently produced 25KWh. To do the same with the batteries used in the Tesla would require about 53,000 cc, even assuming you could build a collection of cells without any gaps in between.

If Rossi's box was a battery, it would be worth a fortune as that. It wouldn't make any sense to pass it off as something else.

I see only 4 explanations:

1) The test results are completely wrong and it produced about 1/1000th of the electricity they think it produced.

2) Conspiracy! They're all lying!

3) The energy was being supplied from something other than the box, i.e. it's a con and they were fooled.

4) There's a reaction of an unknown type happening inside the box.

I'm not sure yet, but it's definitely interesting. This is certainly not the run of the mill con jobs promising free energy, blah blah blah.

Exactly.

I can't see a few well respected scientists/academics being in on a conspiracy like that, especially as it would be guarenteed to be found out (and they would lose their reputations and probably jobs).

Energy supplied from elsewhere is a possibility, however how much energy would be needed, considering those wireless energy prototypes have about a 10% efficiency...

To me one of the main points of the tests would be to check that the amount of power produced was around the amount claimed. If they didn't do that then well...

I'm still very sceptical about it but to suggest out of hand that it is false, mostly because people couldn't check a small box, is stupid IMO.

arknor · 9 Jul 2011 at 23:30

how come these type of things are always moving along at a snail pace? you would think if it were true it would be marketed pretty quickly or atleasst taken advantage of in a worthwhile way

Sin_Chase · 9 Jul 2011 at 23:36

Patents are not always a good idea.

Coca Cola do not patent their secret ingredients., if they did it would be INSTANTLY public domain then after 20 years available for anyone to use licence free.

It's not always smart to patent something if you feel you can keep it under wraps.

Angilion · 10 Jul 2011 at 01:50

Sin_Chase said:
Patents are not always a good idea.

Coca Cola do not patent their secret ingredients., if they did it would be INSTANTLY public domain then after 20 years available for anyone to use licence free.

It's not always smart to patent something if you feel you can keep it under wraps.

He couldn't possibly feel that he could keep this under wraps if he was selling it and it worked. A reaction of a previously unknown kind would be investigated in minute detail by a horde of scientists wanting to know how it worked and what implications it had for various parts of physics. As well as that, numerous companies would throw resources at understanding it well enough to make their own. If it works, the value of the market would be enormous.

Angilion · 10 Jul 2011 at 02:15

arknor said:
how come these type of things are always moving along at a snail pace? you would think if it were true it would be marketed pretty quickly or atleasst taken advantage of in a worthwhile way

That's one thing that's making me suspicious. He claims it's perfected. Not an early prototype that sometimes works fairly well, but a fully developed invention that works efficiently and reliably. A zero-emissions non-radiocative power source that cheaply produces lots of energy and can scale over a wide range. If he asked for a couple of hundred billion pounds and a 100 feet tall statue of himself in every major city of the world, that would be a bargain.

Phenomenologica · 10 Jul 2011 at 08:14

clearly there are things happening that are not covered by the equations used in hot fusion

Obviously, quantum mechanics needs to be rethought to include these reactions.

It's a scam. Lets consider what is required for fusion to occur: The nuclii of the two atoms have to be forced close enough together for the strong interaction to outweigh the electromagnetic repulsion between them. Considering that to do this conventionally temperatures of 100 million degrees are required, I don't buy that a bit of nickel can do the job. It just doesn't make sense by the laws of physics, which is why cold fusion has been dismissed as bogus by the physics community. It's like telling a builder that a cocktail stick is an excellent replacement for a 5 tonne steel I beam.

Everyone would love cold fusion to be a reality. But as far as human science can determine it's absolute hogwash. And if it IS possible some guy isn't going to figure out how to do it messing around with nickel and hydrogen in his shed. Nuclear physics just isn't that simple. We're talking about altering the components of an atom here. You can't just stick a catalyst in like a chemical reaction, it doesn't work like that. If this comes to anything I'll buy a hat and eat it.

Amp34 · 10 Jul 2011 at 12:48

SpeedFreak said:
did anyone point a Geiger counter at the box lol

Angilion said:
That's one thing that's making me suspicious. He claims it's perfected. Not an early prototype that sometimes works fairly well, but a fully developed invention that works efficiently and reliably. A zero-emissions non-radiocative power source that cheaply produces lots of energy and can scale over a wide range. If he asked for a couple of hundred billion pounds and a 100 feet tall statue of himself in every major city of the world, that would be a bargain.

One of the big problems though is shown in this thread... Most people are just calling "con", if it is actually real how does he get people to take notice? If he asked governments to test it with a view to buying it they would just say no, same with most power companies. He has managed to get a few people that apparently know what they are doing go check it but they have also been labelled "con artists" as well... He appears to have managed to go further than most by apparently persuading a company to install a set of them in their factory, but he will still need to fund and build them, which us why it will take several months to do.

Of this actually works then it wouldn't br the first great invention that everyone ignored initially... In fact only a year or two from conception to believed would be pretty quick.

Glaucus · 10 Jul 2011 at 12:50

No ones been allowed to check it out.
You would patent it and allow proper scientific checks. Until that happens I'm calling 99.9999% con.