This post refers to the original blog post Let’s join forces to bring out the truth on Rossi-IH affair, where over 600 comments has made it too slow to load for many users.
Please continue the discussion here below.
I will soon move the updates here and add some new updates, based on relevant comments.
Andrea Rossi
(UPDATED below with statement from IH)
(Also UPDATED with response from Andrea Rossi).
(June 2: IH filed motion to dismiss lawsuit—link below).
First of all—we now know that the one-year 1MW test was very successful and that the E-Cat and LENR is a technology field that will fundamentally change the world. [Admittedly premature. We haven’t seen the report yet]. More about this later. In any case, let’s wait for the detailed report for final confirmation. Champagne is still on ice.
On Wednesday, April 6, I received a press release from the lawyer representing Rossi’s company, Leonardo Corp., about a lawsuit on Rossi’s US licensee Industrial Heat (IH), its representatives Thomas Darden and JT Vaughn, and Darden’s main company, Cherokee Investment Partners. Link to the case docket is here.
Thomas Darden
I was first somewhat surprised, but reading the documents and adding info that I have received during the last months, things became clearer.
I recommend you to read the complaint and the license agreement between Rossi and IH (see below)—it tells a detailed story of what has been going on during the last years, and one good thing about the lawsuit is that all this info, originally protected by NDA, is now open.
Rossi and IH entered an agreement in October 2012 (as I also report in An Impossible Invention), on which Rossi was paid $1.5M.
A 24h Validation Test was performed in May 2013 with a plant consisting of 30 E-Cats. After successful completion Rossi was paid $10M, and he transferred all the necessary IP for the E-Cat and its fuel to IH.
Now things are getting interesting. The license agreement defined that IH acquired a license for North and South America, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, to sell and manufacture E-Cat based products, but the IP remained property of Leonardo Corp. Yet IH stated that it had acquired the technology from Rossi, apparently in order to raise more money (we know that at least $60M was raised, of which about $50M from UK based Woodford).
IH then delayed the one-year test—the ‘Guaranteed Performance Test’. If successful, with at least six times more energy output than input (COP>6), IH should pay Rossi $89M (or less at lower performance). And although the test was finally undertaken, and successfully concluded recently—producing over 50 times more output energy than input energy (!), validated by two experts, paid for and chosen by IH and Rossi—IH never paid Rossi (we will probably soon see the full report that was delivered to Rossi and Darden on March 29).
Instead, it turns out from Leonardo’s lawsuit that IH (Darden and Vaughn), made a series of maneuvers to avoid undertaking the one-year test, to avoid risking the billions in Cherokee’s fund, while trying to get hold of the E-Cat IP, sharing it with Rossi’s competitors in which IH was investing, and even filing patent applications based on the IP transferred from Rossi, nominating other inventors than Rossi.
These claims are supported by independent information I have received lately (not from Rossi), on people connected to IH, actively trying to engage experts in the field to work on replication of Rossi’s effect, while telling various stories about Rossi, all indicating that IH might have been missing some essential info, or at least wanted to get this info before paying Rossi.
Furthermore, in the lawsuit, Leonardo demands a trial by jury. Everything out in the light.
This doesn’t fit well with the hypothesis that Rossi is a fraudster and that IH knew this and therefore tried to get away from him. Not a bit.
But even if all the claims in the lawsuit are true, it’s not obvious that Darden and Vaughn had these intentions initially, as Torkel Nyberg points out on his blog Sifferkoll.
IH might have been pressed by investors’ expectations, while not being sure of having all the technology details. IH can even have been approached by more powerful entities, seeing the E-Cat as a threat, or wanting to secure the technology for the US, without depending on Rossi.
We don’t know this. And to settle the case might take years, unfortunately. In any case—the public statement from IH a few weeks ago now comes into another perspective, looking more like damage limitation, with support of the well-known PR agency APCO Worldwide.
The good part is that all this info now is public, that the one-year 1MW was successful, and that commercially viable LENR is here to stay, and that it will change the world.
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As for the New Energy World Symposium, I’m very close to take the final decision to hold the event now.
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Files regarding the lawsuit:
All documents released from the court
Rossi et al v Darden et al_(complaint)
Rossi et al v Darden et al (Rossi’s patent)
Rossi et al v Darden et al (license agreement)
Rossi_et_al_v_Darden et al (First amendment, Exhibit A—E-cat Validation)
Rossi et al v Darden et al (Second Amendment)
For further documents use the link above (“All documents…”).
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UPDATE (April 7): Industrial Heat has issued a statement in response to the lawsuit by Rossi and Leonardo Corp. It starts:
“We are aware of the lawsuit filed by Andrea Rossi and Leonardo Corporation against Industrial Heat. Industrial Heat rejects the claims in the suit. They are without merit and we are prepared to vigorously defend ourselves against this action. Industrial Heat has worked for over three years to substantiate the results claimed by Mr. Rossi from the E-Cat technology – all without success.”
I’m still waiting to see the report, but if it confirms the data that Rossi has given—a COP over 50, validated by the ERV chosen by Rossi and IH together—and if it’s true that IH has had its staff present at the test all the time, even bringing representatives for UK based Woodford to the plant to make due diligence and then receiving $50M in funding, I would find it quite difficult to understand that IH has not been able to substantiate the results claimed by Rossi. Maybe IH has not been able to replicate the effect themselves. But in that case I guess that they should kindly ask Rossi for help.
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(UPDATED April 8): Rossi earlier said he couldn’t comment the ongoing lawsuit, but after IH’s press release above, he responded to some questions on his blog, Journal of Nuclear Physics. I have chosen to publish three of these comments, which I think speak for themselves:
Drawing of the 1MW plant.
On February 17, 2016, a 350-day commercial test of a one megawatt heat plant based on Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat was completed. The event must be considered historic since it’s the first time an industrially useful amount of energy is produced over such a long time from this kind of yet unexplained radiation-free nuclear reaction—LENR or Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.
To be clear, the report from the one-year trial, which has been controlled by a major independent third party certification institute, will be released only in about a month or two, and until then no official information is provided on the test result. However, multiple sources have told me that the test has been successful.
Earlier, some sources having visited the test plant told me that the COP, Coefficient of Performance, i.e. the ratio between output power and input power for control, was in the range 20—80, meaning that the heat plant was consuming 12—50 kW while producing 1 MW—the average consumption of about 300 Western households, including electricity, space heating, water heating and air conditioning.
I have also been told that the total amount of fuel—mostly harmless elements such as lithium, hydrogen and nickel, according to Andrea Rossi’s granted patent on the technology—was in the range of tens of grams. And supposedly the charge has never been changed during the year. On the other hand, after one year’s run, the reactors are now being recharged for further operation.
All this might be confirmed by the third party institute, that has been controlling the heat plant 24/7 with video cameras.
The test has been undertaken by Andrea Rossi and his US industrial partner Industrial Heat, and according to Rossi, commercialisation of similar industrial heat plants will be initiated as soon as possible, provided that the result is positive. Industrial Heat has acquired the right to produce and sell E-Cat based technology in, as far as I have been told, North, Central and South America, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
New Energy World Symposium, NewS.
Needless to say, the consequences of such an energy source for the world will be huge. And the consequences for industry, finance and society is also the focus of the New Energy World Symposium or NewS, which will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, on June 21, 2016, provided that the report from the test is clearly positive.
So, now we all wait for the report. Personally, however, I will put the champagne on ice. Now.
The small reactor used by Alexander Parkhomov, glowing from heat.
In just a few weeks, the whole landscape of cold fusion and LENR has changed significantly and, as many have noted, 2015 might bring a breakthrough for LENR in general, with increased public awareness, scientific acceptance and maybe even commercial applications. This is great news.
For those who haven’t followed the latest events, let me summarize.
Most important is the apparent replication of the E-Cat phenomenon by the Russian scientist Alexander Parkhomov. On December 25, 2014, Parkhomov, a respected and experienced physicist, published a short report on an experiment where he had used a reactor similar to the one used by the Swedish-Italian group in the Lugano experiment with Rossi’s E-Cat, and with similar materials in the fuel.
This kind of replication, based on the information in the Lugano report, was what I predicted in the second edition of my book.
Parkhomov reported significant excess heat from a very small amount of fuel, just like in like other LENR experiments, and the amount of released energy was in the range of kilowatts just like with Rossi’s devices, which sets them apart from most other LENR experiments. Although the report was more of research notes than a scientific paper, the method was so simple and straight forward that it was quite convincing. Obviously it was also important that Parkhomov had performed his experiment without any contact with Rossi or the experimenters at Lugano.
A review of Parkomov’s report is made by long time LENR researcher Michael McKubre in the magazine Infinite Energy. Meanwhile Parkhomov has held two seminars in Russia on his findings, and he has released a second, updated report.
Parkhomov’s report has inspired other groups to attempt a similar replication of the E-Cat effect. Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project, MFMP, which I report on in my book, had already planned a similar experiment, and the group is now ready to start this work, with support from Parkhomov.
Renowned LENR researcher Brian Ahern has also plans for a similar experiment.
I also know that the Swedish-Italian group that performed the Lugano experiment is working on continued investigations of the effect, although I cannot report any details of their work.
Apart from these, there are most probably many others who are trying the same thing without giving notice. It must be stressed though that such replication attempts should only be initiated by trained personnel in proper labs with rigorous safety equipment. The nano materials used are hazardous and unexpected effects, included radiation, cannot be excluded.
One reason for believing that many attempts are being made is that the Lugano report which was published by the blog Sifferkoll.se just a few hours before I published it here, has been downloaded from Sifferkoll about 150,000 times by now. Torkel Nyberg who runs the blog recently told me this.
Apparently the interest is great all over the world (let me expand on Nyberg’s views on a possible connection between the Lugano report and the falling oil price in a separate blog post). The increased interest has also been reflected in more media reports than before. One of them is a recent piece in Wired UK, noting that “if Parkhomov’s work can be copied, the Chinese may not need a licence.”
Apart from attempts at replicating Parkhomov or building on the information in the Lugano report, I would also expect more and more researchers to do other experiments within the same domain.
Some useful knowledge of this kind might come out of the collaboration between MFMP and the Italian researcher Francesco Piantelli, who used to work together with late Prof. Sergio Focardi before Focardi started to help Rossi (read about Piantelli and Focardi in my book).
MFMP went to see Piantelli in his lab in Tuscany, Italy, in January 2015. I joined them for a few days to take part in the discussions, and found out that MFMP had a good contact with Piantelli, learning a lot from his long experience of LENR systems with nickel and hydrogen, which are different from the kind of system Rossi, even though the main elements are the same.
I have no direct knowledge about Piantelli’s experiments or results. As you can read in my book, he has strong opinions on how scientific work should be performed and reported, and it’s not easy to access his work. But he could very well have gained substantial amounts of knowledge which could show to be useful. On the other hand, also Piantelli warns for unexpected effects, including radiation.
It’s a good thing that MFMP sticks to the idea of open science, publishing results and experiments in real time, and that the members have declared that they will never sign any kind of NDA. In this way, there’s good hope for new knowledge being communicated to other interested researchers, and that the this knowledge might grow significantly over time.
All in all, things are starting to move, and they might move very fast now. On the other hand, as I note in the second edition of ‘An Impossible Invention’, it seems that we will not get much information from Rossi and his industrial partner Industrial Heat during 2015.
Rossi still claims that he and IH are working with a 1 megawatt plant installed at the premises of a customer on commercial terms, but that they will not be ready to show the working plant until it has been running for a year.
There’s no way to confirm this, but let me just say that I have reasons to believe that the megawatt plant exists and works and that the collaboration between Rossi and IH goes on.
In any case, this year might be decisive, and I invite you to talk about this with friends and colleagues who have not yet discovered what’s going on (for anyone who wants to know a little more, An Impossible Invention is now available both as e-book and paperback through Amazon).
The reactor used in the test is made of alumina and is significantly thinner than earlier hot E-Cat reactors.
A new scientific report on the E-Cat has been released, providing two important findings from a 32-day testrun of the reactor — together leading to the clear conclusion that the E-Cat is an energy source based on some kind of nuclear reaction, without radiation outside the reactor.
The first finding is an energy release which puts the reactor way beyond conventional (chemical) sources of energy.
The second is a dramatic shift in isotopic composition in the fuel after the testrun, meaning changes have occurred in the atomic nuclei of the elements present in the fuel.
The report is entitled “Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel” (Download here) and is written by Giuseppe Levi, Evelyn Foschi, Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson, Lars Tegnér and Hanno Essén, all of whom also wrote an earlier third party report on the E-Cat.
In the concluding remarks they write:
“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. Nevertheless we have to relate to the fact that the experimental results from our test show heat production beyond chemical burning, and that the E-Cat fuel undergoes nuclear transformations. It is certainly most unsatisfying that these results so far have no convincing theoretical explanation, but the experimental results cannot be dismissed or ignored just because of lack of theoretical understanding.”
The authors are very careful not to make any decisive conclusions on how the reaction occurs. Yet, they make some interesting remarks, among them considerations on similarities with observations in astrophysics.
Without any optimization with regard to input power, the reactor produced between 3.2 and 3.6 times the input power, and a total energy of 1.5 MWh from about 1 gram of fuel. The reactor was switched off according to plan, with no signs of the reaction slowing down. As I point out in my book An Impossible Invention — an energy source of this kind will have huge consequences for humanity, possibly solving a series of global issues.
In order to avoid doubts that were presented with regard to their earlier report, several things have been changed: The measurement was performed during 32 days in a neutral laboratory in Switzerland, electric measurment on the input power has been improved, a 23-hour test of the reactor without charge was done in order to calibrate the measurement set-up, and chemical analysis of the fuel before and after the run has been performed with five different methods.
The report has been uploaded to Arxiv.org which, however has put it on hold, without specifying any motive for this. It has also been sent to Journal of Physics D. I got the report sent to me by Hanno Essén who said that he now considers it to be public, although not supposed to be published in any commercial journal until further notice from Journal of Physics D.
I asked Professor Bo Höistad, one of the authors, a few questions on the report:
Mats: What do you consider to be the most important take-away of the report?
Höistad: That we have been able to do an isotopic analysis of the fuel before and after running the process, and that the results indicate the presence of nuclear reactions in the process.
Mats: What have you done differently this time, based on the experiences from your last measurement and report?
Höistad: An accurate measurement, particularly the control of energy balance without fuel in the reactor, and a isotopic analysis of the fuel.
Mats: What reactions do you expect on the report?
Höistad: Hopefully that the interest in the possibility of achieving LENR reactors get a decent boost, and that critical overtones in the debate are downplayed in favor of scientific discussions.
Mats: What do you personally feel facing the inexplicable observations you have made?
Höistad: As pointed out in our paper, we face a phenomenon without explanation. However, we can not categorically reject the clear experimental results just because a credible theory is currently lacking. We need to relate to the actual experimental results and continue the investigations to gain more knowledge about the LENR phenomenon.
AN IMPOSSIBLE INVENTION 