sbkrivit

Sep 302011
 

Yesterday New Energy Times published “NASA Advances Evaluation of Piantelli’s  LENR Research.”

In this article we wrote about a visit by NASA engineers to Bologna, Italy where they observed two tests of a device made by Andrea Rossi which he claims produces large amounts of LENR-based heat.

“On Sept. 5 and 6, a team comprising representatives from an investment group and NASA visited Andrea Rossi’s showroom in Bologna. The team went there with an explicit agreement about test parameters and opportunities to observe and evaluate Rossi’s claims. They did not observe any positive results.”

Soon after we published that article, we sent a link for the blog post to several of the sources we mentioned in the article. One of those sources was Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, NASA. Within a minute, Bushnell responded via e-mail.

“Well done, as usual,” Bushnell wrote. “Look forward to your reporting of the upcoming Rossi tests.”

We also mentioned Andrea Rossi in the article. Rossi responded to our article by posting the following comment on his blog:

WARNING:
THE SNAKE HAS WRITTEN IN HIS BLOG THAT NASA MADE A NOT POSITIVE TEST WITH US. THIS IS TOTALLY FALSE. I AM BOUND FROM A CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT AND I CANNOT GIVE DETAILED INFORMATION, BUT I CAN SAY THAT:
1- WE ARE IN CONTACT WITH NASA, WHO WANTS TO TEST OUR ECATS TO TEST THE POSSIBILITY TO MAKE THEM USEFUL FOR THEIR PURPOSES
2- NASA’S DENNIS.M.BUSHNELL HAS SAID PUBILCLY THAT NASA WILL BUY AN E-CAT AS SOON AS IT WILL BE POSSIBLE TO TEST IT
3- OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NASA IS TOTALLY POSITIVE

IN A SEPARATE STATEMENT, A SNAKE’S ACCOLITE WROTE THAT THE TEST WE ARE GOING TO DO ON THE 6TH OF OCTOBER WILL BE ALWAYS MADE WITH STEAM. UNFORTUNATELY, WHEN YOU SPEAK WITH THIS PEOPLE YOU DEAL WITH PERSONS THAT HAVE REAL DIFFICULTIES TO UNDERSTAND A TITLE OF A NEWSPAPER IF THEY ARE AT THE SAME TIME CHEWING A GUM, BUT, JUST TO AVOID CONFUSION I REPEAT THAT:
THE MEASUREMENTS WILL BE MADE ON LIQUID WATER. WE WILL HAVE THE STEAM PRODUCED FROM THE REACTOR THAT WILL WORK IN A CLOSED LOOP, WHICH IS THE PRIMARY CIRCUIT, AND THE STEAM ITSELF EXCHANGES HEAT WITH THE LIQUID WATER IN A SECONDARY CLOSED LOOP, SO THAT THE WATER IS HEATED BY THE STEAM THROUGH THE WALLS OF A HEAT EXCHANGER. WE WILL MEASURE THE ENERGY TAKING THE DELTA T OF THE WATER, THE WATER, THE WATER, NOT OF THE STEAM NOT OF THE STEAM, NOT OF THE STEAM, THEREFORE THE ISSUE OF THE QUALITY OF THE STEAM HAS ABSOLUTELY NOT IMPORTANCE, BECAUSE WE DO NOT MEASURE THE ENERGY FROM THE STEAM !!!!!!! WE COULD PUT IN THE PRIMARY CIRCUIT STEAM DIATHERMIC OIL, GLYCOLE, COCA COLA: IT IS ABSOLUTELY IRRILEVANT WHICH IS THE FLUID IN THE PRIMARY CIRCUIT AS FOR CONCERNS THE MEASUREMENT OF THE ENERGY BECAUSE WE MEASURE THE ENERGY ONLY MULTIPLYING THE CUBIC METERS OF WATER FLOWING THROUGH THE SECONDARY CIRCUIT IN ONE HOUR BY THE DELTA T OBTAINED SUBTRACTING, FROM THE TEMPERATURE OF THE WATER (LIQUID) OF THE SECONDARY CIRCUIT AT THE EXIT FROM THE HEAT EXCHANGER, THE TEMPERATURE OF THE SAME LIQUID WATER AT THE INPUT OF THE SAME HEAT EXCHANGER.
ANDREA ROSSI

Sep 282011
 

Multiple sources have confirmed to New Energy Times that a team comprising NASA engineers and an investment group from the U.S. is expanding its interest in the low-energy nuclear reaction research of Italian biophysicist Francesco Piantelli. A meeting with the group and representatives of Piantelli will take place in the next few days.

According to Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, NASA was working months ago on experiments based on Piantelli’s research.

Piantelli’s work with LENR goes back two decades and includes two dozen scientific publications and conference presentations. Piantelli and his colleagues’ only significant challenge came from a group at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, but Piantelli’s group published an effective rebuttal.

The Piantelli group’s nickel-hydrogen LENR work remains the most promising demonstration of LENR technology. New Energy Times wrote two feature articles on Piantelli’s work in 2008. We also wrote a summary of the work in the Wiley and Sons Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia, excerpted as follows:

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Whereas electrolytic D/Pd experiments have typically produced scientifically meaningful levels of excess heat, such effects were generally observed only in the milliwatt range. The Piantelli group’s Ni-H gas experiments produced excess heat in the tens of watts.

The researchers explain that an anomalous heating effect in the Ni-H cell takes place “when a cell containing a nickel rod is maintained at temperatures above a critical value and is filled with gaseous hydrogen at subatmospheric pressures.” The critical value is obtained by a heater in the cell that provides constant input power to initially raise and keep the cell temperature at its working value, about 700K. When the heat production rises above the equilibrium condition, the authors identify this as the excited state. Because the experiment can run in the excited state for months a time, the researchers were also able to observe sporadic evidence of both neutrons and gamma rays, which are generally hard to detect in LENR systems because those experiment run for much shorter periods.

Whereas excess-heat-producing electrolytic D/Pd experiments typically ran for days before the electrode corroded or the researcher stopped replenishing electrolyte, the Piantelli group’s hydrogen gas experiments ran continuously in a stable state for months at a time. In November 1998, the group reported two experiments in Il Nuovo Cimento.

Cell “A” produced 38.9 +/-1.5 watts of heat, and cell “B” produced 23.0 +/-1.3 watts of heat. The cells produced excess power continuously at a slowly increasing rate during that period: cell “A” for 278 days; cell “B” for 319 days. The integrated excess energy was 900 MJ for cell “A” and 600 MJ for cell “B.”
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New Energy Times has published a bibliography of papers (and download links where available) from the Piantelli group here. The list includes Piantelli’s patent applications. Among other things, the Piantelli work requires very specific surface preparation performed under an ultra-high vacuum.

A few related events happened in September.

On Sept. 2, Samantha McRoskey, an analyst with Diligence Global Business Intelligence, representing an anonymous investor, contacted New Energy Times to learn more about Ni-H LENR research. We directed her to our published reports and analysis.

On Sept. 5 and 6, a team comprising representatives from an investment group and NASA visited Andrea Rossi’s showroom in Bologna. The team went there with an explicit agreement about test parameters and opportunities to observe and evaluate Rossi’s claims. They did not observe any positive results.

On Sept. 22, NASA conducted a LENR Innovation Forum workshop at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Speakers included NASA scientists Joseph Zawodny, Gustave Fralick, Michael Nelson, Jim Dunn and Dennis Bushnell and retired University of Illinois professor George Miley.

At the meeting, Bushnell said that LENR has a strong potential for a new source of energy. He was optimistic about nickel powder LENR solutions.

“The temperature you can get out of [LENR] is interesting,” Bushnell said. “We’ve had to be careful [in our research in] terms of the energetics. I don’t think there is a power [limitation] problem.

“I think the problem now is of raw courage to look into something that is new. We’ve been fortunate to have a center director at Langley that has the courage to support us to do this. We’ve been at it for three or four years.

“The U.S. efforts on this, for reasons I don’t understand, haven’t gone to the Widom-Larsen theory. They also haven’t gone to try to understand the 18 years of hydrogen-nickel [work] with really superb intellectual content. We need to get off of the Pons-Fleischmann electrochemistry and get into flow systems.”

Sep 152011
 

By Horace Heffner posted on Vortex
Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:14:08 -0700

[Valkonen’s] post seems to be utterly out of touch with reality, a total fantasy. It is shocking to read. I don’t know whether to respond or not.

The claims made for months that all the water was being converted to steam has been utterly crushed!

Krivit was clearly right on his seven points.

More importantly, the claim that all the water was being converted to steam, the repeated, defended, and heralded basis for thinking something practical has been created, the basis for the “calorimetry” of the public demos, is now shown to be without basis in fact. The hose was taken off. Water pulsed out of the outlet right at the exit of the E-cat in large quantity. It obviously did not condense there. The water trap was clearly undersized by more than two orders of magnitude! It was less than useless! That I assume was because it was never dreamed the flow of water would be so large. What an embarrassment that must be.

The fact that the steam that comes out with the water is dryer than the water that pulses out with it is irrelevant. It is a red herring issue, a distraction from the glaring truth, a distraction from attention on the months of wrong headed excuses for not doing calorimetry on the output, and failure to *do* anything useful, other than talk, to see if the claims being made were true. So is the issue of the definition of steam quality. The important fact, that all the water is clearly *not* being converted to steam, clearly demonstrates just how bad the prior “calorimetry” claims were.

Now the new E-cat never reaches equilibrium. This is a far more difficult regime in which to do accurate calorimetry, and a far better regime for self deception. Further, the E-cat mass has been greatly increased, and the max input power increased. The “heat after death” from mundane causes will now obviously be much longer. The thermal mass is larger, and the thermal resistance from the outside of the lead to the water is much larger. It will make for a dandy magic show, and much more discussion, but will make actual evaluation of the value of the device much more difficult.

None of this indicates for sure whether Rossi has anything of value or not. Maybe he does. The continued failure to obtain independent high quality input and output energy measurements prevents the public from knowing. Since the public is being kept in the dark, the months of fluffy bluster does, however, tip the scales more strongly toward a negative verdict. What a pity and waste of valuable time this is for Rossi if there really is something extraordinary going on in the E-cat. Hopefully the 1 MW unit test will provide economical steam for a very long period.

Best regards,

Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/

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New Energy Times reader John Nelson via e-mail:

I watched Mats Lewan’s NYTeknik video of Rossi’s latest E-Cat demo — Heffner is right, this videotaped result (large amounts of liquid-phase water pouring out of the E-Cat’s output ‘port’) is a catastrophe for Rossi’s claims of huge excess heat production.

If Rossi’s claims were true, then there should have been little or no liquid water present in the E-Cat’s output stream.

What is actually observed in Lewan’s video clip are copious streams of liquid water with some admixed steam; if that’s the best device performance Rossi can demonstrate as of today, his little charade is over.

As far as supposedly demonstrating “heat-after-death” for 30 minutes, the device itself is hidden behind tinfoil and (presumably) underlying insulation. If the E-Cat’s reaction vessel has thick stainless steel walls, it could easily have substantial intrinsic thermal mass. An input power of 2.5 kW of heating for a while would transfer thermal energy into the steel vessel walls (i.e., heat them up). Depending on the E’Cat’s total intrinsic thermal mass, cool-down after the power is cut-off could easily take 30 minutes. Therefore, what was demonstrated in that video doesn’t prove anything with regard to there truly being any excess “heat-after-death.”

Sadly, this is yet another very poorly designed and instrumented, horrendously sloppy, experimental fiasco that proves nothing other than the technical incompetence of the people that designed and executed the so-called experimental ‘test.’

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New Energy Times reader Hans-Göran Branzell via e-mail and posted to energikatalysatorn.se:

The stomach of the Fat-Cat can hold around 30 kg of water and at start-up it was empty. With a pump flow of 15.8 kg water per hour it takes about 1.4 hours to fill up the Fat-Cat and the warming starts after half an hour when 8 kg of water has been pumped into the cat.

After 2.5 hours a temperature of 100 C is reached and by then the cat has been full and overflowing for 1.1 hours. Now boiling starts, but the temperature is still increasing, up to 133 C. This may seem odd because it corresponds to a pressure of around 3 bar. But the explanation of this is evident when Mats removes the steam / water exit hose and you can hear the new sharp hissing of the Fat-Cat: there is a flow restriction in the exit. This restriction causes the pressure in the Fat-Cat to increase in relation to the steam / water flow.

When the electric heater is turned off there is around 30 kg of water with a temperature of 133 degrees Centigrade and 33 of these can be used for boiling water during the so called “self-sustained mode”. How much steam that actually was produced during the half hour that the Fat-Cat was running without heating is anybody’s guess because nobody had the good sense to perform CONDENSING CALORIMETRY.

The Fat-Cat show was ended by closing the input water valve and removing the feed water tube. When the valve was opened over a bucket, water with a temperature of 122 C and with a pressure of about 2 bar was leaving the Fat-Cat. The overheated water boiled momentarily thus lowering the temperature to 100 C and the produced steam gave the spray high speed and generated a very loud hissing noise.

It would appear that the only reason for the transformation of the the E-Cat into the Fat-Cat would be to pull the above described stunt off.

It should be pointed out that this supposed design of the Fat-Cat would be subject to safety regulations that apply to a pressure vessel that contains an overheated fluid. 30 kg of water with a temperature of 133 C at 3 bar poses a deadly threat to any bystander.

Sep 032011
 

FULL STORY: Andrea Rossi – Energy-Catalyzer Index

June 15, 2011 Video interview of Andrea Rossi by Steven B. Krivit of New Energy Times
Rossi Interview Part 1
Rossi Interview Part 2
Rossi Interview Part 3
Rossi Interview Part 4

June 14, 2011 video interview of Daniele Passerini by Steven B. Krivit of New Energy Times

June 14, 2011 video interview of David Bianchini by Steven B. Krivit of New Energy Times

Aug 282011
 

For readers who don’t have time to read the 201 pages of New Energy Times #37, I have distilled it into a two-page summary called “Rossi’s Scientific Failure in Seven Steps.

I can distill that two-page report even further, into two paragraphs:

In a seven-month period, the Rossi group sought credibility for its claim of extraordinary levels of excess heat through scientific and academic validation. In seven public attempts, the group tried to demonstrate convincing experimental evidence for its claims.

In all attempts, the group failed. It has no experimental evidence on which to base its extraordinary energy claim. It never did.

Rossi then changed strategies and claimed that he would prove his claim commercially, with a working device, in October, in Greece, through his partner Defkalion Green Technology. When the day came (Aug. 1, 2011) for Defkalion to make its first payment to Rossi, it didn’t. He then dissolved his relationship with Defkalion. No Greek factory. No public demo in Greece.

Still riding on his remarkable promotional abilities, Rossi met the next day with a new potential investor who apparently did not understand or did not care about the significance of Rossi’s track record of failed demonstrations.

Will this new potential investor strike it rich? Or will this investor and his scientific advisers learn the importance of scientific validation?

There is good work in the LENR field, worthy of attention and funding. This is not it.

Steven B. Krivit
Senior Editor, New Energy Times

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