As reported earlier a very important E-Cat Fusion conference was held saturday July 23, 2011. The conference started at 4:00pm at Villa Borbone in Viareggio, Italy. Delta Energie and Italian solar energy company hosted the said E-Cat and Cold Fusion conference. Heres a full coverage of what was said on this E-Cat Fusion conference:
Among the roster of important participants were Francesco Celani, a physicist and cold fusion researcher at Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare; Mario Menichella, an astrophysicist and futurologist; Andrea Rossi, who joined via Skype; Sergio Focardi, his retired research partner and a physicist from the University of Bologna, via a pre-recorded presentation; Roy Virgilio, a renewable energy researcher and author; Daniele Passerini, an author and a blogger who happens to be a long time-friend of University of Bologna physicist Giuseppe Levi. Roy Virgilio’s significant work includes authoring a small Italian paperback book on cold fusion.
He is also acquainted with Francesco Piantelli who has done early research nickel-hydrogen reactions. On the other hand Daniele Passerini provided a summary of the events in his blog and has also promised to post a video of the conference that will be online in a matter of days.
Excerpts of important events from the summary of minutes in the conference:
16:30
• Rossi, father of the E-Cat fusion Fusor E-Cat, was contacted on Skype. He confirms delivery of 1MW, within schedule.
• The pioneer industrial plant delivered will have a patent pending and have high hopes of getting the approval of the European patent application
• Domestic reactors will need to wait for years because of certification issues.
16:57
• In a pre-recorder interview Andrea Rossi E-Cat partner, Sergio Focardi reiterates that he has no knowledge of any nuclear process that could bring an atom of nickel to capture a proton and transform it into copper though the chemical analysis proves that this happens.
17:03
• 60-700C is the recorded temperature when the E-Cat reaction started.
17:05
• Many samples of E-Cat reactors have been tested that included circuit reactors as stated by Sergio Focardi.
17:56
• Celani states that he is conducting a research on nanoparticles being deposited on thin and long strings of Palladium in Deuterium atmosphere.
• He was getting 400W/g at 5000C with good reproducibility.
• He has worked with Nickel strings in Hydrogen atmosphere and he is getting an efficiency of 1800W/g at 9000 C but with problems in reproducibility.
18:26
• Roy Virgilio takes the word that Piantelli is doing a good job on his research.
• A new company (Nichenergy) has been formed 5 months ago and is licensing to industries how to produce reactors of different sizes.
18:35
• Piantelli refuses to make any type of publicity and plans only to arrive on the market with a commercial product and would let the market decide if the technology is real or not.
18:37
• Nickel and Hydrogen is used by Piantelli without any catalizers.
18:39
• Offered on for sale were the first reactors on the range of Kw, after they will scale up.
19:10
• Amongst the public who expressed interest is Milli Moratti and takes word that there are clear experimental evidences of Cold Fusion.
As a background, Milly Moratti, is a very influential woman and happens to be the wife of Massimo Moratti, who also is one of the richest men in Italy and the owner of the Saras Petrol Refinery, the biggest in Italy and even in Europe.
This company is worth 5.3 billion euros. Having this money and political knowledge enables her to command respect and influence amongst her peers. The turn of events regarding research and political interest about the process is interestingly positive though the timeline for the arrival of the domestic reactor is disappointing due to delays.
There were also other important items brought up in the conference and they were:
• Celani’s allegation that the public denigration of cold fusion and the hiring of the best cold fusion researchers by US Military government labs likely stem from the same policy that the military interest in cold fusion research being the production of tritium for use in thermonuclear warheads.
• His naming of the Japanese researcher, Yoshiaka Arata, as the “real father of cold fusion”; as Arata have had studied deuterium in the gas phase (loaded into a metallic lattice or powder, presumably) since 1958.
• Virgilio’s comment on Piantelli’s insistence that what occurs in the nickel-hydrogen reaction may not be a proper cold fusion reaction but instead is some other type of low-energy nuclear reaction consisting of a complex sequence of events. Andrea Rossi, father of the E-Cat, aka the “Italian competitor” has mentioned Francesco Piantelli, several times on his website Francesco Piantelli earlier worked with Sergio Focardi for many years.
Also in his recent encounter with physicist Julian Brown, Rossi has mentioned that Brown claimed that his competitor had a patent on the matter which was granted in 1995.
Piantelli also applied for a patent in 1995 named “Energy Generation and Generator by Means of Anharmonic Stimulated Fusion” but this patent unfortunately was never granted. Even though of this incidence that the patent was not validated it could still be used as proof for prior art in a claim against Rossi’s 2008 patent and could happen to be the idea Brown was trying to convey to Rossi. Recent reports has also expressed that Piantelli’s group were able to achieve 40 KW of thermal power and 7 KW of electrical power.
Though the updated reports from Virgilio seems to suggest a more modest claim, Nichenergy’s best option on this matter would be to compete with Defkalion GT on price and also of the best possible time to market this—if Piantelli’s device indeed produces under 5 KW of thermal power. However this would be only true if Nichenergy’s reactor is not also hampered by regulations on domestic use.