As Rossi Talks of Production and Outsourcing, Competitors Speak Up

http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/11/as-rossi-talks-of-production-and-outsourcing-competitors-speak-up/

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As Rossi Talks of Production and Outsourcing, Competitors Speak Up
November 21, 2011
As interest grows in cold fusion technology as knowledge of Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat technology spreads, it is not surprising to potential competitors coming on the scene with their own claims and plans .

Rossi’s erstwhile partner, Defkalion Green Technologies recently announced that within the month they will be providing more details about their Hyperion products, which they say will be running on a different technology to Rossi’s energy catalyzer. Alexandros Xanthoulis, DGT’s CEO told the Greek publication Tovima last week that, “within the next 15 days there will be announcements and initiated testing and certification by independent third parties. We will present the final product – not just a laboratory prototype – with all its subsystems to operate according to European safety standards.”
Another cold fusion researcher, Brian Ahern, former researcher for the US Air Force, has announced that he will be revealing details of a cold fusion/LENR breakthrough at the Flash Summit clean tech conference in New York City on December 7th. Ahern states on the Flash Summit’s website that, ““In the last 8 weeks I have been astounded by a superior nanotechnology that will capture the imagination of even the greatest foes of LENR. I believe all of LENR is just a new and unanticipated form of nanomagnetism.”
Meanwhile, Andrea Rossi is working towards expanding production of his 1 MW thermal plants. Yesterday he made this statement:
“I AM RECEIVING TO MY MAIL THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS FROM MANY PERSONS:
1- IS MY TECHNOLOGY FIT TO MAKE WEAPONS? ANSWER: NOT AT ALL
2- HOW MANY PLANTS OF 1 MW CAN WE MANUFACTURE IN 1 YEAR?
ANSWER> SO MANY WE WANT, THROUGH A VERY WELL ORGANIZED OUTSOURCHING SYSTEM
3- IS IT POSSIBLE TO VISIT THE FACTORIES WHERE THE PLANTS ARE MANUFACTURED?
answer: no.
Warm Regards,
A.R.”
Rossi is surely aware that any success he can demonstrate will garner the interest of scientists and industrialists worldwide. For many years the cold fusion/LENR field has been a fringe movement, with only independent minded researchers going against the grain of mainstream science which had declared cold fusion impossible. Now that there is evidence that the once-considered impossible can be achieved we can only expect that the field will become more and more crowded. Andrea Rossi has been the first off the starting blocks, but whether he can keep ahead of the pack remains to be seen.
Frank Acland

http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/11/as-rossi-talks-of-production-and-outsourcing-competitors-speak-up/

The Cold Fusion Ping List

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/coldfusion/index?tab=articles

-------------------------------------------------------------- http://ecatnews.com/?p=1144

Unfortunately, if Rossi did the following:

1) hired a bunch of actors to pretend to be the customer reps,

2) created an elaborate year-long special-effects-derived series of demos,

3) bribed, hypnotised or otherwise fooled Focardi, Levi, Kullander, Essen, Bianchini, Stremmenos

4) arranged for Piantelli, Miley and a host of others to try to fool the world into thinking that cold fusion was real,

5) got NASA, SPAWAR, The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and The Defense Intelligence Agency to say nice things about the field,

6) got Bushnell to make a fool of himself,

7) and convinced his former partners to set up another company called Ampenergo to pretend that they had a contract for The Americas for a substantial sum ----- or that they just did this with no proof because they have worked with Rossi and trust him because he’s such a fine fellow,

8) sold his profitable company to his ex-partners in order to spend that wealth on a multi-million dollar scam; ----- certain that once he got all the above ducks in a row he would pretend to sell the first device ----- and then reel in the true target of his dastardly plan

9) and convinced a bunch of Greek crooks to set up a dummy company called Defkalion ----- to pretend to fight with him over the non-existent eCat, ----- to perpetuate the illusion and spin it off into a competing mirror-scam

[the second (this time genuine) buyer of a 1MW plant that will net him $2 million dollars ----- until they want their money back or sucker a $100 million dollar deal under the table ----- because he has experience in pulling the wool over all these idiotic eyes ----- and knows that they will just take his word for it ----- and not want to test if his 1MW plant can heat a small village without truckloads of coal or oil or a big fat electric cable coming into the container from beneath the floor (no you can’t lift the carpet!) ]

10) and that, in order to pull this off, Rossi had to risk discovery by interviewing all the people he subsequently fooled so that he could only invite the gullible Professors and not the brilliant anonymous posters on the Internet who surely would have found him out

then, yes, all bets are off and I’m with the guys who think that Rossi is an idiot and they are all geniuses.

True.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110215164336.htm

New Material Provides 25 Percent Greater Thermoelectric Conversion Efficiency
ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2011) — Automobiles, military vehicles, even large-scale power generating facilities may someday operate far more efficiently thanks to a new alloy developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. A team of researchers at the Lab that is jointly funded by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, achieved a 25 percent improvement in the ability of a key material to convert heat into electrical energy.

See Also:
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Tellurium
“What happened here has not happened anywhere else,” said Evgenii Levin, associate scientist at Ames Laboratory and co-principal investigator on the effort, speaking of the significant boost in efficiency documented by the research. Along with Levin, the Ames Lab-based team included: Bruce Cook, scientist and co-principal investigator; Joel Harringa, assistant scientist II; Sergey Bud’ko, scientist; and Klaus Schmidt-Rohr, faculty scientist. Also taking part in the research was Rama Venkatasubramanian, who is director of the Center for Solid State Energetics at RTI International, located in North Carolina.

So-called thermoelectric materials that convert heat into electricity have been known since the early 1800s. One well-established group of thermoelectric materials is composed of tellurium, antimony, germanium and silver, and thus is known by the acronym “TAGS.” Thermoelectricity is based on the movement of charge carriers from their heated side to their cooler side, just as electrons travel along a wire.

The process, known as the Seebeck effect, was discovered in 1821 by Thomas Johann Seebeck, a physicist who lived in what is now Estonia. A related phenomenon observed in all thermoelectric materials is known as the Peltier effect, named after French physicist Jean-Charles Peltier, who discovered it in 1834. The Peltier effect can be utilized for solid-state heating or cooling with no moving parts.

In the nearly two centuries since the discovery of the Seebeck and Peltier effects, practical applications have been limited due to the low efficiency with which the materials performed either conversion. Significant work to improve that efficiency took place during the 1950s, when thermoelectric conversion was viewed as an ideal power source for deep-space probes, explained team member Cook. “Thermoelectric conversion was successfully used to power the Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo, Cassini, and Viking spacecrafts,” he said.

Despite its use by NASA, the low efficiency of thermoelectric conversion still kept it from being harnessed for more down-to-earth applications — even as research around the world continued in earnest. “Occasionally, you would hear about a large increase in efficiency,” Levin explained. But the claims did not hold up to closer scrutiny.

All that changed in 2010, when the Ames Laboratory researchers found that adding just one percent of the rare-earth elements cerium or ytterbium to a TAGS material was sufficient to boost its performance.

The results of the group’s work appear online in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team has yet to understand exactly why such a small compositional change in the material is able to profoundly affect its properties. However, they theorize that doping the TAGS material with either of the two rare-earth elements could affect several possible mechanisms that influence thermoelectric properties.

Team member Schmidt-Rohr studied the materials using Ames Laboratory’s solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy instruments. This enabled the researchers to verify that the one percent doping of cerium or ytterbium affected the structure of the thermoelectric material. In order to understand effect of magnetism of rare earths, team member Bud’ko studied magnetic properties of the materials. “Rare-earth elements modified the lattice,” said Levin, referring to the crystal structure of the thermoelectric materials.

The group plans to test the material in order to better understand why the pronounced change took place and, hopefully, to boost its performance further.

The durable and relatively easy-to-produce material has innumerable applications, including recycling waste heat from industrial refineries or using auto exhaust heat to help recharge the battery in an electric car. “It’s a very amazing area,” Levin said, particularly since many years of prior research into TAGS materials enables researchers to understand their nature. Better understanding of the thermoelectric and their improvement can immediately result in applications at larger scale than now.

Additionally, the Ames Laboratory results — dependent as they were on doping TAGS with small amounts of cerium or ytterbium — provide yet more evidence of rare-earth elements’ strategic importance. Cerium or ytterbium are members of a group of 15 lanthanides, deemed essential to just about every new technology from consumer electronics and cell phones to hybrid car batteries and generator motors in wind turbines. The Ames Laboratory has been a leader in rare-earth research going back to the closing days of World War II. Fears of shortages of rare-earth elements have caused these little-known materials to be a much-talked-about subject in the news lately.

Partial funding for this research was provided by the DARPA/DSO Program, along with the DOE Office of Science.

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