Catalyst project
Introduction
The Rossi and Focardi energy catalyst (also known as Rossi & Focardi Energy Amplifier: 'Rossi-Focardi energy amplifier') is a supposed experimental cold fusion system proposed by the inventor[1]
Andrea Rossi") (philosopher of science) from the Italian city Bologna[2][3]
and by the physicist Sergio Focardi") (emeritus professor of physics at the University of Bologna).[4].
No publication has been made of Rossi & Focardi's catalyst in worthy scientific journals of international or Italian relevance, and the scientific relationship that should explain and illustrate the results of the experiment has been rejected by the scientific community, given that it failed to pass the peer review phase.[5].
An international patent application received an unfavorable international preliminary report in 2011 because it was considered to "violate generally accepted laws of physics and established theories."[6].
The device has been demonstrated and tested several times, and discussed by various academics and others. Independent testing has never been performed and peer-reviewed tests of the device have never been published. Steve Featherstone wrote in Popular Science that by the summer of 2012, Rossi's "outlandish claims" about the E-Cat seemed "completely discredited."[7]
In 1978 Rossi created the company Petroldragon, which was supposed to produce oil, gas and coal from urban waste. In the eighties and nineties he was the protagonist of several judicial proceedings against him, of which he was acquitted.[8].
The two inventors have created a website (Journal-of-Nuclear-Physics.com), where they declare that it is a device that works thanks to low-energy nuclear reactions, which would transform into heat the nuclear fusion energy contained in gaseous hydrogen and nickel (in the form of nanometric powder), the main nuclear fuels of the reactor.[9]
The energy production mechanism that the inventors propose would be related to hypothetical (and never demonstrated in the world) cold nuclear fusion phenomena of the two elements, which would be borne by the terminal production of copper, which according to the authors is a transmutation product of the element nickel.[10].
1994-2013: history of the E-Cat device
In 1989, the biophysicist Francisco Pignatelli, from the University of Siena, while he was carrying out research on samples of organic material,[13] noticed the existence of an anomaly in the production of heat[14]