Historical research guide · 0346 · 2012
Andrea Rossi E-Cat / Energy Catalyzer (Ni-H LENR reactor)
Andrea Rossi
In one minute
Andrea Rossi filed this in March 2012 and the patent office granted it in August 2015 as ‘Fluid heater’, assigned to his Leonardo Corporation. It is the E-Cat written as plumbing. A sealed steel-and-mica wafer, roughly a foot square and a third of an inch thick, sits in a finned receptacle inside a water tank; inside the wafer a wound resistive wire heats a powder of nickel, lithium and lithium aluminium hydride. That heat starts a three-step reaction sequence which walks the hydride down through lithium hydride, aluminium and hydrogen, the last step reversible, with the nickel present as a catalyst rather than as fuel — Rossi notes platinum or palladium would serve the same function. His central operating claim is the interesting one: once lit, the sequence sustains itself, and a temperature sensor tells the controller when to put roughly one kilowatt-hour of electricity back in after roughly six have come out. A wafer runs about 180 days, then you swap it.
Connection
Chapter 12 is about persuading nuclei to fuse inside ordinary solid matter rather than inside a star, and this is the most commercially pursued version of that idea set down as a serviceable appliance — fuel recipe, reaction chain, operating cycle, service interval and shielding. It sits on chapter 6’s shelf as well, because what Rossi specifies is a heat source that returns several times the electricity spent keeping it alight, and on chapter 1’s because the patent is precise enough to name the measurements that would settle it.
From the source
The fuel is a powder mixture, and Rossi gives the recipe: a starting mixture of 50 per cent nickel, 20 per cent lithium and 30 per cent lithium aluminium hydride, in largely spherical particles between 1 nanometre and 100 micrometres across. The nickel is pre-treated to raise its porosity by heating the powder until water trapped in the micro-cavities inherent in each grain superheats — the resulting steam pressure blows the cavities open and makes additional smaller nickel particles.Detailed Description; Claims 2 and 3
The reaction sequence is written out and catalysed by the nickel: 3 LiAlH₄ gives Li₃AlH₆ plus 2 Al plus 3 H₂; 2 Li₃AlH₆ gives 6 LiH plus 2 Al plus 3 H₂; and 2 LiH plus 2 Al gives 2 LiAl plus H₂, the last of the three at least partially reversible. Nickel acts as catalyst and is not itself a reagent, and Rossi states that other column-10 elements — platinum or palladium — can carry out the same function, nickel being preferred for its abundance.Detailed Description; Claims 9 and 10
The operating cycle is the load-bearing claim. Once the resistor has initiated the sequence the voltage source can be switched off, because the sequence is self-sustaining; the reaction rate is not constant, so a temperature sensor reports to a controller which decides when to reapply voltage. Rossi states the interval: after the reaction has generated approximately 6 kilowatt hours of energy, it is desirable to apply approximately 1 kilowatt hour of electrical energy to reinvigorate the sequence. A wafer sustains approximately 180 days of continuous operation before replacement becomes desirable.Detailed Description; Claim 1
The hardware is fully specified. The fuel wafer is a welded sandwich — a mica central layer about 0.1 mm thick carrying a resistive wire wound through holes in it, mica insulation on either side, then steel layers about 1 mm thick enclosing each fuel layer — about one third of an inch thick and 12 inches on a side. It drops through a sealing door into a finned receptacle protruding into a tank of water or gas, and the units combine: in series for a hotter output, in parallel for a greater volume, and upstream of a conventional furnace that stays off unless the output temperature falls below threshold.Detailed Description, FIGS. 1 to 7; Claims 4 to 7
The tank is specified with a lead composite shield, and a radiation shield is claimed in its own right as claim 8 — the document’s own statement of what class of products it expects from a mixture whose chemistry is written as ordinary hydride decomposition.Detailed Description, FIG. 2; Claim 8
What would settle it is a set of measurements the patent does not contain. It specifies a composition, a reaction chain, an operating cycle and a service life, but reports no calorimetry, no isotopic assay of a spent wafer and no radiation measurement — so the three numbers to watch for from an independent laboratory are the energy balance across a full 180-day wafer life, the isotope ratios in the nickel and lithium before and after, and the dose behind the shield.Whole document; compare Detailed Description with Claim 8
The way in
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9115913B1/enHow to cite it
Andrea Rossi (2012) Andrea Rossi E-Cat / Energy Catalyzer (Ni-H LENR reactor) US9115913B1