Andrea Rossi is an Italian entrepreneur who claims to have invented a cold fusion device. In the 1970s, Rossi claimed to have invented a process to convert organic waste into petroleum, and in 1978 he founded a company named Petroldragon to process waste. In the 1989 the company was shut down by the Italian government amid allegations of fraud, and Rossi was arrested. In 1996 Rossi moved to the United States and from 2001 to 2003 he worked under a U.S. Army contract to make a thermoelectric device that, while promising to be superior to other devices, produced only around 1/1000 of the claimed performance. In 2008 Rossi attempted to patent a device called an Energy Catalyzer, which is a purported cold fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactionthermal power source. Rossi claims that the device produces massive amounts of excess heat that can be used to produce electricity, but independent attempts to reproduce the effect have failed.
Biography
Andrea Rossi was born on June 3, 1950, in Milan. In 1973, Rossi graduated in philosophy at the University of Milan writing a thesis on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and its interrelationship with Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Although Rossi also holds a degree in chemical engineering, this degree was granted by Kensington University in California, which was later shut down as a diploma mill. Andrea Rossi is married to Maddalena Pascucci.
Business ventures
Petroldragon
In 1974, Rossi registered a patent for an incineration system. In 1978, he wrote The Incineration of Waste and River Purification, published in Milan by Tecniche Nuove. He then founded Petroldragon, a company that was paid to process toxic waste, claiming to use Rossi's process to convert the waste into usable petroleum products. In 1989 Italian customs seized several Petroldragon waste deposit sites and assets. Investigations showed that petroleum presumably produced by the company was never been placed on the market, and that mixtures of toxic waste and harmful chemical solvents were being stored in silos or illegally dumped into the environment. Rossi himself was arrested and eventually tried on 56 counts, 5 of which ended in convictions related to tax fraud. As of 2004 the government of Lombardy has spent over forty million euros to dispose of the 70,000 metric tons of toxic waste that Petroldragon had improperly dumped.
In the US Rossi started the consulting firm Leonardo Technologies, Inc.. He secured a defense contract to evaluate the potential of generating electricity from waste heat by using thermoelectric generators. Such devices are normally only used for heating or cooling, because the efficiency for generating electrical power is only a few percent. Rossi suggested that his devices could attain 20% efficiency. Larger modules would be manufactured in Italy. Rossi sent 27 thermoelectric devices for evaluation to the Engineer Research and Development Center; 19 of these did not produce any electricity at all. The remaining units produced less than 1 watt each, instead of the expected 800–1000 watts.
Energy Catalyzer
In January 2011, Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi claimed to have successfully demonstrated commercially viable nuclear power in a device he called an Energy Catalyzer. The international patent application received an unfavorable international preliminary report on patentability because it seemed to "offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories" and to overcome this problem the application should have contained either experimental evidence or a firm theoretical basis in current scientific theories. Journalists were not allowed to examine the core of the reactor, and there is uncertainty about the viability of the invention. In February 2012, Australian aviator and skeptic Dick Smith offered Rossi US$1 million if Rossi could prove his device generated output many times input, as he had claimed. The offer lapsed, Rossi having declined to take up the challenge, describing it as "clownerie".
