Mats Lewan interview

This is a study of a post on Mats Lewan’s blog (linked under the date below), copied for purpose of analysis and critique. It included some good photos of Dr. Rossi, eliminated here because they are not necessary for this purpose. My comments are indented and italicized.

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Here’s The Settlement—Getting The License Back Was Rossi’s Top Priority

July 18, 2017 Uncategorized

Mats has not categorized his pages. It’s not an active blog, so it doesn’t matter.

In the settlement between Rossi and his US licensee IH, Rossi got the license back together with all E-Cat equipment and materials, while none of the parties will have to pay damages to the other.

Yes, if this is the settlement as agreed, and if there are not other agreements. IH is, in signing this, totally relinquishing all claims to Rossi’s IP. A fly in the ointment would be Ampenergo. AEG was a party to the IH/Rossi agreement, and modifications of that agreement without Ampenergo signature are not valid, and this new agreement modifies (basically revokes) that original agreement. Ampenergo is mentioned; Ampenergo rights (and responsibilities, if any) are not altered by this settlement agreement.

It was Ampenergo’s refusal to sign the Second Amendment that created a major legal problem for Rossi in claiming the $89 million payment was due. The provisions allowing this in the original agreement had, in fact, expired, so the Rossi claim depended on estoppel, the idea that IH had behaved as if bound by the Guaranteed Performance Test provisions; but Rossi was unable to find any clear evidence for this, in spite of extensive effort. The evidence that was found only showed that in a few internal communications, IH referred to a test in process according to an agreement, but the reference was vague and could have referred to the Term Sheet agreement and Penon’s involvement.

Getting the license back was his top priority all the time, Rossi explains in this interview.

Yes, he claims that. Mats does not seriously question it — or anything Rossi says. If that was his “top priority,” he went about it very strangely, creating an enormously complicated lawsuit at high expense. It has been claimed on the blogs that Rossi offered to settle with IH for a return of the License fee (probably $10 million); that is implausible and without evideniary support as far as anything I’ve been able to find. If that had been offered, it would be unlikely for IH to settle as they did with no refund of any kind. However, there are many strange features of this case’s history, so that isn’t proof of anything. Indeed, proof is elusive, but there is a great deal of evidence that Mats is ignoring.

Update. Frank Acland has pointed to a 2016 interview with Rossi. This is probably the source. This claim, unverified in part, has been repeated as if clear fact, on which various conclusions are then based.

During summer 2015, IH offered Rossi to back out from the test and cancel it, with a significant sum of money as compensation. Rossi’s counter offer was to give back the already paid 11.5M and cancel the license agreement, but IH didn’t accept.

From many examples in the lawsuit, we know that Rossi’s reports of conversations are subject to extensive distortion, even if there may be a core of reality. IH did offer money to Rossi, not as “compensation for cancelling a test,” but apparently assuring Rossi that money was not the problem, the problem was them not having been successful in making devices that would pass fully-independent testing, which was absolutely necessary for them. So this first part is framing, how a fact is presented. The second part is not verified. This has later been called a “public offer.” Such a public offer would have been a violation of the License Agreement. Rather, it was a claim made to Lewan, which became public because Lewan published it. A sincere public (or private) settlement offer would normally remain on the table (possibly modified somewhat due to legal expenses). Rossi, in fact, did not request return of the License in the lawsuit, and there was certainly no public offer. Had there been, and assuming that this is what Rossi actually wanted, it would have changed the entire complexion of the case. It might have settled early, saving both sides substantial expense, and netting IH more than $10 million for other LENR research.

But Rossi hated “other LENR research.” More money for it would be the last thing he wanted.

[Here’s the document defining the terms of the settlement (un-disclosed source)].

This copy is unsigned and undated. There is a copy that appeared on LENR-forum, without attribution, that shows Rossi’s signature and a date, July 14, 2017. The draft agreement does not require confidentiality as to itself, nor in general. What remains protected is the secret fuel formula and anything disclosed in Discovery and already covered by a Protective Order. Everything else is, on the fact, permitted.

“To us, the most important thing was to regain complete ownership of the IP and of all the rights that were conceded through the license. At this point, it had become very clear that a continued collaboration had become impossible because of the choices IH made and because of other reasons.

Collaboration actually broke down by July, 2015, when Rossi violated the Term Sheet, refusing entry to the Doral plant to the IH engineer, Murray. Rossi gives reasons in this interview that don’t make sense from a business perspective, but only from within his well-known paranoia.

The development, the finalization, and the distribution of the technology—any agreement regarding this would have been impossible,” Rossi told me during an interview via Skype on July 15.

The impossibility was entirely related to Rossi’s absolute intransigence about his ways of doing things. He made it impossible for IH to actually verify what was happening in Doral, made the “test” take total priority over showing IH how to make devices that would pass independent testing (small scale testing, the normal testing one would expect), and this made it impossible for IH to raise the $89 million payment. Even though the time for that had expired, IH indicated in communications that came out in the trial that they were willing to pay Rossi if they could make those working devices. One of their theories is that Rossi never disclosed what was needed, and that is quite consistent with his comments to Mats. He didn’t trust them, but the mistrust goes back further than he discloses.

IH had obtained a commitment for another $150 million from Woodford, so the plentiful Rossi claims that they objected because they couldn’t pay were simply more smokescreen. They could have paid if Rossi had shown what was needed.

The settlement was drafted on July 5, 2017, on the fourth day of the trial regarding a lawsuit that Rossi filed in Florida, mainly against his US based licensee Industrial Heat, IH, early in April 2016, for not having paid the final amount of USD 89M according to the license agreement, after one year of operation of a 1MW heat plant based on Rossi’s E-Cat technology, apparently successful according to a supposedly independent report made by nuclear engineer Fabio Penon.

We do not know when the settlement was drafted. What I saw in court was that the parties requested that the judge dismiss the suit with prejudice, with all parties bearing their own legal costs, with any details to be worked out with private agreement. The indications I had at the time was that this agreement did not yet exist. It is possible that some outline existed. The settlement agreement provides for a joint filing, which hasn’t happened yet.

The documents as they stood did not require that $89 million payment. Rossi used shaky legal theories to advance this. He would not have prevailed, my opinion, based on what I saw. I did not expect, however, that IH would relinquish all rights unless compensated; and a reason for doing that only occurred to me a few hours after seeing the agreement. Tax purposes. They had come to believe that the IP was worthless, but there would be a residual value due to a small probability of future value. If there is a formal release as binding legal settlement, they could then totally expense all the costs, being able to distribute this as a loss to their investors, which is part of how these risky LLCs operate. They create losses that are then fully deductible from income for their investors. Otherwise the investments might sit there for years, not deductible. So a more accurate description than “worthless” would be “not worth as much as the tax deductions.”

(IH would still have gathered a valuable intangible, “experience.” I was told that IH does not intend to abandon LENR, but a sane long-term approach would be to gather experience, learning to recognize what has true commercial potential and what does not. They would retrench and maintain “watchful waiting,” including readiness to act quickly when needed.)

The defense, on the other hand, accused Rossi of having produced false results in conspiracy with Penon and others.

According to whom? Mats is relying on Rossi’s account. This is a story about the lawsuit that doesn’t fairly present it. What IH did was to call the Doral test into question; this was actually a secondary defense, the primary one being that Doral simply was not a Guaranteed Performance Test, but rather a sale of power to a supposedly independent customer with an immediate and desperate need for steam, willing to pay for it, and the site serving as a demonstration for investors. No mention of “test.” Then, tacked onto this was measurement by Penon, but this was to be in addition to independent measurement by the “customer.” The customer was, we now now, entirely Rossi, and the invoice requests from the customer, signed by Johnson, were drafted by Rossi. There was no independent customer, this was all fraudulent inducement, and that all became totally clear in the evidence, and was emphasized in the opening statement. At trial, Rossi was going to lose, totally, on the $89 million claim.

The claims of fakery in the test results were secondary, not primary. It only became relevant if the GPT arguments were to fail. The underlying equity was that without the ability to reproduce results, IH could not possibly raise the $89 million; the Rossi counterargument in the case was that the Agreement did not require reproducibility. That is literally true and utterly misleading. Perhaps Mats should actually read some documents!

Eventually, however, none of these accusations could be confirmed by proof, which I will comment on below.

Mats is here stating as bald fact what is obviously a conclusion, his conclusion. He refers to “proof,” which is legally naive. The standard of factual judgment in a civil case, like this, is not “proof.” Proof is rare in the world. The standard is the “preponderance of evidence.” He has not actually specified the allegations but is already referring to them as if established. This is the kind of vagueness on which Rossi has long thrived. It is distressing to see in someone who was, at one time, a serious journalist.

Mats does not cover the evidence for fraudulent representation, he simply declares it out of existence. This is appalling.

“There were two clauses in the license agreement that were extremely dangerous to us—the right of first choice [if you plan to make any agreement outside of the licensee’s territory, you first have to offer the licensee the possibility to make an agreement for that new territory] and the rights also to all subsequent inventions. These clauses would have made any further development very complex.

Not really. This is simply Rossi paranoia and smokescreen. The term is “right of first refusal.” Before acting to make an extraterritorial agreement, Rossi would have had to offer the agreement on the same terms to IH. IH could then accept or refuse. This could not harm Rossi’s legitimate interests. However, Rossi often used alleged difficulties to excuse his refusals. He told IH that the presence of an independent engineering company experts at the Ferrara Validation Test in 2013 would “make problems” for him. What problems? One possibility is obvious. They might see through his friend Penon’s incompetence or collusion with Rossi. None of this is proof, but it all builds a coherent picture of how Rossi has operated.

“The perspective for the continued trial was that we could win or we could lose. You always have to examine these possibilities and investigate the consequences. A victory for us risked becoming a pyrrhic victory. Even though we were convinced of having a very strong case, eventually the jury would decide. And the problem was that in the case of a victory, the jury would probably say that it would be fair for Leonardo Corporation [Rossi’s company] to receive the claimed funds, but it would also be fair for IH to keep the license. For us to also get the license back was beyond the horizon.

Many people had pointed this out. Rossi did not actually ask for license cancellation in the Complaint nor in succeeding documents. If this was his primary goal, that’s rather odd. A license cancellation would probably be accompanied by a refund. It has been claimed that Rossi offered such a refund, but I’ve seen no confirmation of this. [see above, there is evidence, a Rossi comment to Mats Lewan in May, 2016, with no independent confirmation]. Refund for cancellation of license would have been an obvious settlement. It would have involved IH eating an additional $10 million or so of expenses, but surely better than a total loss of the entire $20 million investment. 

“So my lawyers asked me before the trial which my priorities were if the trial would lead to any transactions—those indispensable and those negotiable. My answer was that the indispensable condition was to get the license back because I didn’t want to collaborate with IH anymore. As for the financial aspects, I told them which my expectations were, from a lower level to a higher one.”

“My lawyers” is a bit vague. The one who apparently negotiated the settlement was Lukacs. Notice that the primary goal is emotional: “I didn’t want.” I think he’s telling the simple truth here, this is what he thought. Why didn’t he want to collaborate? Where did that come from? It’s found below. It was crazy paranoia, the classic Rossi story. The paranoia led to the major breakdown, by July, 2015.

Were you aware of the danger of the two clauses in the license agreement when you signed it?

Unless Rossi was later lying, always possible, he didn’t consult attorneys before accepting the License Agreement, nor after. There was no danger in the clause he mentioned. It was more or less standard. There was no occasion where this caused him any actual loss, it was all fear. The second clause is misrepresented by Rossi, somewhat. It is not “all subsequent inventions,” it is only inventions that would compete with the original E-cat technology. Again, the reason for that clause is obvious. Inventor has product A, sells it to investors, then comes out with B, which destroys the market for A. Not great for investors, eh? Rossi consistently has shown, since before 2011, that he does not understand the needs of investors.

“Yes, I had understood the risk but I was convinced that I was collaborating with a partner that I would never separate from. Let’s say that I got married without taking into account the difficulties if there would be a divorce.”

Sure. However, most agreements for $100 million involve a bit more sophistication. The settlement agreement looks like something drafted by a lawyer, and includes contingencies dealing with various failures to agree. Marriages where significant property is involved often include separate property agreements that protect the parties. There is no way that IH was going to suggest these protections to cover Rossi (and they were not going to include them to protect themselves, and this was all seen as necessary to deal successfully with Rossi, given Rossi’s character. Bring up such a possibility, for example some attempt to verify his measurements, very possible he’d explode and walk out the door. He’d done it many times.)

What would have happened with your new reactor version, the E-Cat QX (formerly known as Quark X), if you hadn’t got the license back?

This was all obvious, I wrote about this many times, with Rossi supporters screaming that it was biased. Now Rossi acknowledges it.

“It would have been very complicated because it’s an E-Cat—the theory base is the same and the patent protection is basically the same, even though revolutionary inventions have been added, but the license agreement expressed very clearly that all inventions, also subsequent and future ones, would become IH’s property. Together with the clause of first choice it would have become very complex. So it was absolutely necessary to eliminate the license.“

Very complex = “absolutely necessary to eliminate.” Not actually very complex! Quite simple. If Rossi improves the invention, they get that technology. Rossi makes more money, certainly not less. Yes, he’d be sharing profits. At this point, status quo, IH had paid only $10 million for that full benefit. Of course Rossi didn’t like that, but he had many opportunities to be paid much, much more. He turned away from them. They would have required that he actually fulfill the intention and letter of the Agreement, and he didn’t trust them, that is the long-term Rossi position. Mistrust. Mats knows Rossi well enough to recognize this.

To obtain another $89 million, all he’d have had to do was to get the signature of his friends at Ampenergo on the Second Amendment. There was no time limit on that. Then he’d have needed to get all parties to agree to the start of a test date. If they unreasonably dragged their feet, that would have made for a simple specific-performance demand, and lawsuit if necessary, a much less complex lawsuit, with far more basis (and easily resolved by going ahead with a test with reasonable precautions).

Alternatively, it appears that IH offered to waive the GPT requirement. All Rossi had to do was teach them how to make devices that actually passed careful, independent testing. Rossi either could not do that (one possibility) or did not want to do that (the other major possibility, consistent with the story he now tells Lewan.) Annesser, Rossi’s early and very pugnacious attorney, pointed out another possibility: they were incompetent boobs who could not follow instructions. However, if they were truly incompetent, find them competent advisors. Pay them if you have to. Guide them through the process step by step. And an absolute no-no: if an error or possible error is found in your measurement methods, don’t storm out claiming the Russians Did It. Fix the problem, nail it.

According to the settlement, the defendants shall return or destroy all documentation, return all reactor vessels including the 1MW E-Cat plant, also promising not to disclose the E-Cat fuel formula to anyone. How will you be able to control this?

It’s in the Settlement Agreement. Rossi’s answer is also fairly obvious.

“With the information that I have provided you can make a replication, and if we see other companies producing something analogous, even partly analogous, this means that our technology has been transferred. And we will protect our IP.”

Yes, this is more or less correct. However, something like a secret formula, which is the only secret aspect, could be found by someone else doing what Rossi claimed to do, running a thousand tests. That’s not very many, actually. There are techniques for running millions of tests, simultaneously. It’s only money. So why hasn’t this already been done? Well it’s being done, but not focusing on “Rossi technology,” for the most part. Why not? Because nobody with the resources believes that Rossi technology is real, for all the obvious reasons, very obvious, if one studies the case documents (which is a significant project by itself, I will be working to make it easier; I’ve already done this to a limited degree. It, itself, is a significant project, and it is not funded beyond my expenses — which are crowd-funded).

An early theory, which I considered possible, was that Rossi deliberately created the appearance of being a con artist, in order to allow easy dismisssal of his work by others who might otherwise seriously investigate with the goal of competing with him. )Mats supports this idea in An Impossible Invention. It was this argument that led me to conclude that the appearances did not prove that Rossi was what he appeared to be. So … what if this is still happening? Mats is ignoring obvious appearances, as if they don’t exist, he is not confronting them and asking difficult questions. Why not?

That, again, is obvious. Ask Rossi difficult questions, there goes your access! (An alternate explanation is that Lewan is simply not smart. I doubt this. He could understand if he wanted to.)

Talking about replication. In his deposition, Tom Darden [President of IH and of Cherokee Investment Partners] claimed that with the information you provided, they ‘were never able to build devices that successfully produced energy.’ What is your comment to that?

That is a decent question. The problem here is that Lewan doesn’t go deeper. Darden said this in a deposition (though I don’t have the exact quote in mind and Lewan does not bother with sourcing like this.) That means under oath, under penalty of perjury. Rossi responds with misdirection.

“During the discovery phase, emails from Darden were provided and made public, where Darden himself confirmed to have replicated our process successfully.

Well, by being vague, Rossi maintains appearances. Darden was enthusiastic and had some early results that appeared positive. We have seen this many times with LENR! Some of that disappears when examined more closely, the “unable to build” comment is about a fuller, later judgment. In Rossi case arguments, positions that changed over time were often collapsed, as if a person would have one, fixed view, from beginning to end. This would not have impressed a jury, it’s easy to understand.

We also have testimonials from persons who have assisted at such replications. Woodford [Investment Management] assisted at one of those replications, after which it invested USD 50M in Industrial Heat, even before the [one-year 1MW] test started in Doral [Miami], at a time when IH obviously had nothing but our IP in its portfolio.”

This is radically misleading. Woodford did not “assist” at an “IH replication,” as far as we know. Rossi is vague, but may be referring to the Doral test as a “Rossi replication.” This was totally managed by Rossi, featuring a faux Director of Engineering for the “customer” who was literally a puppet for Rossi, saying what Rossi told him to say. Maybe Rossi is talking about some other test, but, if so, I haven’t seen evidence for it in the documents. Woodford committed to invest in 2014, up to $200 million. IH had suggested that this go into IPH, the Dutch BV, where it would be exposed to Rossi claims. Woodford insisted that it go instead into a new UK limited liability company, IHHI, which became the owner of IH, but not obligated to pay IH debts; it could voluntarily do so. The first tranche, $50 million, cleared in May, 2015, and this money went into other technologies, not Rossi, and that totally pissed him off, though this was simply Woodford doing what they wanted to do with their money.

Woodford did not invest in Rossi technology, but that IH had a hedge to cover the possibility of Rossi success was likely attractive. They were not impressed by the Doral plant, apparently. I wouldn’t have been, beyond, OMG, what a complicated piece of machinery for a fraud! Maybe it’s real! I would not be impressed by steam pipe going through a wall into an inaccessible “customer area,” with the only sign of a megawatt being the claims of Rossi (or the “customer engineer” who was clueless), from instrumental readings. It’s hard to hide a megawatt! That is the only reason I could think of for a megawatt test. It’s a terrible way to gather reliability data, the way it was done.

“We also have testimonials.” That appears to be a claim without evidence, very common. It’s meaningless without specifics. Lewan does not ask for specifics. Notice that underneath Rossi’s claim is an implied claim that Darden and Vaughn and others perjured themselves. If there was a successful “replication” — which is itself misleading, because replicating results is not yet independent confirmation if the test methods are flawed — Woodford would know it and would then be a possible witness in a perjury prosecution. This is all misleading, implausible, but Mats swallows it whole, apparently. (It isn’t obvious in the early parts of the interview, but shows up in what Lewan states as fact without attribution to Rossi.)

In his deposition, Darden also claimed that you had said that JM Products [the ‘customer’ that used the thermal power produced by the E-Cat plant in Doral—more comments on that below] was a subsidiary of Johnson Matthey, that Johnson Matthey would have operated the plant of JM Products, and that after [a] brief period of positive operation Johnson Matthey would have announced that they were the customer. What’s your comment?

Lewan attributes this to a Darden claim, instead of what the IH attorneys did, referring to the primary evidence, a series of Rossi emails, as well as evidence from James Bass, and the OFAC declaration of Johnson. That sets up Rossi’s basic answer, an implication that Darden was lying and that there was “no evidence.” But there was plenty of evidence, conclusive evidence, overwhelmingly so. The representation that the “customer” would come out like that is in a Rossi email that is quite clear on the topic, quite enough to convince a jury in a civil case, and possibly enough to convince a jury in a perjury prosecution. By not understanding this, Lewan simply provides a soapbox for Rossi.

“Mr. Darden hasn’t been able to prove what he said under oath. Basically, he has sworn on things of which he has no evidence. I have never said or written that Johnson Matthey was the owner of JM Products, while in contrast I always said and wrote that Johnson Matthey was the producer of materials that I had use for in my work with JM.”

First of all, the history of the draft of the Term Sheet shows that IH believed that the customer was Johnson Matthey. The customer was allegedly a chemical company with a need for steam. IH obviously got the name of Johnson Matthey from somewhere! Here, Rossi has created a cover story that might explain it, i.e., he told them of his plans and IH misunderstood. However, this is utterly inconsistent with Rossi’s subsequent behavior. Instead of telling IH that it was a mistake, he told them that he “wasn’t supposed to mention their name.” In many documents, he referred to the customer as a distinct and independent entity, not merely himself planning to work with JM materials. When IH suggested they might visit JM in the U.K., Rossi demanded that they not do this, it would spook them. If he was merely buying materials from them, what would be the problem? And this goes on and on. This isn’t just one piece of evidence and it isn’t just Darden’s word against Rossi’s. Rather, the reality is that there is no contrary evidence in the evidentiary record to what Darden claimed, and there is massive support. Rossi obviously led IH to believe that the “real customer” — that is, the hidden owner of JM Chemical Products — look at the name! — was Johnson Matthey. He was lying from start to finish, and he is still lying, to Mats.

More accurately, it’s likely that Rossi believes his lies, that is part of how he is able to convince people, his obvious sincerity. Technically, then, they are not “lies,” but intention to mislead, which is the core (not “false statements”) is obvious. It exists somewhere in Rossi’s psyche, he is creating his own “reality,” and transmitting it to others, but the patterns are consistent. Mats is refusing to recognize what really, by now, should be obvious to him. Rossi is, at best, insane. Nice wig, though. Nice smile. Cordial. And very persistent, hard-working, etc.

When one creates a misunderstanding, the best construction I can find, and there is a clear opportunity to clear it up, and, instead, one papers it over with appearances, it becomes clear that the “misunderstanding” was intentional. (Rossi said there was nothing wrong with dealing with a new company, which was true, except … he had claimed originally that this was an existing company, ready to go, and hurry, they need to go soon, don’t miss the opportunity, when, in fact, and this is simply not in doubt, there was no independent customer, no existing process requiring steam, and all the funding and control was purely Rossi. IH obviously decided, even though it was starting to look shaky, to give Rossi the chance, and that fell apart by July, 2015, when Rossi blatantly violated the Term Sheet by excluding the IH engineer, and even if we imagine that Doral was a GPT, this was a gross violation of the orginal GPT intention. I think Rossi is telling the truth that he had decided he didn’t want to work with IH any more. Consider what he claimed to have done with Hydro Fusion. This could have been, quite simply, a more elaborate version of the same behavior. 

Some of Rossi’s supporters think all this is irrelevant, that what really matters is “did the Plant work?” The problem is that how Rossi set it all up makes conclusions about actual power generation depend entirely on trusting Rossi. The “independent ERV” was not quite so independent, and the actual management of operation and data collection was … Rossi. The test conditions were entirely controlled by Rossi, and then we find out about, say, other pumps in the system. One of the ways to fool a steam measurement system as existed in Doral would be through such hidden elements. And … the instruments were removed immediately at the end of the test, taken by Penon. All with excuses, of course, but an attorney saw that and immediately said, to me, “spoliation” (Not an IH attorney, and this was before IH claimed spoliation. This was before more examples of spoliation of the evidence appeared, the removal of the steam piping not allowing verification of the slope of that return pipe and the exact installation of the flow meter, which itself had multiple problems.)

The pressure gauge, critical to understanding the state of the alleged steam delivery, was being operated above the specified operating temperature, and the simplest explanation of the rock solid report of 0.0 bar pressure is that the gauge was broken (or simply blocked; removed from the system, it might operate perfectly), and it was removed by Penon. (0.0 bar in the Penon report was a blatant error, and this was generally translated to 0.0 barg, which is, at least possible! but then there are many other problems, all glossed over by Rossi’s facile explanations that don’t hold up under examination. In any given example, there may be an explanation, but this “test” was a mess. Penon was vastly overpaid.

Rossi often made the point that Penon, his friend, was a “nuclear engineer” as if that made a difference. Nuclear engineering is irrelevant to measuring steam, Jed Rothwell has often made the point: one needs an HVAC engineer who actually works with steam. While some nuclear plants use steam, the training of a nuclear engineer would not extensively prepare a person for this work, for there is no clear theory of operation for LENR devices, but measuring steam and generated heat are all well-known and with well-known possible errors, to steam engineers.

Darden also reported an episode when they provided a reactor that you operated successfully, after which they revealed that the reactor was empty, suggesting that there were systematic errors in the measurement method, also describing your violent reaction when they told you this. Can you comment?

This was, again, a good question. It’s a report, I think more than one person has referred to it, and, again, Rossi talks about “proof.” In court, Darden would testify, someone else would testify who may have been a witness, and Rossi would testify. The jury would consider how these match and how they differ. What does Rossi actually say here?

Mats actually makes the statement that Rossi operated the reactor. This is not a clear account matching what I recall. However, maybe. Mats does not attribute sources for his information, generally. He is, in effect, repeating rumors or creating them based on something he read somewhere, which may or many not have been accurate.

“Darden has said lots of things that he has never been able to prove. What he assures doesn’t exist. I always made experiments with reactors charged by me, or by me in collaboration with Darden. Never with reactors provided to me as a closed box, for obvious reasons.”

What obvious reasons? Rossi has diverted from the actual story, and talks about something else. I saw this many times in his pleadings. IH would assert an alleged fact, A. Rossi counsel would “dispute” the fact but then, for evidence, would provide irrelevancies that would all be about how A was to be interpreted, not the fact A itself. This managed to confuse the Judge, actually, which may have been the purpose. It is all clear from the record when one actually studies the pleadings and looks up the cited references. It’s not very visible if one just reads the pleadings themselves. To understand those documents actually takes a lot of work! Unless someone has organized them and analyzed them, making verification easy.

The actual story, at this point from my memory. IH was running tests of reactors, and had apparently created empty reactors. They had written a letter on the outside of the reactor, as I recall the story (eventually, I’ll look all this up). They were getting some strong results, high COP. Then they realized that they had been confused by an upside-down letter and what they thought was a fueled reactor was actually unfueled. Notice that Rossi’s answer completely avoids the actual reported situation, which involved a reactor that was unfueled, so even if Rossi was correct, and all the fueled reactors had been loaded by him (but Darden supposedly had the formula), IH may have made some unfueled versions and got one confused with the fueled ones.

So they called Rossi and demanded that he come to North Carolina immediately. He did, and they showed him the test. They then, together, cut open the unfueled reactor, and it was empty. The story I have in mind has Rossi getting angry, claiming “The Russians stole the fuel!” and storming out.

Was this story pure invention? It seems unlikely, but a jury would have decided, looking at the witnesses in testimony and under cross-examination, and possible corroboration. And, remember, all this was peripheral. The central issue, the contractual requirements, was actually very clear. Much of this would be relevant to the counterclaims, not the primary lawsuit.

What this shows to those interested in Rossi Reality would be how a lack of control experiments can be fatal to experimental studies. Rossi hated control experiments, had expressed his contempt for them in 2011. Lugano was most seriously damaged by the lack of a control experiment (a “dummy reactor”) at full input power, which would have immediately exposed, if it existed, error in temperature measurement. In fact, the IH mislabelling showed a naivete on their part as well. One would label controls either not at all (depending on later opening them up) or with a code unintelligible to the experimenters. Using a letter and knowing what the letter was supposed to mean would damage neutrality; ideally the difference is blind. (This is far, far from what Lugano did. The fueled and dummy experiments were treated differently and known. That’s relatively weak, but not uncommon in initial studies. Lugano was not designed to be conclusive.)

Let’s talk about JM, since how, why, and by whom the company was formed was one of the main topics to raise doubt about your motives with the one-year test. You already explained that you never said that Johnson Matthey was the owner. So who formed the company?

“I always said that the owner of JM was an [Italian] person who knew me since a very long time, and who was in contact with a British company and wanted to participate in the work with my technology.

He is still lying, here, that is, being deceptive. At best, Rossi isn’t at all careful. He “always said” this to whom? There is no sign that what he has said here is what he said to IH in 2014. “Italian” was supplied by Lewan?

Johnson, supporting the JM story, claimed that the owner was a “U.K entity.” Not Italian, and, in fact, the supposed owner (in name only, in fact, Rossi was entirely responsible for JM Products), Rossi may have indeed met again in Johnson’s office, he who became the sole beneficiary of Platinum America Trust, but that wasn’t a U.K. entity, it existed in a file cabinet in Johnson’s Florida office, only. That this was a long-time Rossi friend was concealed from IH, and covered up with the OFAC “U.K. entity” story. In his deposition, Johnson acknowledged that there wasn’t and had never been a “U.K. entity,” giving the excuse that they had planned to create one, but it was too expensive.

But why would they even bother; there is only one reason I can think of: to make it appear that it was Johnson Matthey. Once they had made that representation, and once IH had agreed to the Doral move, there was no longer any need to go to the trouble of creating a U.K. entity.

So I invented this proposal for him to be both a customer, buying the energy produced by the E-Cat plant, and collaborator, verifying the validity of my technology [both the E-Cat technology and the one used by JM Products]. This is what I always declared. And in my depositions, I also provided the name of the owner of JM. I also explained that the owner of JM didn’t achieve any agreement with the British society, and therefore went on by himself together with other partners.”

The depositions were, of course, after the lawsuit had been filed. Rossi did not lie about it then, except in one way: claiming that he had not told IH the customer was Johnson Matthey. He obviously led them (and others, such as James Bass), to believe that, then backed up and mixed up the story while maintaining the impression of an independent customer, still Johnson Matthey. What other partners? Rossi is continuing with his vagueness that is designed to confuse. Johnson presented the “U.K. entity” claim as a present fact, not some future possibility. But this is standard for Rossi: present a possibility as an already-realized fact. Johnson was a rubber-stamp for Rossi.

Rossi did invent the proposal. But look at how this was proposed to IH! The story he now tells is very, very different. Okay, the customer was to “buy the energy.” $1000 per day. Attractive proposal, to be sure, and he pointed out that the Plant only cost $200,000 to build. Amazing profit! Really, read that email. Here, I’m not spending much time looking up stuff, but compare this to what came out and what Rossi is now saying. 

(Rossi also claimed that the test didn’t happen in North Carolina because of IH failures. In that email, we can see that Rossi declined an opportunity to run a test under close IH supervision in North Carolina. He claimed that an independent customer in Florida would be much better!)

How was JMC/JMP to pay that $1000 per day? It’s totally obvious: Rossi paid all operating expenses of JMP. JMP had no independent income, Rossi would have paid the $1000 per day, if IH had ever actually issued the invoices. (they were not confident; I think it was a mistake. they would have invoiced “per your report.”) Rossi developed a story to justify moving payments around on paper: JMP would process materials and Leonardo Corporation, Rossi’s company, would buy them.

Yes, as I recall, the first element of the scheme to appear, though it was not public until disclosure was required in the lawsuit, was the formation of Platinum America Trust. So Rossi planned all this, there was no independent customer: like turtles, it was Rossi All The Way Down. So all of Rossi’s claims about the independent customer, to IH and to his public, over the years, were deceptive.

Pace’s theme in his Opening Statement on Day 3 was “fake [this], fake [that], and fake [the other thing]. Easy story for the jury to remember and to use to mentally file the evidence that would then be presented in the next phase of the trial. While this or that might be shown to have some factual basis, or to be wrong, the overall story was easy to understand and the evidence for deception was massive and overwhelming, and not dependent on Darden Says. That was just support!  (Sworn testimony is evidence.)

Rossi then explained that he had presented his attorney Henry Johnson, who would have the formal position as president for JM Products for administrative reasons, to Darden and JT Vaughn [vice president of IH], making clear that Johnson was his attorney.

Eventually, yes (though I don’t know that Rossi volunteered the information. IH claimed to have been surprised to find the Rossi attorney as the “JM” representative. However, the impression was carefully maintained that the Johnson and JMP were merely representing for public purpose a true owner, who would, Rossi claimed, be willing to reveal true identity after a few months of successful operation. By this time, the proposal stank, but …. IH apparently reasoned that surely an attorney would not participate in a fraud…. 

“I would then have directed JM’s operations from a technology perspective. I also sent an email in June 2014, provided as evidence, in which I informed Mr. Darden that I was going to be the director of JM’s plant.”

The language was there, but in context, did it mean what Rossi is now claiming?

One of the things I intend to do is create a chronological index to the documents. I haven’t checked, but Rossi may have said, I seem to recall, that he would be the director of the “Plant,” and in context, this could have meant the power Plant.

Rossi, in fact, entirely controlled JMP, making all decisions, and paying for everything. JMP did not have its own facility. The original name was JM Chemical Products, but they had trouble finding a rental, landlords being reluctant to rent to a “chemical company.” The response to that was typical of how some lawyers — and Rossi — think. Change the name, problem goes away! However, ultimately, Leonardo Corporation rented the warehouse, then subleased part of it to JMP.

So you invented the technology used by JM?

“Yes, I made all the technology, I invented their production plant, and I made the plant.”

It was all very obviously invented as an excuse. Rossi All The Way Down. Remember all the claims on JONP about an “independent customer”? That customer is now revealed as entirely the invention of Rossi. They were not, as claimed, an independent company with a process they needed steam for. The “independent company” was an idea in Rossi’s head, even though he used the third person for it. In mercato veritas, which to Rossi apparently means, create a dummy customer and create dummy sales, where you pay yourself, and hey, “the market has spoken.”

Can you describe the technology?

“We produced substances with a very high added value. To do this we had to achieve an extremely high pressure inside small reactors that were introduced in larger tubes. The concept was to provoke contractions in certain materials, using heat exchange with the hot steam [from the E-Cat plant] and a pressure of a few bars but concentrating the force from the pressure on a larger surface, a few cm2, on much, much smaller surfaces, increasing the pressure proportionally. And this process consumed heat.“

In mercato veritas. “High value” implies high sale value to arms-length customers. Did he actually sell any products? We don’t think so. Now, “this process consumed heat.” That’s not impossible. However, crucial: how much heat? A process does not “consume” heat, rather, some processes will store it as chemical energy, or possibly phase change. How much chemical? This would be the real question. What we know of the “product” was the raw material: Rossi originally asked for a bid on a kilogram of platinum sponge from Johnson Matthey. That was apparently the only actual contact with JM. The bid was a million dollars. (which is roughly reasonable.) Rossi apparently decided to buy some catalyzers and scavenge a few grams of platinum sponge from them. So we have a few grams of platinum sponge. If this was the most efficient energy storage process known, how much energy could be stored in a few grams? Later, Rossi claimed to buy some graphene. Again, how much energy? Let’s put it this way: these processes could have been run with less than a kilowatt of power. A megawatt was vast overkill.

“Very high value” is actually contradictory to the basic idea here, large amounts of product. Was Rossi producing a fabulous value of product every day? How much energy could a kilogram (a million dollars worth of palladium sponge, the original production material claim) “absorb”? 

How much of the heat from the E-Cat did this process consume?

“On average it consumed between 20 and 40 percent of the heat produced by the E-Cat plant. I had to learn from the experiment how much heat was necessary, because there were not any precedent analogous experiments to get data from.“

Not before and probably not yet. His “customer process” could not make a measureable dent in a megawatt under the conditions at Doral.

This is completely unreasonable, preposterous. This was all examined at length on the blogs. There is no way that this much energy could be stored in product (Rossi’s “consumed” implies violation of the laws of thermodynamics, but translating it to “stored”). It would require massive deliveries and removals of product. Storing that much energy, the product would be very, very dangerous. Etc. A non-dangerous endothermic reaction could have been melting ice, requiring a constant flow of ice deliveries.

So since it didn’t consume all of the heat from the E-Cat plant, you had to get rid of the excess heat in some way?

When this was raised on JONP, Rossi eventually settled on some combination of endothermy and ventilation. He did not mention “heat exchanger.” That was only raised this year, and nobody who had seen the plant suspected a heat exchanger, which would have been quite visible and very noisy. Rossi’s idea was a kludge, almost certainly yet another fantasy. He would have had to create it so it would be hidden, which is not what one would do if this was simply getting rid of the heat. Such a heat exchanger, operating, generating measureable temperature rise in a measurable amount of air, at least as to round estimates, would have been a great confirmation of Plant energy generation. And this is standard engineering. Why hide it?

“Yes, I didn’t have any experience of the process in the JM plant, so obviously I over-dimensioned everything to be sure to achieve the intended physical transformations. I didn’t know how much the plant would have consumed, so therefore I introduced a heat exchanger after the plant that could dissipate the eventual excess thermal energy, condensing the steam to water that could be sent back to the E-Cat plant. I designed the heat exchanger so that it could dissipate all the heat from the E-Cat plant, in the case of malfunctioning of the JM plant, since I didn’t want to stop the E-Cat plant, because I needed to make the famous 350 days of operation within 400 days [according to the license agreement].“

This makes no business sense. A cooling tower (Smith shows one) could have been purchased and easily installed, and then, later, sold when no longer needed. 

Problem is, this wasn’t made clear to IH, at all. Further, the GPT requirements did not actually require a continuous megawatt, they only required COP. All this would have been much more easily handled with a simple agreement with IH, and then if power wasn’t needed, shut down reactors (but leave at least one running at a COP of 6.0 minimum, or a few, if one wants to insist on that 350 day stuff)! If the plant cannot be controlled that way, it would surely be very dangerous! The heat exchanger and what it required was a system change, clearly not mentioned to IH at all. The only kind of process that could actually dissipate a major fraction of the power would be phase change (simple version: melt ice.) It was obvious ab initio that a major heat exchanger would be needed. This can be purchased off-the shelf, as rooftop cooling towers, cheaply. Why go to all the trouble to make one from scratch, and why put it in the mezzanine?

I think the answer is obvious: this heat exchanger only existed after-the-fact, in Rossi’s imagination. If it were in the obvious place, on the roof, it would have been visible, so it couldn’t be there! Perhaps there might have been some regulatory problem, but then this would reveal that Rossi, ah, fudges and hides. If he got fire department approval for his reactor assembly, it was based on power input, not actual  (or expected) generated power. Deception. Don’t leave home without it!

In fact, the entire idea of a megawatt test was insane. But that is what Rossi wanted and had declared in 2011.

So how much thermal power could the heat exchanger dissipate?

“One megawatt.“

This is controversial. Wong thought it could do the job. Others have said, no, but the idea of the heat exchanger was introduced late in the Discovery process, not early, so there was less consideration of it. Rossi could have put a standard cooling tower on the roof, no controversy. Or Rossi could have agreed with IH for a different GPT, IH was apparently quite amenable to that.

And you didn’t have any photos of the heat exchanger?

“No. I never take photos. I don’t need them. I never take pictures of my prototypes.”

Rossi always has reasons. This was not a “prototype,” it was allegedly a fully-functioning heat exchanger that had to be working every day of the test, and before the test, as soon as the reactor was in operation. It had to be there first. But nobody saw it or saw any sign of it. The jury would have loved this. Easy to understand. Murray, there at the end of the test, would have seen evidence. He was looking for evidence of how the warehouse was cooled. He didn’t see it, and then Rossi claims he dismantled it, after the “test,” making it impossible to actually start up the reactor again, if anyone wanted to do that. This was not a real chemical operation, and it had served its purpose, a faux “test” under full Rossi control, unlike the original GPT concept, which would have been under full IH control, at least full detailed observation.

This was the famous heat exchanger in the mezzanine of the premises in Doral where the one-year test was run. The heat exchanger was questioned by the defense in the lawsuit since there were no photos or other proof of its existence.

Not the only reason, and, again, “proof” is a strong word. There was actually no evidence at all of its existence other than Rossi Says. Okay, Engineer48 on E-Catworld.com claims that a photo of a tree outside the window showed heat damage. It sure would have damaged the tree! It would have killed it. I don’t see what E48 sees. Maybe if you squint, just right…. He also claims there were some scratches on the floor, that show …. what? Where did all the materials go? Rossi says he “repurposed them.” Where? This was a huge pile of stainless steel pipe. Did he have receipts? None were produced. Did he hire a crew to install and then remove them? Yes. Off the street, and no, no record, probably he paid them in cash.

You can always come up with some explanation…. But a jury will decide (and if we need it, we will decide) based, not on proof, which is rare outside of mathematics, but on the preponderance of the evidence, and to decide that, one needs to look at all the evidence, not just what one side or another claims.

That’s what we have now, a huge mass of evidence, that can’t be hidden. If someone wants to know, read the evidence, not merely me or Mats Lewan or Andrea Rossi or Engineer48 (who has a clear conflict of interest). Use all of us to consider arguments, but … you are the judge and jury for your own life decisions. If you are considering investing, and you depend on bloggers, ah, be really careful! If you are an inventor considering working with Industrial Heat, will you follow what Sifferkoll has written? Sanely, you will check it out yourself. Sifferkoll presents evidence, to be sure, but what does it mean? that’s up to you! Again, be careful, what Sifferkoll claims as proof of Cherokee (and thus IH) misbehavior is simply normal business practice that he doesn’t understand. So study it! Don’t just look at cherry-picked anecdotes, selected for ready — and misleading — appearances, by someone obviously convinced that Something is Terribly Wrong.

However, the plaintiffs’ expert witness Ph.D. Vincent Wong [Prof. of thermodynamics for engineers at the University of Florida] confirmed that Rossi’s description corresponded to a possible design for dissipating the necessary heat.

I agree, it might have worked. And it might not have. It’s marginal. Wong was shown a window being replaced, allegedly the window where the heat exchanger fans blew hot air out the front of the building. Only problem: this was about a year after the test ended and the heat exchanger was removed. So Rossi left the window out for a year? In Miami, with blowing rain being common? This would have caused interior damage. There are photographs from Google Street View in that period that appear to show reflections of the sky, i.e,. glass present. The noise from the heat exchanger would have been very, very noticeable. Nobody reported hearing or seeing it. These questions were not asked in most of the depositions, because they were taken too early. But they would have been asked at trial, you can bet on it.

Rossi was going to lose his primary case, that was obvious (and the case was obviously defective from the beginning, just from Rossi’s filings, and became far more clearly so as discovery proceeded). The question is what would have happened with the counterclaims. My sense is that IH would have prevailed on some counts, but monetary damages might have been relatively small. Recovering on the original payment of $10 million, very difficult, though they were certainly going to try. They could have ruined Johnson, but their own benefit from this might have been small. I do not know what considerations led them to accept the settlement we have seen. Nobody from IH is yet talking about it. I’m asking so eventually I may get some answers. Hopefully, I can get answers I can publish! I did just get the Day 4 transcript.

Rossi explained that it consisted of tubes and two fans blowing horizontally inside an isolated wooden construction attached to the windows where the heat was vented out. A large tube for the steam and a smaller tube for the returning water went through the small door to the mezzanine at the lower left corner.

Yes, that’s what he claimed. The door would have been open, I think. Those fans would have been quite noisy. This would all have been visible from outside the customer area. But because nobody suspected the existence of a heat exchanger (and when asked last year, Rossi did not mention it), searches were not more narrowly focused. Rossi confused this all and continues to confuse it.

Rossi explained a couple of things with regard to the heat exchanger.

A ‘circulator’ was used to stabilize the flow of steam and water through the whole system. Rossi wouldn’t comment on further data of the circulator since he said he was preparing a patent for this device.
This circulator had nothing to do with a pump of the model ‘Grundfos’ that was brought up by the defense’s expert witness Rick Smith who suggested that the Grundfos pump was used to make hot water flow through the system and that no steam was produced.

I advise against relying on Rossi for statements of what Smith claimed. What were raised were possibilities. I.e., “may have been used.” As an example, very strangely, the flow meter had a sending unit that would have allowed automated data collection. This wasn’t used. The basic unit was undersized, designed for higher flow than was used, not actually rated for accuracy at the relatively low flow in the system. However, the sender would have provided higher resolution, at least. There is a suggested fraud mode. (A “fraud mode” would involve deliberate deception, as distinct from error. The Defkalion flow meter artifact could have been error, maybe. A fraud mode, if it could be proven — which wasn’t claimed –, would prove fraudulent intent.) An obvious one: at night, run a pump that floods the system and winds up the flow meter. Indeed, if this is run at night, one could run it until the flow meter reads exactly what is desired, thus explaining the remarkably constant values, in spite of other operational variations in the system. “Explanations” are never proof — though sometimes they indicate the state of the explainer.

The real use for the Grundfos pump was instead to push the water through a by-pass with a filter about once a week to make it cleaner.

That’s plausible. However, this is all complexity added to the system that wasn’t covered by Penon.

Rossi also addressed the claim made by IH that producing one megawatt of heat inside the building where the test was run would have made it so hot that you couldn’t have stayed there. First, he noted that the sun on a sunny day radiates about 1 kW per m2 and that the building, having a roof of about 1,000 m2 normally would have received about 1 MW of heat from the sun, without making it too hot in the building, even though the roof was barely insulated.

That’s one of Rossi’s nutso arguments that can sound plausible if one is inclined to believe him. Solar irradiance does not generate much heat “inside the building.” The figure for Miami seems to run between 1000–2000 BTU per day. “Barely insulated” doesn’t cover the fact. Most heat will be reflected. The roof itself will get too hot to touch, and if the air in the building got that hot, it would be fatal, and a common example is an automobile, which, on a hot day, will quickly reach fatal temperatures. This doesn’t happen in an ordinary building, and why not? I created large protective structures in a desert, weather very hot, using nothing but one layer of paper. Very little “insulation,” but high reflectance. White newsprint paper, I got the rolls from a printer as roll ends. Shade. Really, this is obvious.

The figure of about 1 kW per square meter is about right; in fact, that is called “one sun.” However, the roof does not “receive” a kilowatt per square meter from the sun, because most of the energy is reflected. Insulation is only one factor, different from reflectance. What is absorbed will heat the roof, and then whatever insulation is there will slow heat transfer to the interior.

Furthermore, it had large openings with exhausts for venting air out of the building. Then the JM plant consumed on average 20 to 40 percent of the produced heat, and the rest was vented out with the heat exchanger.

The openings have been considered and modelled. Wong, in his deposition, acknowledged that without the heat exchanger, and a megawatt of power, the building would have become uninhabitable. Wong was evasive, encouraged to be so by Evans (a Rossi attorney at the time, later withdrew), but finally acknowledged the matter. See deposition pages 147-150.

(Wong starts out by asserting that the heat was probably being used to heat some industrial process, as if this would make a big difference. It would, if there was major product being moved. But such processes are normally not efficient, thus most of the heat is “waste heat,” and, indeed, large quantities of product would be required. Wong had no clue about this, as a practical reality. Wong was evasive, and why? He didn’t want to say something because it was what Murray had said. This shows that he was not simply providing expertise, but argument on a side. He knows the facility would become unbearably hot. He ends up acknowledging that the difference between his analysis and that of Murray is that Murray did not account for a heat exchanger, while Wong did. Obvious.

Rossi, with Mats, is beating a dead horse, he’s flat out wrong, but won’t admit it, because Rossi Never Gives Up. Mats knows Rossi’s character, but doesn’t confront or challenge it, knowing full well what would happen if he did.

Pump capacity

I then wanted to hear Rossi’s view on the discussion about the 24 smaller pumps feeding water into the E-Cat modules, which had become one of the defense’s major arguments against Rossi, and also one that attorney Christopher Pace raised at the beginning of the trial.

This is not an argument “against Rossi.” It’s just about asserted fact. The thinking is primitive. It is not a “major argument,” other than being quite simple to present and understand. It was, in fact, raised in the IH Opening statement, that is correct.

Update: This issue is covered on Pumped Up or Stupid Mistake, and then OMG! Good news!

“This is my favorite because now we’re going to have some fun. You need to see it from a ridiculous side because it’s so ridiculous that you can’t take it seriously.”

Rossi thinks he has a zinger here. And maybe he does. However, the matter is not so simple, and quite a few people have looked at this, and, in my mind, it’s not fully resolved. To fully resolve it someone needs to actually test one of these pumps; what is obvious is that the pump data sheets do not contemplate the conditions Rossi describes as actual usage.

[Update: there is now a project started by some LENR Forum people to actually measure the Prominent pump output. OMG! Actual experimental evidence! Will Lewan look at this? There are possible pitfalls, but … they can be avoided and, in fact, anyone could do this. Not even expensive. If any controversy remains, MFMP could do it, and MFMP does have a reputation for reporting their results, “exciting” or otherwise.]

Not mentioned by Rossi is that the pumps are metering pumps, not “workhorse pumps.” A metering pump is designed to deliver a controlled flow, with relative independence from pressure variations.

The argument, which was brought up in the Expert Report by engineer Rick A. Smith, was based on an observation that on the name plate of the pump it said ’32 l/h.’ In his report, Smith concluded that this was the maximum capacity of the pump, and multiplying 32×24 you get 768 l/h which, if evaporated, only consumes 482 kW—less than half of a megawatt.

It’s actually nominal capacity, not, technically, maximum. Or it is a “maximum setting,” again, not actually maximum flow. however, Rossi confuses this massively. If Smith erred, Smith erred, it happens all the time. Rossi commonly converts the alleged errors of others into proof of incredible stupidity. The basic argument as presented by Pace in the opening probably stands. We will find out. Then it’s further confused with the “recirculation pump,” which, of course, might be able to increase flow to what was claimed. It could make the flow whatever they want; problem is, it could also flood the system, possibly causing all the measurements to become meaningless.

The Expert Report. There are two expert reports by Smith. The second one was issued after inspecting the facility. Rossi is referring to the second, supplemental report. This is the cited page.

The issue is that just next to ’32 l/h’ it says ’02 bar’. The reason is that any pump’s capacity depends on the pressure it needs to overcome to pump the water, the same way as the flow of air you can blow out of your mouth depends on how open it is. Now, 2 bars correspond to the pressure under 20 meters of water, which is way beyond the pressure in the E-Cat plant, and the pumps’ capacity in the actual situation was therefore much larger because the pressure on the pumps was about 1/10 of bar.

Mats here loses attribution. Is this his own explanation, or is it Rossi’s? This is definitely Rossi’s argument, but is treated as fact by Lewan. If Lewan were retaining journalistic reserve, this would be very obvious to him, trained journalists simply don’t do this.

This is a misleading explanation. Mats is treating this pump as “any pump.” (Following Rossi; this is what has often happened, Rossi gives an explanation that seems plausible on first impression to some observer, and it is then presented by the observer to others as fact. Happened, very obviously, in the Lugano report.)

It is not just “any pump,” it is a metering pump, designed to deliver a measured “dose,” and it is correct that the rating on the label is not maximum flow, per se, but more likely maximum metering setting. Apparently at low pressure, these pumps may be inaccurate, probably due to leakage in the internal flow regulators. This leakage can even cause high variation from the “stated flow,” which is what the pump reads on its display. However, that high variation is probably not at maximum setting, but at much lower flow settings. It doesn’t seem plausible that at low pressure, as described, the flow error would be anywhere near as high as Rossi claims. However, the proof would be in experiment. It is possible that someone will obtain direct manufacturer information, the manuals are vague on the issue. Bottom line, these pumps were not intended to operate accurately at such low pressure.

[Great minds think alike. There is, as linked above, a project to measure the actual capacity of the pump.]

I have a beginning look at this in the post Pumped up or Stupid Mistake.

In a comment there, there is an estimate from published data on the pump of a possible 20% increase in rate at 0 bar. I do not consider any of this definitive, but the matter is, quite simply, not as Rossi presents it.

“Here comes the comic aspect. At the trial, you cannot bring documents that you haven’t produced during the discovery phase so I would have needed to explain to the jury, which was not composed of experts on the matter, that the capacity of a pump is a function of the pressure.

Technically correct but highly misleading in this example. Lots of Rossi “facts” are like that. Depending on design, and within operating specifications, metering pumps can be quite independent of pressure. Obviously, a pump is pressure-limited, but the limit would be the force that the pump can exert on the fluid, and below that limit, it could be quite insensitive. The general principle here, as applied to a metering pump, is just plain wrong, so Rossi is either ignorant or lying, and Mats seems to have accepted this deception as fact.

Again, experiment trumps theory, always. But Rossi was using theory here to explain, not actual experiment.

I would have had to explain that the flow rate of a pump is an integral, not a number, as any intelligent engineer knows. It would have been a little difficult, albeit possible.

If Rossi had been allowed by his attorneys to present this to the jury, IH attorneys would have torn him to shreds. The flow rate is an integral? That’s nuts! Total flow is the integral of the flow rate. Rate is the differential of the total flow. And anyone who knows the mathematics of physics knows this. In the jury pool there were members who had the math background. I know the strongest weren’t selected — for other reasons.

This is not all that complicated, if presented by attorneys or experts with skill. Smith, in fact, has high communication skills, this is obvious, reading his reports and deposition. And the little piece of supposed fact here is actually irrelevant, Rossi introducing techno-confusion. He has often done it on his blog. He is someone who thinks he’s smarter than he is, and adoring fans don’t help. None of this means he doesn’t have reactors that work, but it does mean that what Rossi Says is not reliable.

“But during his deposition, Smith, after having insulted me and Penon [the independent controller], several times, saying that we were fraudsters

I don’t recall Smith saying that. Maybe someone can point it out. This is the World According to Rossi. What the evidence in the case establishes is that Rossi presents information designed to mislead. That’s not possible to deny, reviewing the case documents. I recall no claim at all that Penon was a “fraudster.” The Penon data shows anomalies, something is off, apparently. Penon was fed data by Rossi. Rossi apparently destroyed the emails. Conclude what you like. The Penon report doesn’t present the raw flowmeter data, just daily difference (i.e., calculated), and very strangely constant, with a system facing many variations. The legal point is that the report cannot be trusted, not that it was fraud. Explaining the anomalies with clear evidence could be impossible because of the spoliation.

and how can you say that with 32 l/h and 24 pumps you produce a megawatt, and so on, then he said something like ‘now I will show you the brochure of the pump, 120 pages of technical data,’ as if he wanted to show how much of an expert he was.

This is all personal fluff, imagination of the motivation of another, a motivation not actually likely for Smith, who, from his comments, could care less, he DGAF what people thought of him. Rossi doesn’t give me enough evidence to find what he’s talking about, and it’s irrelevant.  Mentioning the pump manual (not “brochure,”) would be completely normal if asked how he knew something.

Then you need to know that I have used these pumps for years and know the brochure by heart. I opened the brochure and looked at the page where I knew that the capacity was specified, and it said ‘minimum capacity at 2 bars pressure, 32 l/h.’ But in his report, Smith had written maximum capacity.

We have looked at the manual. It’s here. There is also a brochure, here.

Smith did write “maximum capacity,” but he was also clear that he was translating “Dosierleistung.” When I look that up I find “dosing capacity.” Rossi is correct that this is not literally a maximum, though ‘capacity’ implies maximum. I read the specification as the maximum setting for the pump, the maximum “stated rate.” Remember, this is a dosing pump, not a workhorse where faster is better.

“When he said this I could have reacted, asking if he had read the brochure, open it and make him read. But we preferred to remain silent, letting them being convinced that it had passed as true, just like when you have an enemy and you let him run and get himself pierced by your bayonet. I showed it to my attorney who laughed under his mustache, and we would then have brought it out at the trial. We would have destroyed them.

Rossi also apparently deceived his attorneys. Or they knew and simply liked his money. 

Actually, if this is the error he claims, this would very likely have been realized and IH simply would not have presented this in the evidentiary phase, it wasn’t a crucial part of their case, merely something very simple that could be shown and understood. However, at this point, it looks like it may not have been an error.

Because half of Smith’s report talks about this and the other half about things that are related. But the problem is—we would have won, but they would have kept the license. That’s why my lawyers told me ‘you need to tell us clearly which is your priority—getting the money or the license because listen, you won’t have both.’ And I said the license because the license has an enormous value not only in economic terms but also in technological, philosophical, and existential terms.”

And personal terms, to Rossi, who always wants to be in full control. He doesn’t really trust anyone else.

But, what do you think—didn’t they ever realize that they were wrong?

Lewan appears to be assuming Rossi is correct and a skilled engineer is wrong. It’s definitely possible, though not particularly likely. Experts make mistakes. That’s obvious. Will Lewan check these things out? This is not really difficult. I’m a blogger, not exactly a journalist, but … I might check it out further. I prefer, generally, to delegate these things to my readership — and then I will check what they find. That makes far better use of my time and l love to involve community, it’s far more fun than doing everything myself — my older habit.

I think… I’m extremely puzzled by the fact that two engineers, Murray and Smith, are so naive not to realize making errors of this kind. I cannot make conclusions because I cannot start imagining things. I can only say that they probably all thought we were fools. I think that their problem, from the beginning to the end of this affair, was just that—they underestimated the person they had in front of them enormously. I believe that they thought they could write such things without my noticing it. It’s impossible that two good engineers with excellent careers, like Murray and Smith, really can have thought that something like that was true, because if a student at the first year of engineering school takes the exam in thermodynamics and tells his professor that a pump, of which the specifications says that its minimum capacity at 2 bars is 32 l/h, has a maximum capacity of 32 l/h, he would have been sent home immediately.”

Rossi often argues like this, makes up a hypothetical situation involving something he thinks is really stupid, with a hypothetical professor, then the imaginary professor confirms his idea.

What is the 32 l/h figure? It is a dosing capacity. Can the meter dose at a rate less than that? Of course, that’s the maximum stated rate, it’s a setting, apparently, unless I’m way off here. Rossi has actually worked with these pumps, which would ordinarily create a level of respect. However, Rossi isn’t ordinary, and there are certain errors that he has made for years, in spite of them being pointed out. He takes all critique as enmity and “clownery.” He doesn’t actually consider how it might be right. He doesn’t look deeper than his own set ideas.

Continuing this, what is the maximum flow? As I read the evidence, it is the maximum set rate plus possible error under the conditions given. So, yes, it can be higher. But not much higher, as Rossi claims below. Does Rossi claim to have actually measured this? Under what conditions?

And maybe he’s right. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. His arguments, however, are not convincing to those who are careful.

Mats saw Rossi arguing against experts in that Hydro Fusion test, obviously convinced that he was right, and he has more recently made statements that show he has never understood the power measurement issue. (This was the test where Rossi later claimed to Industrial Heat that he had deliberately made the reactor fail, but not mentioning the measurement issue. So either Rossi was stuck on his own completely incorrect ideas, as appeared to Mats, or he was putting on an elaborate show to deceive Hydro Fusion — and Mats.) However it’s sliced, Rossi is often some combination of wrong and deceptive, and the deceptive part is beyond a shadow of doubt.

By the way, since you know these pumps, what capacity do they have at the actual pressure in the plant—about 0.2 bars?

“About 75 l/h.”

So he has it as double, but this is simply Rossi Says at this point. There is no other evidence that I’ve seen supporting his position. There is a statement in a brochure that these dosing pumps can, at atmospheric pressure, deliver two to three times the “stated rate.” That is interpreted by a Rossi supporter as the specified rate on the label, but that isn’t what it actually says. The real meaning is, in my opinion, not clear, but easily it could simply mean that you might have a setting of 1 l/h on the display, and an actual delivery rate two or three times that. Not necessarily at the full allowed setting, which appears to be 32 l/h.

The brochure linked above has this at the very beginning:

The gamma/L is a diaphragm-type, solenoid-driven, microprocessor based metering pump with maximum capacities to 8.4 gph (32.0 L/h) and maximum backpressures to 253 psig (17.5 bar).

So perhaps we might cut a little slack for Smith saying that the maximum capacity is 32 l/h, since the brochure actually states that. The manual does have a specification for “minimum capacity,” as Rossi claims, at 2 bar pressure. It’s a chart, not a sentence as implied, but close enough. It has this as 32 l/h at 2 bar, and 36.2 l/h at 1 bar. It is not unreasonable to extrapolate this to 0 bar (though certainly not reliable). That leads to a figure of 40.4 l/hr. However, I’m quite unclear on what “minimum capacity” means for a metering pump, because the “capacity” can obviously be lower if the pump is set lower. This kind of unclarity breeds error. Bottom line, what will one of these pumps actually deliver under the stated conditions? This is not at all difficult to measure with a bucket and a stopwatch, which is how these things are normally tested. In order to meet the 1500 kg/hour that is claimed from the flow meter, with 24 pumps, 62.5 kg/hr would be needed. A kilogram of water is close enough to a liter for these purposes.

The issue here is not the system flow rate, per se, it is whether or not the reactor pumps could deliver that flow rate. By introducing other pumps, it all gets more complicated. Had this been done openly, not a problem. But it wasn’t.

Going back in time—when did you first understand that things were not going well between you and IH?

“When I discovered that IH was making agreements with our competitors. At that point, I understood that they were trying to fill up their portfolio of intellectual property in view of litigation with us pending the huge payment they were going to have to pay. It was instinct—I had no proof, but eventually, the facts confirmed this instinctive doubt.”

He doesn’t respond with when it happened. In the timeline Chaiken constructed, the point was to show an alleged change in attitude on the part of IH. Supposedly when they got the $50 million from Woodford, IH didn’t need Rossi any more. There was no sign that IH was considering litigation with Rossi, he’s made that up. They wanted him to teach them how to make devices that worked. But they allowed him to run the Doral power sale and demonstration plant, and cooperated. The Woodford sale closed in May, 2015, after the Doral “test” had been running for about three months. In July, IH decided they needed to take a closer look, with an expert, so scheduled a visit with Vaughn and Murray, whom they had hired to manage engineering. Rossi refused to allow it, violating the Term Sheet which explicitly allowed such visits. Later, in a pleading, Rossi remarkably explained this as being because he believed Murray was a “spy.” But hadn’t Rossi already disclosed his secrets to IH? (or if there were new ones, related to new developments, i.e., Quark-X, wasn’t he obligated to disclose them?)

There was nothing about the License Agreement that didn’t allow IH to diversify. They actually were permitted to sublicense the Rossi technology, though there is no evidence that they actually disclosed it. This was all Rossi paranoia, here confirmed. Does Mats realize that?

This story has often been told by Rossi as Woodford investing because they were so impressed with the Doral plant. However, they had committed before they had seen that plant. Above, Rossi mentions a prior test that Woodford participated in. This isn’t public information, as far as I know. It may be true or not. But Woodford very clearly didn’t actually invest in Rossi technology, but in all the other stuff. That obviously enraged Rossi. He had created this, though, by being unresponsive to IH requests for assistance — if we assume that he actually had a real technology. Otherwise this is all smokescreen, fluff.

And later, on January 8, 2016, there was a meeting in Miami between you, Darden and the lawyers. What can you say about that meeting?

“Nothing, because it was a meeting between lawyers and covered by NDA.”

Implausible, though not impossible. A party may disclose their meeting with lawyers. The lawyers may not disclose it. But there might have been special conditions. We do know what conflict existed at that point, there are documents. Contrary to common Rossi claims, it simply is not true that IH did not complain “until it was time to pay.” They informed Rossi long before “time to pay,” according to his demand, that they did not consider Doral was the GPT, nor had they consented to Penon as ERV for a GPT there. Rossi actually filed the lawsuit a day prematurely, the payment was not yet late. But he did know they wouldn’t pay.

Now, there’s much more to comment, but leaving all this behind, what are your plans now?

And Rossi goes on to give his plans for starting “industrialization” of products. I’m not commenting on that. I prefer to comment where I have knowledge.

[…]

Finally—what happened to your hair?

Again, that’s Rossi’s private business. As I wrote in the blog about the trial, his wig looked normal and was attractive. It’s unfortunate that some have made light of it, making some remarks about “false hair” as if it means something about his character. That is aggressively and gratuitously rude, and it saddens me to see it.

When Rossi filed the lawsuit against IH I had to take a step back and look at all possible explanations. I was and have been open to the possibility that Rossi was involved in fraud and conspiracy. But during the discovery phase of the litigation, it became obvious that the defense couldn’t produce any convincing evidence for this hypothesis.

Mats, this is preposterous. What you have done is to set up a very narrow definition of “fraud.” Rossi engaged in fraudulent representation. The evidence is overwhelming, the situation is far from what you say, which is obviously not based on an actual examination of evidence, but on looking for something to leap out at you about fake data. There are problems with the data, none of which rise to the level of clear fraud. That’s not the core problem. The core is that what Rossi says cannot be trusted.

All technical arguments that were put forward were hollow and easily torn apart by people with engineering training.

You are focusing on technical arguments while you have a shallow knowledge of them. Your overall assessment is not based on your personal discussion with unbiased people who have no axe to grind, but on conversations in highly biased environments.

Yet, these arguments were continuously repeated by a number of people, possibly related to IH, at various forums.

There is only one person “related to IH” who has discussed this affair, and that is Dewey Weaver, who becomes a figure in the case, as an IH investor and contractor. Weaver is not among those with high engineering knowledge who have discussed the technical arguments. Weaver made highly personal arguments based on his personal and direct knowledge of Rossi and the people and the history of the relationship, not technical arguments.

Mats, it looks like you have swallowed Sifferkoll’s obviously paranoid conspiracy theory. Sifferkoll has claimed that various people have been paid to attack Rossi. There isn’t a shred of evidence of that; Sifferkooll puts together random shreds of connections, thinking, for example, that because Eric Walker was affiliated with the Baha’i faith, there is a “fundamentalist” religious conspiracy to suppress LENR (and he’s made the same argument about me, because I’m Muslim) and he’s also claimed that I’m paid to write against Rossi, when my limited funding, covering expenses, came from a source completely unrelated to Industrial Heat and Rossi, and came with no strings attached, it was actually granted for writing about Wikipedia process — and lately I’ve been crowd-funded, that’s how I went to Miami for the trial.

None of my sources have been related to Industrial Heat. This is all paranoia, very similar to Rossi himself.

Since there was no way to discuss them in a serious way I early decided to stay away from such discussions, also closing the comment feature on this blog, yet I admire a few individuals, mostly anonymous, who continued to fight for what they considered to be the truth in those discussions.

Foolish decision, allowing you to remain ignorant. Yes, the ordinary blogs can be a mess, but this one was created to set up coherent discussions, far deeper content. It takes little courage, Mats, to be an “anonymous fighter for truth,” because there is no responsibility.

You know that I’m a real and known person, we had personal history, and I’m responsible for what I write. I created Wikiversity resources years ago so that serious writing could be done, including serious discussions. What you are thinking of as “truth,” unfortunately, is mostly conspiracy theory. There are some anonymous writers who are dedicated to objective analysis, but …. you have not been paying attention, your activity has mostly — or entirely — been on E-Cat World, which is explicitly Planet Rossi, contrary opinion is often banned. I’ve been allowed to post there, to be sure, but that’s fairly unusual (Thanks, Frank!). The actual IH voice, even though he’s not official, at least the connection is real, Dewey Weaver, is apparently not free to comment there.

I am confident that if Rossi were really involved in fraud, evidence for that would have been found during the time—a year and a half—since IH claimed to have started to be suspicious about Rossi.

Mats, you have not considered most of the evidence of fraudulent representation. You have not done your own analyses, looking for the balance, the preponderance of evidence. You may be confident, but your confidence is rooted in ignorance, sorry to say. I’m truly disappointed, I did expect better of you.

Looking back and noting that no such evidence was found, while hollow arguments have been shouted out loud, I have very little doubt that the E-Cat technology is real and that the one-year test was a clear success of a world changing technology, producing 1 MW of heat without emissions, from small amounts of harmless fuel at a COP of about 80 for a whole year!

You have studied neither the evidence in the case — it is voluminous — nor the arguments, yet you dismiss them as hollow. Some arguments are, indeed, hollow. Which ones? You just presented some arguments from Rossi, some of which were hollow. You’ve lost it, Mats.

Noting this I have also started investigating the timing for relaunching the energy conference I proposed in 2016—the New Energy World Symposium, addressing the consequences of LENR based technologies for industry, society, and finance.

Now the fun can start!

Good luck. I won’t be there. LENR technology isn’t ready, we are still at the basic science level. That’s where I’ll be, in Texas, at Texas Tech where crucial heat/helium research is being done, and at ICCF-21, which was planned to be hosted by IH in North Carolina, but because of the lawsuit, they found it necessary to withdraw, and I’m in contact with possible organizers, I’m hoping that some support can be found.

Rossi is an enemy of LENR research, sucking the life out of it. His attitude about investment in alternatives betrays his real position, he is anti-science and anti-research, except for his own.

And you are helping promote this. If you decide to look deeper, start the conversation, you would be welcome.

§

Documents:

The document defining the terms of the settlement.

Information I have, so far, indicates that this is not yet fully signed.

Rossi’s notes addressing the Expert Report by Rick Smith.

Rossi’s notes regarding arguments raised by Joseph A. Murray.

§

Note: All comments to this post will need to be confirmed by me.

So far, all fawning praise. If that’s what you like, you are welcome to it. You had some experts, people with actual knowledge, commenting before. You insulted them.

I have commented on the Lewan post, citing this page. The comment was made at July 20, 2017 at 18:33 and is awaiting moderator approval. (I draw no conclusions from the delay. No additional comments have been accepted since then.)

Update

July 24, 2017: The comment is still awaiting moderation. This is how it appears to me now.

Abd ulRahman Lomax July 20, 2017 at 18:33

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

for an alternate point of view, this interview is studied at http://coldfusioncommunity.net/mats-lewan-interview/

There is a newer comment approved at July 23, 2017 at 06:06.

It is August 20. Still awaiting moderation.

April 1, 2019.

The comment never appeared. I looked at this today because it came up in another comment. There have been a total of 24 comments approved. My comment was left, I infer from the time of this post, on July 18, 2017. There were nine fawning comments left that day. Most comments continued to be full of praise for the interview, except those I cover below, plus the most recent comments were not on that post, but on other issues.

truthseeking2015 July 19, 2017 at 03:44

I wish Mr. Rossi had not used the “failed to provide evidence” languaje, that is known to be the kind of languaje of people witholding truth.

I will agree, particularly that there were mountains of evidence provided under oath in discovery in this case, and other evidence (such as Rossi emails) attested as authentic with no challenge. “No evidence” is an obvious falsehood, and Lewan personally confirms this deception. Quoting him:

I am confident that if Rossi were really involved in fraud, evidence for that would have been found during the time—a year and a half—since IH claimed to have started to be suspicious about Rossi. Looking back and noting that no such evidence was found [. . . ]

To maintain that position requires ignoring a veritable mountain of evidence. Now, in a trial, it will all be presented to a jury, but if there was no evidence, the IH countersuit would have been dismissed. Lewan is ignorant of legal process and of the facts of the case, and does not appear to have read the evidence, he reacted from . . . I don’t know what? Rossi’s baby face?

I have to say that the whole process of the lawsuit left me with the impression Mr. Rossi was not an honest person, in spite that it also left me with the impression that the persons behind IH are also not honest.

A lack of honesty on the part of Rossi was obvious from many Rossi documents, he admitted in one to deceiving his prior associates at HydroFusion. The “independent customer” in Doral was nothing other than Rossi, hiding under a trust created by Rossi’s attorney and entirely managed and controlled by Rossi. That’s only part of it! This was not denied by Rossi and his attorneys

Hence, the fact that they both preferred to settle than submit them to the proverbial fecal matter flinging show, confirms me they both preferred to hide things than putting all it to public light.

I don’t see that IH settled to hide things. They had never wanted the lawsuit, Rossi forced it. They then defended themselves. There were about nine attorneys in that courtroom, suppose we figure $1000 per day per attorney. (I think that is conservative. So $9000 per day. The trial was estimated to be five weeks. Plus it was taking up the time of the CEO of Cherokee Limited Partners, a $2.2 billion corporation. The costs of trial then may be estimated very conservatively at $225,000. IH damages would be technically limited, they could not prove, my guess, that there had been fraud in the Validation Test in Italy, though it all stank. They could not recover, then, the $11.5 million they had paid Rossi, even if the technology was worthless (as they appear to have concluded, or they would not have settled as they did). They could readily claim damages for the expenses of the move to Doral and other related expenses they paid. But recovering this could have been problematic. Nobody was paying them to “put it all to public light.” I’m not sure that I’d have chosen as they did, but what I saw in that courtroom was that everyone was happy, certainly the attorneys on both sides were happy! So they should fight it out in court so that “truthseeking2015“, anonymous, sees the shitstorm he wants? If TruthSeeking loves and seeks the truth, why does he or she (very unlikely “she’) hide behind anonymity?

In the direction of the choice they made, they may have believed that the world was now protected from Rossi claims, because of all the evidence that became public in that trial. I agree, it is all there to be seen by anyone who is considering investment in Rossi technology, how he treats his investors.

And if an investor wants to believe the various conspiracy theories, well, a fool and his money are soon parted, one way or another. Rossi did commit perjury, my opinion, but someone would have to convince prosecutors in Florida to spent their time investigating this. It’s not worth my time, and I have no desire to beat the old man with sticks. I actually like him (as have most who have met him.) But let’s put it this way. He is an inventor, an inventor of fantastic stories, that he embellishes in great detail, and about which he puts on shows that interest some, even many.

The only thing that I find interesting now about this settlement release is the accompanying notes of Rossi. No one would write such detailed notes if had no a real machine working. This opened for me a slight chance that, after all, Mr. Rossi does has something working as he says. I will not hold my breath, but at least this gives me a reason to keep an eye on whatever Mr. Rossi has on schedule.

“TruthSeeking” will not find the truth using the methods of inference employed. Rossi would have created extensive notes for his attorneys, already. Rossi did not have a “real machine working,” at least not, for sure, generating a megawatt. This was always a problem. Since 2011, when Rossi announced that his megawatt reactor was available for sale, many noted that a 20 kW reactor would be far more useful and far easier to test. The megawatt reactor was just a pile of 20 kW reactors. Why was it made so complicated? In any case, Rossi’s expert agreed with the IH expert, that if no heat exchanger were built that could dissipate that kind of power, the warehouse would have reached fatal temperature levels internally. The temperature of the warehouse is a rough calorimeter. Rossi gives completely bogus arguments on Lewan’s blog post. And if anyone doubts that, I suggest asking for clarification. This is not marginal. Had the case gone to trial, Rossi would have been exposed to a prosecution for perjury, a criminal offense. The evidence, far from being non-existent, as Lewan claimed, was abundant. Hiding a megawatt of power is very difficult!

Marijuana growers were busted, many times, because they tried to hide much less power, in the apartments and other places where they grew the plant under artificial lights, perhaps 20 – 30 kW. They would stand out like a sore thumb with infrared imaging devices.

(There is a rumor that IH had IR satellite data, but did not use it because of difficulties with chain-of-custody issues. I should ask, actually. The Settlement Agreement did not require them to not comment, and Rossi certainly commented!)

Peter Metz July 20, 2017 at 17:18

“The argument, which was brought up in the Expert Report by engineer Rick A. Smith, was based on an observation that on the name plate of the pump it said ’32 l/h.’ In his report, Smith concluded that this was the maximum capacity of the pump, and multiplying 32×24 you get 768 l/h which, if evaporated, only consumes 482 kW—less than half of a megawatt. ”

This has been very extensively discussed on Lenr-Forum, and a Rossi supporter actually tested a pump. However, this is typical for Lenr-Forum. There is no way to easily search for the final report.

This is all, however, a red herring. Yes, it was presented in the opening arguments by IH. It was one of the easiest arguments to understand, as presented. Was the engineer correct? Rossi’s story about this requires that he use the pumps to the limit of their capacity, to a level not guaranteed, at best. Apparently there were also only 18 units functioning by the end of the “test.” (So the full capacity would be much smaller). Further, Rossi claimed to be operating much or most of the time in “self-sustain mode,” with no power input. With no power input the only control would be pump rate. Would you operate a steam reactor, depending on cooling to prevent runaway, pushing the pumps to the limit? I’ll discuss this more if someone finds the report.

But, like the issue of the flow meter (crucial to Rossi’s measurements), equipment was used outside of prudent operating ranges, creating many opportunities for error or misinterpretation. Those were metering pumps. What were the settings? They were not free-run pumps that would pump whatever depending on power input and pressure. It’s been some time since I looked at the manual, but my sense is that 32 l/hr is the maximum setting!

Okay, I never checked this and I don’t recall anyone discussing this aspect. The pump manual specifications page is here. The pump is the gamma L 0232. That has a rated capacity per stroke (full length, I assume) of 2.96 ml at back pressure 2 bar, and 3.35 ml at 1 bar. 0 bar is unreasonable, but using that, I’d estimate single stroke capacity at 0 bar of 3.74 ml. The maximum stroke rate is 180 strokes per minute (see. p. 19.) That yields a maximum pump rate at 0 bar of 40 liters per hour. The label was 32 liters per hour, at 2 bar. Using the 2 bar figure, it works out to 32 liters per hour. Yes. That is the maximum setting!

The Rossi arguments on this are insane. The pump capacity will indeed vary with pressure, but only a little. It’s a metering pump! Modifying the argument to consider this small variation, 24 pumps could only cool by evaporation 600 kW. If the reactors were actually producing a megawatt as claimed, they would have failed from overheating (perhaps spectacularly!). Those pumps did not have enough capacity. 400 kW uncooled in a small space, it would heat very rapidly.

And if we consider the claims that the  plant was still producing a megawatt with only 18 units operating, the capacity is even smaller, 450 kW.

I cannot seem to find this in the Smith Expert Report and elsewhere. It’s probably my mistake but I’ve looked now including the reports and depositions including Murray’s. I know this was discussed on the blogs but this specially says Expert Report by Rick A. Smith and Rossi seems think IH’s defense hinges entirely on this so it’s important to me that this gets verified including the context in which it was stated. A page number or other link would be helpful. Thanks.

This was a piece of the IH defense, not necessarily the core of it. Here is the IH opening argument (from the second presentation). (It followed the Rossi argument.)

I will remind readers that these are both attorney arguments. They are not testimony under oath, this is a framing the attorneys are allowed to give, a story that the jurors might use to place the evidence they will see in the trial itself. While that evidence has generally been disclosed, not all of it is public, only what was asserted in connection with various pleadings and motions was published. The pump issue is brought up on p. 141. It is given a few words, in a relatively long statement. This is far from the core of their defense. Rossi, however, is focusing on what he thinks he can attack, and perhaps he can.

Peter Metz July 20, 2017 at 17:38

OK. I found it. It’s in the Supplemental Report produced by Smith, report page 16.

Link: http://coldfusioncommunity.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/0235.10_Exhibit_10.pdf#page=16 [added the page link –Abd]

In the report the name plate says ‘DOSIERLEISTUNG 32l/h’ which Smith translates to ‘dosing capacity or maximum flow.’ This clearly differs from the pump guide which states minimum flow. Why Smith, presumably an expert on pumps, made this translation which conflicts with the manual we can only guess. It clearly invalidates this part of Smiths analysis if the pump guide is correct. I will also add that it seems to me Rossi is overstating his case here that the entire Smith Report depends on this analysis.

Sorry for the confusion.

The expert, Smith, did overlook the pressure specification. What the actual operating pressure was is unclear. If the reactor is producing steam, this will create pressure from resistance to flow in the system, up to the condenser. So 0 bar is unreasonable. But perhaps it was less than 2 bar, so perhaps Smith erred in figuring maximum capacity, but his calculation was based on the full complement of 24 pumps operating, when only pumps feeding the active reactors would be relevant with 18 pumps operating. The substance of this part of his report stands in spite of the possible error, not to mention the rest.

What I assume is that Smith had in mind that these were metering pumps, with the “maximum capacity” being full stroke at the maximum rate. The difference with pressure is small. So he was basically correct. And Metz is also correct that Rossi, even if we accept the error, was drastically overstating his case. And Lewan does not notice any of this, or if he does, keeps his mouth shut. I see no sign that Lewan has understood any of these issues.

Dan Peter August 9, 2017 at 22:52

DEar Mats, Why don’t you interview the other part

Mats Lewan August 9, 2017 at 23:03

Dan, Darden promised me an interview 2 years ago. I have asked him several times to do it, and I also asked JT Vaughn, but they never answered my emails or phone calls. Last time I asked was just a few weeks ago. No answer.

If I read what Mats had written, I’d decline an interview also. Mats rejected commentary from Dewey Weaver, an IH insider. Getting an interview with the officers of a multi-billion dollar corporation is not easy. He would have other ways of obtaining response.  For example, I was at the trial, and was, before that, very familiar with the evidence, so I knew what I was seeing. I’ve been interviewed by Ruby Carat for her podcast series. And if I thought that IH should issue a statement, I could get the message to them., there are open channels. Generally, they have no interest in internet debates. Dewey shows up sometimes in them. He is generally representing himself, but, more privately, he sometimes speaks for IH.

Mats has never involved himself with the general CMNS community, it is all Rossi this and Rossi that. Indeed, that IH engaged with the full cold fusion community is what enraged Rossi. He thought of that whole community as his “competitors.” It’s obvious in the interview.

Rossi is not and has never been a scientist, and his interest is not benefit for humanity, but rather for his personal goals. Mats has seen plenty that would enable him to understand this, including the HydroFusion deception. Has he read what Rossi wrote about that? Here, a free gift, Rossi’s email, if he gets as far as reading this. Mats was at that test, it is covered in his book, pp 236-243. Either Rossi lied to Darden and Vaughn, or to Mats and HydroFusion, or both. Take your pick.

 

 

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