All commercially available (COTS) nickel powder comes in batches in a very limited size range. For example, we can buy 10 nanometer powder up to 10 micron powder. I have not seen a COTS powder come in a wide mixture of sizes. In LENR, using the widest range of sized in nickel powder is important.
In his patent, Rossi says that he preprocesses the COTS powder so that the COTS powder is transformed into a wide mix of sizes from 1 to 100 microns. It is my estimation that many smaller sizes are produced by this sintering based preprocessing but Rossi has never felt the inclination of documenting the very smallest particle fragments.. This randomization of nickel powder sizes is important because of the way nanoplasmonics works. All open Rossi replications use COTS powder characterized by a very limited size range and I believe that this is way most replication that we know of have limited success. There is a rule in nanoplasmonics that the most power is produced by a wide size distribution in the size of the nickel particles. In other words, a mixture of a very small particle and a very large particle will produce the most EMF power. If a replicator wants to see good results, they are well advised to use the widest sized nickel particle mix. For background on how particles work in nanoplasmonics, see http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.1657.pdf Plasmonics with a twist: taming optical tornadoes on the nanoscale On page 15, the details about particle size range is discussed: 12.5. Molding the river of light in vortex nanogear transmissions
