This is an excellent video in which Bernard Haisch explains the extraction of ZPE via Casimir cavities. You may not be able to fully grasp the way this could work wrt the Rossi E-Cat, unless you watch the entire video and then apply the alternative details suggested below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5IAugkmNso The patent that he and Moddel received describes one particular way to extract ZPE, but the experiments they performed were not successful. Why not? I think that they used the wrong gas medium - noble gases. Haisch says that these gases are preferable, when in fact they are counter-indicated, particularly for manipulating the Lamb shift along with the Casimir force. Had they used hydrogen in such a way that spillover could have been happened at the same time as sequential Casimir cavity filling/refilling, then IMO they would have been successful. I think it is a reasonable suggestion that this is precisely what Andrea Rossi has done in his reactor by filling a tube with a "critical mass" of Casimir cavities, combined with a spillover catalyst, such that dense hydrogen is continually and sequentially condensed and expanded in cavities to give off heat in a continuous flux. He does this by providing a travelling wave in pressurized hydrogen around a phase change in the catalyst. The catalyst could be zirconia, and there has been recent mention (on the Italian blog) of the Rossi tube containing two grams of nickel nanopowder and one kilogram of zirconia. Perhaps that is a guess, based on Arata/Takahashi/Kitamura. Or perhaps it is right-on. Zirconia is well-known to have an extremely pronounced phase-change in the range of 350C and overcoming that problem is why it took the 'Bloom Box' and other SOFC devices so long to get to market. Now the 'problem' becomes a 'feature'. The second part of the equation, which can explain everything which has been seen in the Bologna demo, and other claims - is that in so doing, the Rossi active material is locally "depleted" in a way that allows secondary nuclear reactions to happen in a novel way. Since the nuclear (weak force, or decay) reactions happen because of location in an energy depleted "space" there is little radioactivity, and the other normal indicia of standard nuclear reactions, like gammas are strongly diminished. IOW - the nuclear reactions which are seen in the Rossi device, and mistakenly thought to be the active means for gain - are instead a by-product, and a secondary effect of the previous extraction energy via ZPE. Jones
