Connect-the-dots... and ... the devil is in the details... (for those who are not accustomed to weekend postings on vortex, the following account may be partly factual, partly wild guesswork, and partly attempted cynical humor).
The "secret sauce" of Andrea Rossi, which is the identity of the ingredient(s) besides nickel which makes his reaction more robust than the others in the progression ... going back to Piantelli and Thermacore, circa 1991, has been a subject of intrigue since his original demonstration. IOW in the early 1990's substantial thermal gain was seen or claimed with Ni-H reactors - in the tens of watts level at low COP, but twenty years later - something which Andrea Rossi added to the nickel, perhaps inadvertently, allowed a more robust gain, going into the kilowatt level. More recently, many including the geniuses at NASA have suspected that SPP was the key to understanding... but SPP (surface plasmon polaritons) requires photon emission. Things did not add up. BTW - up until the time of his 2011 demo, Rossi was paying his bills by working as a metal fabricator in New Hampshire (basically copper pipe fabrication, aka: plumber). This is no secret and he admits it on his blog. In retrospect, what was once a secret is that Rossi's breakthrough was probably always there, "in plain view", as they say. Hidden in plain view - it is almost laughable in the continuing Rossi saga. The next devilish dot to connect: P or phosphorous or "Phos". Every good plumber uses phosphorus self-fluxing alloy, called Phos, since the element P is an extremely reactive nonmetallic (metalloid) element, a pentavalent pnictogen, a compound of which was once called "lucifer's powder" but which is seldom mentioned as a reactant in LENR. Phosphorus is the element which allows cigarettes to be lit with matches, and allows SPP to be lit in a reactor. Phosphorescence is the general term for a light-emitting material. That lack of prior mention in the LENR field is why P could have remained Rossi's "secret" for so long, not to mention that Rossi himself was probably unaware of this detail until sometime near the end of 2012. A strange design "feature" of E-Cat, which has been noted from the early days of Rossi is his crude (appearance) copper reactors which were brazed in a way which leaves a lot of residue near the joint. This residue turns black, and gives the appearance of crude craftsmanship - but in fact, it is nearly impossible to braze good joints that do not look this way since you risk a leak when you go for pretty. Phosphorus-containing brazing alloys are used for this in many applications as a substitute for welding, since they are self-fluxing, when joining copper to copper, making strong joints at minimal cost. Self-fluxing phosphorus alloys when in contact with nickel produce nickel phosphides. Paper of interest: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja403440e Anyway, the first form of elemental phosphorus to be produced by alchemists and magicians in the Middle Ages was white phosphorus, aka magician's dust, which can explode violently, and emits a faint glow upon exposure to air, and was called lucifer's powder, referring to the light-bearer of Gnostic tradition. Finally there is the dot called "Chemiluminescence" of which nickel phosphide is a prime candidate, which will in fact provide the photons which are required for SPP. If the above "connect-the-dots" scenario is correct, then now we know the identity of Rossi's secret sauce = Phos. And the curious thing is that Rossi may not have realized the secret himself until later. This can explain why he may have had so much trouble in replicating the device for observers in early 2012 - since if he tried to make his reactor look pretty for the guests, by eliminating the flux from the brazed joints; but in so doing, Rossi probably also eliminated the phosphorus which bleeds into the inner wall; and it took him some time to figure out the problem. Good joints equals no gain. Nowadays he probably adds "Phos," which he orders from Bellman, directly to the nickel so that he does not have to worry about his sloppy brazing technique as the secret sauce ... http://products.bellmanmelcor.com/viewitems/copper-phosphorous-brazing-alloy s-and-preforms/copper-phosphorous-brazing-alloys ...or else, Andrea is getting his practical magic direct from Lucifer ... Poser: why is Lucifer called the "dark side" ?
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