Invited guests attended several demonstrations in
Bologna in 2011. According to
Phys.org (11 August 2011), the demonstrations held from January to April 2011 had several flaws that compromised their credibility and Rossi had refused to perform tests that could verify his claims.
University of Bologna researchers have attended some E-Cat demonstrations, but only as observers. On 5 November 2011, the University of Bologna clarified that its researchers had not been involved in the demonstrations and that none of those took place at the university. Rossi had signed a contract with the university, but the contract was terminated and no research was done because Rossi did not make the first payment. Skeptic Ian Bryce speculated that the E-Cat was misconnected during demonstrations, and that the power attributed to fusion is supplied to the device through the earth wire.
Dick Smith offered Rossi one million dollars to demonstrate that the E-Cat system worked as claimed, while the power through the earth wire was also being measured, which Rossi refused. Peter Thieberger, a senior physicist at
Brookhaven National Laboratory, said it would be very difficult for this misconnection to happen by accident and that the issue could only be cleared with a fully independent test. After working with Rossi, Sergio Focardi concluded that
nuclear fusion reactions happen inside the Energy Catalyzer. Focardi states that the nuclear process is facilitated by a secret additive, known only by Rossi and not by him. According to Focardi, the process would be much less intense without this additive. Rossi and Focardi are then reported to have been unable to find a peer-reviewed
scientific journal that would publish their paper describing how they claim the Energy Catalyzer operates. Their paper appears only in Rossi's self-published blog,
Journal of Nuclear Physics. In May 2013 a non-peer-reviewed paper describing "results obtained from evaluations of the operation of the E-Cat HT in two test runs" was submitted to the
arXiv digital archive. Although the authors of the paper wrote that they were not in control of all of the aspects of the process, they concluded that, even by the most conservative of measurements, the device produced excess heat with a resulting energy density that was at least one order of magnitude, and possibly several, higher than any other conventional energy source. The test was partly funded by the Swedish energy research consortium, Elforsk. Elforsk stated on their website that the results were very remarkable, but that it was highly questionable to speculate whether nuclear transformation had occurred when no access had been provided to the reactants. In a response to the original manuscript archived on arXiv, commentators criticized the testing as not truly independent, described the report as having "characteristics more typically found in pseudo‐scientific texts", and stated that "The authors seem to jump to conclusions fitting pre‐conceived ideas where alternative explanations are possible." Astrophysicist
Ethan Siegel commented at
ScienceBlogs saying Rossi did not allow the reactants or products to be measured on this occasion. In the previous tests there were not enough and (the only two nickel
isotopes which can fuse with hydrogen), at 3.6% and 0.9% respectively, in the reactants to explain the 10% copper output; these isotope levels are typical of natural copper, rather than of fusion by-product. According to Siegel, Rossi also refused to unplug the machine while it was operating despite it being an easy way to surreptitiously power the device. He also added that the supposedly independent testers had to rely on data supplied by Rossi. In October 2014 a non-peer-reviewed paper by the same authors as the May 2013 report describes results from evaluations in March 2014 of an upgraded version of the E-Cat which runs at higher temperatures. Unlike previous demonstrations, the test was carried out with monitoring equipment and in a laboratory not supplied by Rossi, and was run over an extended duration (32 days). However, as with the previous report, the authors were not in full control of the process; Rossi intervened during the insertion of the fuel charge, start up of the reactor, shut down of the reactor, and extraction of the spent fuel. Overall, the total excess heat measured was calculated to be well beyond that possible by any conventional, non-nuclear source. In this report, they present analyses of samples of spent fuel, concluding from the isotopes found that "nuclear reactions are therefore indicated to be present in the run process, which however is hard to reconcile with the fact that no radioactivity was detected outside the reactor during the run." Following fuel and ash isotopic analysis, the authors speculate as to isotopes of especially
nickel and
lithium being part of the reaction, in particular transmutation of and to , and from to through some unknown process. Particle physicist Tommaso Dorigo commented on the 2014 test, called the isotopic measurements "startling" but he expressed deep concern about Rossi being involved in collecting the spent fuel, that the testers may have "overlooked some simple trick" and that "given the extraordinary nature of the claim… this constitutes a major flaw, which totally invalidates any conclusions one might otherwise draw." Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel was highly critical of the test, stating that the testers were not independent, that Rossi could have tampered with the fuel samples, that the 'open calorimeter' setup used was inappropriate, and that "it’s relatively easy to fake the amount of energy being drawn through a power cord if there is a hookup to an external source." On 31 January 2019, Rossi's company released a new product (E-Cat SK) via live video stream. The product is reported as currently available to be leased by factories as a source of heat. After viewing the video,
Tom Casten noted that "The E-Cat demonstration makes giant claims of scientific breakthroughs with no validation". Similarly, the Australian physicist and aerospace engineer Ian Bryce noted that, in the video demonstration, the "inputs, outputs, and measurement points are not defined, making the results largely meaningless", that the nuclear reaction purportedly occurring within the E-Cat SK would "release much deadly radiation. Yet the meters show zero ionizing radiation and no neutrons. Fortunate for the bystanders!" and concludes, regarding Rossi's E-Cat cold fusion device, "there is no real doubt about it being a fake". == Reactions to the claims ==