E-Cat QX 2018: A one-centimetre reactor in Stockholm

By GAIA Redaktion 15 May 2018

E-Cat QX 2018: A one-centimetre reactor in Stockholm

Between 2011 and 2018 the E-Cat story took many turns. The editors of the NET-Journal visited Andrea Rossi in Bologna in July 2011, saw a 1-megawatt plant there and organised their own E-Cat congress in Zurich in 2012. Licences for Switzerland and Germany were agreed – and then unwound again when Rossi accepted an offer from a US group and moved to the USA. That collaboration broke down in 2016.

The Quark X

After that, Rossi concentrated on a much smaller device: the E-Cat QuarkX, or QX for short. The actual reactor sat in a pencil-thin tube about one centimetre long and was supposed to deliver around 20 watts of heat. Its advantage, according to Rossi: it could be combined in any number, switched on and off at will, and could produce heat, light and electricity.

On 24 November 2017 Rossi demonstrated the QX in Stockholm to around 70 scientists and business representatives, with the Swedish technology journalist Mats Lewan as moderator. The heat output was calculated from the radiation temperature using a spectrometer and compared with the electrical input power. Parts of the reactor were kept secret.

Big numbers

In 2018 impressive figures were circulating around the QX:

a coefficient of performance (COP) of at least 50 to 1, according to supporters even around 500 to 1
operating temperatures of 2,300 degrees, later allegedly up to 12,700 kelvin
industrialisation with robots from ABB, and a possible stock market flotation

Licence sales were not planned for the time being, it was said.

Assessment

Stockholm was a demonstration, not an independent test: the measuring method was indirect and the set-up partly secret. One detail is missing from the NET-Journal’s reporting at the time but belongs to the overall picture: in 2016 the former US partner Industrial Heat stated publicly that, after more than three years of its own work, it had been unable to reproduce the claimed E-Cat results. Rossi disputed this; a lawsuit followed, which ended in a settlement.