Edmund Storms said:
Rossi was using a nickel catalyst to explore ways of making a fuel by combining hydrogen and carbon monoxide and apparently, observed quite by accident, that his [apparatus] was making extra energy. So then he explored it from that point of view and, apparently, over a year or two, amplified the effect.
He’s exploring the gas loading area of the field. This is also a region, a method used in the heavy water, or the heavy hydrogen, system. But in this case, it was light hydrogen, ordinary hydrogen and nickel and what happens is quite amazing.
You create the right conditions in the nickel, and he has a secret method for doing that, and all you do is add hydrogen to it and it makes huge amounts of energy based upon a nuclear reaction.”
Using this info as a clue to narrow the possible Rossi secret catalysts as follows:
Background
In order to convert hydrogen and carbon monoxide to methane, the preferred set of catalytic materials for this purpose is fairly small. These materials are transition metals (particularly nickel, cobalt, osmium, iridium, rhodium, ruthenium and rhenium) typically coated on metal oxide supports. In the case of nickel and cobalt, the metal is present in a relatively high concentration on the support due to a lower activity level (>5 wt-%), while the more active but much more expensive ruthenium and rhodium catalysts use lower levels of metals (<1 wt-%).
A new nano-particle based technology is replacing substrate supports, where two or more types of pure nano-particles are mixed. This mixture is either configured in a bed or is coated on the walls of tubes within a reactor.
Application
These “spill over” catalyst materials are in the platinum family: osmium, iridium, rhodium, ruthenium and rhenium are most reactive in a hydrogen reforming roll (hydrogenolysis) and the ones that I would look at to identify the Rossi secret catalyst. It is of interest to note that the carbon oxides can also readily be converted to methane over the same catalyst and conditions described for the hydrogenolysis reaction. This would have been Rossi’s goal in his survey of biofuel forming technologies. Rossi would have explored ways of making a fuel by combining hydrogen and carbon monoxide using these materials in combination with nickel.
In this set of platinum family of materials, the material that is the most reactive in a hydrogen reforming roll (hydrogenolysis) and the one that I would look at first as the Rossi secret catalyst is ruthenium.
The Work Function of ruthenium is 4.71eV
There are reports that two elements are used besides nickel in the Rossi reactor and are secret. This second material might be a catalytic promoter. Both Barium (work function: 2.11) and/or Cesium (work function: 1.81) are used as catalytic promoters to increase the effects of ruthenium in a hydrogen environment by increasing electron density on the surface of the catalyst.
Since Rossi would be using less than one hundredth of a gram of this platinum family based precious metal catalytic promoter, its cost per unit would be minimal.
Ruthenium is seldom used in biorefining because its effectiveness is reduced by impurities in the hydrogen feed stock. In the Rossi reactor the hydrogen feed stock is very pure so this limitation is not a problem.
PS: rhenium is identical in its chemistry to technetium but it’s not radioactive.