Andrea Rossi is all over the map now with his E-Cat plans. We have been learning about plans for barrel-sized 1 MW plants; now there’s something else in the works. Rossi said yesterday, “We will test soon reactors very small (2-300 watts of power). For the future, not for short term sales.” He clarified later that he meant 200-300 W.
I’m not sure what the best applications would be for 200-300 watts of heat — but there are plenty of electronic devices that could use those kinds of power levels. Of course in that case you would have to find a very efficient way to convert the heat to electricity, and it would have to be direct conversion to make sense at those levels. Leonardo is apparently working in that area.
By last report, Andrea Rossi said that Leonardo now has 63 employees, and I imagine that most of them will be working on the engineering and R&D side of things. With all the new developments we are hearing about there would most likely be people with a wide variety of expertise involved. One thing that might account for the rapid progress that apparently is taking place is if the E-Cat theory is well understood within Leonardo Corp. Instead of haphazard progress coming from somewhat blind experimentation, a deep understanding on what is going on within their reactors would allow them to exploit the process much more rapidly.