From the Archives: Interview with Sergio Focardi About his Work with Rossi on the Ecat

I have discovered a translation of an interview that was conducted with the late Professor Sergio Focardi on the Bologna, Italy radio station Radio Citta del Capo. I am not sure of the date of this interview. None is provided, but I think it must have been in either 2011 or 2012 after Rossi and Focardi did their first demonstration. In the interview, Focardi gives an interesting account of how he became involved in cold fusion research, working first with Francesco Piantelli, and later with Andrea Rossi.

I don’t believe that I have read this before, so I thought it might be of interest for readers here. I believe that Focardi is one of the most compelling witnesses that we have so far regarding the validity of the E-Cat, having worked extensively with Andrea Rossi, and having a distinguished career as a professor of physics at the University of Bologna, where he was also the head of the department of physics and mathematics there. Focardi died in June 2013

Here is a link to a transcript of an English translation of the interview:

https://docslib.org/doc/13232370/a-radio-interview-with-sergio-focardi-the-father-of-ni-h-cold-fusion

A few key quotes:

“I was running the risk of dying of a tumor. I was lucky, I found a good doctor who saved my life, and so I retired, I stopped working (as a professor, obviously), but kept on … then I did quit for a while … until Rossi looked me up.”

“So Rossi calls me and tells me he’s interested in the subject. We met, talked things over, and I could see that he had some innovative ideas; for instance, he immediately thought of using powder. Powder increases the surfaces involved and thereby increases the hydrogen which gets into the metal. We came to an agreement and began conducting experiments — this happened about two and a half /three years ago — in Bondeno, where he had an assembly plant, he was running a business there.”
“After this, we began to build our first devices, extremely simple ones: a container, with a small cylinder inside, a tray for the nickel, which is the component we were using (we experimented with other metals too, we did all sorts of things), hydrogen — obviously, you can get it out of a gas bottle or produce it with electrolysis, depending on the application. You heat the system with a resistor, an (electric) current; at a certain point the system begins to produce energy. And the energy that comes out is more than the energy given at input. But there’s a difference: input energy is electrical, output is thermal, and therefore less valuable. Granted, if you want heat, it’s what you need.”
“We would put measured energy in the system … In the first experiments we would boil water… we would measure the steam … we would boil and let off the steam … we would take water from the waterworks … and so by simply measuring input energy with an electric meter … and then, with a water meter, the water we had used … we were able to calculate the energy which had been produced. We came to perform experiments in which the energy produced was in the order of two hundred times the input energy — and that’s quite a factor.”
“From a certain point on, the system runs by itself. I mean, the problem is starting it, priming it; but one it’s primed, it can actually run by itself and we can reduce its energy. The important thing is that it must have a certain amount of energy, because every phenomenon produces thermal energy and thereby locally heats up the system. This is the way it works. In one case we made it run for months, and we heated Rossi’s offices, in this way.”