Any physicists in the house?
I’ve just read this article at Forbes on LENR, and the associated Arxiv PDF here. Unfortunately, I’m not a physicist, but my initial reaction to all the complex indirect testing they seem to have done is, “Why not simply stick the device in some suitable heat exchanger? Or just put it in some liquid Indium and see how much the temperature rises?” IOW it all seems suspiciously complex.
Still probably fake. There has yet to be a test of the device under controlled conditions conducted by an independent third party. Furthermore, the claimed power density of the device is frankly implausible from a materials point of view. If the magic nickel powder inside the deice was actually producing that much power, it would melt the device. On the other hand, the observed power being emitted is reasonable if you assume it’s the outer case being heated by resistive or inductive heating.
To answer the OP - the problem is the Rossi and his team specified the test conditions and ran the devices.
There was no radiation monitoring - if low energy fusion reactions were occurring there should be detectable radiation.
The clamp power meter was apparently not on all connected leads (just the “live”) leading some to suspect a wiring connection that passes additional current via the unmonitored earth wire to supply resistive heating elements.
The “complex switched waveform” could fool the clamp meter into misrepresenting the input current.
The reaction contents were not analyzed before and after the test run - this should show increased copper level and reduced nickel
In other words - still probably not real.
The whole “Trade Secret Waveform” bit screams B.S. to me.
It’s a heater. It doesn’t require any secret waveforms.
The very first warning sign is that the magazine you’re reading it in is Forbes, not something like Science or Nature or even Scientific American. A real scientist would worry about confirming that it’s really working, and then take on the financial side. A huckster would worry about selling it first, and only then bother about whether it works.
There is a theory that’s been proposed to explain LENR if it’s actually real, but I don’t get the impression there’s anything approaching general acceptance of it.
The paper in the OP is… umm… not convincing. (“Complete malarkey” sounded too mean.)
Really? Before they were allowed to test anything when they didn’t know anything about the the device (and when they got their hands on it, still weren’t told how the secret proprietary ‘wave form’ works)… and they were supporters? What kind of scientists is a ‘supporter’ of unsubstantiated, hard-to-believe claims?
The kind with no reputations to lose.
It should be pointed out that Rossi has done prison time in the past for other scams he’s run. In the 80s & 90s he had a scam where he claimed to take waste oil and convert it to diesel fuel. In reality, he was taking customer’s waste oil, stashing it in storage lockers or dumping it in fields, and delivering diesel he bought at the gas station.
So, yeah, not exactly the kind of guy you assume is telling the truth.