Andrea Rossi (entrepreneur)
| Andrea Rossi | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 3, 1950 Milan, Italy |
| Residence | Milan, Italy |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Alma mater | University of Milan (1973) |
| Known for | Petroldragon, Energy Catalyzer |
Andrea Rossi (born 3 June 1950) is an Italian entrepreneur who claims to have invented a cold fusion device.
In the 1970s, Rossi falsely claimed to have invented a process to convert organic waste into oil, and in 1978 he founded a company named Petroldragon to process waste. In the early 1990s, the company collapsed upon discovery that it was dumping toxic waste into the environment, and Rossi was jailed and later convicted for tax fraud and environmental crime. From 2001 to 2003, Rossi worked under a U.S. Army contract to make a thermoelectric device that, while promising to be superior to other devices, produced only around 1/1000 of the claimed performance.
In 2008, after moving to the United States, Rossi attempted to patent a device called an Energy Catalyzer (or E-Cat), which is a purported cold fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) thermal power source. Rossi claims that the device produces massive amounts of excess heat that can be used to produce electricity, but independent attempts to reproduce the effect have failed.
On August 25, 2015, Rossi was granted US Patent No. 9,115,913 for what is described as an apparatus for heating fluids.
Andrea Rossi was born on June 3, 1950 in Milan. In 1973, Rossi graduated in philosophy at the University of Milan writing a thesis on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and its interrelationship with Edmund Husserl's phenomenology.
Andrea Rossi is married to Maddalena Pascucci.
In 1974, Rossi registered a patent for an incineration system. In 1978, he wrote The Incineration of Waste and River Purification, published in Milan by Tecniche Nuove. He then founded Petroldragon, a company for developing oil from waste, which collapsed in the 1990s amidst allegations of dumping toxic waste, and accusations of tax fraud. Its assets were seized, together with Rossi's personal assets, and Rossi was arrested pending trial. Rossi spent four years in prison working on his legal defense in 56 trials, 5 of which ended in convictions related to tax fraud. Rossi wrote that he was acquitted in the other 51 trials. According to court documents found by journalists at Swedish Radio, Rossi was convicted and sent to prison on three accounts of environmental crime on which he was never acquitted of. The government of Lombardy spent over forty million euros to dispose of the 70,000 tonnes of toxic waste that Petroldragon had improperly dumped. According to the mayor of Lacchiarella, Luigi Acerbi, "In the years when [Rossi] was working here, he didn't produce a single drop of oil, as far as we know."
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