Andrea Rossi (born 3 June 1950) is an Italian entrepreneur who claimed to have invented a cold fusion device.[1][2][3]
In the 1970s, Rossi claimed to have invented a process to convert organic waste into petroleum, and in 1978 he founded a company named Petroldragon to implement waste processing technology. In the 1989 the company was shut down by the Italian government amid allegations of fraud, and Rossi was arrested.[4] In 1996 Rossi moved to the United States and from 2001 to 2003 he 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.[5][6]
In 2008 Rossi attempted to patent a device called an Energy Catalyzer (or E-Cat), which was a purported cold fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) thermal power source.[7][8] Rossi claimed that the device produces massive amounts of excess heat that could be used to produce electricity, but independent attempts to reproduce the effect failed.