Why Cherokee changed its tune?

@barty
I should say, I'm not a scientist - just an amateur with some scientific education and quite a lot of engineering lab experience.

But, do you think LENR would get much funding if funders listen to people like me? I agree it would have been safer to fund Rossi a little while trying to get clearer evidence. But, to some extent they did that.

I can't see that they are much to blame from their standpoint of thinking that LENR was almost certainly real. They took a brave risk. It is very easy to be wise after the fact.

Quote from Alain

It is beyond stupidity to screw a partner when you have many. How will Brillouin, (why not Miley ? is he related) react if Rossi is screwed, even if it is to his benefit?Anyway things beyond stupidity have happened recently.

Alain,

If you open your mind to the possibility (now looking a lot more probable even to ECW readers) that Rossi has never had anything that works, then IH is not screwing Rossi. Rather, IH is deciding, rather late in the day, that they no longer wish to be screwed by Rossi.

@H-G Branzell
This post from 'guest' on Mats site is not rocket science but summarises nicely what I think IH are preaching, and why they have acted as they have.

And if this is true the public and legal row is Rossi having a hissy fit about it as - given his past behaviour - is what you'd expect. It boggles belief, to me, the way that so many people are being complicated about it! Rossi's grip on the blogosphere is only to be expected, given the effort he puts into cultivating it, but it is good that real world finance has this self-correcting mechanism so that people do not go on paying when things don't work.

The patent issue: IH are specifically allowed to prosecute e-cat patents under the license agreement - so I don't know what Rossi means about "without his permission"? Or would he rather they submitted the patent without his name as inventor?

Quote from guest-mats-site

As to why IH would not walk away, to me it’s obvious. Per contract two separate conditions preceded the $89M payment requirement:

1) convey all IP, know-how, recipes and provide any assistance required for IH to make the technology work immediately after $10M payment,
2) report of successful one-year test.

We’ve all focused on #2, but #1 would be way more important for IH. And until #1 is fulfilled, easily argued that $89M payment isn’t contractually required. This means IH sits on the contract until #1 is completed, and if it never is then the contract remains unfulfilled and further payments aren’t required.

Why walk away from that contract ever? Even if you doubt Rossi’s technology works, you sit on it in the off-chance that at some point in the future he is able to show you how to get it to work. If Rossi teaches IH how to make the tech work down the road then great, $89M payment triggered, IH starts manufacturing and selling. If not then Rossi hasn’t fulfilled a pre-condition of the $89M and they aren’t obligated to pay until he does.

This is why they don’t call him fraud, and instead basically say we haven’t been able to make it work. Rossi is obligated to help them get it to work. There is no benefit to walking away, and no harm in keeping it open.

Keep in mind, they’re invested in other LENR technologies, and still seem optimistic even in their press release responding to lawsuit. They see promise in LENR in general and may be getting good results elsewhere. So if you believe in LENR in general, you don’t end the contract with Rossi (because if other people have something real then maybe he does too), you keep it open until the day he is able to show you enough to replicate and validate his claims on your own.

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I guess IH is able to reproduce a COP around 2 - 3. So Rossi's "old" IP.

That would mean Darden is a bare-faced liar. The tests on which they and others invested were all showing that COP except for one outlier at 6. Darden is not a fool*. A COP of 3, reliable, cheap, is nevertheless a world breakthrough LENR and commercial in the context of 'Industrial Heat' - though not competitive with gas. Furthermore, as has been pointed out so many times, COP of 3 => COP of infinity with some engineering and the correct variable cooling.

If Rossi's stuff works at all than Rossi is hot property and IH will pay $89M to keep him on board and preserve the juicy license. The license specifically allows them to make improvements. In the current situation they have no license for that IP and disaster-level PR.

'guest's comment above fits all the facts nicely, without saying bad things about Darden and Vaughn.

*H-G I know what you are going to say! Given his belief - that LENR likely works - Darden is no fool.

H-G

Do you mean that? COP=0.9 breaks conservation of energy - or else would imply some nuclear absorption mechanism! I've noted this suggestion on ECW but expected better of you...

Quote from Barty

What I wanted to say is: IH was/is able to reproduce, but with much smaller COP than Rossi is achieving now. Maybe Rossi just gave them enough information to build reactors and fuel to get COP < 10.

But Rossi knows how to boost that to 50 and higher. IH is not able to reproduce such COP values.The license agreement also wants this knowledge to be transfered to the IH staff. But Rossi didn't do that. So IH didn't pay.Just my guess. It would make sense in my view.

Condition 13.3 of the license is the anti-competition clause. It means that for the term of the license agreement Rossi, Leonardo, etc or anyone the gang up with cannot compete with IH using e-cat technology. That specifically includes the claimed COP=50 long-term-test plant. If some new development does not count as e-cat technology (and therefore it must bypass all existing patents) then it is not covered by the license anyway and IH have no right to be given it.

Therefore IH strategy would be to hang on to the license, keep Rossi happy with his $89M (clearly the thing that makes him unhappy is lack of payment) and steam ahead.

The simplest way through this, which ticks all the boxes, does not require Darden to have metamorphosed into a planet-sacrificing monster, is as in 'guest's post quoted above.

Exactly!

Quote from H-G

(paraphrasing) Rossi's stuff does not work...

Quote from barty

Sorry, this makes no sense.

In the first time of the IH-Rossi relationship both sides seemed to be satisfied of each other.

So I guess there was some IP exchange as demanded by the license agreement and IH was able to reproduce the claims to that time (COP of 3 - 6? as hot-cat did with ssm?).

H-G's view makes some sense if you allow that barty's guess might be wrong.

And here is why the guess is (probably) wrong.

Ask yourself how IH worked out whether Rossi's stuff works or not? We know the answer from the license agreement. They get independent tests done. We know of SIX INDEPENDENT TESTS. All were positive. On basis of the reports from these tests IH thought that Rossi's stuff works, and were very happy with Rossi. Other investors (Woodford, China?) saw tests and were also very happy. Note that at least one of these positive tests (Lugano) used a reactor designed and manufactured by IH. So not only does IH know Rossi's stuff works, but also they know they can reproduce it.

That is fact, backed by the license agreement, and statements from principals. (The Chinese involvement is somewhat vague).

Now here is the guess that makes H-G correct.

Suppose every one of Rossi's tests turns out to have errors that make it invalid. IH cannot be expected to realise in advance that this would happen. They will not jump to that conclusion. It is only after much in-house testing with repeated inability to replicate the tests (even using the same reactor that worked in Rossi's test) that they will think this. And then maybe they will pay attention to the comments of skeptics on how all of the tests have loopholes.

For this guess to be plausible (it sounds really strange) you need some background (all fact):

• The single high quality and latest Lugano test is known not to have worked, with COP = 1 to within experimental errors, due to a mistake in the analysis. This has been published and generally accepted, but the Lugano authors have never replied nor retracted their report. I guess to do that would be commercially sensitive. The Lugano isotopic change results are meaningless because Rossi's previous set of isotopic change results were eventually stated by Rossi to be due to his substitution/contamination of ash. The same could be true here.
• The two released Penon tests all have failure mechanisms based on bad measurement of input power. Penon (extraordinarily) did not even specify what equipment he used to measure input power. He stated that two different methods of measuring input power had quite different results, and chose one of them, without saying what the other method gave, or justifying his choice. His report would not be accepted as satisfactory by any competent reviewer. He also made basic errors when calculating output power.
• Rossi's previous public demos all have known and various failure mechanisms detected by observers. When Rossi has been asked (by friends, e.g. Josephson), to tighten the test to avoid the failure mechanism he has not done this.
• The two Ferrara tests also have a known failure mechanism based on bad measurement of power. They are the best of the bunch, but the followup to Ferrara, intended by the same authors to be more rigorous, with additional input power checks, is Lugano. This followup is known not to have worked as above.
• The long-term test that Rossi claims shows COP=50, with a report not yet released, has very complex instrumentation (>100 sensors) and is validated by Penon. On the basis of his past record that validation is unsafe.

These facts show that many people's intuition (if a test looks good and has been signed off by a scientist it will probably be OK) is just wrong. That may be true generally, but Rossi's technology is a special case. It has a unique ability to generate apparently good test results that are nevertheless wrong. That is in part due to the testers (including Rossi himself), who all have qualifications but they are the wrong ones to do the tests.

In the argument between Rossi losing v. winning in court.
1. Rossi wins, settles for the original $89 million. Darden has proof from justice system that LENR is real and works. The resultant IP is more valuable than without the publicity of the court trial.
2. Rossi loses, Darden loses rights to Rossi's patent and thereby loses.
3. Rossi loses on the basis of his patent being flawed and the modified version submitted by Darden NOT having that same flaw.
4. Rossi loses on the basis that his patent is in conflict with an earlier patent made by Miley or someone else whose patent is now assigned to Darden. Such a conflict would mean that Rossi doesn't really own the IP he claims to own and that its sale was therefore a fraud or otherwise invalid.

d

Why Cherokee changed its tune? Well, what about this!

One other or more of Industrial Heat's LENR research programmes have also come up with ground breaking LENR 'discoveries' and 'controls' which are 'cleaner' show greater 'commercial promise' and are far more likely to attract 'big name investment'.

Just another angle.

Just seen this:

Quote from dartin

Robert Godes (Brillouin) may be the person or group who Darden has working on making an improved system which WILL BE commercially viable.

Best Regards
Frank

Indeed. Even a COP of 1 based on the existing Lugano data would show overunity exists, since there are so many routes for energy to be lost due to lack of measurement.