@me356
Here is my uneducated opinion -
1 - Patents do not work. They will only provide you a time lead. The time it takes for someone else to develop a variant of your product is the time you get to make money (as a monopoly). After that you still make money (because of the brand), but now you must compete with low priced and better products.
2 - If it is a physical phenomenon, it cannot be patented. You can patent embodiments and applications. But someone else will come up with another embodiment and application very soon. A patent can try to cover all embodiments using legal language, but people will make their own version anyway and prefer to fight in the court for years, because they will be making billions anyway, no matter what the judgement is.
3 - Some countries can legally allow production of the product, even if it is patented, and if it is for public benefit (such as life saving drugs).
4 - Many countries do not respect patents, these are also powerful manufacturing hubs.
5 - Your patent will possibly infringe on other past patents. There are hundreds of lenr patents.
Bottom line : You cannot stop copying and improvisation of your product by others.
The only way is to release a lower version in the market (say with low COP) and wait for a few years till the copy cats invest most of their money in the lower version. Release your improved version after that. This will give you even more time. But it will also get copied. Just repeat till you are a billionaire. You will of course need big partners to do this. Do not have a single partner, keep many options.
There is one other way. Release your invention as open source hardware (search google for it). It has a GNU type license. Here you license it as open source, but reserve the use for some heavy applications (such as military). The big boys usually pay because they are backed by governments and cannot violate the license. You product will get copied widely, but you will still earn a good money from legal entities (military, gov, public sector companies etc).
Remember that you cannot monopolize it, but you can benefit from it hugely. Keeping it secret will only delay it and you may end up inside big sharks. Rossi is a good example of what not to do.
All the best ! and thanks for your efforts in this research.