Rossi, Andrea, 1950-

Andrea Rossi (born 3 June 1950) is an Italian entrepreneur who claimed to have invented a cold fusion device. 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. 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. 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. 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.