Richard Oriani

Richard A. Oriani (July 19, 1920 – August 11, 2015) was an El Salvador-born American chemical engineer and metallurgist who was instrumental in the study of the effects of hydrogen in metal.

He also made significant contributions to the field of cold fusion.

Oriani was born in El Salvador in 1920, to a mother of Spanish descent and a father of Italian descent.

The family emigrated to the US when he was 9 years old, and lived in Brooklyn, New York with his parents, brother Ernest and sister Elena.

In 1943, Oriani graduated from the College of the City of New York with a degree in chemical engineering.

Although he was at the top of his class, Oriani had difficulty finding work because although his father had lived in Salvador for a number of years, he never pursued Salvadoran citizenship.

Because of this, Oriani's passport was Italian, marking him as an "enemy alien."

However, one of Oriani's professors helped him secure a position at the Bakelite Corporation Research Laboratory, where he worked on the study of adhesion and on the development of a military adhesive, for which he was granted a patent.

This work kept him from induction into the Army, and in 1948 he earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Princeton University.

Oriani then went to the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where as a research associate he studied, among other topics, the thermodynamics of solid metallic solutions, the order-disorder reaction in superlattice systems, nuclear magnetic measurements of hydrogen in metals, and Knight Shift measurements in liquid alloys.

As a sideline, Oriani independently verified the high pressure technique developed at the GE Laboratory for the synthesis of a diamond.

After ten years at GE, Oriani moved on to U.S. Steel's Bain Laboratory for Fundamental Research in which he served as assistant director and researcher on irreversible thermodynamics applied to metallurgy, nucleation, thermomigration, electromigration, impact adhesion, and hydrogen embrittlement of steel.

They married in 1949 and had 4 children.

18:147–57, 1970. [E.C. Bain Lab.

Fundamental Res., U.S. Steel Corp. Research Center, Monroeville, PA

Equilibrium Aspects of Hydrogen Induced Cracking of Steels

By Oriani, R. A.; Josephic, P. H. From Acta Metallurgica (1974), 22(9), 1065–74.

Language: English, Database: CAPLUS,

Generation of Nuclear Tracks During Electrolysis

In 1980 he retired from U.S. Steel and was invited to serve at the University of Minnesota as professor and director of a newly established Corrosion Research Center.

In 1989, Oriani's work expanded to include the growing and controversial field of cold fusion.

In 1990, barely a year after the original announcement of excess energy in an electrochemical cell by Pons and Fleischmann, Oriani corroborated this finding using a sophisticated calorimetric technique.

Oriani then focused on the nuclear origins of the excess energy, detecting and quantifying the emission of nuclear particles by electrochemical reactions.

Oriani has conducted meaningful and successful collaborations with many researchers and theorists in the field, including John Fisher and Japan's Tadahiko Mizuno.

He has published at least nine papers describing nuclear reactions unexplained by the present state of scientific knowledge, in spite of editorial bias against such revolutionary findings.

If cold fusion becomes a reality, Oriani says, "It would open up a new area of nuclear physics entirely. It would augment nuclear physics as we understand it today."

He retired in 1999, but maintained an office and conducted research experiments there until 2014.

Oriani published over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals during his long career.

His early work focused on the thermodynamics of phase changes in metals and metal solutions, while his later work at U.S. Steel gained him worldwide respect for his advancements in the field of hydrogen embrittlement.

Oriani's theory on the diffusion of hydrogen through metal and its tendency to embrittle metals by concentrating at certain defects became the first to reconcile the widely scattered observations and interpretations of hydrogen embrittlement.

The work served as a foundation for subsequent researchers who expanded and refined Oriani's original theory, leading to a deep understanding of how one of the mankind's most important structural materials can fail catastrophically.

While serving as the director for the Corrosion Institute at the University of Minnesota, Oriani pioneered the use of the Kelvin probe to study corrosion of metals in a wide range of environments, including corrosion induced by humidity.

By Oriani, R. A.; Fisher, J. C. Edited By:Hagelstein, Peter L.; Chubb, Scott R From Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, Part 1: Regular Papers, Short Notes & Review Papers (2002), 41(10), 6180–6183.

Language: English, Database: CAPLUS,

Application of a Kelvin Microprobe to the Corrosion of Metals in Humid Atmospheres

(November/December 2010, Issue 94, Infinite Energy)

An avid and self-taught musician, playing the viola and piano, he met his wife Constance at a musical group in New York.

He died on August 11, 2015, in Edina, Minnesota.

Highly cited research paper according to SCI®: Oriani R A. The diffusion and trapping of hydrogen in steel.

Acta Metall.