At 12:14 PM 12/30/2009, Craig Haynie wrote:
Here are two more replications:
The first link shows no apparent current increase as the speed of the rotor picks up, and tends to really display the effect that is perplexing all of these people. http://www.youtube.com/user/m1a9r9s9#p/u/2/nDABKqdB538
You have got to be kidding. He uses a 5 amp analog meter to show a stated operating current, coil turned on, of 100 mA. It's hardly visible. The demonstration shows the claimed basic effect, which is a no-brainer: switching on the toroid current quenches the magnetic attraction toroid core for the permanent magnets mounted on the rotor. Thus the rotor accelerates. Where does the energy being stored in the rotor angular momentum come from?
The demonstration is unable to show if there is any significant increase or decrease in current. It's just an analog meter, and way, way too insensitive.
Further, I would not expect, even with a more sensitive meter, any visible change in current as the rotor speed varies, except when it gets very slow, you would see the coil current switching on and off.
Rather, the key to the effect is the transitions. It is the switching of the response of the toroid to the permanent magnets that produces the acceleration of the rotor. Steady-state on, the rotor is freewheeling. Constant current, independent of rotor speed. Steady-state off, likewise, no effect on current (zero) from rotor speed. It's crazy to expect a visible change in steady-state current from rotor speed.
But it is the transitions that are the issue. What happens during transition? It is during this time that an interaction between rotor velocity and current exists. Basically, the electronics, such as they are, are switching on and off a response to a magnetic field. This takes energy. Standard overall theory would predict that the energy it takes is greater than or equal to, but never less than, the energy increase in the rotor. And, since the energy it takes to accelerate a rotor like that, slowly, is quite small compared to the power consumption of the coil, it only takes a small jolt, each time the magnet passes the coil, to cause acceleration.
And then this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPRoHgz8Rw
Nice demo. Notice the neon bulb lighting up, apparently with each shutdown of current to the coil. That's back-emf, as he notes. Lots of it, the bulb is a voltage-limiter, I'd expect, what, 65V? Notice that the bearing isn't low friction, the rotor slows down when the current is shut off.
That high back-EMF will be associated with a current spike. That current spike, forgive me if I'm wrong, could cause a reversed magnetic field, to repel the permanent magnet as it moves away from the core.
In any case, to show that there is some anomaly here would take far more sophisticated instrumentation, and might even be very difficult, since the amount of energy necessary to produce the observed acceleration is much less than what is being dumped through the coil with each cycle. It would only take a small effect, such as the repulsion I mention as a possibility, to cause acceleration.
And I'm not satisfied with this explanation of mine. The basic cause of the acceleration is the attraction of the permanent magnet for the core. That attraction is switched off by the electronics, at a critical time, presumably the ideal point to switch it off is as the rotor magnet passes the ferrite core. how much power does it take to switch off the ferrite's attraction? Apparently quite a lot, and it must stay off for the entire time until the magnet begins to approach the next attractive core. This seems horribly inefficient, but that's beside the point. I've seen no evidence or analysis that actually considers the obviously relevant effects. The claim of no back EMF is obviously wrong. If I'm correct, they had a clamping diode in the Steorn demo to dump the back EMF current, back to the battery, providing a minor recovery of energy.
Hand-waving. Suppose you have a magnet in your hand and you wave it. Wave it at the right time, and you could accelerate the rotor. But that process, action vs. reaction, would cause drag on your hand-waving. Not necessarily much, it might be imperceptible with each wave. But it only needs to be just a little to cause rotor acceleration.
It is the high inefficiency, in fact, that makes it difficult to detect and measure the effect.
