At 10:24 PM 2/9/2010, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
> Yeah, I think you are right, on that end. Energy is stored in the > inductor field, but with relatively long rise time. When the switch > opens, though, the field collapse will recover some of that energy, and > quickly. Usually it's dumped through a diode to protect the switch. Again, it's not a current spike, it's a voltage spike.
That's correct. It's a *power* spike. Energy built up slowly is recovered or dissipated quickly.
In fact it's the opposite of a current spike: The current is like the Energizer bunny. It just keeps going, and going... no sharp spike, but no sharp dip either, and when you try to interrupt it, if there's no place else to go it'll go through an arc. And then your switch gets fried.
Yes. The diode across the toroid in the Naudin schematic clamps the voltage to the power supply voltage plus the forward drop across the diode, perhaps a half-volt. Depending on the impedance of the supply, the supply voltage might increase a bit during this transient.
Bottom line, though, no convincing demonstration has been done that there is any excess energy here. Easily, if there were, it could have been demonstrated and measured, if it were at all as significant as claimed. We have no numbers from anyone on energy dissipated in the toroid circuit, and none on the energy found in the rotor and extracted by the pickup coil. All I saw was a plot of pickup coil (voltage? current?). With no units visible, as far as I saw, and certainly no analysis that made sense.
Trivial to set the resistance in series with the pickup coil to a value that would cause continuous extraction of energy from the rotor, to balance the energy input from whatever, so that rotor rotation rate was constant, and well below free-wheeling.
Then we would see actual comparative numbers for energy in and energy out. And if there is a watt of energy in, and a milliwatt of energy out, we'd know that we might be looking at a small effect, some way in which the circuit and operation doesn't meet the "ideal behavior" that Steorn proposes. If we had a watt in (ending up as heat, they claim) and two watts out, well, they would certainly have discovered something, or it was literally fraud.
Instead, obfuscation and hand-waving.
