Rhong Dhong wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Rhong Dhong wrote:
Here's what I've been able to glean from their
site.
It is self-powered. There is no input.
No it's not.
Right. The ceo has said he does not know the source of
the energy.
It isn't anything obvious, so maybe it is something
like Frank Grimer's gamma atmosphere. Whatever it is,
it just goes on and on and on, even to powering a
550bhp motor.
They said it was a "550 hp unit". They didn't explain what that meant.
Presumably it means either 550 HP _in_ or 550 HP _out_. It tells us
nothing about the difference between power in and power out, however.
There seems to be far less information on their website than one might
think at first glance.
This makes no sense, really. If they had something
that really
poured
out far more power than it consumed, how much
"testing" would
they need
to do to verify that it worked?
The testing was done early on to eliminate the
possibility of a measurement error. As I understand
it, the testing since then has been to make it more
efficient.
Nothing in, something out => efficiency = infinity.
Their jury of 12 scientists has not yet produced any public report,
AFAIK, and they're supposed to be verifying that it works, not just
tweaking it. So I'm not so sure the "initial testing" phase is really over.
The whole thing seems to come down to this: If there's more usable
power coming out than going in, you _CAN_ close the loop. (COP>1 does
not imply the _usable_ power balance is positive, please note -- a heat
pump typically has COP>1 and is anything but a perpetual motion machine.)
If you close the loop, then you have PPM#1 and you're done.
If you CANNOT close the loop, then you need to depend on expert
witnesses and indirect data to show that you really have something.
They apparently cannot close the loop, so they must resort to expert
testimony to convince people that they've really got something.
I am strongly reminded of the self-powered electric car which was
ballyhooed around a while back -- whose was that, anyway? It used
lead-acid batteries to power it (oops, not quite self-powered!) and
recharged them as it ran. Couldn't close the loop; why not? Because
the power really did come from the batteries, which were being whipped
to bits to produce more power than is usual for batteries of that type.
That's known to be possible, but not normally done; down side is that
it supposedly ruins the batteries in relatively short order.
This is where the lengthy cycle of testing to be sure the machine is not
consuming some piece of itself comes in. If, to use the foregoing
example, it uses lead-acid batteries, one needs to confirm that the
machine isn't gradually chewing up the batteries while appearing to
"recharge" them on the fly.
There isn't enough information on their website, that I could see, to
tell if they have any little "gotchas" of that sort built into the
device. However, if it's really taking a jury of competent scientists a
substantial amount of time to determine whether the thing actually
works, it seems like a plausible guess that there might be some such
issue involved.
