At 10:51 PM 12/23/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
As I understand it, they are not claiming that the motor being
demonstrated is OU in the sense of more *mechanical* energy out than
electrical energy in.
Yes. The electrical energy is entirely being dissipated as heat, they
claim, it is not accelerating the rotor. I think they are deceiving
themselves. Or others or both. But at least we now have an idea of the claim.
Rather, they are claiming that it is a unique design which has no
(electromagnetic) back EMF, with voltage drop and current both
independent of load, and that, in fact, all input power goes into
resistive heating of the coils.
What they are doing is turning of the attractiveness of the core.
Alsetalokin says this:
In the Orbo, the coil's field per se does not contribute to the
rotor motion directly since it is mostly trapped in the toroidal
core, and there is no repulsive modality active (except for the
slight coil and lead leakage fields).)
EDIT @LC note that this also explains your oscillations. The magnets
are attracted to the cores, not the winding's field, so when the
power is OFF the thing cogs strongly, and when the power is ON the
rotor is freewheeling.
From user Angus repeating Alsetalokin:
the motor works by switching off the attraction of a magnet to a
ferrite by saturating the ferrite. It's not new, (US Pat 5,327,112)
, but is perhaps new in a motor? Instead of using the electromagnet
to generate force you use it to turn off force - a kind of inside out affair.
Back to Stephen:
Consequently, the mechanical energy which comes out (and which
also eventually turns into heat, but that's beside the point) is
all "free", as a result of which *total* energy out (mechanical +
resistive heat) is larger than the electrical energy in.
However, whether their claim is true or not, the fact remains that
the battery's energy is being dissipated, and a supercap, with
smaller capacity than the battery, would just run down faster. That
is, at least, the obvious conclusion.
Until they put a generator on the rotor. That's when a supercap would
be appropriate, and would demonstrate the effect if it exists and the
losses aren't too great.
Anyhow that's my take on their claim, and the reasoning behind
demonstrating the motor with the battery as though it is something
more than just a motor run by a battery.
They didn't really explain it, which I find odd in itself.
Some of the snarkier folks at VOTB have observed that Steorn's claim
that all electrical energy goes into heat could be interpreted to
mean their motor is essentially 0% efficient, and that they are
"spinning" this to claim its efficiency is greater than 100%. Be
that as it may, it's interesting.
There are a lot of criticisms which are completely off. For if it
were true that the battery power were going entirely into heat, the
motor would certainly be over-unity, so that "snarkier" person was
blowing smoke. However, it only takes a small fraction of the battery
power pumping that magnetic field, turning it on and off, if that
energy ends up in angular momentum of the rotor, to make the motor
obey conservation of energy. If that's the case, then there is no way
to extract enough energy from the rotation to keep up the charge on
the battery or capacitor.
