At 07:45 PM 1/25/2010, Harry Veeder wrote:
----- Original Message ----
> From: Stephen A. Lawrence <sa...@pobox.com>
> What we absolutely will *not* see:
>
> -- A true self-runner, which convinces all but the most pathological of
> skeptics. Will not happen -- not from Steorn. Not now, not ever.
> This includes motors with no external power supply, and motors driven by
> capacitors (which are shown conclusively to remain charged during the
> run) instead of batteries.
In the last set of videos, Sean made it pretty clear that it is not
part of Steorn's mission to build such a device. He expects future
developers of orbo technology to build one. If he does present a
self-runner, he is a liar! ;-)
Or, hey, they managed to find an easy way to do it.
However, "self-running" is a red herring. What we would want to know
are these things, which they could easily provide:
The inertia of the rotor, i.e, how much energy it stores at a
particular rotational speed, so we can understand how much energy is
stored at a particular RPM level.
How this energy decays (the rotor slows down) in the absence of any
input, to determine the energy being dissipated in friction or other losses.
How much energy is being supplied from the power supply, which is
difficult to assess with a battery, but far easier with a capacitor
bank, which could be designed to emulate the low resistance of a
battery, avoiding the problems of high current spiking of batteries,
which could produce spurious results. The capacitor voltage will show
the rate of energy supply from the capacitor bank, which can be
calibrated by dumping current through a resistor of known value.
So we can compare the energy being accumulated in the rotor with the
energy being supplied from the power supply. It is not necessary to
reach self-running, which might fail even if the system is overunity,
by not being sufficiently efficient in recovering power from the rotor.
It is also possible to apply an electromagnetic brake, a pickup coil
that generates current from the motion of the permanent magnets past
it. If the coil is open circuit, it will not slow the rotor at all,
but as resistance in series with the coil is decreased, the coil will
draw more energy from the rotor and slow it. This can be adjusted to
keep the rotor at constant speed, thus providing an almost direct
measure of power being supplied to the rotor by the process. (It
would only be off by the friction, measured already by the slowing down study).
Then, study of and measurements of voltage and current in the
toroidal circuit can be performed, and the disposition of the power
dissipated there determined. How much power is being dissipated in
the coil and in other circuit elements. How much heat is being generated?
Calorimetry of the whole system would, of course, be of great
interest. If the rotor is held at constant RPM by a brake as
described, then the total heat generated should be directly
correlated to the consumption of power from the capacitor bank, and
be about the same, unless it is overunity. If it's over unity by a
factor of two, that would be hard to miss, eh?
The reason for using a capacitor bank is that the voltage provides a
measure of stored energy, and its decline, that is not dependent upon
calculations from what may be ridiculously complex waveforms.
The most difficult of all these would be the calorimetry, I assume.
The rest is trivial. The rest, however, might make the calorimetry unnecessary.
They are presumably not presenting calorimetry data in the "final
demo," as of a few days ago that was still a future project, not a
done deal, it seems.
The back-EMF claims, which seem reasonable as a first approximation,
imply that all the energy of the battery is going into heating, in
the end. So, put a heat sink on the coil, and measure the thermal
mass of the assembly, which can estimate energy dissipation in the
coil from differential temperature measurements. Measure or calculate
heat in the rest of the circuit and add it all up. Does this sum
correlate well with what is expected from energy drawn from the
battery? Or is there some missing energy? And, if so, how does the
missing energy compare with the energy appearing in rotation of the rotor?
Let me guess. The energy appearing in the rotor is quite the same as
missing energy in the coil circuit, or indistinguishable from noise
in the measurements.
It is not necessary to understand the system adequately to calculate
stuff, what calculations are needed should be simple ones, such as
rotational inertia from the effect of known energy draw (through a
pickup coil, for example).
Instead, let me guess. It will be complicated, with calculations
being asserted as proper and complete, neglecting "minor" variations.
Such as the claim that there is "no" back EMF, based on a display
that only showed that, sort of, what we'd expect from back EMF could
not be seen. But which would not show a low level of back EMF. I.e.,
would certainly not establish that there was none. And we have no
idea how large the "Orbo effect" is, though, from the requirement for
very-low-friction bearings certainly implies it is quite small. And
thus able to easily hide in the noise.
But, of course, all this is directly contradicted by the 2:1 or 300%
over unity claim. That isn't a small effect at all, it's enormous. An
effect like that *might* appear, short-term, due to battery discharge
anomalies that manage to extract more energy than expected from a
battery, an effect claimed to be common with pulse motors.
