At 01:11 PM 2/18/2010, Harry Veeder wrote:
And if it is a generator more heat will be dissipated?
There isn't an "if" here. The device is a generator. That is, the rotor is rotated by some effect from the toroid and permanent magnets. Then this rotation of permanent magnets past a pickup coil generates power in the pickup coil which will, of course, if it is not stored in some way, generate heat.
The Steorn claim is that all the energy in the toroid circuit is dissipated as heat, that any energy accumulated as kinetic energy by the rotor is extra, free energy, as it were. However, no showing has been made that the energy in the rotor is anything more than a small percentage of the energy dissipated in the toroid circuit. They are claiming 200%, i.e., that there is twice as much energy provided to the rotor as is dissipated in the toroid circuit. That seems highly unlikely; the toroid power is about 5 watts in the Naudin version, and is clearly significant power in the Orbo demonstrations, but the rotor is on very-low-friction bearings, which were apparently necessary, so there is no sign of major power being supplied to the rotor.
The claim is made that if the power drawn by the toroid does not change due to rotor speed, that this necessarily indicates that rotor power is not provided by the toroid circuit; however, this appears to be a non sequitur. Rather, toroid power may be split between various sinks: it may end up as heat, for the most part, but some of it could end up establishing a pattern of magnetic attraction that then can be drawn by the rotor, or dissipated as heat, depending. In other words, I expect that while toroid power may be constant (or close to constant), where this power goes may change. With no rotor, it would end up entirely as heat, whatever is not, say, radiated in some way (probably not much goes there). However, if the rotor is present, with those strong permanent magnets being attracted and then released by the toroid/cores, there may be less heating and more energy going elsewhere, i.e., into the rotor.
I don't think that there is any principle that says that source power must be related to the power drawn off of a process by some device.
Suppose, for example, we have a beaker and it is tipped to pour water, in a stream. We can see the rate at which the water is being poured, and say this is kept constant. Now, we could put a generator in to the stream of water, that would turn from the flow. This generator being present or not present will not affect the rate at which the beaker is supplying water, which is power that has been stored in the water by raising it to the height of the beaker. If we don't pick up that power with our generator, it will end up as heat or other kinetic energy of the water (if it is all caught by another beaker, it will all end up as heat). If we use the falling water in a generator, there would be less heat in the product water, because of the diversion of energy into the generator circuit.
Setting up the toroids the way they do, with their cores being turned on and off as to their attraction for the permanent magnets in the rotor, they have developed a means of creating a kind of magnetic flow. It takes a certain amount of energy to set up that flow, and to keep it going. The rotors, so to speak, ride on that flow, diverting some of its energy into rotation instead of into heat. The source power is independent of what is drawn off. But the well-established theories of thermodynamics predict that the energy drawn off cannot exceed, over time, the energy used to establish that magnetic flow. It's far from free, and that output power seems independent of input power is a kind of trick, making it seem that, if we can just make the magnets turn in just the right way, we could get more power out without requiring more input power.
That, more or less, is how I read what Sean has said about this, that the output power is independent of the input power. That's only partially true, if I'm correct. He can draw off some output power, up to a limit, and it has no effect on input power. But it will, surely as the laws of thermodynamics (that's the issue, eh?), be limited. That is, the rotor can only accumulate a certain amount of power, diverted from heating.
This might have to do with magnetic viscosity, I'm not nearly competent enough to go further yet. It would seem, though, that Steorn has only been able to keep up interest in this through obfuscation and secrecy. (Apparently Steorn did acknowledge, at one time, that they had released false information to divert and confuse industrial espionage. Cool. What this means is that we cannot trust anything they say. Doesn't mean that they are still lying, just that they didn't mind lying in order to preserve their possible profit position.)
What's obvious is that their supposed conclusive demonstration February 1 wasn't. Not even Naudin, with far, far more exact disclosure, hasn't even come close to demonstrating over-unity power. Given what he's done so far, I expect he will remedy the defects, he will describe and show more precisely the voltages and currents in the pickup circuit, and show correlated voltage and power in the toroid circuit, and explain or show voltage and current as the lights oscillate between on and off. He will provide enough information to determine the power in the toroid circuit and power in the pickup circuit. Whether this will conclusively answer the matter isn't yet clear, but it could provide some bounds.
The next step in the analysis would depend on that data. It is one thing if the output power is 0.1% of the input power, or if it is 10%. With the latter, some simple calorimetry might show the effect, i.e., lower heating when the rotor is drawing off power. With the former, it could become difficult and very precise calorimetry might be needed.
What I would avoid is conclusions based on theory like "No back-EMF, but the rotor obviously spins up, so there must be excess power." That's a non-sequitur, it proves no such thing, based on the presence of back EMF in a regular motor. The Steorn motor is more like a device that pours a lot of energy into a coil to create some magnetic effects that can then be tapped, or not. They are fixed, and all that varies is what happens to the energy in them.
