The last time we heard from
Steorn, the company had just joined a long line of optimistic but doomed
people and
companies unable to actually demo free-energy tech when put the test -- and although the Orbo didn't actually do anything, CEO Sean McCarthy
promised us that we'd eventually get a working demo with physical access to the device. Well, it's over a year later, and Steorn's back -- with no demo in sight. Shocking! Instead, the company's selling SteornLab testing equipment to other organizations working on
magic fairy-power rotary and magnetic systems, and it's also got plans to sell something called "ZeroF passive magnetic bearings" later this year -- we'd assume ZeroF means "zero friction," which is nicely impossible and totally in line with basically everything Steorn stands for. To convince you that this isn't all an elaborate sham, Steorn's also setting up the "SKDB," a knowledge base containing all the secrets of the Orbo, which will initially be open to 300 engineers and then sometime later to the general public. This, of course, sounds like an elaborate sham. Here's a hint, guys -- instead of the cheesy video of people sitting around talking about the Orbo, maybe shoot a video of it actually producing more power than it uses. Or, you know, admit the truth. Whatever works for you.
[Thanks, Yury]
posted February 4th 2009 5:03PM
These guys might just succeed.
well Suck Seed like a bird with a straw.
When they become JailBirds that is.
They are clearly con artists and deserve to be locked up.
People get so polarized when discussing concepts like these. What's worse is that both sides usually take it to extremes that basically add nothing to the progress of the idea or the discussion. The "orthodox" scientists need to open their mind a bit more to new ideas. You don't have to compromise your core beliefs or principles, but perhaps take a moment to think about how a certain outcomes could be reached with a different explanation. The "fringe" scientists need to also realize that the "laws" of physics are not something one should strive to "break" they are fully capable of accommodating for your discovery. You just need to take a moment to think about how your idea works without "breaking" physics. Because you can't.
I am a an "alternative energy" hobbyist. I have built a small working "over-unity" device that, in effect, produces around five times the electrical energy out than is required to keep it running. What's the magic? No magic. How did I break the "laws"? I didn't. It's a very simple concept that, properly executed, does what it is designed to.
The rub here is not about "free-energy" being inexplicably conjured from the aether. It's about using an efficient process to catalyze the conversion of one kind of energy to another. That is what it has always been about. People who claim to be pulling "free-energy" from their ass pull out something else entirely. Unfortunately, it is those people that make legitimate projects garner unfair prejudice.
Let's get some perspective in here people.
Also, if anyone is wondering how my little over unity device works, it's pretty simple. A pulsed-coil motor is attached to a high efficiency generator. The rotors contain high-density rare-earth magnets and heavy-metal weight balances. The 12 coils pulse against the permanent magnets in the rotor and start the rotation. The rotor is very heavy and takes a lot of energy to get going, however as it reaches the optimum RPM, the momentum of the rotation requires less pulsing coils to KEEP the speed up. At about 750 RPM, only two of the 12 coils are needed to maintain the speed and the generator will generate almost five times the electrical energy than is required to pulse the two coils. A small portion of the generated power is fed back into the controller board to power the coils and the device can be disconnected from external power. The device will now run itself for an undetermined amount of time giving off excess power to do with what you please.
See? No hocus pocus. No zero-point harnessing. Just good old-fashioned engineering and Tesla-style ingenuity.
The "free-energy" in this device is just converted inertia and magnetic potential.
I recommend anyone interested in building one or at least learning more about it, research "Over Unity Pulse Motor" "Lutec Engine" or "Sundance Engine" Youtube has a plethora of videos demonstrating these.
Also here is a video of a different adaptation of what I made. (this is not me but he lives near me)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHpikCPKPiE
Keep an open mind, but not too open lest your brain falls out.
Oh, and for the record:
I am not opposed to the idea that the energy being harnessed originates from an all-pervading fundamental "source." Nikola Tesla himself was an avid believer in "the medium." But for the sake of simplicity and to be honest, street cred, I'll be shaving with Occam's Razor until the results of the experiment are so fantastic, there is no other way to explain it.
We don't yet have the tools to defend the substantial claims of the Zero Point movement.
Oh, and thirdly:
Speaking of perspective, like mine, these kinds of devices usually don't pump out a whole heck of a lot of power. It may be many times the input power, but we're still talking 5-20 watts with a tabletop version. I have not build a large one yet. I don't really have the equipment or the money to right now. Some colleagues have claimed to make larger ones that could comfortably power a small house. It certainly seems possible on paper. This technology is fairly scalable, but to a point.
I hope to make one that has enough output to power a ceramic space-heater and is started by a hand-crank/gear-box combo. Maybe people won't freeze to death when the archaic electrical grid fails in winter. But it will be quite a task to get one of these pumping out 750-1,500 watts. May not be possible at all without making one too large to be practical. We'll see.
Ohmigosh. That is absurd. Run your motor forever, then I'm interested. You have not created an over unity motor.
Mr. Durwood, I hate to break it to you, but you have not constructed an "over-unity" (ie, perpetual motion, let's dispense with the euphemisms) device. You have built a fly-wheel into a variable-speed electric motor; all this does is allow you to store energy in the momentum of the weights, which is consumed overcoming friction/inertia in the motor. For a while after you reduce the input power, the motor will run faster than it "should" at the new level of input power but this is only because it is drawing out the (in essence, wasted) power you put into accelerating the fly-wheel during the charging phase, and eventually that stored energy will be dissipated. Yes, in the meantime, you're getting more energy out of the device than you are currently putting in, but if you keep track you'll find you aren't getting more energy out of the device total over a set running time (including charging period) than you put into it overall. "Unity" is absolutely maintained.
This does demonstrate the problem with a lot of perpetual motion claims, though. It's easy to fool yourself by measuring the wrong thing, and this is precisely why it's important to be skeptical - open-minded, that is, about the possibility that there is another less exciting explanation for the results you appear to have achieved.
That does Steorn no good, though, since they're clearly a pack of scammers, and ought to be subject to legal or even criminal proceedings.
Thanks for your comment Charles.
I would like to make three points in response to your comment.
First, you insinuate falsely my use of the term "over-unity." You draw parallels to perpetual motion in an effort to tint the topic in a negative tone. A common tactic for detractors and is simply not needed when discussing subjects as peers. I assure you, while you can semantically skew the subject, you apparently don't have the experience actually researching, honestly, the mindset and motives of these ambitious projects. Let's be a bit more human here and recognize that people are pouting their heart and soul into something that they feel is significant and many claim to have data to back it up. If you have a serious discussion with a person working on such a project, you may see a bit more than what your eyes do.
Third, you assume that we (designers of these devices) don't have the mental capacity to evaluate the basic physics of what we accomplish.
Let me be as clear as possible:
Yes. Initially, the energy we use to bring the flywheel up to speed is converted to kinetic energy and then reconverted back to electricity. Duh. We got that.
For my device, the electrical potential from the initial "wind up" is calculated to last a few minutes or so.
Here's the hole in your logic. Beyond that, once the rotor reaches optimum RPM and external power source is disconnected, it will still run.
See that there? It will still run. Personally, I've had mine go for almost a full day giving off power with no power coming in. If you say that it is still running off of the initial investment energy, I say there is something wrong with your math.
Also you can technically start the rotor by hand too.
I think the disconnect here is that you think that I think the energy is coming from "nowhere" like so many claim. Well I don't. As a matter of fact, all of the energy is accounted for. When the system is "closed off" the "new energy" is actually generated from the permanent magnets. That's where the "extra" power comes from. The whole thing is designed around using as little power as possible to spin a high efficiency generator. Permanent magnets have the energy potential the mechanism just brings that out in a very efficient way. I'm not talking about "free-power" just skillfully extracted power that utilizes the basic properties of nature. I believe a more technically accurate term for this device would be "reactor," but that visualizes different things for different people.
You can claim shenanigans as much as you like but that doesn't change the fact that I have on my tabletop a generator that could run for days generating power with no input voltage.
The device does not "create power" it just converts energy into "useful power"
If you are going to berate a legitimate project, at least have the decency to do some research.
Take care.
Erik,
The machine you have built is not so much a legitimate "project" as it is a legitimate "experiment," one that might be designed by a clever high school science teacher to challenge students' understanding of conservation laws. You note that your machine can run for "almost a full day." Nothing in that statement contradicts Charles' observations that you are effectively storing energy in the momentum of the weighted rotor and slowly discharging it over time when coupled to a battery. If you were truly operating over unity, why would your device stop after only a day? Why would it not still be running since you first "energized" it?
You are reasonably adept in sophistry, although I concede that you might be sincere in your mistaken belief as opposed to trying to pull a fast one. You cleverly argue that you are not violating laws, the concept is "obvious," there are no tricks involved, etc., all of which obscure the fact that you are proposing a device that is fundamentally impossible and violates the first law of thermodynamics. You have created a slightly more complicated rotational version of a simple magnetic overunity toy (aka, SMOT), which is a (regrettably) patented perpetual motion machine which I see used sometimes as a demonstration for high school students to see how easily energy, work, power, momentum and thermodynamics are confused and misinterpreted. I encourage you to Google phrases like "testing a SMOT," "disproving a SMOT" etc. If you stop using terms like power and energy interchangeably, you should quickly be able to understand what is (and what is NOT) happening in your device. The additional complexity of the battery in your device serves only to increase what we might refer to as the "time constant of confusion", where a typical SMOT will stop after a few seconds whereas yours may actually run for "almost a full day." You might eke some efficiency out to make it run two days, maybe use a bigger battery and make it run for weeks... but there is no tweak that will make it run forever. You simply do not understand the meanings of power, kinetic energy and potential energy. You do not have an over unity device, that is impossible. Seriously. It is impossible. There is no personal vendetta against you, there is no intended impugning of your character or motives... you simply don't understand what you have. Once you disconnect your device from the initial energy source, you are DISSIPATING energy, which can be measured by instantaneous power output. You are technically NOT "generating" power. If you measure all the energy put into the system, and all the energy put out, you will see that you have a somewhat complicated UNDER unity device.
The reason trained scientists get so worked up over claims such as yours, or the claims of the folks at Steorn, is founded in the reason we pursued scientific fields in the first place. We want to understand how the world works. When we see gross misunderstanding, we feel an obligation to correct it. There is no subjectivity or personal emotion that needs to enter into the discussion. Put simply, you are wrong, and we are right. You can not prove your claims, but we can disprove them. That is the elegance of science. I encourage you to better understand and document the relevant fundamentals of electromagnetism, thermodynamics and electrochemistry, and then package your device as a fun curiosity to demonstrate to students how these concepts can be misunderstood, but also how they can be logically explained.
Erik,
For someone whose native language is Quack, I have to say you translate it to English very well.
All that said, perhaps you should take a basic high school science class and understand why your claims are baseless.
But hey, you might be able to get a million bucks out of James Randi if you really think you can stand up to the scientific method.
Or not.
Chief said:
"You note that your machine can run for "almost a full day." Nothing in that statement contradicts Charles' observations that you are effectively storing energy in the momentum of the weighted rotor and slowly discharging it over time when coupled to a battery. If you were truly operating over unity, why would your device stop after only a day? Why would it not still be running since you first "energized" it?"
Okay, well first I didn't say the device stopped after a day. That's how long it ran. I stopped it manually at that point. It would probably have ran much longer had I not stopped it. Once I put together a higher quality version I'll see how long it can run on it's own.
Second, I never said my device was coupled with a battery. Once disconnected from the power source, it is running off of it's own power. No batteries anywhere. Actually I don't even use a battery when starting it. I use a small bench power supply and disconnect it entirely once the generator is up to speed.
But you know, it seems like everyone has already decided how to feel about this. I suppose it would be fair to say that the true test of this concept would be to see how well it is commercialized and improved upon. If we start seeing products with this technology in it then I guess that is that. If not then it will fade into obscurity like the other "crackpot" ideas.
I'm not claiming to be smarter than anybody here. This is my hobby. I never went to school for this. Maybe I'm just blind to something pretty basic going on but when I build a device that supplies power continually for at least a day and possibly longer with no batteries or external power anywhere, you can't blame me for defending it. I've investigated the possibility of the running power being from the "investment" charge but I just can't see how less than a minute's worth of power can stretch over that much time, especially with a load attached.
In any event, I think we've drawn this out too much. Thanks for the comments guys, I'll do more research and maybe I'll see what you guys see. But for the time being I'll try to get the next version to run for a week powering something with no batteries or external power.
Take care.
Erik,
We have drawn this out too long. Imagine what it must be like getting a degree in the sciences. It can take years. I recommend "Physics for Dummies." That is not intended as an insult, it's a suggestion for a relatively easy read for a layman to help you understand the reasons why you're device is not doing anything extraordinary. That should take a few weeks to read, and at the end you will understand why you shouldn't waste your time on this thing anymore.
A "minute's worth of power" is totally arbitrary, and it is not surprising at all to see a device which can receive input power for 1 minute yet discharge over a day or longer. You are inputting a relatively large amount of power over a short period and discharging a small amount of power over a longer period. I can charge the battery in my cellphone from near zero charge to nearly full in about 1 hour but it will discharge for days. You need to measure the energy in versus the energy out. Power is energy over time. Let's say you initially started the device rotating for 1 minute with a 5W bench power supply, assuming all the associated energy is stored and not wasted as heat, etc. You just successfully stored 83.3 mWh of energy. If friction is low and you have a reasonably hefty rotational mass, you could certainly run for at least a day continuously expending about 3mW of power. Nothing surprising or magical there. I have a solar-powered watch, I can expose it to sunlight for about 1 hour and it will operate for 6 months in the dark after that. Not hard to believe, you just have to understand the simple relationships between power, time and energy.
Seriously, I may not be a university level professor, but I'm not an idiot.
I'll say this one last time. I use a bench power supply, no batteries, supplying about 24 volts DC, 2 amps for about a minute. Once up to speed, I disconnect the power supply and feedback the output power back in to keep it running. Last time I ran it, it ran for a little over 22 hours giving off between ten to twenty WATTS of power continuously WITH load attached.
You can pick me apart with semantics and terminology but you just can't change the fact that over the span of a day, my device gives off significantly more usable power that was needed to start it. This effect is being reproduced around the world and is earning patents and producing prototypes. Some bunk, others with more substance.
Deal with it.
Oh, and I can start it with a hand-crank too.
This is my last post on the subject.
Take care.
Impossible. You have a serious measurement error.
Remember that XKCD about conspiracy theories? [xkcdDOTcom/258]
This reminds me of that.
There is certainly something going on here and it is certainly interesting.
But that thing, whatever it is, is happening inside Mr. McCarthy's brain.
I don't want to debate the possibility of thermodynamics being wrong the same way I don't want to debate the existence of Thor.
So what exactly is going on in that dude's head?
The laws of thermodynamics cannot be violated and so if the Orbo actually works, it is tapping into some external energy source. That would be as big a scientific breakthrough as technological. It is not, as many insist, completely impossible that some anomalous property of magnetism has been stumbled upon. Science is constantly discovering that things don't actually work the way they were once thought to work. It has to be said, though, that Steorn has not behaved like people who have made such a discovery. It's been two and a half years since they first made the claim and nobody has actually seen the thing in action. I think that they have something that appears to be close to working and they keep thinking that with a little more tweaking it will work. But it cannot work.
Steven, I think you are correct, the promise of such a thing can be very intoxicating, and maybe they are just chasing that impossible dream.
Zero friction is impossible due to one thing-> reality. In an absolute vacuum, at 0 Kelvins, there is no atomic vibrations in space. But you'll also have to achieve a gravitational accelartion of 0, as well as a maintain total mass of 0 to achieve zero friction. In modern machinery, there is no situation where you can achieve a "zero state", such as it were. Machinery often run in damp, humid areas, frigid tundra, high pressure vessels, super-heated or super-cooled liquids etc etc. There isnt a single machine in the world that requires an absolutely complete zero state to function, which is to say, there will never be a chance that a machine will be in a situation in which zero friction can be achieved. Just the mere movement of a piston will cause the "zero state" to destabilize into a higher energy state due to energy conservation.
IE, a machine to be in a zero state,to achieve zero friction, it is a machine that does no work,and produces no energy, not just empirically but also in practicality .
So for Stoerns Zero Friction bearings to work, it has to actually NOT work, to achieve zero friction (if no work is applied to an object, than the sum total of friction forces is zero).
This alone shows that Stoerns Orbo machine will not work,because there will always be friction forces, in every industrial and consumer application. Friction forces alone will reduce total energy production significantly below 100 percent of conversion from motion to electricity.
Phew, man, this just shows that the modern USA education system is completely bankrupt when logical reasoning and critical thinking is devoid from commentary on a TECHNOLOGY blog.
"... the company's selling SteornLab testing equipment to other organizations working on [magic fairy-power] rotary and magnetic systems."
This sounds like a great business model. There can be no better market for the Emperor's New Clothes than other aspiring delusional emperors.
Certainly this is a whole lot easier than selling something that doesn't (add can't and won't) work to people who live in the real world.
Do you think this idiot just enjoys the attention or what? I mean, what else is in it for him?