Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Inventor's Motor Uses 80% Less Power
novakane007 writes "A Japanese inventor named Kohei Minato has created a new kind of motor. It uses magnetism to perpetuate the motor motion. As a result the motors uses 80% less energy than a conventional motor, while still maintaing the same horsepower. "Minato assures us that he hasn't transcended the laws of physics. The force supplying the unexplained extra power out is generated by the magnetic strength of the permanent magnets embedded in the rotor. 'I'm simply harnessing one of the four fundamental forces of nature,' he says."
On top of the energy savings the motor runs cool to the touch and is significantly quieter than a tradtitionally powered fan. Sound to good to be true? Well he's already started selling the fan to a chain of convience stores in Japan. Hopefully soon the design will make it in to your home PC, allowing them to run much quieter."
"9.144 volts and 192mA output. 1.8 x 0.15 x 2 = 540mW input and 9.144 x 0.192 = 1.755W out. "
So there's nothing real to be seen here. Move on.
Evil people are out to get you.
As opposed to what? Oh, wait, the ones that are in there are ALREADY magnetic. How do you think normal electric motors work?
Search for "over unity motor" on google , you'll find a heap of these.
I always get suspicious when those sites say, "and my motor/generator at full load begins to get cold"
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
To the contrary, the magnets in your hard disk are the most powerful types of permanant magnets, rare earth magnets. They are very strong. A single hard disk magnet can usually lift at least 10 pounds, maybe more.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The next few sentences after the one you posted cast even more doubt on the claim:
Minato says that average efficiency on his motors is about 330 percent.
Mention of Over Unity devices in many scientific circles will draw icy skepticism. But if you can accept the idea that Minato's device is able to create motion and torque through its unique, sustainable permanent magnet propulsion system, then it makes sense that he is able to get more out of the unit than he puts in in terms of elctrical power. Indeed, if the device can produce a surplus of power for longer periods, every household in the land will want one.
Is everybody here retarded? What did you think made your existing fan motors spin, Space Pixies? No, it's a freaking electromagnetic motor. Every single one of them. And there's that PC speaker up front with a big magnetic coil on the back that beeps everytime you turn your PC on, too.
I though you were supposed to be nerds.
There are thousands of people sprinkled over the web who claim to do things with magnets that violate the laws of themodynamics; this guy is just one more.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence: this guy provides none.
... on April 5
It's not violating any laws of thermodynamics, it's violating the law of conservation of energy.
If you attended college, I'd ask for a refund. The first law of thermodynamics *IS* conservation of energy. Check out this.
That being said, this device definitately violates it.
Cheers,
Justin
To your "how a drive ... can operate next to it"... I think this is the explanation.
That way the field will be super-strong next to the magnet, but super-week even a short distance away.First of all...
The use of permanent magnets in motors has been common practice for over 20 years, since high-strength permanent magnet alloys became good enough.
A permanent magnet contains stored energy from when the magnet was made. An electomagnet uses electricity on the fly. Note that one of the two magnets in a motor *must* be an electromagnet (usually the stator, for convenience of wiring, but occationally the rotor, especially in DC motors) since the motion requires a varying magnetic field.
Speaking of DC motors: ALL motors run on alternating current in some form. In a classical DC motor, the alternating current is produced by the motion of the motor itself by having the electromagnet be on the rotor, and have the brushes leading the current onto the rotor brush against a "commutator" -- two half-cylinders back to back -- instead of slip rings. Unfortunately, this requires brushes, which wear out and are generally unpleasant to deal with. As a result, especially higher-power motors have generally switched to using brushless AC motors using electronic commutators.
Wrong, you need to review your physics a bit more. Work is defined as force times distance, W = F * d. Since the levitating magnet is not moving, no work is being performed. A levitating magnet is simply a balance of forces, nothing more. It is exactly the same as putting the magnet on a table (gravity provides a downwards force, the table exerts an equal force upwards).
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Bullshit. My IDE Barracudas are near silent, they're 7200 RPM--and I've got pretty damn good hearing.
My Quantum Fireball drives, on the other hand, sound like turbo-prop airplanes taking off... But the Seagates are faster!
If you're willing to spend $10 more, you can get a quality drive.
US Patent 4,751,486
US Patent 5,594,289
Note that I'm not speaking for or against his claims, but if you want to see how it works, there you go.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
to "Randomize" the magnetic "markings" on the disk, you need a Degausser. (Gauss being the pioneering physicist on the subject of magnatism.
A Degausser is an electromagnet that creates a magnetic field that is constantly changing. that is what you need to "Randomize" the magnetic alignment of the particles on the disk in order to erase it entirely.
For the record, I took a full, height, five-and-a-quarter hard drive apart, (I think it was on the order of 1 GB) and there were two extremely strong magnets in the head actuator mechanism. they were so strong that you couldn't pull them apart, you had to slide them, so they were kind of offset and twist them.
I still use them to re-magnitize screwdrivers and bits
2.)In terminal (on OSX) type "cd
3.)type "ls" (your ipod (whatever you named it) will show in the list).
4.)type "cd <your iPod's name>"
5.)type "ls -a"
6.)explore the folders whose names begin with "." (dot).
all your music is in there. use "mv" as needed.
I'm sure on windows, the command line, or at the very least, Cygwin can accomplish the same task
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
There also exist many third party utilities for extracting music from iPods. These can be used to generate filenames, which the iPod often discards as it exclusively uses ID3 tags to populate its database.
Actually, you're right. Simply put, (and I am oversimplifying this) the shrouds you always find around the *pairs* of magnets effectively contain the magnetic field.
Try taking the two halves of the magnetic assembly in the hard drive and putting them together like how they are when mounted in the drive. Now bring your favorite piece of non-magnetized ferromagnetic material near the magnet pair. You should notice that there's virtually no attraction.
Now, put your ferromagnetic material *in the gap* between the magnets--you know, where the head positioning coil goes--and you've got a *huge* attraction.
The field exists almost exclusively between the magnets because of that magnetically conductive shroud around the outside of both the magnets.
Magnets, particulalry permenant magnets, are indeed a reservoir of magnetic potential energy.
This energy is small. Like, really small. I'm involved with calculations on magnetic materials, and we typically use units of meV (milli electron Volts) for a magnetic interaction coefficent. That's 1.602 x 10^-22 Joules. Values are typically between around 2 up to maybe 30. Might be higher with the special rare-earths, dunno.
Iron has 8 interactions per atom. Thus, a magnetic energy of the order of 2 * 10^-20 J per atom. One mole of iron will therefore have of the order of 2 * 10^-20 * Avagadro's number = 2 * 10^-20 * 6 * 10^23 = 12 * 10^3 J. That's 12 kJ of magnetic energy, in 55g of the stuff. [0]
So, a post about says that the moter has a discrepancy of 1.2 W (can't get to the article myself). With 55g of iron permenant magnets then, that's enough to run that system for 10 000 seconds. Might sound a lot, but that's 2.7 hours. If I'm within an order of magnitude, that's a runtime of the system of around a day at most, assuming 100% conversion of the magnetic energy into rotational energy. [1]
No. There is not enough magnetic energy in the parmenant magnets.
[0] In fact, I think that you could only get 1/2 of that out. Still, I'm ignoring that, cos I think that this is only within an order of magnitude.
[1] Which I doubt. A lot. In fact, I've never seen any suggested method for doing that.
JOEL JOHNSON -- After reading the story about Kohei Minato's super-efficient motor, reader Chris Drake wrote in with this explanation:
You are comparing a high frequency motor with a 50 or 60 cycle motor which needs a lot of iron to provide enough reactance. Simply changing the frequency changes the amount of iron needed. A great example is take an old fashioned power supply with a 60 cycle transformer of about 100 watts. The transformer will weigh several pounds.
Now compare it to a modern switch mode power supply typicaly used in a laptop computer's power supply. They typical also use a iron core (powdered iron) and copper wire just like it's 60 cycle counterpart. It still provides the 100 Watts of power but due to the 50 thousand cycles it runs, the amound of iron needed to provide reactance is much less. Because the core is smaller, the windings can be shorter to reach around a smaller core. Shorter wire means less wire IR squared losses. Now a 100 watt transformer is smaller than a golf ball and makes less heat. This is the simple reason 60 cycle power is not used on airplanes. 400 cycle power is typical. Motors and transformers are much smaller for the same power.
Comparing a 60 cycle AC 50 horse motor with the high frequency ac motor used in the new Toyota Prius will show a huge size and weight diffrence even though the horsepower is close to the same.
Taking a 2 phase DC fan motor and going from 4 pole to say 32 pole at high frequency will increase the effeciency of the motor simply because less iron and wire are needed in the windings.
Large electric motors typicaly have effeciencies of over 80% Don't expect the breakthrough to triple the output of an 80% effecient motor. It can't. Small inefecient motors can see vast improvents in effeciency however. Good examples of low effeciency small motors are vaccuum cleaners, electric drills, skill saws and such that get hot.
The truth shall set you free!
Car companies are very conservative, they don`t want to ship new cool things because if things don`t work as advertised or an accident occurs they get sued for large amounts of money. All the car companies want their competitors to try out new and potentially dangerous components. If you have a new technology and you think that a car manufacturer will be interested in it prepare to wait 10 years for evaluations( that you will more than likely have to fund yourself).
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
Lt Col Tom Bearden (US Army, retired) has been predicting this since 1995.
It's fascinating to read Bearden's views. He claims that what we know as Maxwell's Equations are actually gross oversimplifications, made by Heaviside, of the real Maxwell's Equations -- and that a lot of amazing physics would be possible if we would go back and exploit all the possibilities in the real Maxwell's Equations. Heaviside's "arbitrary crippling" of Maxwell is basically the reason we haven't yet colonized Alpha Centauri.
There is a lot of overlap between Kohei Minato's research and Bearden's. Bearden made quite recent comments about Minato's motor.
By the way, Minato's invention is called the "MagMotor." Does anybody know whether this is related to the Magmotor Corp. of Massachusetts?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I'd love to switch to a solid-state hard drive, but the number of write cycles before it dies is way too small. I guess you might be able to get away with it if you had a few Gig of RAM so you didn't need swap and you had room for a RAMdisk-based temp/tmp folder, but just putting a Flash-drive in place of your system's hard drive will cause it to fail within a few months.
This statement is wrong several ways. First, you probably mean RMS ("root mean square") current, not "average current". The average current in an AC signal is of course typically zero. AC multimeters display RMS current and voltage.
Second, you cannot in general calculate average power from RMS (or average) voltage and current, even if the voltage happens to be constant and the current is somehow time-varying. The familiar P=VI formula is for instantaneous power, i.e. P(t)=V(t)*I(t). It happens that if the current and voltage are in phase (i.e. the load is purely resistive) then the average power is the product of the RMS voltage and current. This is a special case.
Third, it is not that hard to get even a good multimeter to read a time-varying current incorrectly. They are designed for low frequency signals. If your current is time varying with even moderately high frequency (e.g. >1000 Hz) most multimeters will not correctly read even the RMS current. A poor multimeter might not even give an accurate RMS current for a low-frequency but non-sinusoidal signal.
This is not the first time someone has produced a free energy device scam based on the faulty assumptions that P=VI holds for average values and a multimter always gives an accurate 'average' voltage or current, regardless of how complicated the waveform of the signal is.