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."

Comments

Just to be clear..

[TechyImmigrant]

"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.

Re:Just to be clear..

[Viv]

Not quite right -- in an AC circuit, if you take ALL power into account, you'll always get equal power in and out. The key is that when the current and voltage are out of phase (as in an inductive or capacitive circuit), some of the power is "real" and some of it is "reactive". The real is measured in watts and the reactive is measured in "VAR"s. You can't use the VARs directly because they're the power that gets stored in the inductance and/or capacitance in the operation of the circuit.

If you get a higher output power than input or a higher input power than output, it means that you forgot to check the reactive power :)

Four laws of electrical science; there are no exceptions to these, ever:
1. Voltage is equal to current times impedance
2. The algebraic sum of all voltages in a loop is zero.
3. The algebraic sum of all currents in a branch is zero.
4. The algebraic sum of powers in a circuit is zero. (aka, power in = power out).

If your measurements ever violate any of these laws, you either f*cked up, or you need to file a patent because you just found a way to violate a _law_ of electrical science. That's a big deal, like violating gravity :)

Re:Right next to the disk drive...

[raygundan]

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.

Re:Amazing idea

[BobTheLawyer]

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.

Re:*MAGNETIC* fans in my PC?

[ron_ivi]

Mod this guy up... This is a really strong magnet; and dead hard drives are an awesome source for refrigerator magnets.

To your "how a drive ... can operate next to it"... I think this is the explanation.

While a normal magnet

N---S

has a field that falls off at something like 1/R^3 or 1/R^4, you can arrange more than one that falls off even faster. I think like this:

N---S
S---N
N---S
S---N

And extend it to 3-dimensions and it'll fall off even faster than that.

That way the field will be super-strong next to the magnet, but super-week even a short distance away.

Re:*MAGNETIC* fans in my PC?

[hpa]

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.

Judge for yourself

[Martin Blank]

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.

Re:Quiet PCs?

[sprintkayak]

From Gizmodo.com

JOEL JOHNSON -- After reading the story about Kohei Minato's super-efficient motor, reader Chris Drake wrote in with this explanation:

All Minato's power calculations appear to be wrong (apparently it's a common mistake many scientists make); you can't measure input power using a multimeter when the current drain isn't constant. You can see his workshop in his videos - all his calculations are done using common multimeters and a desktop calculator. Minato motors use an optical sensor to "switch on" the "stator" (electromagnet) for a fraction of each RPM, so he'd need an oscilloscope and some funky math to figure out how much current the motors are really sucking up (or a stopwatch; and wait for the driving battery to go dead, then estimate based on the battery capacity). It's still a super neat idea though - which seems to boil down to "drive motors from the outside using aligned permanent magnets and momentary pulses from the stator" instead of the traditional "sick the stator in the middle" idea.

Re:Quiet PCs?

[srleffler]

As long as he's using a constant voltage supply, the average input power can be calculated from the average current, which is what a standard multimeter will show if the current is fluctuating quickly and periodically

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.