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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."
"Hopefully soon the design will make it in to your home PC, allowing them to run much quieter"
What? I wasn't quite aware that computers generated their own power yet... Also, the article says the engines are quite large- probably impossible to be able to use them in a laptop setup. Plus, anyway, power supplies are quite quiet anyway, and they don't generate their own power. The problem with the noise from computers these days is unbearably loud hard drives and harsh fans.
Uh, no thanks. :)
Heh, This guy will soon end up in the oil company holding cell with the guy trying to make a porcelain engine that runs on water.
How long do these magnets last?
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
"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.
Quiet vibrators..
Hopefully soon the design will make it in to your home PC, allowing them to run much quieter."
The noise in your pc is caused by air turbulence caused by the fan blades. Even if the motors inside your fans were 100% efficient, your computer would not be significantly quieter.
Life is too short to proofread.
Only 20% of the power of a conventional motor? The next glaringly obvious step is to figure out a way to make CPUs out of these motors. Rather than GHz, they would be rated on RPMs. Dell will market them as the "Magnetron". These next generation computers will never randomly fall from desks as the gyroscopic effect of the motorized CPU will keep it firmand will as its own fan! The Intel 9600 RPM Gyrotron TFB (Titanium Fan Blades) and the budget Intel 5400 RPM Cyclotron CPS (Cheap Plastic Shit)
BAhahaah!@!@@ I'm a frickin' genius! I'll be a trillionaire and all you slackers will still be reading
Trolling is a art,
The oil companies will hunt this man down, steal his patents, then dump his dismembered corpse into the ocean.
Magnet power cars are a threat to national security.
Cheers,
Justin
question: wouldn't the magnets de-magnitize after a while? isn't that what physics would predict? good business opportunity tho. exchange the cost of electricity for the cost of buying a new motor, when the magnets stop working any physicists out there who can comment?
As opposed to what? Oh, wait, the ones that are in there are ALREADY magnetic. How do you think normal electric motors work?
Heh, This guy will soon end up in the oil company holding cell with the guy trying to make a porcelain engine that runs on water ...down the hall from the vault containing the Skynet microchips from the future, all those Tesla inventions that the government has been sitting on, alien car motors from Roswell, turbines that run on Orgone energy, and real working cold fusion.
By the way, the porcelain engine with water? I've got one in my bathroom. It turns on when you flip a metal lever.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It'll need a big case, in any event.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
"Mention of Over Unity devices in many scientific circles will draw icy skepticism."
Hmm.. Simple reason why. If you supply power to the motor using a carnot engine
and use the power from the motor to drive a carnot refrigator.
Then there will be an overall flow of heat from cold to hot..
Breaking the second law of thermodynamics..
Bullshit is word of the week.
Simon.
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.
Amazingly enough, if you had read the article before posting, you might have gotten your answer:
That alone makes it sound fishy to me, but IANAP.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I saw a similar effect on one of my brother's contraptions. Essentially, it was a roller skate wheel that had powerful magnets embedded in it. When it was spun, the magnetic field would act on a spool of wire underneath and create a charge that went into a capacitor. When tinkering with the thing, I found that one could take a magnet and place it a small ways away and that magnet would repel the other magnets on the wheel, making the thing spin longer for the same amount of energy. Later, my brother's acquaintance found a similar effect by placing the magnet on the bar that held the wheel up. I'm guessing that the process is more similar to the latter than the former.
As all of these sorts of posts are appended IANAP, so I could be wrong.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Not for nothing, but if this thing realy uses magnets of any power, it's the last thing I'd want in my computer.
Apple has never claimed not to be evil, they're just very stylish about it.
Either the proponents of this device are complete incompetents, or they are complete frauds. I'm inclined to believe the latter, as incompetents tend not to have the sales skills evident in the article
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
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.
The Classic Magnetic Shield Engine, from The Museum of Unworkable Devices.
Why do I have the feeling that this is yet another perpetual motion machine/free energy posting?
Search google, perpetual+motion+magnet
Hey, that's my password you are typing
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.
yes, electricity to generate a magnetic field, to push the similar charged magnet away.
16 watts driving a 35 kg load. Thats the equivelent of a couple of C cells driving a golfcart around.
;)
Which is entirely possible - what they don't say is how slow it goes
What would be impressive is getting that golfcart from 0 to 100 in 6 seconds.
...shoestring potatoes... shoestring shoestrings
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.
Dear Svartalf,
I recently invented just such an engine that taps into new unexplained laws of physics. I think that you are just the sort of investor I need to have this project take off. Please send your bank account number.
Henry
P.S. There may be some scoffers, but what is to say that I'm wrong? After all you are reading this on the internet. It must be true.
Still incorrect though. Using this logic, you could hook one motor to another, using one as a generator. Take the power from the generator, and use it to power the first motor, which makes more wattage than you put in, which spins the armature faster, which makes more current... Until you have an infinitely fast spinning infinite energy generator.
It's fake if this is true, I can't get to the article to verify myself.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
What will come next, dogs mating with cats?!?!
Venkman: "Or you could accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of Biblical proportions."
Mayor: "What do you mean, Biblical?
Ray: "What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor. Real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky. Rivers and seas boiling."
Egon: "Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes."
Winston: "The dead rising from the grave."
Venkman: "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
didn't I read back in 1993 that we'd all be using solid state hard drives by now??? Guess that was a sure thing in the days of $600 hard drives.
Pricewatch.com tells me I can get a CompactFlash card reader for USB for under 20 USD and a 2 GB CF card for under 200 USD. There also exist adapters to plug CF cards into ATA cables. It seems that the desire for more capacity in a 3.5" desktop HD enclosure has outpaced the desire for larger persistent solid-state memory in desktop machines.
Why build some fans when you can build a nice powerplant out of these and supply the world with free energy?
Can't believe Taco fell for a free energy hoax.
Extrordinary claims require extrordinary proof, and this is a very extrordinary claim.
What's to say it isn't powered by giant invisible lamas?
There is no "interesting anomaly", there's just a claim phrased in the language of junk science. We don't find new models for physics on the basis of undocumented, unreviewed, unrepeated claims.
motors uses 80% less energy than a conventional motor
A conventional electric motor motor uses at most 1.6 Joules of electric energy to produce 1 Joule of motion energy (German Wikipedia). If you reduce that by 80%, you use only 0.3 Joules to produce 1 Joule... nice perpetuum mobile.
I have seen a few posts about "basic physics" and how the magnets would have to "demagnetize" to do work. But in actuality, basic physics says that magnetic forces can do no work. Why? Force = v x B (velocity of charged particle cross magnetic field) and work is the integral of Force dot dr. v cross B dot dr is 0 (because v and dr are in the same direction and the cross prod. of v and B will be perp. to v).
So the permanent magnets don't do ANY work. They can accelerate charged particles by changing their directions, and maybe they can increase efficiency by reducing friction somehow (like maglev trains). But they are not putting work into the system.
Greg
The Toyota Prius already gets 60mpg in the city. Imagine the gas mileage these cars could get if they used one of these motor
If I calculated correctly, not a Toyota Prius outfitted with one of these motors would excrete 1.3 litres of gasoline every 20 miles. (it is beyond a matter of getting "great gas mileage": the car would put out more gasoline than it takes in).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Ok, if the input is less than 1/3 of the output, then he just discovered a machine that, if the output was looped to the input, would create infinite energy in theory. That is obviously impossible. It sounds interesting, that input and output ratio is not possible. Just because the guy gives you a reason why it's possible doesn't mean that it's true.
... on April 5
I worked as a patent consultant briefly and in a short time saw a couple of perpetual motion schemes. The most elaborate was proposed by a bank security guard and involved a hydraulic pump and motor combined with an electric motor and generator.
I explained that energy in a system worked like a bank account (bank guard -remember?) You put energy in and you can take it back out, but you can't get quite as much back out as you put in because there was a service charge in the form of friction. He begrudgingly understood. I complemented him on his nice drawings.
"In this house we obey the law of thermodymanics" - Homer Simpson
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
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
This is the exact same argument every peddler of perpetual motion machines uses to claim that his invention is not a perpetual motion machine, but is somehow harnessing external power which is just hanging around out there to be used.
The Earth's electromagnetic field is a popular choice among these hucksters. With this guy, it's magnets.
The very fact that this showed up on the front page of /. shows that they've given up all pretense of caring what they publish here.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You can get them at Radio Shack.
They are on the same shelf as the Flux Capacitors.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
And how much energy is needed to keep something suspended above the floor?
(Hint: how much current does an ordinary piece of string draw.)
Elementary physics, again. Keep your force, energy, power and work apart!
Is everybody here retarded?
You're new here, aren't you?
Cthulhu loves you.
Why the fuck is this crackpot on slashdot?
The claim that the extra energy is coming 'from permanent magnets' is risible. It's like claiming to extract energy from the gravitational field of the earth.
MAYBE he has a very efficient motor (though I haven't seen any independant evaluation of that claim). But he certainly doesn't understand how it works, and his claim that he can extract more energy from a motor-generator configuration than he put in is obvious fraud.
I'm not sure what's worse, that the journalist who wrote the article is so credulous, or that the people here (who should damn well know better) are.
Can you prove that there aren't chocolate cakes in orbit around Saturn?
No?
Well I guess that means that there are!
Be real. Anybody who's done some basic maths knows that to prove something you need to prove that it ALWAYS works. As to prove something wrong you only need to prove it ONCE.
Same thing for the burden of proof here.
Imagine a world where everybody would be guilty else they prooved innocent. Things don't work that way thank god! Err wait...
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
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
Notice that he blames both 9/11 and Enron for not wanting to deal with large companies. Maybe smaller companies are easier to fool and less likely to be able to expose him?
This sounds like a scam to me. I hope it isn't, but it sounds like one.
Lasers Controlled Games!
...I just use all those wonderful microwaves floating around from the massive Cell-Phone usage.
Magnets are so old school.
1. Conservation of energy is not true. Highly unlikely.
2. The energy stored in the permanent magnets is being used up. This is the most likely (and probably actual) phenomenon. Any magnetic field has stored energy. You can get this energy out by demagnetizing the magnet. I don't know how much energy is in these magnets, and as I can't read the article I can't see if there are any comments on the longevity of the magnets. My guess is these motors would "work" for a while, then suddenly drop down to worse than normal functioning electromotive devices (due to adverse effects of eddy currents, etc). I'd put my wager here. (Especially since it sounds like it only works with large (i.e., lots of stored magnetic energy) magnets.
3. The device somehow draws energy from the environment in some new, undiscovered manner. The combination of moving electromagnetic fields could somehow convert some other energy source (i.e., background radiation) into mechanical forces. Highly speculative and unlikely. If the device were really "creating" energy from the magnets, you could start one up, turn a generator, start another one up, then chain the output of the generator to the input of the motor, then keep them going forever. That would be a neat experiment.
In summary, there is probably a well-understood phenomenon here, and it's nothing out of the ordinary. I applaud the marketing prowess of the "inventor" here, in any case. If the device does work, I look forward to seeing the interesting results as the basic conservation laws are reexamined and we end up neat things like warp drives, levitation, and all the other stuff I've wanted since I was 4!
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
You could do this for a finite amount of time, and then the fixed magnets would degrade as their energy was lost. I'm not an expert on magnetics by any means, but AFAIK the basic concept is they are a store of potential energy and run down like batteries (oversimplifying greatly since I don't know the technicalities myself).
For a time you do get more energy out than you put in, just like a nuclear reactor, but then just like in the reactor you need to replace your fixed energy store.
(Ianal.)
I suppose that if he's quickly depleting the stored magnetic field on the permanent magnets that he could get out more electrical power than he put in, but that would only work for a couple rotations of the ol' motor. Aside from that, it don't matter which of the "four fundamental forces of nature" you harness, there ain't no cheating the laws of thermodynamics, even in convenience store cooling fans...
I'll take you to the ball, Barbara Manitee!!!
Darn japanese inventors take all the credit. Well, I'm dating a japanese woman - and I have my super wind-powered car that is going through the patent office right now! Since I'm nice, I'll give you a sneak preview of it!
First, there is a mini-windmill that is attached to the hood of your car.
Then a gear steps the RPM up, which powers a fan in the back of your car to push it!
I swear, once you get up to 30 mph, you don't need anymore gas! It's all about aerodynamics, I swear!
I had a similar problem with a cheap VA meter (designed to run at 50Hz) when I made a HF transformer. At the low voltage side it measured 5V 1A, at the high voltage side it was ~500V, 100mA. I was young at the time and got all excited until common sense brought me down to earth and I tried lowering the frequency from 1kHz.
As most meters are designed for a 50Hz sine wave, his pulsed system could very easily cause confusion.
The acid test would be to run a conventional motor and the new motor from a fixed quantity of joules, e.g. a battery.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
OK, the guy claims to have invented something that will produce 3.3 watts of energy for every watt put into it.
Well, what would you do if you invented it?
Bzzzzt, wrong answer. The right answer is sell 40,000 fans to a Japanese convenience store. ROTFL.
Sigh. In the age of Google, can't people even bother to look up the history of all these "over unity" machines...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
When I was 14, on the very first day of my high school physics class, lesson number one was "there is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, since that day I've known how to recognize a perpetual motion scam from a mile away. I assume the quality if my education is no different than that of most other people.
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.
This sentence pretty much tells you this is another perpetual motion hoax:
With the help of magnetic propulsion, it is feasible to attach a generator to the motor and produce more electric power than was put into the device. Minato says that average efficiency on his motors is about 330 percent.
Wooo-Hooo we can replace coal, oil and nuclear by just string these things together like Christmas tree bulbs!
The other clue that this is a scam is the entourage of bankers and investors to the demos, not physicists and engineers.
Joining us are a middle-aged banker and his entourage from Osaka and accounting and finance consultant Yukio Funai. The banker is doing a quick review for an investment, while the rest of us just want to see if Minato's magnetic motors really work. A prototype car air conditioner cooler sitting on a bench looks like it would fit into a Toyota Corolla and quickly catches our attention
Letter To Iran
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.
:)
What? Name one. Oh, wait.
Nevermind.
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4. Someone doesn't know how to measure actual power correctly.
5. Someone is deliberatly measuring actual power incorrectly so he can sell crappy motors for more than they are worth.
Magnets, to many people, can explain anything, becuase they do not understand them properly. Just as you can not construct a perpetual motion device using magnets, however, you cannot raise efficiency using magnets as an energy source. Magnets can only raise efficiency by acting as frictionless bearings, but that is not the case for these motors. This is blatant fraud, and I cannot believe these people fell for it.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Or they think that pointing out incredible claims for scrutiny is a good way to test them. Note the "from the skeptical-eye-on-the-science-guy dept." tag on the article rather than, say, "from the holy-shit-give-this-guy-a-Nobel-quickly dept."
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You can get out more than you put in. Maybe this new motor works like a savings account. (Yeah, I know, the "extra" comes from somewhere else!)
Something with extremely high permeability that soaks all the force lines into itself. Commonly called Mu Metal, it's a nickle-iron alloy with some copper and molybdenum in the mix. It's magnetically "soft" meaning it the force lines like/want to be in the metal and stay there. Mu metal will stop fields just short of .1 Tesla in strength dead in their tracks.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This is reposted from Dan's Data
http://www.dansdata.com/danletters097.htm
Shock news: journalists gullible!
I was giving this magnetic motor (reached via Gizmodo) the skeptical benefit of the doubt, until I got to the "more power out than in" claim. And the fact that the Japan Patent Office wasn't willing to grant a patent until the US PTO did (given some of the goofy patents awarded in the US, that's not a good sign).
However, it may be possible this guy genuinely has a more efficient motor, and the super-unity power claim is the result of measurement/calculation confusion (simple multiplication of peak values vs. the area under the curve). I could believe the reporter might make this mistake; the fact that the inventor goes along with it is not encouraging.
Joe
Answer:
I only read the Gizmodo precis about that when it was mentioned there the other day, and assumed that when they said it used 20% of the power of a conventional motor they just had the wrong end of the stick, and should have said it was 20% more efficient than some existing not-too-efficient maintenance free long service motor design, or something. Since motors with better than 85% efficiency are common already, a motor that draws a fifth as much power to do the same work will, as you say, be one of those fabled "over-unity devices", a.k.a. perpetual motion machines.
On reading the actual article, it seems clear to me (and others...) that this is just another fraudulent "magnetic motor", with the usual explanation that the mystic energy of permanent magnets is somehow making up the shortfall (some such motors are supposed to slowly use up their magnets, the lost mass being somehow converted to energy to keep the thing running).
If this guy actually has orders for his products, from people assuming they do what this article says they do, he will soon end up fleeing angry buyers. I suspect the orders haven't actually been placed, though (or are conditional on working products being delivered, with no payment having yet been made...), since these sorts of scammers are usually in it to fleece small investors, who're the only people who believe their claims. No company with an engineering department will buy this line of bull; it's been tried far too many times before.
A reader kindly found what looks to be the appropriate patent for me. The patent clearly states that it's for a a way in which "rotational energy can be efficiently obtained from permanent magnets", which I would have thought would have triggered the USPTO's perpetual-motion-device radar, but apparently not. Maybe they're getting sloppy about more than software patents these days.
It should be noted that, generally speaking, patent offices do not require proof that a device works in order to grant a patent. They often make exceptions in the case of perpetual motion machines, but if you disguise your over-unity patent application as an ultra-high-efficiency motor or something (which Minato has pretty much done in his US patent application), your local patent office would probably be happy to grant you a patent.
As I've observed on previous occasions, (one involving another magic magnetic motor...) the patent office's job is to sell you legal protection for your idea, not to guarantee that the idea is worth protecting.
Evidence:
From what they said about the energy transfer of the system, it sounds to me like a bit of handwaving about transient and steady-state operation. Seems like he used permanent magnets to provide a sort of momentum to the motor which must be overcome at startup, but which will keep the sucker turning on seemingly very little energy. The same effect could be achieved by simply adding a great deal of mass to the system. As long as the journalists aren't paying attention during the transient phase (and when do they ever) it would seem like magic once it finally gets up to speed.
Sort of like how if you carry a big heavy rock to the top of the hill, you can then input a small amount of energy to push it over and watch the huge kinetic energy output. But you have to carry it up first.
I'm guessing this was a troll, but i'm going to pretend it isn't and answer it anyway.
The PSU, my misguided friend, is the Power Supply Unit. The "Power Supply" you referred to. I can assure you that you're using one, unless you have replaced it with a series of very large 12v and 5v batteries carefully wired into the rails.
Now, for the 8th-grade lesson you seem to have missed-- your power supply works using a large transformer to convert the voltage coming out of the wall into the 12v and 5v voltages required by your PC. How does a transformer work? at its simplest, it's a pair of coils of wire placed next to eachother. The coils are magnetically coupled-- the first coil gets the power from the wall and generates a HUGE magnetic field. The second coil does what coils do when placed in big magnetic fields-- it makes electrical current. The number of turns of wire on each coil determine the ratio of the input to output voltages.
That's how things worked in the 1980s. Now, today's power supplies aren't that simple. Computer power supplies today are switching power supplies, and use a frequency step-up before feeding into the transformers to reduce the size of the transformer needed. But you will note, as this nice article says and clearly shows in pictures, there are still multiple transformers in a switching power supply. And yes, the way they work is by shunting all the power you're using through a big ol' magnetic field between two coils with different numbers of turns of wire.
So, yes, your power supply is producing a gigantic magnetic field. One large enough to transfer all the hundreds of watts your PC needs through the air as a magnetic field.
And for this you got +5 Informative?? Are there actually that many people on /. that would for even one moment believe that this device actually does what the "inventor" claims.
There have been hundreds of these bogus devices trotted out in the past. They never quite seem to work, but the inventor always promises that it just needs a little more tweaking, once he gets enough investors lined up. Not one has ever accomplished anything beyond emptying the wallets of the suckers that invest in these scams.
Minato doesn't sound like he's just made a measurement error, he sounds like a fraud. The fact that he fooled the reporter doesn't make his invention any more real.
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http://quasiturbine.promci.qc.ca/QTIndex.html
6E8C 8721 B3D9 5269 5A9B 1122 00C3 C03D 99A7 1CFC
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.
{ Pillar candles great for when the power fails and you cant see the keyboard..
You're mistaken. Most of the Space Pixie Smoke is actually inside capacitors. You typically only get to see it released when the electrolyte is crap, or when you wire things up wrong.
Computer chips contain very little space pixie smoke, and must be heated to staggering temperatures to get it released. I did, however manage to make a UV-erasable PROM glow (UV erasable chips have a little window in the top so you can see the actual chip through the case, and thus expose it to UV) once by accidentally connecting the power supply to one of the data pins. Just like a little lightbulb, all those tiny circuits worked nicely as a filament.
The permanent magnet motors in your hard drive have a DC magnetic field, called B0 (B-Zero). It's strong, but it's not changing.
To change data on magnetic media, a DC field isn't going to do it. You need to get the particles moving first, using an AC magnetic field at a bias frequency. That allows the particles to go into a state where they can be set by the record signal, another AC signal which has the actual signal to be recorded. In the analog world, a bias frequency might be, say, 40KHz, that gets the particles moving, and then the signal which is your audio information, which sets the particles in place. A DC field won't change much without a biasing signal going on.
Slashdot insults Einstein's memory by regularly posting junk science articles with his image attached. But of course, they don't actually write the articles .. or submit them .. or proofread them .. or fact check them ..
What do they draw a paycheck for again?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> What's to say it isn't powered by giant invisible lamas?
Llamas as in the South American camel?
I've been in South America for 5 years, and if there are any invisible llamas here, I certainly haven't seen them.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Erm.... the word you're looking for is fallacy. I suppose your invented hybrid word might mean "mistake with a penis", as in "Bill Clinton commited lots of phallacies".
But then, you are an AC so maybe it was on porpoise.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Oh, and before accusing someone of talking out of one's arse, you should be very, very certain you're not the one actually doing it.
I am certain, and you are talking out of your arse. Energy cannot be extracted from the quantum zero point, merely borrowed. And the Casimir effect is only tangentially related to the zero point; in fact, it was first observed between ships which lie parallel to one another, a decidedly non-quantum system.
Let's look at the case of the solar system, which you claimed could be condensed out of the zero point energy contained in a single cubic centimeter. Assume the solar system is made from just the Sun; then, with a mass m = 2e30 kg, we have a rest-mass energy E = m c^2 of 1.8e47 J.
If we want to borrow this much energy from the vacumm, the uncertainty principle indicates that we have to give it back after a time t = h/(4 pi E), where h = 6.64e-34 J s is Planck's constant.
Solving for t, we find that we can borrow a solar system's worth of energy for t = 4.42e-83 s. This is around forty orders of magnitude shorter than the Planck time, the shortest timescale of the universe. Therefore, your original claim about condensing the solar system is ridiculous. As are similar claims made by crackpots who want to tap the 'limitless' energy of the vacuum.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
There are a variety of different types of electric motors, not all appropriate for electric cars. Being that this motor uses magents, my question would be what kind of starting power or torque does this motor have.
"and that caroline let frank feel her up in assembly"
Man, you had to do that in assembly? I would think a compiled language would be easier, but still not as easy as just using your hands and the more traditional analog interface.
Raser Technologies recently (ie within the last year) introduced technology to convert existing electric motor designs to run not more effeciently, but more powerfully. Their patented (with a real US patent) design allows a motor to produce up to three times as much power than previously achievable. All electric motors can be "overdriven" to provide more power in short bursts. This technology (which they dub Symetron) allows the motor to run at those higher powers at a sustained rate without burnout or explosion.
Unlike Kohei Minato, Raser Technologies has been to various trade shows, hosted several demonstrations and posts results done by 3rd party test facilities. Also unlike Japan Magnetic Fan Company, Raser Technology is a publicly traded company under the stock symbol RSTG.OB.
Although not as revolutionary or jaw-droppingly-fake, this new technology does have a huge amount of practicle applications. For example, currently to run an electric car you need about a 50-HP motor. Here's an example of how big a motor that's rated for 50 horsepower continious usage can be (610 lbs). A counterexample would be this video from a trade show where Raser Tech runs a bus on 500 horsepower motor that is noticably smaller.
Yes, these motors still have the same efficiency rating as the motors without the Symetron adjustment, but they are extremely small for their power ratings. The key is truly the power density.
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Additionally, the metal case of the PSU acts like a Faraday cage and keeps most of the magnetic fields inside the PSU, but it is mainly there to keep you from electrocuting yourself (PCs are one of those few items of consumer electronics that the consumer is expected to open up at some point).
You'll note that all of the coils in a transformer are wound together closely - this is due to the strength of magnetic fields decreasing rapidly (faster than the inverse square law) as you move away from the source. You can't seperate the coils by much distance and "transfer all the hundreds of watts your PC needs through the air as a magnetic field". It just doesn't work like that.
There is some electromagnetic noise from the power supply, but not very much really. Open up a piece of consumer electronics (like a Tivo or CD player for example) and you'll note that they didn't even bother to put any shielding around the PSU, because the magnetic field strength coming from it is really weak. How do they get away with it? The fields just aren't that big that they cause any problems with modern digital electronics.
Open up a dead hard drive sometime and you'll find two really really strong magnets and an electromagnetic coil in the head actuator assembly, adjacent to the sensitive magnetic media. How do they get away with it? Simple, the field is really quite small.
Unless your power supply includes the type of electromagnet used on a scrapyard crane, I wouldn't worry about it - the field is much smaller than you might think.
Putting moderation advice in your
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.
The only way you will ever get more energy out of a system than you put in is if there is a pre-existing source of energy in the system that someone else stored there. E.g. I flip the switch on a flashlight, and more energy comes out as light than I put into flipping the switch, but that energy is being removed from the batteries (a pre-existing component in the system), where it was stored by someone else. In the case of a magnetic motor, energy may be drawn from several sources: electrical input to electromagnets, existing momentum of the rotating shaft (flywheel), or most improbably it might come from the "energy in the permanent magnets". Most of the perpetual motion claims I have seen focus on this "permanent magnet" energy. Unfortunately, if an easy way were found to liberate this stored energy, it would have the side effect of demagnetizing the permanent magnet itself, essentially making the "p-m generator" nothing more than a battery harnessing the stored potential energy in the magnet... And before someone claims that permanent magnets hold an infinite amount of energy that could be thus released, remember that the exact amount of potential energy stored in a permanent magnet could be calculated by measuring the energy required to magnetize it, and this quantity is definitely finite. The only thing that violates the Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy, is the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy, which simply states that mass and energy are the same thing, so even in fusion, you still do not have a perpetual energy source.
1) Permanent magnet motors start at around 80% efficiency (for tiny motors) and get much better from there. Ergo, generating the same mechanical power output from only 20% of the electrical input - which is the principle claim in the article - puts this firmly in the realms of a perpetual-motion claim. Show me the requisite extraordinary proof...
2) The motor ain't the major source of noise in small fans. It's white noise from the inefficiency of a small rotor stirring the air at high speed - effectively a mechaincal-impedance mismatch.
3)IF I could do what the article claims, I'd run and sell out to the very largest industrial installations first - traction, pumping etc , where saving MWH contributes to the bottom line. And retire *loaded*, in a year or two.
Sounds very much like snake oil to me. What this is is doing on a News-For-Nerds website I have no idea.
(and no, I'm not as 'new around here' as my ID no. suggests...)
Martin.
Not sure what old skool drives you're using but the FDB drives are super quite, and not much more expensive than the others. The Seagate 120GB FDB drive I have is definatly the quietest moving part in my PC. I can't even hear it churning over the fan noise that's rated at a mere 28dB!
I have an HDD activity light, I don't need to hear the drive... blinky lights are MUCH cooler than some grindy, clicky, whirly sounds anyway.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
This guy is putting energy into the machine every time his magnet moves. Attach it to a fixed position say with a clamp and it would not work. Take a look at this video of Minato and then read the explanation here. You will need to search in your browser for minato because the page is long. Also you have to wait for the avi to completely download.
Tanstaafl
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
4. Someone doesn't know how to measure actual power correctly.
That was my thought. I was wondering what the input and output waveforms were like and what method they were using to measure them since they almost certainly aren't DC.
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You Americans with your large penises are very superior and will undoutedly jump on this huge opportunity to continue your dominance of world industry. To hear more about how you're extreme prowess will prevail, listen to the following messages:
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
The moment you claim 330% efficiency, and in the same breath say you haven't violated the laws of physics is the moment it becomes total bullshit.
If it were 330% efficient, that would mean, for instance, it draines 100W, and puts out 330W.
Throw in a generator in a closed loop, and the device could power itself forever, while producing excess power. The world's energy problems would be solved, forver.
"Harnessing one of hte basic forces...".. bullshit.
You don't harness a force, you use it.
If you push two similar magnetic poles together, you build up potential energy.. when you stop pushing, that energy is used up moving the poles apart.
In order for gravity to work on something, it first has to be raised up in the gravitational field... (it has to go up to come down). This takes energy.. and ideally, the same amount of energy.
Now, although it's possible this guy has invented something that branches out into totall unexplored areas of physics.. it is quite unlikely... more likely he has created a nice, efficient, quiet motor, and is measuring things the wrong way.
Nothing has over 100% efficiency, sorry.
A U.S. Patent? Shit, I got one of those in my cornflakes this morning. :o)
Based on a quick Google, electric motors already seem to run anywhere from 77% to over 96% efficency. Claims of running on '80% less power' push even a crummy 77% efficency motor up to 385% efficency. Anything over 100% makes it a perpetual motion machine.
:D
I had to hit the Google cache to read the story itself, but it does claim that "1.8 volts and 150mA input, and from the generator, 9.144 volts and 192mA output. 1.8 x 0.15 x 2 = 540mW input and 9.144 x 0.192 = 1.755W out". X energy in, 3.25*X energy out. Chain them together and you get infinite free energy out.
Much of the rest of the story is spent on the usual con artist routine - an entire laundry list of reasons for delaying commercial applications while baiting in more investors. He blames everything from the various patent offices to 9/11
It may be an interesting motor. It may even be a patentable motor. But the claims surrounding the motor are patently false (pun intended).
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Hmmm, no wonder it sounds familiar. Oh, wait, it's a crock of shit. SUPRISE!
Ever build one yourself? Did those storage batteries last as long as you thought they would? And what math do you speak of?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Of particular merit is the one that shows Minato on CNN... and you can clearly see his arm doing the "work" of keeping that wheel moving.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Now that's what I call a whack with the physics clue-stick. You know, the plan would've worked if Planck wasn't so lazy. When I was Planck's age, I could saw and split six cords of wood, milk fifty cows, and plow 100 acres behind a single lame ox in 10^-43 seconds. Now here's this Planck fellow, claims he cain't git nothin' done-- not ONE SINGLE THING-- in less than that. Lazy, I tell ya'.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
no, it's just a difference in the law. it appears that japanese law requires that the idea in the patent description is actually valid, something which the US does not require. do a US patent search, there are plenty of mechinanisms for perpetual motion and even time travel described in detail. as long as the mechanism described is unique, it can be granted a patent in the US.
We know something you don't know
&
Yes, but we'll sue them
What worries me are phrases like "proprietary design innovations", "proprietary scientific principles", "strict confidentiality agreement", etc. I read their Press Briefing, which left me more and less satisfied. The best i can piece together is that they've got better cooling, some special design tweaks and a "means for increased magnetic energy storage" The deeper you go the curioser it gets...
Just for shits and giggles they make almost the same claims as our Japanese friend. "300% more power" anyone? Their SEC filings make for veryinteresting reading. they've only spent 600K on R&D since raser's inception, they haven't obtained patents yet (only applied for them), "Raser's auditor's report contains a "going concern" qualification", "Our officers have no long-term experience with electrical motor sales"... I just can't understand... If their tech is so mindblowing how come it isn't everywhere?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
http://www.lutec.com.au/
The Lutec 1000 is claimed to be more than 100% eficient (lets see all those themodynamics laws thrown about now)
I leave you with this question, how is it that an electro magnet can consume large amounts of power to keep a 10kg weight suspended, yet a permanent magnet can do the same job without consuming any power? This is the energy source they are using. The tough part is timing the "kick" to keep the motor from polling.
It certainly doesn't seem like he's being deceptive. He may have just designed a highly effiecient motor (note that it still takes electricity to run, it's no perpetual motion machine). He may not even be fully sure what he's done, which is why some of his extrapelations on his current product get ridiculous. But the motors spin on less power, that in and of itself is something amazing...
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Nothing can use %80 less power for a given amount of output if it's already got more than %20 efficiency. That's why these perpetual motion and free energy jokes keep popping up. Either the numbers are grossly mistated or this thing would be better described as "about %20 'motor' and around %80 'battery' or 'compressed spring' or 'water behind a dam' etc...
Of course there's always a change something we don't know is going on, but the unfortunate fact is that 999999 cases in a million it's a crook. Besides, it's very easy for this guy to prove his claims.
If he hooks up the miracle motor to generator and uses that generator to power up the motor and it keeps running (should be easy with 330% efficiency, you can also draw infinite amount of energy from the circuit while at it) then he has either found the invisible and so far unexplainable power source or has proven that laws of thermodynamics don't work and perpetual motion machines are possible, you can bet that million physicists will swarm in to observe it and everything we though we know will be turned upside down. He'll also be worlds richest person in no time.
Carefully observe how he fails to do that, and instead relies on (probably wrongly calculated or rigged) simple electrical meter. Now ask yourself why? Simple answer: because it doesn't work, and this is nothing but a con.
This guy claims the motor actually outputs more power than it consumes with an efficiency of 330% and what is the author excited about? Quiter PC fans. Yeah!
This reminds of the castaway who met the girl on the island and when she offered him anything he wanted, said "do you have an internet connection?"
Inventor: I have invented an Over Unity device
Author: Does it mean my PC will have a quieter fan?
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
This is the exact same argument every peddler of perpetual motion machines uses to claim that his invention is not a perpetual motion machine, but is somehow harnessing external power which is just hanging around out there to be used.
;-) ) While the gadget certainly does run down, it takes an unexpectedly long time to do so.)
The Earth's electromagnetic field is a popular choice among these hucksters. With this guy, it's magnets.
I'm not so sure. I am normally extremely skeptical of such claims, and yes, I understand at least most of the implications of the laws of thermodynamics, and believe they hold true here, too. But at the same time, I've witnessed this effect myself, and so can you - it's easy. Either something strange, or the illusion of something strange, is going on, and I don't at this point pretend understand it all. Here's how you can see for yourself:
----
Building "Colin Dublin's Batteryless Magnetic Motor"
(Credit for "discovering" this particular arrangement must be given to my 9-year-old son, Colin, who came to me a few months ago claiming to have invented "a motor without batteries". An avid Junkyard Wars fan, he is continually trying to invent new motors and engines. (I guess it just runs in the family...
Go to the toy store and get one of those cool little magnetic construction sets that have a bunch of ball bearings and a bunch little plastic connector sticks with neodymium magnets molded into each end. (You really ought to have a set of these anyway, right? They're just too cool not to...) Now start building:
1) Make a flat, regular pentagon, with 5 ball bearings connected by five sticks.
2) Now tesselate the top by adding a stick from each of the pentagon's ball bearings to a sixth ball bearing above.
3) Repeat the process to tesselate the bottom side, too. You should now have a polyhedron consisting of ten triangular sides, 5 top and 5 bottom, with your original pentagon in the middle. (If not, start over and try to figure out where my instructions are confusing you...)
4) Stick a ball bearing onto another stick, and let that ball adhere to the top ball of your polyhedron. This is the "low friction bearing/axle" for the gadget. Note that there are two ball bearings stuck together here - that's important to keep the friction down.
5) While holding the axle stick vertically in one hand with the polyhedron hanging under it, give the polygon a spin with the other hand. It will run down in a bit.
6) Now spin it again, but this time, hold another magnet stick near (but not touching) the outer rim of the polyhedron as it spins. If you can do it steadily, without perturbing the spinning polyhedron too much, you'll feel and see it continue to spin far longer than you might expect.
Depending on the polarities with which you assembled the thing, you can get a rather surprising sustaining effect at times, especially if you "alternate" the polarity of the tesselating sticks. Experiment to see what works best. Because the rim is five-sided, you'll have some point at which there are two balls of the same polarity, and this will make things bumpy. Try other shapes, too, if your set allows (some are better than others) - a hexagon, for instance. Have fun with the magnets; you might even learn something. And who knows, maybe you'll have a career option in Japan as a magnetic motor engineer...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
So, to sum the above comments. 1. The motor is assumed to be a hoax by people who take notice of the 330% efficiency mentioned. Which is pretty understandable. Nobody wants to rewrite the rules of physics that have served us so well so far (Note: "rules", not "laws"). 2. What Tom Bearden's highly interesting comment claims though (see somewhere in comments), is that the efficiency is gained by exploiting other source of energy. Ie. it is not 1 W input -> 2 W output, but rather: 1W input + X W other source -> 2 W output. In this case, the efficiency may well be very low actually, as long as most of it comes from a source that requires no cost from the user. Tom's post mentions an analogy with a windmill. You may well need electricity to run it, but basically you rely on wind, not electricity, to turn the blades. The inventor's motor is thus probably more adequately called a "magnetic"/"magneto"-motor rather than an electromotor. Some interesting texts to that effect are mentione d in the Flying Dutchman Project: http://www.fdp.nu/thebook/default.asp including the instructions for building your own constructions that demonstrate the principle (and sound quite practical, at least in the post): http://www.fdp.nu/thebook/rpmm.txt