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Self Contained Power Source?
McOSEN writes "Your Server Cabinet could have a 100% self sustained power source. It's called Parallel Path Technology and it's being coined as a revolution in the magnetic motor industry. From Segways to Vacuum cleaners to Server Cabinets. The article talks about the technology but doesn't exactly lay out specifics."
From TFA:
1. It's a motor, not a generator. It sounds like it could be a neat motor, but it's still not a generator.
2. "The technology claims to be able to increase magnet motor efficiency substantially, even over the 100% barrier."
That's right folks! It's perpetual motion machine!
So, this is about a motor that makes claims that are pretty universally accepted to be impossible. The poster, of course, is affiliated with the site hosting the page, so he really should have read the article the same way I did. Even if he didn't, maybe ScuttleMonkey should have.
I would be more annoyed, but this fits ScuttleMonkey's past science articles. Could someone send him a few pop-sci introduction texts, so we can stop having the Electric Universe, perpetual motion, and other fringe theories on the frontpage as science?
I hear this was developed specifically for the new Phantom gameconsole and online service. I cant wait to get duke nukem whenever going on that baby!
I thought they were called squirrel cages. And they're not perpetual, someones gotta feed the squirrels!
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"Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Yet another 'Coming Soon' thing that will always be 'Coming Soon'
Did someone forget entropy?
So the first lines of the article basicly claim it's a perpetual motion machine, and than later in the article it says this is impossible. Wonderful when even the articles contridict themselves. I really enjoy the part where they state that they recieved a patent, like it actually means something.
Imagine a beowulf cluster made out of vaporware
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
Why is it that every new PMM for the last two decades has involved permanent magnets? Is there some kind of mad-scientist cabal that decrees these things? Will the fashion turn to something else soon, like, I don't know, materials so bouncy that they rebound with more energy than they hit the surface with? (Name that classic SF story.)
Seriously: Editors, please shitcan perpetual motion machines before we have to waste precious seconds on them. When a real PMM is possible, you'll know it's happened because suddenly the universe will have stopped working properly, and you'll be instantaneously and very thoroughly dead.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I love how the "Lab" in the picture looks a whole lot like a kitchen.
"... in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
If you like exotic motor designs, check out these "thin gap" motors. These brushless permanent magnet motors can reach 90% efficiency, which is very impressive. The windings are made from thin copper plates rather than round wires. These are real. You can order them.
There's some interesting work going on in motor electromagnetics, but the "greater than 100%" motor probably isn't it.
Bullshit detector overload!
This is Slashdot, for crying out loud. We're nerds, we don't fall for this idiotic screed even a high school freshman could debunk.
Ooooh, big words are scary! Stator, rotor, magnetic flux. Dammit, both the editor and article submitter should hand in their geek cards.
This guy does have a real patent, though. I don't know which is worse, the ignoramus patent examiner who allowed this one through or the baboon who posted it to Slashdot. Check the USPTO link here.Like many here, I read the article and got the idea that they were talking about a perpetual motion machine (could be the "The technology claims to be able to increase magnet motor efficiency substantially, even over the 100% barrier." at the beginning of the article that gave everyone that impression...), but the only place that I can find such a claim is from the author of the article...From the way it's written, it just doesn't appear that he knows what he is talking about.
I glanced through the patent at USPTO and it appears to me that what this is is a more efficient electric motor, not something that outputs more energy than is put into it.
-R
It's clear that the writer of TFA didn't understand much about what (s)he heard/read about this. I'm sure that the developers of the technology make no silly claims about greater than 100% efficiency. More likely, this is just an improvement on existing technology that gives, perhaps, somewhat better efficiency, or higher power in a smaller size, less weight for a given power, etc. Any of these would be good, but violate no physical laws.
BSA: "Would you like a free Software Audit"? me: "No, thanks. My software is all Free".
I really wish these kooks could separate the perpetual motion crap from reality here. They are not "over-unity", perpetual motion, or what have you. The do in fact obey all laws of thermodynamics. These motors are real and can deliver as much as 98% efficiency. We've seen them, they work. I was at the presentation recently by Boeing Phanton Works that featured these things. ..Chuck..
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
> Electric motors are already 80-90% efficient, while this might make
> it closer to 100% it won't go over, unless someone discovered some
> new laws of physics.
The only natural law involved here is "There's a sucker born every minute".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Current electrical motors/generators are up to 99% efficient, and the loss is mostly in resistive loss in wire.
/. readers: You have one C++ programmer, and you need more work done. Just hire one more programmer, and to your surprise, you get 4 times as much done.
There is no room for any meaningful improvement unless you claim to have more than 100% efficiency, and they do. Lunatic bin right here!
Current electrical motors/generators are up to 99% efficient, and the loss is mostly in resistive loss in wire.
There is no room for any meaningful improvement unless you claim to have more than 100% efficiency, and they do. Lunatic bin right here.!
I was curious as to what they based their claim on?
First, go to http://www.flynnresearch.net/ to se some details on this.
The answer is:
Just doctor up formulaes: Force is proportional to magnetic flux. Se http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/ Look up 'amperes law', 'magnetic force' and 'Lorentz force'. As you can see they are all _linear_. I.e. F=B*k. (Force = Field times some constant. Flynn makes the relationship quadratic: F=B^2*A/2u.
To translate for
"Fix it"
Read it again. The adverb is substantially. So the question is "How much are they increasing efficiency?" The answer is "Substatially." The then elaborate that total effiency is over 100%. Technically I'd agree with you though, if the word Barrier wasn't there, it implies and increase over a specific known barrier, thus is the 100% efficiency barrier.
Let say I was to say
"This will increase your runnning speed substatially, over 4 minutes in a mile"
You could assume to you would be cutting 4 minutes from your mile.
If I were to say
"This will increase your runnning speed substatially, over the 4 minute mile barrier"
The assumption would be vastly different.
Is it reasonable to assume you can get more output power with better efficiency? Try this article titled
Increase Efficiency 10 Percent and Double Output:
I think the original poster/editor misunderstood the original claim...
They're absolutely right. The submitter was wrong about the subject matter, and the subject matter obviously had many misonceptions about how the technology works (greater than 100% output... WTF?) But here is a look at how the technology actually works. It seems to be a motor that is simply more efficient, which is indeed a positive and achievable goal.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
As I understand it, the claim of above unity energy utilization in the articel summary is (of course) false and not being made for this motor.
What they are saying is above unity torque production. And here unity simply means the ratio with respect to a particular arbiratrily chosen standard. It's not a magic number. Just a way to avoid using units in the discussion.
Now what appears to be happeing is that if the rotor were stopped and one measured the torque on the rotor (or linear actuator) then you would find that this force was four times as high as a motor without the parallel path technology, running at the same current and the same number of windings.
Now we can see that this is sort of misleading. If we kept the current constant and the windings constant then the force or toruqe is higher in a non-moving rotor or actuator. But in a non-moving system one can, for the same current always increase the number of windings to increase the force. The ultimate limit comes from several practical realities. 1) increasing the windings increases both the impedance and residual reactance of the motor making it lossy and limiting it's frequency response. 2) The upper limit is reached when the magnetic flux is no longer contained by the ferrite. Both motors probably have a problem with #2 but the parallel path motor has fewer windings for the same level of force as a conventional motor.
Okay but that is still begging the question since were talking about non moving motor. adding in a permenant magent to boost the force is a lot like adding a spring to boos the force. You pay for it by the energy it took to load the spring.
Once this motor starts moving then one has to do a dynamic anayis to the flux collapsing as the rotor or actualtor moves is drawn into the field. What does this do the current in the motor? What does this do to it's complex impedance? I don't actually know the answers to those questions. The static analysis is simply bogus for concluding that. But if one were to maintain the "spring" analogy then it seems like one could not possibly be getting any net gain.
what this device does seem to be doing however is to make an assymetric pull on the acutator. that is it pulls on one arm of the motor with 4 times the torque and the other arm with no torque at all. That might possibly lead so some sort of alteration in the lead-lag curve of of the phase response of the motor at different speeds. If so it might somehow make a motor with a given amount of windings and ferrite optimally usitize it's material content better.
So if there is any gain at all here I suspect it lies with this latter effect. But I cant' do the analysis to be sure.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The energy stored in a permanent magnet (from rotated domains held from returning to their equilibrium condition) is called magnetic energy density, and is given in SI units of KJ/m^3. A more common unit used to be the Mega Gauss-Oersted (MGOe). T [1 MGOe = 8 kJ/m^3]. For most nifty permanent magnets, the KJ/m^3 value will be in the 20's to 30's. Now consider the volume of magnets that would fit in a motor you could hold in your hand, and thence calculate the energy density. Then calculate the effect of releasing ALL this energy in one minute, say of a 100mm x 10mm x 10mm magnet, releasing its 0.3 J in 60 seconds, for a whopping 0.005 Watts of power, leaving an unmagnetized lump of metal. Impressed?
And if you'd looked into it a *BIT* more, you'd know that this technology (PPMT) has nothing to do with free energy or perpetual motion. Flynn has been done a profound disservice by the cited website. Check out his website for the real scoop. Nowhere in there does it say anything about free energy. What he has is simply a very efficient motor that can act as a generator when an *EXTERNAL FORCE* is applied to the shaft.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Parallel Path is a quantum leap in electromagnetic motor technology
At least they're being honest. As a scientist would know, (and they purport to be scientists), a quantum leap is the absolute least amount something can move without standing still. And they didn't say whether it was a leap forwards or backwards.
So basically they probably mean that this is a tiny tiny step backwards for them. I'll can believe that.
The power lost in the electromagnet in this scenario is only due to the resistance in the electromagnet. If you were to do this you would notice that the electromagnet would heat up and that heat would account for the energy lost from whatever energy source you used to power the electromagnet. This is the only power loss as long as the other levitating magnet is remaining stationary.
I am currently dumbfounded by two things. (1) That someone keeps modding these comments down, as the subject is intensely interesting and there is valid debate here, as I shall show (again). and (2) That I get responses like this one which are self-defeating, as I shall proceed to show.
As to your comment, above, let us try a simple thought experiment. Imagine two electromagnets sitting on a tabletop and oriented such that their flux will cause a repulsive force when the electromagnets are powered. Imagine that both of these electromagnets are attached to a platform that can move on the table (wheels, low friction surface, whatever). Now further imagine that we place them arbitrarily close together. When we apply power to the electromagnets, what happens? Obviously, the electromagnets exert a motive force on one another and move apart. The act of moving apart clearly uses energy.
Is your assertion that the energy expended to impart a motive force to the experimental apparatus not originating in the electrical power used to energize the magnetic coils? Or, perhaps you believe that the only energy expended is expended when the aparatus actually moves? If your answer is the first one, then your argument is self defeating because that clearly violates the law of conservation of energy. If your answer is the second one, then let us add aditional parameters to our experiment and see what happens. Since you (in this case) are stating that energy is only consumed when the aparatus moves, let us place two rigid bodies with pressure sensors on the opposing sides of each electromagnet and re-run the experiment. In this case, the electromagnets will exert a motive force on one another, but the aparatus can no longer move. However, the pressure sensors will register presure (active compression) related to the imparted motive force. This constant pressure REQUIRES A CONSTANT EXPENSE OF ENERGY.
Do you disagree? If so, can you please explain how the electromagnets are causing a measurable compression of the pressure sensor without a constant expenditure of energy?
Now for the electrons repelling each other; the energy comes from bringing the electrons closer together. So, in order for the electrons to repel each other again, some amount of energy has to be exerted in bringing the electrons close together again. Energy is completely conserved in this situation. Just remember... force is not energy. It also doesn't take a supply of power to maintain a force. While there are problems with our understanding of the universe, this is not one of them.
It took me exactly 2 seconds to conceive of a simple thought experiment to prove you wrong. I am surprised that you didn't realize the same thiing when you were typing your response to me. I must assume that you are not actually thinking about this subject, but rather blinding regurgitating old, learned, conservation of energy religion. Here it is:
Imagine a closed system in free space with a large quantity of electrons freely *bouncing around*
Get the picture yet? Need help?
Ok, here is help: Those electrons don't have anyone pushing them together (e.g. they are not being accellerated, except perhaps by one another). However, over time they will have essentially infinite electrostatic interactions with one another, bouncing around infinitely, never loosing energy. But here is the kicker: Because of their interactions with each other, they will constantly be exposed to electrostatic acceleration which implies the expenditure of energy. Acceleration is not free. At no time does t
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