Slashdot Mirror
Yet Another Perpetual Motion Device
The Star reports on this inventor breaking all the laws of physics as far as free energy goes. It even provoked interest from "esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Markus Zahn". I would like to know how this seemingly backyard enthusiast's experimental set up has not been tried a million times over the years. It seems so simple and too good to be true. The article has links to a multi-part video demo of the device accelerating an electric motor under load for free!
More importantly for shooting down the 'perpetual motion' crap is that from his description, the base configuration has the wheel of magnets inducing current in the coil placed at the rim, thereby dumping energy into the coil that is wasted. Then he connects the coil back into the system, essentially dumping the induced energy back into the motor to strengthen the field in the motor's coils. Yes, the motor will speed up; the system is recovering energy that was lost into the coil, which overall reduces the load on the motor, allowing its speed to increase until the load again matches the energy being put in. But the speedup is no different from the speedup you'd get if you simply disconnected the wheel of magnets entirely, taking its load out of the system, except that you'd get a larger increase in motor speed, because you have inductive losses in the coupling of the magnets and the coil, and resistive losses in the coil and the wires back to the motor. So all he's demonstrated is "If I take a load off a motor, its speed increases." Definitely an earth-shattering discovery, fully worthy of high-school freshmen.