The main problem in implementing small output conventional power plants comes from the difficulty of altering power output swiftly enough to follow rapid changes in load. The traditional steam generator method, regardless of the source of heat, has a large amount of inertia which makes its response sluggish. Making them small to get a more nimble response sacrifices efficiency. The conventional method of dealing with this difficulty is to have a huge grid with a quantity of large baseline generators, supplemented with peaking generators which are started up or shut down as needed. The size of the grid smooths out the fluctuations enough so this method works, usually.
As long as nineteenth century methodology, boil the water, use the steam to turn a turbine, dominates the generation of electricity, the use of small generation facilities will be confined to applications such as factories where the load is fairly constant.
This is in fact a dangerous technology -- but only economically and politically. There are squads of high powered contractors and ambitious politicians lining up to promote the next generation of the same old stuff, light water reactors. They are not going to be pleased to see their attempts to extract buckets of wealth by building risk laden plants to generate expensive electricity emasculated by a simple, relatively safe and inexpensive machine. Eric Lerner and his team know what they are doing. They have taken a giant leap into the future, but if we want to take advantage of their discoveries, we will have to fight for it.
My thanks to Cheerio Boy for the name of the Japanese inventor, Kohei Minato. As I understand his claims at the time he was able to reduce the inefficiency of the basic electric motor to one tenth of its former percentage, improving a 90% motor to 99% and a 50% one to 95%. Last I heard he was going into production making large motors for ventilation systems which need to be running almost all the time. I wish him a good market. With the now increasing cost of producing electricity, he might have quite an opportunity.
Regarding the tone of some of the responses to the initial article: The only thing more problematic than trying to prove that the impossible can actually be done is to try to prove that it will always remain impossible.
This is not new. A Japanese inventor, whose name I cannot remember, developed a similar motor with magnets inside of it some two years ago after two decades of work. His design was able to develop the stated horsepower using one tenth of the electricity. Not perpetual motion exactly, but a considerable leap in efficiency. That makes two independent sources verifying the same phenomenon. The least we owe ourselves is to investigate these claims carefully. A large portion of our nation's electrical load is made up of motors.
The first description of how this could be done was in EARTHLIGHT by Arthur C. Clark, a S.F. novel published in the fifties. I always thought Clark's description of the method sounded good, but I wouldn't want to try it. Sorry, Arthur.
My, my, my! What a ruckus. To be sure "Cowboy Neal", whoever he is, expressed himself crudely and provocatively, but the reaction was a bit out of proportion to the insult. Brian Ragle, almost exclusively, had a thoughtful comment, but the question still remains: why would a mention of electromagnetic forces make professional Astrophysicists so ill at ease and defensive?
As an amateur who knows a number of professionals in this area, I have always been surprised that most of the theorizing being published seemed to be sustained by Newton's law of gravity, Einstein's theory of relativity, the observations of particle physicists, and little else. Rarely would electromagnetism enter into the explanations of natural phenomena. This is despite the fact that most of the matter in the universe, as plasma, is subject to a force which is 10 to the 43rd power times more powerful than gravity.
I had questions like: 'how can supermassive black holes, giant sources of gravitational power, emit jets of matter, hot enough to emit X-rays, at nearly the speed of light' and 'how can a diffuse gas cloud of several solar masses and twenty light years across, rotating at the rate of the galaxy it is within, manage to condense into a star with a rotation period of ten hours -- what happened to the angular momentum." They remained unanswered until recently when theorizing involving electromagnetic forces appeared.
I had been told: "Gravity operates only in one direction and is simple to calculate; electromagnetism is actually two separate forces, each in two polarities, and it is very much more difficult to model." I don't think this man was lazy or undereducated, but we are looking at the "old shoes" phenomenon, with a twist.
Everyone cares to use the shoes which are broken in and comfortable, and the tendency is to use them for everything, however inappropriate. But there is more to this than that. Somewhere the plasma- and astro-physicists got into a mud slinging contest. It wasn't science, it was personal. This pointless wrangling militates against good science, because as Mr. Ragle pointed out, nobody has a big enough window to see it all yet. I have seen this "nuts vs. kooks" mentality in the conflict between visual- and radio-astronomers for years. It resembles children arguing about who has the dirtiest socks.
Everybody whose blood is running hot over this matter might want to sit back and consider that if the search for truth requires a majority of time spent proving the other guy wrong, perhaps it is not truth that is being sought.
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The main problem in implementing small output conventional power plants comes from the difficulty of altering power output swiftly enough to follow rapid changes in load. The traditional steam generator method, regardless of the source of heat, has a large amount of inertia which makes its response sluggish. Making them small to get a more nimble response sacrifices efficiency. The conventional method of dealing with this difficulty is to have a huge grid with a quantity of large baseline generators, supplemented with peaking generators which are started up or shut down as needed. The size of the grid smooths out the fluctuations enough so this method works, usually. As long as nineteenth century methodology, boil the water, use the steam to turn a turbine, dominates the generation of electricity, the use of small generation facilities will be confined to applications such as factories where the load is fairly constant.
This is in fact a dangerous technology -- but only economically and politically. There are squads of high powered contractors and ambitious politicians lining up to promote the next generation of the same old stuff, light water reactors. They are not going to be pleased to see their attempts to extract buckets of wealth by building risk laden plants to generate expensive electricity emasculated by a simple, relatively safe and inexpensive machine. Eric Lerner and his team know what they are doing. They have taken a giant leap into the future, but if we want to take advantage of their discoveries, we will have to fight for it.
My thanks to Cheerio Boy for the name of the Japanese inventor, Kohei Minato. As I understand his claims at the time he was able to reduce the inefficiency of the basic electric motor to one tenth of its former percentage, improving a 90% motor to 99% and a 50% one to 95%. Last I heard he was going into production making large motors for ventilation systems which need to be running almost all the time. I wish him a good market. With the now increasing cost of producing electricity, he might have quite an opportunity.
Regarding the tone of some of the responses to the initial article: The only thing more problematic than trying to prove that the impossible can actually be done is to try to prove that it will always remain impossible.
This is not new. A Japanese inventor, whose name I cannot remember, developed a similar motor with magnets inside of it some two years ago after two decades of work. His design was able to develop the stated horsepower using one tenth of the electricity. Not perpetual motion exactly, but a considerable leap in efficiency. That makes two independent sources verifying the same phenomenon. The least we owe ourselves is to investigate these claims carefully. A large portion of our nation's electrical load is made up of motors.
The first description of how this could be done was in EARTHLIGHT by Arthur C. Clark, a S.F. novel published in the fifties. I always thought Clark's description of the method sounded good, but I wouldn't want to try it. Sorry, Arthur.
As an amateur who knows a number of professionals in this area, I have always been surprised that most of the theorizing being published seemed to be sustained by Newton's law of gravity, Einstein's theory of relativity, the observations of particle physicists, and little else. Rarely would electromagnetism enter into the explanations of natural phenomena. This is despite the fact that most of the matter in the universe, as plasma, is subject to a force which is 10 to the 43rd power times more powerful than gravity.
I had questions like: 'how can supermassive black holes, giant sources of gravitational power, emit jets of matter, hot enough to emit X-rays, at nearly the speed of light' and 'how can a diffuse gas cloud of several solar masses and twenty light years across, rotating at the rate of the galaxy it is within, manage to condense into a star with a rotation period of ten hours -- what happened to the angular momentum." They remained unanswered until recently when theorizing involving electromagnetic forces appeared.
I had been told: "Gravity operates only in one direction and is simple to calculate; electromagnetism is actually two separate forces, each in two polarities, and it is very much more difficult to model." I don't think this man was lazy or undereducated, but we are looking at the "old shoes" phenomenon, with a twist.
Everyone cares to use the shoes which are broken in and comfortable, and the tendency is to use them for everything, however inappropriate. But there is more to this than that. Somewhere the plasma- and astro-physicists got into a mud slinging contest. It wasn't science, it was personal. This pointless wrangling militates against good science, because as Mr. Ragle pointed out, nobody has a big enough window to see it all yet. I have seen this "nuts vs. kooks" mentality in the conflict between visual- and radio-astronomers for years. It resembles children arguing about who has the dirtiest socks.
Everybody whose blood is running hot over this matter might want to sit back and consider that if the search for truth requires a majority of time spent proving the other guy wrong, perhaps it is not truth that is being sought.