Hi stalkerator fans! ...Ah... Nois... what is a stalkerator???
Don't you read all of my posts throughout all time??? And the comments??? : )?
In the responses to my post "Kepler, what a buoy!" I revealed my invention of a generator based on a stalk of grass. One reader, greentheo, liked it so much that we continued discussing it in the comments. The design went through several stages and I have now gotten some numbers together... Oh buoy! (Actually, the same idea could generate electricity on a buoy.)
The current design is to have our pseudo stalk be a graphite kite tube about 4' tall, perhaps with a ping pong ball on the top for extra drag - like a thistle stalk (make it a steel ball on the buoy). About 3" - 4" from the bottom you attach some kind of gimbal to hold the stalk while allowing it to bob in the wind as stalks do - ya know? Below the gimbal you build a coil around the stalk and glue a nail up the tube shaft inside the coil. below the nail you attach a floating magnet so that the bobbing stalk flops the magnet around under the nail - Cool! An inductance generator!
OK, fine, so would it be any good? I decided it was time to do a little experimenting. I had a nail on a coil from some earlier experiments (Gary's "Gary Effect" was a little far-fetched I think... the nail was just following the field lines... another post another day...) If I put the nail end near a stack of my Neodymium super-magnets, I get a measurable current.
Last year or so I tore apart some computer hard drives and saved the very strong control magnets. They are mounted to steel plates which I think is to strengthen the magnet so they do not explode under their own stress. They are polarized with the two opposite poles near the middle of the bar with maybe some "dead" space between them. I decided to try the induction coil on that and got an interesting sensation... The nail head was big enough to span the DMZ, so it just felt like 2 strong magnets, but the nail point gave a different result. The dead zone almost felt like repulsion as I moved the nail over it. I do not think it was actually repelled, but I was having to hold the nail away from the magnet, so the reduced pull in the DMZ gave the sensation of repulsion. As I moved the nail point across the zone it snapped sharply across to the other side! Ah ha! Just what the stalkerator needs! I can get up to 16 mV even with my poor coil set up. I did not measure milliamps.
I grabbed my stack of tiny Neos and made 7 stacks of 4 each. I arranged 6 of them in a circle around a heavy iron washer with #7 up the middle. I tried having all the same polarity up, but the nail just sort of smooshed from stack to stack with not much generation. So I flipped every other stack. That was better, but what ever pole I picked for the center stack still created sort of a magnetic plateau for the nail to ride. I eliminated the center stack and got much better action. The nail seemed to hop from one stack to the next as it had hopped across the DMZ on the HD magnet. Also, if it did go across the middle it now had a "hole" with significantly lower field strength, so I got some generation even while crossing the center.
With the final configuration and just holding the nail in my hand I easily got 10 mV and .25 mA. I just measured it with my voltmeter, so these numbers would need to be confirmed with a known load to get accurate results. Anyway, using those numbers, .010 V x .00025 A = .0000025 Watt. Wow! That's Some Pig! Let's just say that with a great coil, great magnets, and optimized construction we can get that up to 100 times that... why not? That is .00025 W.
OK, so according to "The Physics Factbook" (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/BoiLu.shtml) the average house uses a bit under 9,000 kWh in a year! Ugh! There is a long way between those decimal points! However, one guy cited got that down to 1,000 kWh per year. If we assumed that we can generate power about half the time and save it until needed, we have 365.24 x 12 = 4383 hours for generation. That would require generation of 228 W (plus change). Lets see, at .00025 W/unit, that is only 912,617 units! OK, 1,000,000 units. (1.09575 Watts per unit per year)
If I put a stalk at the corner of each square foot I could have 1000 stalks in a 100' x 10' plot. Woo Hoo 1 W/year! Let's suppose I build a papercrete house and a bunch of greentheo energy savings strategies to reduce my need to 1,000 kWh/y. That is only 1000' x 1000' for the 1,000,000 units! Gee... if it takes me 1 hour to make, connect, and install each one (after getting the parts and the bridge rectifiers...), then if I have to repair each one after x hours of operation...
My goodness... this is not going well. A common solar cell gives 1.2 W for each 4" square! That one cell working for a year would make just over what 500 square feet of my "grass" would make... with no moving parts... not good news for the stalkerator... : )?
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Brown has gas...???
My post about the SMOT had several comments. In one response I mentioned Brown's Gas and got a request to blog about that... so...
Brown's gas is the electrolysis output if do not use a partition so that the hydrogen and oxygen are separated. So, the hh and o are all mixed together... kabOOM!!! No, not really. It does take something to ignite the reaction, but still it is highly explosive.
One of the cool things about this explosive mix is that you can make it on the spot with really simple, home made equipment. A favorite setup I have seen is to buy a bunch (10?) of steel switch plate covers from the hardware store. You stack them up and clamp them together, then drill one of the hole stacks to about 1/4". Next you unclamp them and flip every-other-one around so that the holes are stacked small-big-small-big... Next you assemble the reactor core by using threaded rod or long bolts with insulating 1/16"washers. So, you screw the bolt through a washer, then the first hole, then a washer, 2nd hole, washer, 3rd hole, etc. finally you put on a washer and nut to finish the stack. After you do both sides you have a stack with each bolt in contact with every-other plate on both sides... does that make sense?
If the right screw touches the first plate it misses the second plate then touches the 3rd, etc. At the same time on the left, the bolt misses the first, touches the 2nd, misses the 3rd, etc. If you apply 12v DC with right + and left -, then the plates alternate +, -, + ,- etc. All you do is put this core into some water with a little baking soda, apply 12 v and you get Brown's gas! ( 15 - 20 amps) You should bubble the gas through a water valve so that if it does ever flash back, only the gas in the tube will burn, not the larger amount in the reactor... little boom is good. Here is an example... there are many... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDpNUtXbz9U
So, what do you do with the stuff? Some people are making car kits that use the alternator to generate hho near the air intake. BG creates water when it burns, so you get the cooling and steam expansion benefits of water injection but with the added power of the burning hho. Some people hope to make the system so efficient that you can drive forever on just water... uh guys... remember it takes energy from the alternator to run the electrolysis core... One person said that the energy going into the core was just waste energy that would be going to heat. If that is true then this would be a great advantage indeed. However, it seems to me that whatever energy being used by the core will put additional drag on the engine - have you ever tried to light a bulb with a hand generator??? The energy to make the gas has to come out of the engine power via the alternator. I suppose you could charge a deep cycle battery at home, then use it to generate hho to burn. That can not be as good as just doing an electric drive. Plus in the electric scenario you could use regenerative breaking to recover a large percent of the kinetic energy you put into the car. http://www.runyourcaronwater.com/, http://www.hytechapps.com/, http://aardvark.co.nz/hho_scam.shtml
I am not planning to use hho in my car, but it sure seems like it would be great around the shop! If you have a small unit on your bench you can use a simple brass tube nozzle with a flow control. It burns clean and hot. There are a lot of stories about the unusual properties of the flame. For example, it seems to only heat certain things, like metal. You can cut a piece of steel, but not burn yourself if you touch the tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKoU1Fp3gs&feature=related
Near the bottom of the "runyourcarononwater" site there is another very interesting device. They have some sort of electrolysis catalyst cell. The unit is about the size of a drip coffee maker. You buy a "cell" and fill it with any water. Then, for about a month you can plug in devices up to 270 Watt-Hours! After that, you return the cell to the store for a replacement for about $20. (A standard AA battery has about 2.6 WH. http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.html) If you buy several cells, you can take them all with you and just swap them out for continuous power. - Very cool! That would sure be a lot lighter to carry than my 60 lb 105 WH deep cycle battery up to the camp site! : )? http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/portable_power.htm
Brown's gas is the electrolysis output if do not use a partition so that the hydrogen and oxygen are separated. So, the hh and o are all mixed together... kabOOM!!! No, not really. It does take something to ignite the reaction, but still it is highly explosive.
One of the cool things about this explosive mix is that you can make it on the spot with really simple, home made equipment. A favorite setup I have seen is to buy a bunch (10?) of steel switch plate covers from the hardware store. You stack them up and clamp them together, then drill one of the hole stacks to about 1/4". Next you unclamp them and flip every-other-one around so that the holes are stacked small-big-small-big... Next you assemble the reactor core by using threaded rod or long bolts with insulating 1/16"washers. So, you screw the bolt through a washer, then the first hole, then a washer, 2nd hole, washer, 3rd hole, etc. finally you put on a washer and nut to finish the stack. After you do both sides you have a stack with each bolt in contact with every-other plate on both sides... does that make sense?
If the right screw touches the first plate it misses the second plate then touches the 3rd, etc. At the same time on the left, the bolt misses the first, touches the 2nd, misses the 3rd, etc. If you apply 12v DC with right + and left -, then the plates alternate +, -, + ,- etc. All you do is put this core into some water with a little baking soda, apply 12 v and you get Brown's gas! ( 15 - 20 amps) You should bubble the gas through a water valve so that if it does ever flash back, only the gas in the tube will burn, not the larger amount in the reactor... little boom is good. Here is an example... there are many... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDpNUtXbz9U
So, what do you do with the stuff? Some people are making car kits that use the alternator to generate hho near the air intake. BG creates water when it burns, so you get the cooling and steam expansion benefits of water injection but with the added power of the burning hho. Some people hope to make the system so efficient that you can drive forever on just water... uh guys... remember it takes energy from the alternator to run the electrolysis core... One person said that the energy going into the core was just waste energy that would be going to heat. If that is true then this would be a great advantage indeed. However, it seems to me that whatever energy being used by the core will put additional drag on the engine - have you ever tried to light a bulb with a hand generator??? The energy to make the gas has to come out of the engine power via the alternator. I suppose you could charge a deep cycle battery at home, then use it to generate hho to burn. That can not be as good as just doing an electric drive. Plus in the electric scenario you could use regenerative breaking to recover a large percent of the kinetic energy you put into the car. http://www.runyourcaronwater.com/, http://www.hytechapps.com/, http://aardvark.co.nz/hho_scam.shtml
I am not planning to use hho in my car, but it sure seems like it would be great around the shop! If you have a small unit on your bench you can use a simple brass tube nozzle with a flow control. It burns clean and hot. There are a lot of stories about the unusual properties of the flame. For example, it seems to only heat certain things, like metal. You can cut a piece of steel, but not burn yourself if you touch the tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKoU1Fp3gs&feature=related
Near the bottom of the "runyourcarononwater" site there is another very interesting device. They have some sort of electrolysis catalyst cell. The unit is about the size of a drip coffee maker. You buy a "cell" and fill it with any water. Then, for about a month you can plug in devices up to 270 Watt-Hours! After that, you return the cell to the store for a replacement for about $20. (A standard AA battery has about 2.6 WH. http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.html) If you buy several cells, you can take them all with you and just swap them out for continuous power. - Very cool! That would sure be a lot lighter to carry than my 60 lb 105 WH deep cycle battery up to the camp site! : )? http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/portable_power.htm
Friday, November 14, 2008
What we've got is a demon...
Per Wikipedia: "Maxwell's demon was an 1867 [1] thought experiment by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, meant to raise questions about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
I remember studying the demon in high school and thinking how "cool" it would be... and impossible, to have a little "demon" that could sort air into hot and cold molecules! Wow!
Years later, before cyclonic cleaning was common, I learned how a vortex could be used to clean machine cutting oil. I first figured out how it worked at a manufacturing convention when I was a quality engineer at Gerry Baby Products (now defunct... remember the umbrella baby strollers and baby-backpacks they invented?) They had a display with a clear cylinder and dirty cutting oil going in the top. the oil spun and formed a vortex that went back up a center tube in the opposite direction. The oil stopped momentarily then violently spun in a vortex up the center tube and out. With the slowing at the turn and the spinning vortex the fine metal particles were thrown outward and could not go up the inner tube. Voila, clean oil! We see this same idea all the time now in cyclonic, bag-less vacuum cleaners.
Wait, you say! You were talking about Maxwell's demon... how did you get off onto vortex cleaning??? Well, because the vortex is the demon! Just think, it can separate the heavy metal particles from the lighter oil molecules. Interesting. Later, still at Gerry, I discovered that that cleaver demon can indeed be used to sort air molecules into hot and cold sides, just like Maxwell proposed! Incredible!
Here's how it works... you hook up "shop air" at around 80 psi to a vortex tube. Generally the air enters at one end off center so that it spins. Near the far end some of the air turns a corner and goes up a center tube and out while some continues to the end of the tube and out an adjustable hole. Sound familiar? What is amazing is that the "cold" molecules, that is the slower ones, are more likely to be able to turn the corner and spin up the center, while the fast ones can't quite make the turn, so they exit. See the demon at work? You don't? He just sorted the air molecules into two streams with the cold ones coming out the near center and the hot ones going out the far edge. Very smart that demon.
Vortex cooling is used a lot for various things like spot cooling machining operations and cabinet cooling. Check out one vendor http://www.vortec.com/vortex_coolers.php They even have vortex cooled vests that let people work in 200 degree environments! (with protective clothing.)
Maxwell did not say that the demon did not use energy to open and close the tiny door. It was just that the demon was not putting energy into the air to heat it. One side got cold and one got hot but neither heat nor cold was created by the demon, both were already present in the incoming air. What sort of efficiency do you suppose this process gets?
Heat pumps are similar in that they use some energy to move heat from one place to another rather than creating the heat. A refrigerator is a compression-cycle heat pump that takes heat energy from inside the cabinet and pumps it into your kitchen air. Heat pumps for home heating use an almost identical process and apparatus to move heat from the outside air into your house. You could just as well use a thermoelectric cooler or a vortex cooler. However, the good old compression method is around 65% efficient while the thermocouple is lucky to make 8%! Vortex coolers can drop the air temperature by 80 degrees with an efficiency of up to 16%... not bad I guess... (http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/43646/1/hdl_43646.pdf).
You could try to use the heat differential to do work. However, if the hot and cold side are in a fixed volume, then the pressure on the hot side would increase. The demon would need to operate the door more and more, and thus use more and more energy to run the door to keep those fast molecules from passing through to the cold side. A vortex demon needs a free flow of air, not a fixed volume. You could use the hot and cold air streams in the open on a thermocouple to make electricity, but then you would suffer from the poor efficiency of the thermocouple. Hummm... maybe you could use a Sterling cycle engine! Theoretically they can be 100% efficient, but for now, 30% is good... not so good...
Maxwell talked about sorting the molecules, not creating the energy... so if the energy that the cleaver little demon needed to open and close the door was small enough, maybe he could harvest a little heat differential from the hot to cold side to run the door mechanism, and then I could use the rest of the differential to do other things. I could heat my house in the winter and cool it in the summer by just changing some dampers! That would not be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics any more than using some sunlight to power a photocell (about 10% efficient), after all, sunlight heated the air - right? OK, so it looks like the little vortex is a demon, but he needs too much energy to operate his door... do you know any other demons looking for work???
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Electric car info reports
I thought I had found a great resource about EV - Electric Vehicles until I spent some time on their site. I found a link to EV info in an article at "Popular Science" about capicators for use in EVs at http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2008-10/what-comes-after-batteries. As it turned out they provide reports at a cost, which could be OK except for their criteria for inclusion. Quite a bit of it was reasonable, but one criteria is not good. They will not consider EVs that have less than 50 miles of electric-only range. If you have been keeping up with EVs you know that both Chevy Volt (GM) and ENVI (Chrysler) EVs are due out in 2010. All of those models have a 40 mile electric only range, so they will be eliminated from the reports! I think that is poor form indeed because I have great hopes that real products from GM and Chrysler is exactly what we need for our economy, saving the car industry in America, saving our environment, and having new toys! I would be very happy with an EV that went all electric for 40 miles and would be all electric most days for me. I tried to find a "contact us" link on their site to give them my-2-cents, but alas, they did not want to hear from me. I wonder how their customer service is if you buy a report... In case you are interested, check them out at http://electric-cars-today.com
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
To SMOT or not to SMOT, that is the question
I love to read about "free" energy... zero point energy... you know... crazy stuff...
I do not believe in free energy. However, I do believe that we are bathed in a sea of energy fields. If we can just tap them, then we would have "free" energy - right?
There are a large number of new "wireless" energy devices now. They work by harvesting radio energy that is broadcast from a nearby plug-in source. However, I remember using a crystal to harvest energy out of the air... it was called a crystal radio - anybody else remember those? Tesla wanted to put 12 large antennas around the world (vertexes of an icosahedron as I recall) and broadcast huge amounts of electrical energy for all to use. Just connect a device to a ground, and voila free energy! Except that huge generators had to make the field... oh that...
I am especially interested in magnetism and gravity. (Actually, I think gravity may not be real, but that is another post. Clearly something causes an effect that looks like gravity - sort of like centrifugal force which does not exist either!) Magnetism is the effect of the nuclear energy of charged electrons spinning - nothing new there. So, if that energy is being radiated into space as some of the original energy of the universe, why can't we harvest some of it?
Think about what Tesla and others did with an a true energy collector 200 years ago. You just put a metal plate high in the air, run a wire down near the ground, connect another wire to a grounding rod and put a spark gap and capacitor in the path. Instant free energy! The capacitor charges all by itself! Today, we have to deal with this with any improperly grounded antenna system. Is that "free" energy from nowhere? It seems to be, but not if you think about the energy source, which is the earth's huge electric field. We are just shorting across it and harvesting the energy that is there. Otherwise, that energy just dissipates into space. Isn't magnetism like that?
Most of the time people who make "perpetual motion" machines are just crazy. They are just overlooking or misinterpreting a simple explanation. However, there are plenty of perpetual motion machines if you do not think about their energy source. That is, if you restrict the closed system to exclude the energy source - like the antenna charge.
So, what is a SMOT? It is a Small Magnetic Overunity Toy. You can check it out at http://open-encyclopedia.com/SMOT . Basically, it is 2 magnetic rails that pull a ball up a ramp. The idea is that if the ball overshoots the ramp at the top, then the ball will fall. If it does, then it can land on another ramp and start over. Thus, gravity is providing the force needed to "re gauge" the magnetic ramp. If you arranged the ramp series into a circle, the ball would roll around the circuit "forever". I have not tried to build one yet, and I think I will not hold my breath. However, I think I will try it ! Do I think the SMOT could be a perpetual motion machine? Sure, why not! It is easy to try to find out. But, can the ball be heavy enough and gain enough momentum to escape the magnetic attraction that pulled it up the ramp?
Around 25 years ago or so, I made a significant design improvement in a proven, working permanent magnet motor that I saw in "Popular Science". I have never heard another thing about the motor, so they must not have gotten my memo. Oh well. The original design had a difficult to machine spiral cavity in a strong non-magnetic metal. the spiral was lined with strong magnets all arranged with the same pole facing the center. A rotor is mounted inside the spiral with strong magnets and the same pole facing out. For now, imagine a single magnet on the rotor. You press the rotor into the track and let go. Because of the spiral track the magnetic repulsion will cause the rotor to turn in the direction that increases the separation between the magnets. Cool... perpetual motion???
No perpetual motion here. When the rotor turns around to the widest separation, it hits a "wall". It faces the narrow separation at the start of the spiral. There is no way that the magnetic "ramp" can accelerate the rotor so that it will have enough momentum to squeeze it into that narrow opening. (There is no gravity force to re-gauge it in SMOTese.) So, the inventor put an electromagnet there to give it a kick through the gap. After that, the rotor turns on its own and gains speed until it must once again be pressed through the gap on the next circuit. You can add lots more magnets to the rotor to smooth the operation. So basically the electricity needed to re-gauge the magnets is turned into rotation, like most electric motors.
My improvement eliminated the complex spiral machining. All I did was make a circular cavity and a circular rotor, then set the rotor slightly off center. From the narrow-to-wide half of the circuit the magnet polarities were opposite so that the rotor magnet was repelled toward the biggest gap. Then, I flipped the polarity of the permanent magnets for the second half of the circuit. In this configuration the now opposite polarity rotor magnet is pulled toward the narrow gap. See! No spiral is needed! It worked great, but of course, the electromagnetic pulse is still needed to push it through the magnetic wall at the nearest gap where the cavity magnets change polarity.
I have thought about trying to use the Gary effect to push the magnet through the gap, but I am not convinced that the effect is real. I question some of his observations and have not succeeded in getting the balance "just right" as the Gary proponents say you must.
Now I wonder about SMOTing the thing! I wonder if a SMOT ramp could lift a magnet over the gap, then drop it on the other side! Actually, you could make one long circular ramp with a magnet on a spoke rather than a ball. As the magnet is pulled around the circuit it is also raised (using up some the the energy.) Then, when it gets to the narrow repulsive side, it falls down into the narrow gap to restart the system! If a SMOT can do it, why not this motor? Hummmm it seems unlikely... if a rotor magnet is heavy enough to push back into the magnetic gap, would it be too heavy for the system to lift?... I will have to think about this for 10 years and then never get around to actually trying it... as I usually do.
I do not believe in free energy. However, I do believe that we are bathed in a sea of energy fields. If we can just tap them, then we would have "free" energy - right?
There are a large number of new "wireless" energy devices now. They work by harvesting radio energy that is broadcast from a nearby plug-in source. However, I remember using a crystal to harvest energy out of the air... it was called a crystal radio - anybody else remember those? Tesla wanted to put 12 large antennas around the world (vertexes of an icosahedron as I recall) and broadcast huge amounts of electrical energy for all to use. Just connect a device to a ground, and voila free energy! Except that huge generators had to make the field... oh that...
I am especially interested in magnetism and gravity. (Actually, I think gravity may not be real, but that is another post. Clearly something causes an effect that looks like gravity - sort of like centrifugal force which does not exist either!) Magnetism is the effect of the nuclear energy of charged electrons spinning - nothing new there. So, if that energy is being radiated into space as some of the original energy of the universe, why can't we harvest some of it?
Think about what Tesla and others did with an a true energy collector 200 years ago. You just put a metal plate high in the air, run a wire down near the ground, connect another wire to a grounding rod and put a spark gap and capacitor in the path. Instant free energy! The capacitor charges all by itself! Today, we have to deal with this with any improperly grounded antenna system. Is that "free" energy from nowhere? It seems to be, but not if you think about the energy source, which is the earth's huge electric field. We are just shorting across it and harvesting the energy that is there. Otherwise, that energy just dissipates into space. Isn't magnetism like that?
Most of the time people who make "perpetual motion" machines are just crazy. They are just overlooking or misinterpreting a simple explanation. However, there are plenty of perpetual motion machines if you do not think about their energy source. That is, if you restrict the closed system to exclude the energy source - like the antenna charge.
So, what is a SMOT? It is a Small Magnetic Overunity Toy. You can check it out at http://open-encyclopedia.com/SMOT . Basically, it is 2 magnetic rails that pull a ball up a ramp. The idea is that if the ball overshoots the ramp at the top, then the ball will fall. If it does, then it can land on another ramp and start over. Thus, gravity is providing the force needed to "re gauge" the magnetic ramp. If you arranged the ramp series into a circle, the ball would roll around the circuit "forever". I have not tried to build one yet, and I think I will not hold my breath. However, I think I will try it ! Do I think the SMOT could be a perpetual motion machine? Sure, why not! It is easy to try to find out. But, can the ball be heavy enough and gain enough momentum to escape the magnetic attraction that pulled it up the ramp?
Around 25 years ago or so, I made a significant design improvement in a proven, working permanent magnet motor that I saw in "Popular Science". I have never heard another thing about the motor, so they must not have gotten my memo. Oh well. The original design had a difficult to machine spiral cavity in a strong non-magnetic metal. the spiral was lined with strong magnets all arranged with the same pole facing the center. A rotor is mounted inside the spiral with strong magnets and the same pole facing out. For now, imagine a single magnet on the rotor. You press the rotor into the track and let go. Because of the spiral track the magnetic repulsion will cause the rotor to turn in the direction that increases the separation between the magnets. Cool... perpetual motion???
No perpetual motion here. When the rotor turns around to the widest separation, it hits a "wall". It faces the narrow separation at the start of the spiral. There is no way that the magnetic "ramp" can accelerate the rotor so that it will have enough momentum to squeeze it into that narrow opening. (There is no gravity force to re-gauge it in SMOTese.) So, the inventor put an electromagnet there to give it a kick through the gap. After that, the rotor turns on its own and gains speed until it must once again be pressed through the gap on the next circuit. You can add lots more magnets to the rotor to smooth the operation. So basically the electricity needed to re-gauge the magnets is turned into rotation, like most electric motors.
My improvement eliminated the complex spiral machining. All I did was make a circular cavity and a circular rotor, then set the rotor slightly off center. From the narrow-to-wide half of the circuit the magnet polarities were opposite so that the rotor magnet was repelled toward the biggest gap. Then, I flipped the polarity of the permanent magnets for the second half of the circuit. In this configuration the now opposite polarity rotor magnet is pulled toward the narrow gap. See! No spiral is needed! It worked great, but of course, the electromagnetic pulse is still needed to push it through the magnetic wall at the nearest gap where the cavity magnets change polarity.
I have thought about trying to use the Gary effect to push the magnet through the gap, but I am not convinced that the effect is real. I question some of his observations and have not succeeded in getting the balance "just right" as the Gary proponents say you must.
Now I wonder about SMOTing the thing! I wonder if a SMOT ramp could lift a magnet over the gap, then drop it on the other side! Actually, you could make one long circular ramp with a magnet on a spoke rather than a ball. As the magnet is pulled around the circuit it is also raised (using up some the the energy.) Then, when it gets to the narrow repulsive side, it falls down into the narrow gap to restart the system! If a SMOT can do it, why not this motor? Hummmm it seems unlikely... if a rotor magnet is heavy enough to push back into the magnetic gap, would it be too heavy for the system to lift?... I will have to think about this for 10 years and then never get around to actually trying it... as I usually do.
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