I'll offer you my explanation of the Joseph Newman overunity motor. I
suspect its operation is far simpler than Newman would have you
believe. I've not seen anything that convinces me that Newman himself
truly fathoms the operation of his device, but it is really quite simple
as we shall see:
To the unfamiliar, Joseph Newman's overunity motor is similar in many
ways to a conventional DC electric motor, i.e. it has a commutator, a
field coil, permanent magnets, a shaft, and is powered by a battery.
But there are several novel aspects of Newman's motor, as follows:
His motor features a stationary field coil, with shaft-mounted permanent
magnets as the rotor.
The field coil is an air-core inductor.
The field windings are an unusually large amount of wire, on the order
of 55 or 90 miles of magnet wire in a typical configuration.
The power supply is a very high voltage DC battery configuration, for
example 1500 volts of lead-acid or zinc-carbon batteries in series.
The rotating permanent magnets are usually quite large, reaching several
hundred pounds in some configurations.
His motor employs an unusual phase-angle between the commutator and the
rotor's permanent magnet poles.
He uses a special, partitioned commutator as a design enhancement, but
this is not critical for an understanding of the operation.
If an engineer were to design a conventional motor, he would probably
not employ ANY of the above parameters, as they are far from optimal in
motor design as we would normally know it. However, when all of these
things are put together, a special thing can happen, as I will now
describe:
(Power is applied, and Newman gives the motor a manual push to give the
massive permanent magnet rotor its initial motion.)
The commutator directs battery power to the large air core field coil,
and the magnetic field expands. This gives the permanent magnets a
push, sustaining their rotation. The field completely expands, and the
magnets continue to rotate under their stored angular momentum,
approaching the point where the Permanent Magnets' field is
perpendicular to the field from the coil. Here, the commutator
disconnects the battery from the field coil, and the incredibly deep
electromagnetic field collapses - yielding a MASSIVE KICKBACK spark,
which is discharged back into the battery, in the polarity of recharge.
However, the rotating magnets are still in motion and by now have swung
into position well beyond perpendicular, and what happens is THE FIELD
FROM THE COIL COLLAPSES EVEN FARTHER THAN IT HAD ORIGINALLY EXPANDED!
This causes the recharging kickback spark to be LARGER THAN THE SUPPLY
PULSE which was required to expand the field to begin with!
This is possible because the field generated by the air-core inductor is
so deep, that there is enough time for the permanent magnets to rotate
into opposition while the field is still collapsing. (Now, who would
have thought of that ? )
At this point, the commutator has turned 180 degrees, and the second
half of the cycle executes in an identical manner, but of course with
the poles reversed.
So if you can imagine a device where the "action" and the "reaction" are
in the same direction, that would be a good trick, woudn't it? It would
be easy to extract energy from a field such as gravity or magnetism if
we had such a device, right?
That is precisely what is happening with respect to the permanent
magnets in the Newman motor! The EM field expands to ATTRACT the
permanent magnets in one direction, meanwhile the magnets rotate, then
the EM field begins to collapse, but because of the new position of the
rotor this collapse is now also in the ATTRACT direction with respect to
the permanent magnets. We are only familiar with attract-repel
processes, however this is an actual ATTRACT-ATTRACT process.
One more time... The action & reaction are the expansion & subsequent
collapse of the electromagnetic field. The motor is merely arranged in
such a way that both this action & reaction happen in the same direction
with respect to the magnet! Free energy from magnets
The key design concept is that the air core field must be sufficiently
intense, that its collapse will be slow enough for the permanent magnets
to physically rotate into an opposing polar orientaton.
I say there should be no reason why someone cannot engineer a much
smaller, higher-RPM unit which functions just as well or better than
anything Joe Newman has come up with. Newman's protypes, although more
than 100% efficient, are nonetheless wasting vast amounts of energy with
their crude bulky design and high-voltage operation, which results in
lost voltage from arcing at the homemade commutator. But even with all
these problems, his motor achieves overunity! Isn't that something? I
wonder what could be achieved with a really good design?
The "period" of the field just needs to be in tune with the rate of
rotation, and the phase of the commutator needs to be appropriate for
what is taking place. Newman's own commutators employ extra segments,
so that the field is energized in steps, with spacers to reduce the
arcing, but as I say, this is a refinement to his design after overunity
was already achieved. I don't believe this would even be necessary for
a lower voltage, higher-RPM unit. If the voltage were sufficiently
lowered, one could further improve the design by adding rectifiers,
which is a luxury Joe Newman can only dream of. I personally think
he's still using high voltage because he doesn't understand the issue
with the period of the air core field or the underlying
"attract-attract" principle which makes the whole thing work.
That's about it, and we didn't even need to invent any Physics to
describe a working overunity device! :-))
Douglas B. Renner