I am passing on Paul Jagnow's comments. Once again, energy conversion ratios
of electical motors are notoriously difficult to measure.
Gary Vesperman
vman@skylink.net )
Gary,
Stefan's message was interesting, but I would be cautious about drawing
conclusions from oscilloscope waveforms that might be the result of
amplifier saturation, ground currents, current loops, etc. Almost every
engineer who has used a scope has drawn incorrect conclusions because of
such things.
What Stefan describes sounds like normal kinds of reactions when coils with
significant winding capacitance are opened up while a current is flowing
through them. The current in the coil must go somewhere as the magnetic
field collapses. If the open circuit does not arc, it will "ring" at a
frequency set by the inductance of the coil, and the distributed
capacitance across it...until all the energy is dissipated in the
resistance of the coil. If the inductance is rather large, and the
distributed capacitance of the coil is rather small, the ringing voltage
will be very large. I don't think that negative resistance is involved
here, just conservation of energy and AC circuit theory.
I suspect that the ampere meter (if it is a mechanical type) is reading the
average current correctly, and the scope is being overloaded and displaying
incorrect data. It is yet another reason why an over unity system with a
well filtered DC input and output would be nice. It would be easy to take
simultaneous input and output measurements, and there would be very little
to go wrong. When AC is involved, especially at high frequencies, the
measurements get very difficult, and the equipment gets expensive.
The observations made when pulling the electrode out of water might also
make sense if one views the water as a variable resistor. It does not open
the circuit instantly. Instead it creates a high resistance in the form of
a very "lossy" arc which dissipates lots of energy, and prevents ringing.
Since the length of time that the arc exists is very short, so there is
virtually no mechanical effect on the torque of the motor. It's hard to
get something to move at all in 10 microseconds.
Relative to the comments about: "...why Jean Louis Naudin had a faster
spinning rotor, when he used "much negative current scope spikes" in his
commutator setup". Large spikes might simply indicate that the commutator
is opening the circuit when the currents are the largest...which might well
be the point at which the motor is getting the most energy.
One needs to be very careful about what is being measured. Keep in mind
that the simplest electrical model of any "real" coil is an inductor, with
a capacitor connected in parallel. If the current is being monitored by
reading the voltage across a small resistor in series with the coil, the
negative current pulses could be flowing through the distributed
capacitance of the coil, and not actually flowing through the coil
windings. In such a case, the current pulses might flow through the
measuring device, but not through the coils in the motor...so they will
have very little effect on the magnetic field. If the pulses are very
fast, it is likely that they are capacitively coupled...and not flowing
through the inductance of the winding.
I did not understand the comment: "This is also why Newman never could
show running the machine on a charged capacitor bank." It seems that a
very large capacitor should look just like a battery. If the Newman motor
had trouble with this, it might have been due to a resonance between the
coil inductance of the motor, and the capacitors, or just the Equivalent
Series Resistance (ESR) of the capacitors being somewhat higher than that
of a battery. One would need to use low ESR capacitors of very high value,
so that the Q of the resonant circuit would be very low, less than 1, due
to the resistance of the overall circuit. Then, it should work just like a
battery. (With a battery, LC resonances would not exist.)
Relative to the AquaFuel experiments. I suspect that the "large bubbles"
are due to "water gas"...hydrogen and carbon monoxide that is generated
when steam hits a hot carbon electrode. Such gas, sometimes called "town
gas", was used (long ago) in the US. It is created by running steam
through hot, high quality, coal (basically pure carbon). Analysis of the
gas bubbles would provide the answer. The output of such a process would
be somewhat greater than that of electrolysis, because the steam produced
by the carbon arc would combine with the carbon to become part of the
resulting "fuel". That's the best guess from brother Al, the chemist.
Bottom line: With the limited info available, what Stefan has reported
seems to fit well with the expectations of "normal" science.
Regards,
Paul