Testing the TK Tar Baby

[TinselKoala]

@evolvingape:

Thanks for your input! I didn't remember that she had claimed 60 A-H capacity... the latest that I read, in post #666 is the quote and calculation which mentioned 25.6 million Joules in the one test against a batterypack of  5 (or was it six) 40 A-H capacity at 12 volts each, which calculation she finally retracted BUT SHE HAS NOT RETRACTED THE CONCLUSION that she had used more than the battery capacity in that one test.

@Conradelektro:

A better demo of the oscillations that we are actually working with is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w60ycUsuPIY

The circuit that the Tar Baby is modelled upon is the Rosemary Ainslie NERD circuit, which she claims produces COP INFINITY. (She was using the > symbol in there for a while !!) On the basis of this claim she is applying for at least two monetary prizes, one officially offered by this forum and another that's individually offered elsewhere.

HER circuit is claimed to 1) heat a load to useful temperatures 2) recharge the batteries while doing so and 3) run on and on and on, never depleting the batteries AT ALL, forever or until the end of time, whichever comes last, and 4) heals the lame and cures the sick. No, I'm just kidding about that number 4 part. The history of the NERD circuit is very interesting, and you will quickly  learn why I call my circuit the TAR BABY.

Even though I use the exact same... alleged.... circuit that she uses, EXCEPT for a few component substitutions, like the IRF830a instead of the magic IRFPG50 mosfet, and even though I achieve the SAME oscillations (parasitic feedback) caused by the SAME REASONS (stray inductance in the leads connecting the mosfets), and can achieve the SAME HEAT vs. time profiles in an inductive load, she affirms that my TAR BABY is not a replication of the NERD device. So that lets me off the hook totally and I can do whatever I like.

My claim about the Tar Baby is that it performs just like the NERD RAT device in all significant respects. If her device is overunity according to her calculations, since mine will produce the same data, then according to HER calculations.... well.... DO THE MATH (tm Rosemary Ainslie). Note that, in that case, since I am testing and publishing the results from MY TAR BABY..... I'll get priority in all disputes, since she released her design to "open source" yet refuses to show any tests of her own.... other than this one in this video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyOmoGluMCc

So far the traces I've shown on my Tar Baby correspond to the Blue trace (gate input) and the bottom GREEN TRACE, the mosfet common drains, shown in the above video on the Tek scope and in the screenshot -- with my reference numbers -- that I've attached below.

Please note that it has been demonstrated -- and admitted, finally, by Ainslie -- that the circuit diagram shown in the video is NOT the diagram of the device shown in the video, and there are other errors and misrepresentations in the video as well.

As far as I can determine I am using the presently accepted "correct" circuit diagram in my Tar Baby --- and I should be receiving my Magic Mosfets in a day or two, and at that point, except for the clipleads and threaded rods and white pegboard.... it will be very hard to tell any difference between the two devices. But we have her word that mine isn't a NERD, so it must be a Tar Baby. I'm even using a 10-ohm water heater element, OR.... a stack of sand resistors that come out to 50 W, 10 Ohm.

(edited a typo or too)

(Please don't be offended by the "shouting" emphasis. I'm trying to make points that might be able to penetrate someone -- not you two ! -- who seems to be extremely hard of hearing and vision. That is also the reason for the remedial EE and math posts I might make once in a while.)

(I also "claim" that the oscillations are irrelevant and are caused by stray wire inductance, and that if her device was constructed using commonly accepted layout and methods her oscillations, like mine... would go away or become very hard to obtain. If she made a few circuit changes they would be completely eliminated, her load would heat better, and she'd still not see her batteries draw down using the methods she allegedly uses.)

[TinselKoala]

Other than describing the "roots" of the Tar Baby, though... I really don't want to discuss the NERD RAT device. The time for that has passed for now... but will come again before too long. There's not much more that can be said that hasn't been covered in the last two months on her NERD thread in this forum (now locked, thanks Stefan) and also exactly a year ago on OUR, but with less noise.

[TinselKoala]

Let me just point out one thing about that scopeshot, though. The purple or pink trace, item 3,  is the battery voltage. Item 4 is this trace's "zero" baseline level. In item 8 you can see the amp settings for the channels, and see that the purple channel is set to 50.0 volts per major division. Looking at the scale divisions we see that the straight line of the purple trace is 1 major division plus one minor division above its baseline, for a value of about 60 volts, consistent with the DMM measurement in the video.
Now look at Item 9. This is the scope's "parameters" display where you can see what the scope's internal math is making of the traces. You can select various parameters for display here but the users have elected to display statistics like mean, minimum, maximum, and standard deviation here. Note that all you get for the purple trace in that box is its amplitude mean and a warning of "unstable histogram". This means that the trace is so noisy that the scope's math isn't coping with it reliably, and in fact even gets the amplitude wrong. The peaktopeak amplitude of the oscillation portion displayed can be estimated by looking at the number of minor scale ticks, representing 10 volts each, and simply counting them up.  I get about 80 v p-p for these oscillations, which again is an inductive effect caused by wire length. (Of course the mean amplitude will be decreased by smaller oscillations inside that noise, so maybe the scope is right here after all. At this sample rate it is impossible to tell.)
The battery voltage certainly isn't actually doing this. (For channel 1, the CVR, they are apparently calculating the statistics on the mean of the trace... getting a "mean of a mean" of an oscillation, more apparent nonsense).

Yet this is the data that was -- supposedly -- dumped to their spreadsheet for "analysis" that results in the conclusions they have claimed.

[evolvingape]

Hi TK,

Yeah, I don't wanna talk about the NERD circuit either. I think pretty much everything that "could" be claimed, has been claimed, just depends on the "when" you look.

A suitable analogy is a Kaleidoscope hooked up to a dremel, forever. (cos its running on a RAT psu!)

I am enjoying your posts and I am learning a lot from them, so thankyou.

Once you have established the run time of the Tar Baby on 5 A/h (Amps PER hour) batteries, assuming the same C rate, the calculations can be substituted for both 40 A/h and 60 A/h to give a good indication of expected performance. Unless your Tar Baby is COP infinity of course in which case it will not matter.

RM

[TinselKoala]

@evolvingape: that's an interesting quote from Ainslie. So she says the capacity is 60 Amp-Hours. And she says she's delivered 12 watts, five hours per day, every working day for 18 months. I usually figure 200 working days per year, so call it 300 working days. This is the input data, according to Ainslie.

Come, let us calculate together.

12 watts is 12 Joules per second. So, to calculate the energy transferred over the time interval, we multiply the Power in Watts by the Time in seconds.  12 Joules per second  x (60 seconds per minute x 60 minutes per hour x 5 hours per day x 300 days) ==  64 800 000 Joules. Call it 65 MegaJoules. (Note well, you NERD RATS, that before any math is even done, the UNIT DIMENSIONS of the input data and the result... agree. If you would only check this in your own "work"... or even understood it.... you would avoid much error in your calculations.)

That's not an unreasonable figure at all. And it's easy to see that if one allows for her proven tendency to...er... exaggerate or be a "tad out".... it's possible that perhaps not every working day was used, and that the device may have been inoperative for some stretches of time, and that the power level wasn't always 12 Watts and so on and so forth.

Now... if we only knew the actual capacity of her battery pack, we could make some interesting comparisons and further approximations. Note that the batteries won't drop  below 12 volts until they are almost completely depleted, and it is the "over 12 volt" reading that she constantly cites as evidence that they are still "fully charged".

So, using 60 A-H as the battery capacity, what do we have? For an individual 12 volt battery, we can get 12 volts x 60 amps for one hour, or one amp for 60 hours, same thing mathematically. So 12 x 60 = 720 Watts of power, for (60 seconds per minute x 60 minutes per hour x 1 hour) or 3600 seconds. So the energy in there is 720 Joules per second x 3600 seconds == 2.6 megaJoules, about. And then she has the six batteries (or seven, now, she says), so 7 x 2.6 megaJoules = a bit over 18 megaJoules in the batteries that they can deliver at or above a "charge level" of 12 volts each.

And 64.8 divided by 18 is only 3.6.


Personally I think the conclusion is clear. Even according to her exact claimed data, she has only used less than 4 times the battery capacity in that 18 months. Since we know that the FG can recharge the batteries.... well.....



(If we figure 10 watts at the load, 200 working days, 4 hours per day.... we get only about 29 megaJoules, less than twice the rated capacity. If we go to a three-day week, like a University class schedule, with summer and spring and holiday breaks..... we can easily get right down to the ACTUAL RATED CAPACITY of the batteries using a much more realistic test schedule than she reports. And the batteries will still test at 12 volts or above until nearly depleted, and a trickle of charge now and then from the function generator will keep them boosted above 12 volts even without actually substantially contributing to their charge state.)