Rosemary Ainslie Quantum Magazine Circuit COP > 17 Claims

[TinselKoala]

Well, you have to wonder.... how long _does_ it take to heat up 800 grams of water with a static level of 24 volts over an hour?



Perhaps she seeks to generate some kind of data plot like this one, from data I collected back in 2009 on the single-mosfet circuit with a particular oil-immersion load cell. This plot demonstrates that the Q-17 circuit, operated close to the duty cycle and frequency range specified in the Quantum article, is less efficient than straight "static level" DC from a regulated power supply, conveyed to the _same_ load cell, not a different one, using direct wire connection.

[MarkE]

TinselKoala that is yet another of your excellent experiments.  By the looks of things whoever is performing tests for Ms. Ainslie, it looks like they are performing calibration runs.  That would be a good thing to do and if that is what is happening, it suggests that they really do want to generate valid data.

If one were to use the Q-Array as demonstrated August 11, then the curves would have been radically different, reflective of the 5:1 advantage of a simple resistance heater with no other circuitry, over the resistance heater with the Q-Array circuit operating in its oscillating mode.  If anyone cares to perform the tests they will find that efficiency of the Q-Array gets better and better the greater the Q1 on duty-cycle is.  The best efficiency is with a 100% Q1 on duty cycle.  And due to the choice of the IRFPG50 MOSFET, as you have already noted, the efficiency still stands substantial improvement by replacing Q1 with a wire from drain to source.

[TinselKoala]

That's right, and I've used the IRF830 mosfet in the "Q-array" circuit without difficulty throughout its range of operating parameters. This mosfet is much cheaper than the IRFPG50 and has a slightly lower Rdss of 1.5 Ohms. If one wants to leave Q1 on continuously.... then you don't even need any mosfets, and you can just plug a straight wire between the Q1 S and D connection locations. This will provide the most efficient heating of the load, of course. To put it another way, this will provide the _same heating_ in the _same load_ as the fully-populated mosfet version, but at a lower applied voltage from the power supply or battery.

We are at the point now where the Ainslie crew is struggling to find a testable hypothesis.

She has previously claimed that continuous Q2 oscillations were her goal: she expressed ecstasy when long blocks of oscillations occur, and it was her goal to make the longest possible periods of Q2 oscillations when the Figure 3 scopeshot was produced. (The FG is set to its very slowest frequency, the longest possible period of Q2 oscillation that her equipment could produce at that time. She has never demonstrated continuous Q2 oscillations, although her detractors have done so easily, by using the external negative bias supply. Since she does not grasp how this could be, she has never been able to reproduce it.)

Good luck on the "taking water to boil 800 mL" using Q2 oscillations only.

But the Quantum 17 circuit does not oscillate in the same manner. In fact the waveforms that she endorsed, coming from Glen Lettenmeier and that were replicated by Ainslie's team using the 555 timer circuit that was installed sometime AFTER 2007.... those waveforms do not indicate any oscillations, they are simply showing the signal from the timer circuit and the mosfet's response at the high frequency of the drive circuit (over a hundred times higher than the original Quantum magazine circuit can produce). And they show a PG50 mosfet that is being turned ON most of the time, due to its slow response to the high-frequency drive signal, despite the drive signal itself being set to a shorter ON duty cycle. Again.... there are better mosfets to use IF one is concerned about faithfully responding to the drive signal. But IF NOT..... well, we see what happens.

The cartoon drawing below, showing Q2s wired in Strict Parallel, but not acting in parallel, shows how garbled her "understanding" is and how she still cannot state a coherent, testable hypothesis containing operationalized constructs. "A circuit configured thus and so, operating at this specified duty cycle and frequency, will produce effects A and B, which are different from ordinary electronic effects, and which produce excess energy which manifests as C. " Or something like that. We know some of her desired effects. We do not know the circuit, or the operating details, nor do we know upon just what parameters her claims depend. Why don't we know these things? I know why we don't.

(The figure is Figure 9 from "Paper 2". It was drawn when Ainslie believed all 5 of her mosfets were indeed in parallel.... and she has never changed it. She has emitted some silly rationalizations for it, though. Note that the Source of Q1 is shown connected to the Source of Q2, the Gates are connected together, the Drains are connected together. )

[MarkE]

On August 11, with a 72V battery they were getting about 3W into their heater during the Q2 oscillations.  To take 800ml from 20C to 100C she will need 267kJ which with zero thermal leakage she can get in a brief 90,000 seconds, or just over a day.  To actually boil any water into dry vapor, she will then have to add another 2260 Joules for each gram, which will take about 12.5 minutes per gram.  Heating up a to coffee temperature of 60C will be a bit easier, that will only take 134kJ, or just over 12 hours with zero thermal leakage.

Yes, it is true that she does not know how body diodes apply, or don't apply to her circuit, whichever version that might be.

[MarkE]

For anyone considering the promised February tests, here is some food for thought.  Take the simplest of circuits: A resistor divider with two resistors:  R1 and R2.  No matter what source drives the two resistors, the current through each of the resistors is the same due to Kirchhoff's Current Law.  That means that the power dissipated by each resistor is: 

P_(R1) = R1*Iloop²
P_(R2) = R2*Iloop²
P_(R1)/P_TOTAL = R1/(R1 + R2)

Why does this matter?  It matters because no matter what the power source in the circuit, including energy stored in any hypothetical environmental source, the proportion of that energy dissipated by each of the two resistors in the circuit depends on how big the respective device's resistance is relative to the total circuit resistance.  So, in the Ainslie circuit where one of the resistors is a heater element that outputs desired heat, that resistance should be big compared to the sum of all other resistances in the circuit.  If it is small compared to the other resistances, then it will only dissipate a small portion of the total energy used by the circuit.  In other words it will inefficiently use power from any and all sources:  the battery that supplies the circuit, and the intrinsic energy generator that Ms. Ainslie hypothesizes is part of R1 itself. 

Low efficiency due to R1 being a small portion of the overall average circuit resistance is in fact exactly what we saw in the August 11 demonstration.  If we suppose that Ms. Ainslie's hypothesis is correct, that a resistor has internal energy that it can be coaxed into releasing by applying pulses, or alternatively that the ambient environment will deliver energy to a resistor with the right amount of inductance when pulsed appropriately, then the best chance for detecting that energy occurs when the other circuit resistances are low.  This presents a problem for the Q-Array configuration, because the Q-Array configuration during the Q1 "OFF" times only conducts through the Q2 MOSFETs which only ever partially turn-on and almost all power passes through the internal 50 Ohm impedance of the function generator.