The Steorn Permanent Magnet Motor Replication Project: It's FLUX time.

[thevorlon]

Ok. What is the cheapest set of materials needed to build a LEMA (close to Steorn specs) by itself without a rotor?

[cache]

Ok. What is the cheapest set of materials needed to build a LEMA (close to Steorn specs) by itself without a rotor?

Here's my schema:

1) Get two 1/2 in. disk magnets

2) Get one piece of plastic .10 in. thickness, 3/4 in. wide, 1 in. long, a second piece same thickness and width but 3 in. long. If necessary buy a small sheet of Lexan plastic at Home Depot and cut to size. The .10 should be the max. thichness, if you have some rigid plastic sheet that is thinner, use it. You really only need 3 or more molecules minimum thickness.

3) wax paper or thin card board

4) a 4in. X 1 ft. of Cat. # A276-4 magnetic shielding at http://www.lessemf.com/mag-shld.html. This is not the highest grade sheilding but it will do. It is a foil and you can cut it to size with scissors. The 1ft. costs 4.95 but shipping is 10.00. If you buy 2 ft. shipping is 20.00. There used to be a lot of places online that sold small quanities of foil but this is the only one I know of that is not "out of stock" right now. (Yeah, we aren't the only ones trying to build a PMM, and these guys think they've found Perpetual Money Machines).

5) a few drops of super glue.

First of all, aluminum, copper, tin, lead, and most plastics have the same permeability (1) as air - they can all be glued to a magnet with no effect on the magnetic field. So, glue one of magnets to the 1 in. sheet of plastic. Then glue the other magnet next to it with both of them having the same pole up. Notice that the plastic is wider than the magnets - center the magnets so 1/8 in. sticks out past the magnets on each side and the magnets are flush with the top and bottom edge of the plastic. Now, glue the other piece of plastic to the other side of the magnets. This is the 3 in. piece - center it so 1 in. is above and 1 in. is below You should now have a plastic-magnet-plastic sandwich, like so:

      -------
      xxx xxx
---------------

The purpose of the plastic sandwich. A magnetic sheild is highly magnetized when it is wrapped around a magnet. If the shield touches the magnet the surface tension between the two breaks down and they will share electrons in the surface molecular layer. This adds to the friction resistance in sliding the sheild. If you now wrap the shielding around the plastic this is avoided and the friction is metal shielding to plastic.

Wrap two thicknesses of a 1/2 in wide strip of wax paper around the assembly side to side so it envelops one of the magnets.

Now cut a 1/2 wide strip of the shielding foil. Wrap the foil strip over the wax paper. Make cornors crisply 90 degrees as you wrap. Wrap three layers - super glue the last layer to the previous layer.

Slide the shield and wax paper off the assembly - discard the wax paper, it's only purpose was to guarantee clearance. Slide the shield back over the assembly to cover one magnet.

The 1 in. "ears" sticking out of the assembly on the one piece of plastic can be used for mounting the assembly. Glue another piece of plastic, or popsickle stick, or what have you, to the shield to move it from one magnet to the other.

Notice that this design has a major difference with Steorn's patent application. We wrapped the shield around both poles of the magnet. Their drawing only covers 1 pole and the 2 sides of the magnet, but not the opposite pole. I'm sure that after working with shields for 3 plus years they knew better and the drawing was done as a decoy for people attempting to build Steorn devices. A shield is not an insulator, it does not deflect a field. Instead it absorbs and captures the field. In doing so the shield become a magnet too. What is unique about magnets is they always have two poles - there is no such thing as a mono-polar magnet (Fred Flinstone would have created a PMM is there was). The magnetic shield has to serve as a path of least resistance conducting the field from one pole to the other, it can not do that efficiently if the shield does not completely envelope the magnet from pole to pole.

[cache]

Nonsense... Cams drive the timing of the internal parts of the motor on your CAR!

Thanks for the sarcastic response Kent. It worked! It made me look at the problem from right to left for the first time, and from that perspective, you're right! I'm going with cams.

[thevorlon]

This sounds great. We have a plan for a functioning LEMA and we are thinking about a cam to use some of the power from the rotor to move the shield. You know what? If we keep on working on this together we could have a working PMM before long!

[cache]

Cache,

X
       ___
   
A      B

I think you're right, the balancing A magnet could give an extra boost at that point. But, remember that X will be moving in an arc and will have moved away fom that plane so the boost may not be much. Also, Steorn claims they are getting 250+ percent efficiency. That's 250% of the external power they use to actuate the LEMA. If we were trying to design the device that will put Con Edison out of buiness that extra boost may be really valuable. But at this point were just trying to get to that "It Works!!" momemt so I don't know if a lot of the things we worry about - extra boost, friction, precision timing, etc are that important. There seems to be an abundance of energy available once the relationships of parts is made.

I believe you and I have the same idea. We're looking for a design that validates the concept, continuing to run and produce some demonstrable excess work. Something people can build from instructions, even if we have to provide some basic milled parts. Now that the world knows about Steorn's claims it will be hard for university department heads to deny it works if every highschool science fair has one. So, simple is better. That's the main reason why I've changed over to a cam design (even though electronic ignition does work better than the old cam/gear driven rotor). That high school kid has got to be able to explain it.


My fear is that the jury thing will backfire. That it will be a hung jury, or that the jury will affirm it and unleash a scientific fundamentalist backlash. There are "scientists" who still don't believe in evolution or global warming for religious and political reasons. Worse, it's almost impossible to get a scientist to admit that Newton had to invent a supernatural force called "gravity" to explain why things fall down with no ideas about how gravity even works (or why it travels faster than light).

In my opinion, that has to be the key to the LEMA. Because otherwise anyone could have created a system to simply move a shield back and fourth infront of a magnet. The principle of the LEMA must be that it's VERY efficent at moving the shield.

I agree. The boys at Steorn did not have more than one discovery that produced over-unity. They discovered this by chance and mathematically they could not have had two unique discoveries at one instance. So I've assumed from the beginning that the key is in finding the one thing they did that was unique. I haven't even considered how much lower the Low Energy Magnetic Actuator is compared to the High Energy Magnetic Actuator or even the Medium Energy Magnetic Actuator.   I just assume it is lower than not using it, since there are dozens of proposals for sheilding PMM that have failed that didn't use it. And since the guys who did use it claim their PMM works enough to put their money where their mouth is, I assume it was low enough.