Of the more than 1200 permanent magnet or permanent magnet/electromagnet designs I have come up with, only around 30 were built and tested by Mark our group machinist in California. Of those 30 I feel we got overunity indications from 3 maybe 4. We put loads on the generators and got no indication of increase in load on the drive motor. We had limited funding and we used solid mild steel for core material. If we had been able to use laminated electrical steel like the type used in transformers we would have seen a very dramatic difference in results. We were working with a permeability of 300 when electrical steel would have had as high as 5000. I'm still amazed we got any power at all using the mild steel with the low permeability and problem of eddy current losses due to the steel not being laminated and having high electrical conductivity as compared to silicon electrical steel. I will always wonder how many of the designs built had the potential for overunity but had poor performance due to incorrect core material.
I wanted to tell anyone building magnetic motors or generators in an attempt to achieve overunity to try to use electrical steel if at all possible. It could be the difference between total failure and total success. There are many other core materials available than far exceed electrical steel but are very expensive. I have attached links that list the permeability of different materials and other useful information on the role of permeability of core material. Eddy current losses are very important also when choosing a material. Our mild steel would get to hot to touch and we had to stop the test runs due to this eddy current induced heat. If your design does not work, it could be the core material. I can not emphasize enough the importance of the proper core material. It can save you years of time and thousands of dollars. If we had only had the funding for at least laminated electrical steel we may have had a number of overunity machines at this time. Funding is so important with this type of research. You can't cut corners when working with magnetism, it will only take you to a dead end street.
See links > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_core
Also > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_permeability
Interesting note: Ultra high permeability materials The material with the highest magnetic permeability is Metglas Magnetic Alloy 2714A (Cobalt-based) [7] with a high frequency annealed permeability of 1,000,000 (Maximum DC Permeability (?)). Hydrogen annealed (pure iron - N5 grade) can have a permeability of 160,000 (?) but is very expensive.
Thanks,
Butch LaFonte
Birmingham, Alabama
My two cents...
The higher the permeability, the higher the inductance of the electromagnet.
And higher inductance translates into slower response rise time when running the electromagnet.
Slower response translates into less usuable RPM range, being less total power in use.
You should look for a regular permeability but high resistivity core material for good results.
In this case regular laminated non oriented steel, as you have suggested.
There is no use for the expensive and hard to form into shape Metglas Magnetic Alloys.
Bump for a good post. should be stickied imo.
Thanks for the post Butch. Are you guys going to go back and attempt any designs using electrical steel? I wish the community could somehow vote and have the overunity prize money send to worthy designs to actually get an overunity machine, instead of waiting until after... we might be able to achieve something that way.