Eldarion and Bruce's build of Bob's Energy Converter

[MarkSnoswell]

That interesting spike and the even more interesting DC offset only came about when I hooked one of the primaries open end to ground. 

We had a simallar experience when I was testing things at Grhams Gundershans lab. We got the strangest resonance shifts that took many seconds to establish -- with what Graham said was overunity behaviour... but we only got this when one of the open primary coils was connected to ground through the signal generator! ... in turns out that there is a varistor in the signal ground protection circuitry. So I would encourage people to add non linear elements grounding open coils to their list of things to test...

We got the weirdest behaviours driving just 3 of 4 primary coils with the fourth coil open. We were driving with two signal generators. One driving a pair of opposite coils in seris -- but open ended. The second generator was driving a thir primary coil and we were probing the fourth which was grounded at one end (the other end open) via the signal generator. When driving with several frequency combinations we got what appeared to be overunity signature in reverse -- the inability to force resonance at one frequency. No matter how slowly we swept through the resonance peak the output would begin to rise exponentially and then stick and skip past the peak. The implication was that on resonance there was a shift in the speed of light that always caused the external signal to drift of resonance... If the drive signal originated within the device then the hope is that we could have tuned stably on (or more closely at least)resonance and maintained overunity output.

it's all about control -- not brute force!

mark.

[eldarion]

Mark,

Thank you for your insights!  Sounds like you got some interesting results.

Can I ask a couple of questions?

Was this setup toroidal, and was it air core or some other core?  I assume the windings were 4-phase?
And there was a varistor between one end of the "output" coil and ground?

Also, do square waves work or just sine waves?

If square waves will also work, then my controller may be able to keep this thing in resonance...

Thanks!

Eldarion

[MarkSnoswell]

Hi Eldarion,
     We were using a very large toroidal ferrite core -- 6 inch diameter and 1" square cross section. They are a high performance custom core Graham had made up.

Graham had one that was wound with 4 single layer toroidal coils. The 4 coils were identical and covered 90 deg of the toroidal arc. I'll have to refer to photographs to check the number of turns -- somewhere about 50 turns in each coil at a guess.

Driving with square waves or sine waves gave the same result -- because we were driving the coils at resonance -- so the resultant wave was sine regardless of the drive. The coils were all driven as open ended transmission lines.

I brought two of the cores back to Australia with me to continue the work.

On driving wave forms: -- I always tune for resonance with a square wave. It's easier to see if you are exactly on resonance when driving with a square wave and you will get as good or better drive with a square wave. Of course the resultant resonant waveform is always going to be a sine wave at resonance regardless of the driving wave form... although you do want to drive with a higher impedance than the natural impedance of the resonant circuit... unless you are intentionally driving a seris resonant circuit in which case you want to drive with as low as impedance as you can.

Normally, once you have found the resonant frequency you can change to a sine wave drive with little or no change. However I have some resonators that will only work when driven with a square wave -- thats due to a very low impedance resonator being driven by a lightweight drive coil. I have never found the reverse -- a resonator that will only respond to a sine wave and not to a square wave -- practically and theoretically that just never occurs. From an efficency standpoint a square wave drive will always be more efficent if you have your impedances matched.

[eldarion]

Mark,

Thank you for the explanation.  That helps a lot!

I can't wait for the first test of a real coil wound on the correct core...

Eldarion

[eldarion]

Well, I may be getting closer...I have never seen waveforms like this before!

It would appear that the primary coils should have non-negligible inductance, as far as I can tell.  Also, some current flow through the drive coil(s) (very little in my experience) seems to be required.

This waveform came about with 500ns pulses of 13.8V.  As you can see, the resuting voltage at the switched coil lead (the lead connected to the MOSFET drain) is far larger and more interesting.

I will wind three "input" coils with ~30-40 turns each and see if the same waveform crops up.

Has anyone else seen these waveforms?  I can see what appear to be the Barkenhausen jumps at switchoff, but I have no explanation for the sawtooth waves.  My power supply was clean as a whistle during the entire test.

Eldarion