STEORN DEMO LIVE & STREAM in Dublin, December 15th, 10 AM

[captainpecan]

Good work on all your projects guys, I have been working quite a bit the last few days so not much time to get to far.  I'll get done with my replication hopefully in a couple days when I get some more time.  A couple things I wanted to point out I saw while catching up reading here...

First off, I was also thinking of the odd number of coils, and even number of magnets that someone suggested here.  I had planned on making mine to adapt that way already to test it, as I am a huge Bill Muller fan, and I have already used this concept on one of my other projects with some success.  It does make the triggering a tad more difficult.  But, without the ability to hook more than one in series, it could also increase the input for the same torque, just less cogging.  Not necessarily what we need, but still worth trying.

The next thing that has been rolling around in my brain for quite some time, and nobody seems to have a solution for it yet.  Ossie has done fantastic with his replication, and has gotten further than anyone as far I can tell.  But, I have yet to see anyone get this done with 1.2 volts yet.. ? ? ?  We need to start trying to figure out what aspect of all of this we are missing, that is allowing Steorn to get that kind of motion for such little voltage.  I am afraid that even though we have gotten far here, we have still got to missing something that is key.  Can anyone come up with any theories as to how we can do this for much less voltage, without drawing 2 amps of current... ?

@Ossie, I know you show yours running on a dead 9 volt, but could you please take second and throw a D battery on there, and let us know if you can get any consistent spin at all?  They of course use a pretty mighty 10,000 mah nimh, but a simple disposable D battery at 1.5 volt should easily give as much current as theirs. Maybe you can already sustain 200 rpms or something with your new setup.  I know we can easily pulse charge a cap from 1.2 volts, and use the cap to run it.  But Steorn does not appear to be doing that.  What do you think we may be missing here?

[PaulLowrance]

Hi Paul,
[snip]
On you cooling effect.  IF you could reverse your rotation for a while, it might reset it, and then when you go back to orginal direction cool for a while, just a hunch.

Ben

Great idea! Really, the best idea I've heard so far. Thanks.

There are a lot of things to test. Degaussing the toroid. Zapping the NdFeB with strong magnetic field various ways. Put it in the freezer over night, lol-- probably won't doing anything.

[futuristic]

My guess is that they have custom made toroid cores from material that has high permeability and low saturation point.

[PaulLowrance]

But, I have yet to see anyone get this done with 1.2 volts yet.. ? ? ?

That's only a matter of lowering the toroid inductance and using thicker wire. Less inductance means di/dt is higher, which means the current goes higher in a given period of time, which means you can lower the voltage to end up with the same results. Of course you need to make sure the wire resistance is thick enough.

The toroid I'll be using (only as an initial test) has very fine wire, which is why I'll probably need a few giga volts for my coil, lol. And that's why the wire used in Steorn's eOrbo coil is thick because it's designed for low voltage.

[tinu]

I agree with PL on this one. I read their patent very carefully and the only thing they see as the anomaly is magnetic viscosity. But some of their figure don't make sense to me like the energy figure. At 1 rpm they find that everything is behaving "conventionally" but if you look at the energy graph (fig 16) at the 1 rpm mark you see the torque is producing net energy during one full rotation while there's hardly any current flow in the coil. Did they do something wrong with that graph? From their torque graph (fig 13) they show how torque in and out are pretty much equal, so why is there a "energy due to torque" at 1 rpm in their graph?

Actually that is an energy loss of about .12J per one rotation at 1 RPM and it keeps around .12J loss up to about 100RPM. It simply means that in order to rotate the shaft at 100 RPM (considering the same .12J) one needs to provide 0.2W (which is quite reasonable for a setup of that kind).

If you analyze the torque graph, you’ll see the area under the axis (negative part) is slightly larger than the other area hence the energy loss which will heat the core (not the coils; it has nothing to do with coils). That loss is due to hysteresis and to touch another question someone raised, for that reason I’d chose for the core a material with minimal hysteresis loss as the first criteria before anything else.

What does really concern me is the fact that after a carefully study I couldn’t spot in Steorn’s patent a single clue on a possible energy gain. Any ideas?

Best regards,
Tinu