Help with a perpetual motion machine

[burrahobbit]

I am not sure if this belongs in this topic or in General Scepticism but here goes

I have been asked (by someone I cant easily refuse) to study a claim by an "inventor" who has developed something that looks suspiciously like a Perpetual motion machine.

Being unable (at this point) to give my true opinion of this, I am planning to waste some time looking at this.

From the description the product seems to be as follows

A rotor which operates continuously (takes 10 minutes to get up to 3000 rpm speed and then indefinitely runs at that speed). The rotor can be encased in a stator and generate electricity.

The setup is said to incorporate a small battery in the stator circuit "to stabilise the power". The rotor incorporates "advanced magnets"

I have a background in engineering, a passing familiarity with neo magnets and am a sceptic.

What should I be looking for when I study the unit. Any suggestions.

 

[Cainkane1]

Lacking credentials of my own I've always been told that you would have to completely eliminate friction to get a perpetual motion device. There is a device that generates energy but it has no moving parts.

The device you've described has a battery which means it doesn't generate all of its own power which means it isn't a perpetual motion machine.

 

[Horatius]

The setup is said to incorporate a small battery in the stator circuit "to stabilise the power". The rotor incorporates "advanced magnets"

Let me guess- it stops running when the battery runs down?


Okay, so here's the set-up you'd need to see: Battery #1 attached to the PM machine, which is attached in turn to both a battery charger that is charging Battery #2, and a light bulb. No other attachments.

When Battery #1 dies, you swap #1 and #2, and run the device again. If it's really producing power, it should run indefinitely, while lighting the light bulb, without introducing any new batteries. If they can't, or won't, create this set-up, they're full of crap. Anything less is insufficient.

The problem with this plan is, it's a test that might take a long time to run, depending on how large the batteries are. You might be able to speed things up by measuring how much charge goes into the batteries each time you swap them - in reality, we'd expect it to be less every time. But doing an accurate measurement of that might be difficult, so consult a good electrical engineer or technician.

ETA:

What should I be looking for when I study the unit. Any suggestions.

What you should really be looking for is two-fold: hidden sources of extra energy beyond the battery they've told you about, which would be how you'd do this as a scam, and improper methods of measuring power in vs. power out, which would likely be what you'd find in someone who is honestly mistaken or deluded.

 

[arthwollipot]

What's an 'advanced' magnet?

 

[JJM 777]

Debating whether it is a perpetual motion machine or not (it isn´t) is less essential than simply evaluating its potential as a technology. How much does it take and how much does it give, and how expensive is it to build, etc.

 

[Rasmus]

I am not sure if this belongs in this topic or in General Scepticism but here goes

I have been asked (by someone I cant easily refuse) to study a claim by an "inventor" who has developed something that looks suspiciously like a Perpetual motion machine.

How can you tell?

Let me guess: it's not working, right?

Being unable (at this point) to give my true opinion of this, I am planning to waste some time looking at this.

From the description the product seems to be as follows

A rotor which operates continuously (takes 10 minutes to get up to 3000 rpm speed and then indefinitely runs at that speed). The rotor can be encased in a stator and generate electricity.

The setup is said to incorporate a small battery in the stator circuit "to stabilise the power". The rotor incorporates "advanced magnets"

I have a background in engineering, a passing familiarity with neo magnets and am a sceptic.

What should I be looking for when I study the unit. Any suggestions.

The candid camera?

Seriously, though, I think bad power measurements and hidden sources of energy are a good bet.

The "very small" battery should have specs that tell you how much power it holds, right? So once the machine has put out a multiple of that amount of power (plus anything that it needs to get started up!) you should have something worth looking into.

Not an expert at all, but I guess you should also try and work out what individual components do to the system as a whole.

 

[aggle-rithm]

A perpetual motion machine and the universe we observe are completely incompatible.

Therefore, if someone claims to have a perpetual motion machine, and he lives in THIS universe, he is either lying or mistaken.

 

[wollery]

What's an 'advanced' magnet?

It's a magnet that scouts ahead for potential trouble.

 

[aggle-rithm]

Lacking credentials of my own I've always been told that you would have to completely eliminate friction to get a perpetual motion device. There is a device that generates energy but it has no moving parts.

Even if you could achieve zero friction, you would at best have zero energy output.

I have been reading Feynman's lectures on physics, and in the section on friction he talked about some of the pitfalls of trying to minimize it. He said that if you got two blocks of copper, made them perfectly smooth, somehow removed all contaminents from the surfaces so they were absolutely pure copper, then tried to slide one against the other...they would stick together, because the atoms would have no idea which block they were supposed to belong to.

The device you've described has a battery which means it doesn't generate all of its own power which means it isn't a perpetual motion machine.

Sure, there's a battery, but they don't really NEED it!

 

[Rasmus]

A perpetual motion machine and the universe we observe are completely incompatible.

Therefore, if someone claims to have a perpetual motion machine, and he lives in THIS universe, he is either lying or mistaken.

The far more interesting scenario arises, of course, if the guy isn't from this universe ...

That being said: Yes, the question is not if the inventor is wrong, but where he is wrong and why.

Preemptive explanation: Yes, science can sometimes be mistaken or inaccurate. That is the point, after all. There might be a way to gain essentially free and endless energy from the universe (in the sense that we went from burning wood to nuclear reactors, even though they, too, require fuel that runs out eventually!).

The person who discovers that principle, however, will be someone with a - or quite possibly several - degrees in various fields of physics who knows what the buttons on a particle accelerator are for. It will not be some guy with a small battery and "acme advanced magnets".

 

[Brown]

A common misperception is that once you get a rotor of a generator spinning, the rotor will continue to spin indefinitely, generating electricity all the while. Thus, the trick is to keep that rotor spinning for as long as you can. If you can keep that rotor spinning long enough, you might be able to get more energy out of it than you needed to get it spinning in the first place.

Wrong.

Basically, the rotor will not spin indefinitely, even if the system is frictionless. Drawing energy out of the system resists the motion of the rotor, causing it to slow and eventually stop.

Many science centers have a "hands-on" exhibit that demonstrates this effect. The guest spins a crank or rides a bicycle to generate some electrical energy. As the load is increased (e.g., there are more light bulbs being illuminated), it gets harder to turn the crank or pedal the bike.

 

[burrahobbit]

Man you guys are fast with your responses. Just went over to Pharyngula to see what PeeZee was up to and 9 posts already!!

One think I intend to do is to ask them to disconnect the "small" battery once the system is up and running and see if it continues to run for any length of time (even without running the light bulb)

 

[Mojo]

It's a magnet that scouts ahead for potential trouble.

One of them has just sent back a report about something it calls "the second law of thermodynamics".

 

[Crossbow]

I am not sure if this belongs in this topic or in General Scepticism but here goes

I have been asked (by someone I cant easily refuse) to study a claim by an "inventor" who has developed something that looks suspiciously like a Perpetual motion machine.

Being unable (at this point) to give my true opinion of this, I am planning to waste some time looking at this.

From the description the product seems to be as follows

A rotor which operates continuously (takes 10 minutes to get up to 3000 rpm speed and then indefinitely runs at that speed). The rotor can be encased in a stator and generate electricity.

The setup is said to incorporate a small battery in the stator circuit "to stabilise the power". The rotor incorporates "advanced magnets"

I have a background in engineering, a passing familiarity with neo magnets and am a sceptic.

What should I be looking for when I study the unit. Any suggestions.

My guess is that the unit rather slowly builds up to its rotational speed of 3000 RPM, then as the battery discharges, then it slowly looses its rotational speed.

Anyway, I would say that they key to the system is the battery, so what I would do is connect an ammeter to the battery because that would indicate one of three things:

The first, is that if the battery is being charged during the period of 'stablized power', then that would indicate that the system is producing more power than it is consuming (which is impossilbe).

The second, is that the battery is neither charged or discharged during the period of 'stablized power', then that would indicate that the system is producing as much power as it is consuming (which is also impossible).

Or the third, is that the battery is being discharged during the period of 'stablized power' which would indicate that the system needs some sort of power source in order to maintain the 3000 RPM (which is both quite possible and quite likely).

Also, I am interested in how the RPM is being measured. Because if a mechanical tachometer is being used, then please be advised that these unit are not terribly accurate and they do induce a bit of drag into the system. However, there are optical tachometers availble which are rather accurate and have very low drag.

Therefore, I would be most interested to learn how that RPM figure is actually produced.

I hope this helps!

 

[Wudang]

Sounds like a variant on various flywheel-based perpetual motion machines. They neglect to take into account the amount of energy stored in the flywheel while it's "brought up to speed" then the kinetic energy in the flywheel is slowly drained off as electrical energy until the wheel stops. See for example Garabed Giragossian

 

[DC]

by definition perpetual motion machine do not require help

and it is not perpetual motion when it uses Magnets.

 

[burrahobbit]

Re JJM 777, I do not think there is a product here that is even remotely worth anything.

What I know about it is more hearsay from a couple of people who have seen it hand heard the spiel. Will probably go there later this week and take a look.

One of the explanations given was that the device somehow harnesses the earth's magnetic field (that is my interpretation of what my informant told me). Also some garbage about how the earth itself is a PMM since it rotates and revolves perpetually.

(I know, I know don't jump on me-- it's not my garbage!!)

The magnets are supposed to be the high strength NdFeB stuff. We use them in wind turbine generators- very powerful and damnably expensive right now but not strong enough to generate a vortex field into the fourth dimension

 

[quarky]

I'd say it isn't worth debunking. Such devices are pre-debunked by the laws.
It is possible that the 'inventors' are honestly deluded.

Ever seen the dunking bird toy?
Something similar could look like a pmm device.

The odd thing is that the universe appears to be in perpetual motion.
at least we haven't observed anything else.

 

[kowalskil]

I am not sure if this belongs in this topic or in General Scepticism but here goes

I have been asked (by someone I cant easily refuse) to study a claim by an "inventor" who has developed something that looks suspiciously like a Perpetual motion machine.

Being unable (at this point) to give my true opinion of this, I am planning to waste some time looking at this.

From the description the product seems to be as follows

A rotor which operates continuously (takes 10 minutes to get up to 3000 rpm speed and then indefinitely runs at that speed). The rotor can be encased in a stator and generate electricity.

The setup is said to incorporate a small battery in the stator circuit "to stabilise the power". The rotor incorporates "advanced magnets"

I have a background in engineering, a passing familiarity with neo magnets and am a sceptic.

What should I be looking for when I study the unit. Any suggestions.

1) At what rate is the output electric energy generated? Is it more than 10 watts?

2) measure the input electric energy (supplied to the setup by this small battery during the testing period)

3) measure the output electric energy (produced by the setup)

4) make sure that no significant energy is entering the system, for example, via a hidden wireless device, mechanical vibrations, visible or invisible light, etc.

5) Yes, extraordinary claims call for extraordinary precautions. Verification would be less demanding if the output electric energy were generated at the rate of 100 W, or more. The 100 W would produce 2.4 kWh of energy each day.

============================

Breach of rule 6 removed.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles

 

[Myriad]

I think it's time to give a name to the cognitive illusion that seems to be behind this and similar PMM schemes. The illusion is the unstated and almost subliminal implied claim that a large, heavy, or fast-moving machine necessarily needs considerable power (say, more than could plausibly be supplied for a long duration by a small battery) to keep it moving. Call it, perhaps, the momentum-power fallacy.

There are toys with swinging pendulums or spinning tops, powered by a small battery in the base, that run for months on one battery. A typical battery powered clock or watch runs for two years on one battery. A drinking-bird toy keeps moving for days on the miniscule amount of power released by evaporation of a little water. But no one (okay, hardly anyone) seriously tries to pass those off as perpetual motion machines. They're small, and move relatively slowly, so they don't give the impression of requiring much power in the first place.

With good bearings, and very smooth surfaces (or spinning in vacuum), a spinning flywheel or cylinder doesn't need a whole lot more power than the desktop toy spinning tops or pendulums do. But unlike those other items, those can be made large and heavy, and spun really fast. That conveys the subtly false impression (probably rooted in people's experience with motor vehicles) that a lot of internally self-generated power, rather than mere momentum, is involved in keeping it moving.

When orbiting planets are mentioned as an example of naturally occurring perpetual motion machines, in support of the plausibility of a PMM, it's almost certain that the momentum-power fallacy is being invoked.

Respectfully,
Myriad