Stall The Ball

I am reading with much interest the various blogs and news sources speculating wildly on the supposed free energy hype from Steorn in Ireland.

Watching the video from Steorn doesn’t shed a lot of light on the subject and depending on which news source you read they either discovered this amazing technology while working on CCTV cameras or Wind turbine generators. Given the links to magnetism I can only assume that the wind turbine generator is more accurate.

Their basic premise seems to be, and I am reading between the lines and guesstimating, that by manipulating magnetic fields they are able to extract more energy from a moving rotor than they input.

Follow up:

Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, commented: “During the years of its development, our technology has been validated by various independent scientists and engineers.

No names are mentioned, no scientists or engineers have come running forward screaming halleluiah.

Steorn is making three claims for its technology:
1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).

Many years ago I stumbled across a whole raft of supposed free energy machines having read some drivel in a book claiming that the Germans had discovered new energy sources at the end of World War II. The name of the book escape me as does the name of the author but it was along the same lines as the Bermuda triangle, pre historic civilizations, UFO are really our ancestors type of dross.

The various free energy machines being touted on the internet ranged from stupidly complicated solar engines using bottles of gas cross connected in a ferris wheel arrangement through zero point energy up to and including magnets.

In the case of magnetic machines that supposedly give out more energy that they receive there are several instances where this appears at first glance to be true. They do give out more energy than you input.

However once you factor in the magnets themselves as an energy source and that the magnets loose their magnetic field as used in this manner you realise that the total energy output is far less than the energy you have input and the energy used to create the magnet.

Point 2 of their claim is

“The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.”

This is the bit I suspect as being a clever play on words. A magnet that looses its magnetic field is not degraded in and of itself. The materials are still there, it is unchanged physically, unlike a battery, and it weighs the same. But it isn’t a magnet any more.
Let’s make a couple of guesses here just to illustrate the point.

Assume your magnetic machine uses 1 Watt per hour of power to run.
The magnets required 1000 Watts to magnetise the magnets during manufacture.
The machine runs for 100 hours before the magnets fail.

Your machine generates 1.1 watts of energy per hour. (This is the greater than 100% efficiency)

On the face of it your machine is creating energy because you inputted 1 Watt of power and received 1.1 Watts back. Assume you feed the power back to your machine (and we’ll be generous and assume zero loss) then you have a net gain of 0.1 Watt. Truly remarkable and something to be forwarded to the Nobel Foundation.

However at the end of 100 hours your machine dies as the magnets fail.

So you have generated 100 x 1.1 = 110 Watts of power
Your machine consumed 100 x 1 = 100 Watts of power leaving a surplus of 10 Watts
But your magnets required 1000 Watts to manufacture/magnetise so a net loss of 990 Watts.

Lets plug some other figures in to see where the break even occurs given our assumptions.

100 hours = -990 Watts
1000 hours = -900 Watts
5000 hours = -500 Watts
10000 hours = 0 Watts (break even point)

So to break even it needs to run for 416 days

All the above ignores the losses in feeding back the power, losses in creating the magnets, magnetic losses, electrical losses and don’t even begin to consider hysteresis.

On the above assumptions you would have to run the machine for at least a year and a half to prove the concept. Measuring magnets is difficult so just running it would be the better test. If the efficiency of the machine was 101% (still a fabulous feat) then try running it for 15 years and see what happens.

If your feeling bored try Googling zero point energy, magnetic perpetual machines etc.

http://www.calphysics.org/zpe.html is a good read and gives a quick overview of the physics involved in zero point energy.

If you like science fiction then you’ll love some of the hypothesises being put forward.

Some Irish blogs covering the Steorn claims
http://blog.roam4free.ie/steorn/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/free-clean-and-constant-energy/
http://www.minds.may.ie/~dez/serendipity/index.php?/archives/88-Steorn,-Im-all-out-of-faith.html
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RoamFree/~3/15337660/
http://tcal.net/archives/2006/08/19/irish-company-steorn-claiming-free-energy-source-video/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Irisheyes/~3/14208751/free_irish_ener.html
http://threatstodemocracy.blogspot.com/2006/08/is-this-steorn-device.html
http://threatstodemocracy.blogspot.com/2006/08/is-this-end-of-oil-industry.html
http://www.richardoc.com/richardoc/2006/08/physics_defeate.html
http://notoole.blogspot.com/2006/08/irish-firm-claims-free-energy.html
http://colmsmyth.blogspot.com/2006/08/irish-company-steorn-promises-free.html
http://www.theplasticcat.com/?p=743
http://www.avalon5.com/index.php/archives/641
http://tcal.net/archives/2006/08/18/irish-firm-claims-free-energy-invention/