New electrical generator

Wikipedia has a good "power transmission" article.

i

I've seen figures thrown around in the 40% to 50% range to get the energy from the burning coal or oil or gas in the powerplant to your wall socket. The generator at the power plant might be 98% by itself (2% loss), but the prime mover is a huge loss. The excess heat going up the stack and out the cooling towers, and all the little motors and fans keeping the big motor running that do all the pumping and blowing and cooling and lubricating and stack filtering...

Then you have the transmission lines, with little bits siphoned off in resistive loss and flash-over of insulators and dielectric losses in underground cables. And every transformer along the way taking a small bite, whether it's stepping voltage up or down.

A nibble here, a bite there, and suddenly it's half gone.

The only real exception is hydroelectric, wind turbines, geothermal, and the like. There are still losses, but gravity and wind and magma are free (in limited quantities). And building the facilities to exploit them safely (Hoover Dam) costs quite a bit, and has to be figured into the 'cost' of that power.

(Versus the cost of exploiting them *un*safely - St. Francis Dam, Saugus CA, built 1926 failed 1928, killed thousands when it did...)

This is why when you need bulk heat for hot water or cooking or space heat, you buy the fuel (coal, oil, propane, natural gas, wood) and burn it yourself on site. You have to deal with the equipment, sure, but you also cut out that 50% loss middleman that is always involved with electric heat.

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The simplex prime movers, steam or gas turbine, typically run from 37% up to

45% or so efficiency. The newer, "combined cycle" turbines run around 56% - 58%. GE has one that has topped 60%. These are gas turbines that use the turbine's exhaust to heat a steam boiler, then a steam turbine operating as the second stage.

So the overall efficiency of these systems run around 0.98 x 0.56, or 55%. Slightly higher is possible. I see that Wikipedia claims that the overall US distribution/transmission efficiency, as of 1995, was 92.8% (they report it as a loss of 7.2%).

(BTW, on a related topic, a solar Stirling at Sandia (I think) just topped

31% efficiency, which is a new record. That's twice the efficiency of the best photovoltaic cells.)

-- Ed Huntress

This looks to be a variation of the Farady Disk generator. This was discovered, and promptly ignored, about 150 years ago.

It is a very strange phenomenon, and easy to really get tangled up in the implications of it.

Basically, all common generators, and motors, use a rotor and a stator. The electrical load currents will create an opposing magnetic force between the rotor and the stator. That is why a genreator takes more power as you load it heavier.

The Farady Disk, aka homopolar generator, aka acyclical generator, aka space machine etc. does not have a rotor, and a stator. Only a rotor. That's right, only a rotor. The whole things works "sideways" to how you always thought a generator should work. It is Very confusing to think about, since adding a load to the generator cannot create a torque reaction in the conventional way we all understand generators to work. Note 1.

So, many experimentors start thinking, that if we build it, and spin it up, we can add a load to it, and it won't take power to keep it spinning, since it won't react against the motor driving it.

Experiments show anomolous results, and building a model to play with is truely trivial. I challenge any of you to build a model to prove that it IS confusing to think about.

Here is a simple experiment to try..

Here is a test result of the Sunburst Machine.

This nullgrav machine looks very much like a variation of the Farady disk experiment.

And to illustrate just how confusing this sort of thing can be... Here is a lab demonstration from MIT, that WILL blow your mind, if you follow it, and all of it's implication. It blows Kirchoff right out of the water. ..

Watch both parts of this demo. Prof. Levin is really amazing.... Look for the rest of his lectures.

Have Fun. !!

Note 1. The operation of the device can lead you to believe that a magnet cannot "produce" a magnetic field, but can only distort the magnetic field lines inherent on space itself. If a magnet did produced a magnetic field, than rotating a magnet, and a conductor together could not produce any net electrical generation. However, if the magnet is distorting the feild lines of the surrounding space, then a moving conductor (which is not moving relative to the magnet) can produce an electric field.

I don't beleive in "Perpetual Commotion" But, here is a wonderful trap for the unwary to fall in to, and in all honesty be completley befuddled. Be sure and wathc the MIT video. It's is one of the greatest electrical demonstrations I've ever seen.

This looks to be a variation of the Farady Disk generator. This was discovered, and promptly ignored, about 150 years ago.

It is a very strange phenomenon, and easy to really get tangled up in the implications of it.

Basically, all common generators, and motors, use a rotor and a stator. The electrical load currents will create an opposing magnetic force between the rotor and the stator. That is why a genreator takes more power as you load it heavier.

The Farady Disk, aka homopolar generator, aka acyclical generator, aka space machine etc. does not have a rotor, and a stator. Only a rotor. That's right, only a rotor. The whole things works "sideways" to how you always thought a generator should work. It is Very confusing to think about, since adding a load to the generator cannot create a torque reaction in the conventional way we all understand generators to work. Note 1.

So, many experimentors start thinking, that if we build it, and spin it up, we can add a load to it, and it won't take power to keep it spinning, since it won't react against the motor driving it.

Experiments show anomolous results, and building a model to play with is truely trivial. I challenge any of you to build a model to prove that it IS confusing to think about.

Here is a simple experiment to try..

Here is a test result of the Sunburst Machine.

This nullgrav machine looks very much like a variation of the Farady disk experiment.

And to illustrate just how confusing this sort of thing can be... Here is a lab demonstration from MIT, that WILL blow your mind, if you follow it, and all of it's implication. It blows Kirchoff right out of the water. ..

Watch both parts of this demo. Prof. Levin is really amazing.... Look for the rest of his lectures.

Have Fun. !!

Note 1. The operation of the device can lead you to believe that a magnet cannot "produce" a magnetic field, but can only distort the magnetic field lines inherent on space itself. If a magnet did produced a magnetic field, than rotating a magnet, and a conductor together could not produce any net electrical generation. However, if the magnet is distorting the feild lines of the surrounding space, then a moving conductor (which is not moving relative to the magnet) can produce an electric field.

I don't beleive in "Perpetual Commotion" But, here is a wonderful trap for the unwary to fall in to, and in all honesty be completley befuddled. Be sure and wathc the MIT video. It's is one of the greatest electrical demonstrations I've ever seen.

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Thanks for the explanation, half-nutz. I'll bet the dude in question fell into that trap........and we learned something too! phil

Phil,

It is not clear what is going on with that type of device. The evaluation of the Sunburst machine did have some faily confusing results, as to weather or not they were measuring excessive power compared to the input.

- IF - this is some sort of way to harness some sort of overlooked source of energy, then the controversy surrounding it keeps anybody from looking into it, and not getting thrown out of the mainstream community. Bruce DePalma was a prof. at MIT, and left after he got controversial results from his experiments with gyroscopes. Eric Laithwaite, who invented the Maglev train, was thown out of the scientific community once he started doing experiments on gyroscopes, along a similar line.

I once met the machinist that built the machine for Bruce DePalma. He was Convinced that Bruce was killed for working on it.

This whole line of experiments might yield some interesting results, but since the results are "anomolous" to mainstream thinking, no one dares to look into it.

I am reminded of the Hall effect, Hall himself dismised it as being of no interest, since the effect was so weak. And here we are, many years later, using millions of Hall Effect switches and sensors. The enabler to utilize what seemed like a discovery of little consequence, was the later invention of electronic op amps, many years later. So, sometimes we get important results from something that mainstream thinking will throw away. It is not always immediately usefull, but any crazy phenomonon should be looked into a little farther, typically.

So, this controversial "sideways" motor/generator might be revealing something very important to us, but no one dares to look into it. A shame, really.

I won't presume to know how we all "conventionally understand" generators to work... but if you examine Faraday's sketch thoughtfully, you will see that radial current in the disc (in the presence of the axial B-field) will indeed produce countertorque, and an opposite torque will act upon the radial lead to the center. The confusion arises because these torques are so small compared to the residual losses in such systems that they are easily overlooked.

In the Sunburst experiment, residual losses were relatively enormous when the thing was generating no power at all, and losses did increase when power was drawn.

This guy is more performer than docent. Kirchoff's law does not presume lumped sources of EMF, it states merely that EMF's and drops in a closed circuit or mesh sum to zero.

It is true that many engineering texts present circuits (and Kirchoff's law) with lumped EMFs, because in real circuits that is most often the dominant case.

At one point in his lecture he leads (or at least allows with a bit of nudge) his "audience" to think that the induced EMF should be thought of as being lumped at the location where the battery was, which of course is false. Later he shows a line integral suggesting that the EMF is indeed distributed, but he still prefers to discredit Kirchoff in favor of Faraday. The line integral of induced EMF around the circuit or mesh would and does indeed equal the former battery EMF.

He may be a great mentor for academists, perhaps not for engineers.

The cited experiment sez it generates 0.5 volts, 1.5 mA or 0.75 mW at

2600 RPM. This power level at this speed represents a torque of about .0004 ozf-in (.00275 Newton-mm to y'all unit purists) regardless of how the current was generated. It ain't zero, but it's easy to see why an observer might think so. Compared to countertorque due to parasitic losses like windage, bearing losses and brush drag it's a fleafart at a rock concert.

I suggest the following modification to the experiment:

Rather than continuously powering rotation with an electric drill, use a flywheel. With brushes in place but external wires disconnected, spin up the flywheel (perhaps with a tangential air jet), then release it and note the time it takes to slow to a given rate as measured with a photo tachometer. Could use a hole in the disc, LED and photosensor from surplus store or discarded mouse and oscilloscope

-- or perhaps just a pattern of radial lines on the disc viewed with fluorescent or neon light and watch for the "strobe stop". Now repeat the experiment with external leads connected.

Parasitic losses are the same in both cases if both experiments start at the same speed.

If the flywheel slows more quickly when the external leads are connected, there is clearly countertorque due to the rather small generated current.

I don't think it does. The Faraday disc experiment has constant flux while the nullgrav device uses commutated flux reversals thru coils. It is functionally very similar to an automotive alternator. The geometry is different, but they both rely on flux commutation to make an essentially-constant MMF (magnetomotive force) produce time-variant flux linking fixed coils.

If opportunity presents, I highly recommend a visit to Faraday's laboratory in London. It's in the basement of a building near the A&E, British Science Museum and others. Same tube stop.

This guy was a no-shit researcher and an artful artificer as well, no doubt with the help of a skilled technician who is now forgotten but shouldn't be. The discoveries he made are most impressive when one sees what he had to work with and what he was able to do with it.