Free Energy ??

jonski

First off I have no idea where to post this , so I am trying here .

Secondly I neither have a science backround nor do I particularly understand all the big words , so keep it in lay mans terms for me .

http://www.steorn.net/frontpage/default.aspx?p=1

Discuss ............

David19

This is being discussed in the politics forum:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054978349

It sounds like a load of rubbish tbh.

Hobbes

There is nothing to discuss. The website has nothing scientific on it yet has claimed to broken the laws of physics. They claimed that Scientists refused to look at the claim but at the same time refuse to post in any scientific journal. They claimed to post thier results in the Econimist however when I went to the ad in question it does no such thing and just refers you back to the website.

The companys history is pretty sketchy as well.

How they are even being taken seriously is beyond me.

Gurgle

Hobbes wrote:

How they are even being taken seriously is beyond me.

They're not.

Hobbes

Gurgle wrote:

They're not.

Well they where on the news this morning. I'm guessing some kind of PR spam attack on the media.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Yup, that whole "breaking the laws of physics" was just to evoke interest.

It's rpobably along the lines of the Car running on water scam

jonski

Hobbes wrote:

Well they where on the news this morning. I'm guessing some kind of PR spam attack on the media.

Would that not be extremely expensive ?

Hobbes

Hobbes wrote:

They claimed to post thier results in the Econimist however when I went to the ad in question it does no such thing and just refers you back to the website.

Sorry but where on their website do they claim that the results are being posted on the Economist? Link please

Hobbes wrote:

The companys history is pretty sketchy as well.

How do you come to that conclusion?

shayflanco

Hi All,


In an earlier discussion they was a comment on the Forum not working - this has now been solved

"To access the Steorn forum, click the Sign In link on the top right of the page. If you have previously registered a username and password, they will now be active.
If you need to register, click "Apply for membership" and fill out the form. Your membership will activate immediately."

Please note that this is a technical reply only!

Cheers,

S

Thomas_S_Hunterson

shayflanco wrote:

Hi All,


In an earlier discussion they was a comment on the Forum not working - this has now been solved

"To access the Steorn forum, click the Sign In link on the top right of the page. If you have previously registered a username and password, they will now be active.
If you need to register, click "Apply for membership" and fill out the form. Your membership will activate immediately."

Please note that this is a technical reply only!

Cheers,

S

They're monitoring our reactions to it!

Hobbes

Deleted User wrote:

Sorry but where on their website do they claim that the results are being posted on the Economist? Link please

In the interview video on google they claim they where ignored by scientist community and are making thier claims for scientists to check thier claims in an advert in the economist. Of course that "Check thier claims" translates to "register with our website and we will get back to you".

How do you come to that conclusion?

10 minutes investigating on the net. I couldn't find anything scientific so I went the other direction looking for accolades, etc. Because great minds like these would have major degrees or papers posted.


First up a quick check on the site and we find only up until recently the site was very basic looking. A lot of information has been removed from the site (probably to stop people looking up). Here is what we have.

This is what the company originally described itself as...

Steorn is a leading Intellectual Property (IP) research and development organisation. Founded in 2000, Steorn has developed cutting-edge technology solutions in areas such as optical disc analysis and plastic card fraud prevention. The company is currently engaged in the development of its own proprietary battery substitution technology.

That was based on thier information in 2000. Earlier this year they claimed they where building kinetic energy batteries for mobile phones. These are not perpetual motion machines as they claim to have built. They also worked on building website portals e-commerce development.

So I am not seeing anything of note to prove that anyone there is scientific enough to comment on breaking the laws of thermodynamics or even how thier field would bring them to it.

Here is a list of names gotten from thier old site.
Sean McCarthy - CEO
Martin Flood - Engineering Manager

I also got a few others but I doubt they are related to the find.

Taking the first two names and having a look around. I can find nothing of note from either. No technical papers published. Nothing. I do see a comment from Sean in 2004 regarding Chip+Pin however it comes across as someone who has not worked in that field, yet we are to believe they worked on "plastic fraud prevention" (which in some cases it would fall under that).

On their old website they are supposed to have given out an award called "Excellence in Mechanical Engineering 2005 " but absolutly no reference found to who got the award, or what even the award was about. Looks like something internal.

There is also a patent on magnets but no relation again to breaking the laws of thermodynamics in that either. Incidently kinetic motors do not get energy out of nowhere. They get it from movement which transfers the energy.

That was just a quick check. I can do a more indepth one if I was half bothered, however from initial investigation there is nothing in thier history to show they even know the science to claim what they know.

I also noted they got an investor to invest about 2 million or so and claimed they are making a loss and don't plan to make a profit because they have an investor. They where also looking for more investors.

Btw, normal process of your average company is to.
- Patent technology
- Submit technology for peer review.

They don't seem to have done either. Also ask yourself if you are making a claim to scientists why put that advert in the Economist?

When they actually release something I'll review it. Until then treating it as pure bokum.

lostexpectation

does anyone understand the patent linked in the politics thread?

there are more names listed on that too...

it hits the blogs...

Well, the Celts are well-known for discovering unorthodox sources of energy: consider peat.

Look at a map of Europe, and you'll note that most, if not all of the peat bogs are or were in countries that are or were Gaelic.

It's said this is because "God knew the Celts were the only people who could get drunk enough to try to burn mud."--P.J. O'Rourke.

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/08/free_energy_to.html

BendiBus

It's now item 2 on RTÉs business news with an interview on the News at One

http://www.rte.ie/business/2006/0818/steorn.html

http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/2166045.smil

I can't watch the interview here at work. Anything new in it?

ressem

CEO was on the RTE radio 1 news at 1: http://www.rte.ie/radio1/newsatone/ 34:50 minutes in.

Quote
"What we've developed is a way to construct magnetic fields, that when you travel around a magnetic field starting and stopping at the same position, you've gained energy. The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet, it's literally created."

Seems to be the same CEO as
Unison Aug 01
"DUBLIN-based technology risk management company, Steorn, has launched a new service, Technology Project Underwriting, designed to guarantee against the failure of technology projects."
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/index.php3?ca=35&issue_id=5161

Could easily be a PR inspired April Fool, to gain mindshare, their last PR in May was about the kinetic supplemental power source for mobiles, where as Hobbes mentioned, they were looking for funding.
http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2006/05/21/story14326.asp

Quote Hobbes

they are supposed to have given out an award called "Excellence in Mechanical Engineering 2005 "

It appears to be a co-sponsorship of a DIT award. In AIT it's done by everyone from Ericsson to the local supermarket. Just PR.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Here's the patent application
http://v3.espacenet.com/origdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=WO2006035419&F=0&QPN=WO2006035419
Any experts in the field here that could look it over and examine the credibility?

jonski

Why do I get so excited about these things .

Really don't want this to be another segway .

Hobbes

ressem wrote:

It appears to be a co-sponsorship of a DIT award. In AIT it's done by everyone from Ericsson to the local supermarket. Just PR.

Nope it was seperate to that one. It was removed in the new sites contents.

lostexpectation

notice have they claim to have 175 scientist already registered since this morning, or merely people who claim to scientist, I know im being cruel but how many scientist could they have verrifed in a few hours?

The registration process involves our offline verification, and so may take some time to complete. Please be patient.

bloodninja

maybe its feasible,

three electric fields alternating to drive a turbine. Energy needed to operate electric fields is less than that that is yielded... why not.

Rules are made to be broken

Son Goku

bloodninja wrote:

three electric fields alternating to drive a turbine. Energy needed to operate electric fields is less than that that is yielded... why not.

All forms of power generation create more useful power than humans put in, however it wastes something.
For instance in a simple coal electric generator, coal is burned to boil water which then evapourates off as steam to turn a turbine.
However the coal won't burn forever and you haven't given the universe more energy, just redistributed it in a form that is more useful.

These guys are saying that they can insert energy into the universe at the microscopic level, which would disprove General Relativity.

ressem

maybe its feasible,
...
Rules are made to be broken

Skepical because claims of large scale "free energy machines" involving magnets are as common as claims of perpetual pyramid schemes.

Googling brought up this link from MIT.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/perpetual-0519.html
As a teaching exercise they had an annual competition to fake a perpetual motion machine using magnetic or electrical field. Points awarded based on how hard it is to refute.

As for the magnetic actuator described in the patent pending linked above, while there's every chance that positioning magnets could reduce the work required to move a magnetically perimiable cover and attached tray, (less magnetic breaking effect due to smaller changes in eddy currents), which is all that is claimed, you're not going to create energy that way.
But I'm just an amateur who read my undergrad physics book and lightweight science monthlies. So I could easily be wrong, but in this case I doubt it.

kiffer

Oh dear lord, if these people have been working on this why have they not published anything before now? Looking quickly through the patent I notice that they never say that it produces energy. In fact it just states that it is more effeicent and uses less energy than if you used electromagnets to do the same thing...

"A low energy magnet actuator allows magnetic fields to be turned on and off using a small amount of energy. "

The question is how can you use this to generate power? If you allow a metal object to be drawn towards a magnet you could get kenetic energy from that... so they use these low energy actuators to sheild the magnet and then the metal object gets pulled towards the next magnet... which then gets sheilded and so on... all the while you get Energy from the movement of the metal object... now... how much energy do you need to activate the shielding of the magnets? if it's less than the amount you can get from the movement you get a net gain in energy! or so it would seem ...

On one hand I keep thinking wouldn't it be cool if this worked... on the other hand... I don't think it's going to happen. Enthopy is a harsh mistress.

kiffer

"We chose it over a purely scientific magazine simply because we want to make the general public aware that this process is about to commence and to generate public support, awareness, interest etc for what we are doing."

in other words... we have not even tried to submit any papers to any journals because we are claiming to have an overunity device and they would all reject us out of hand...

Here are some of their claims

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).

1., Ok... it produces more energy then is put in to it...
2., 3., Oh really? I think it's very likely that should this tech. turn out to do anything ... to produce any amount of energy it shall do so by by taking energy from the micro currents with in the magnet, which produce it's magnetic field... this will over time cause the magnet to heat up and the field to weaken.

If I had invented an Over Unity device like this the last thing I would call it is a free energy machine... I would just build some and test them... build a large one and sell energy to the grid or build several batteries and get people to test them with out telling them that I thought they would go on for ever... Dear Underwriters Labs. please could you test our batteries and let us know how they compair to the AA standard in terms of power out put over time...
What you say? you've been running a RC car off them for the last 3 days and it's still going? Yeah we thought as much we just wanted you to check it out for us... sign here please.

Think about it ... every one knows that perpetual motion machines don't work... who in their right mind would try and market something as one?

Lets pretend it could possibly work... what's this things power to weight ratio? If I want to have a 12v battery how big an machine do I need? if it wieghs ten times as much what would be the point?

But lets face it... the biggest clue as to this being a damp squib is that they are calling it free energy ... no one in their right mind would call it that if they wanted to be taken seriously. NO ONE! Mark my words it'll turn out to be a poke at the stupid things people will believe once they see it on TV.

Hobbes

Before you continue on I should point out that the patent you can see they claim has nothing to do with this perpetual motion machine.

They are aware it is a perpetual motion machine and that you can't get a patent for that, so they have instead submitting patents for portions of the so called invention which haven't been published yet.

This was mentioned on thier forums.

flogen

I'm very sceptical about this whole thing and believe that it is indeed some kind of marketing campaign, PR hoax or scam to get investors however I am also not scientifically minded and have to ask a possibly dumb question...
The whole problem with their claim is that it defies the laws of thermodynamics and would basically smash physics to pieces... there is the rule that you cannot get out more than you put in etc. and you cannot create energy from nothing, it has to be energy transfered etc.

So; when you attract a piece of metal to a magnet it creates kinetic energy as it travels (to the magnet)... what is this being created from? Is it something like magnetic energy which is slightly depleated every time the magnet is used or something else?

mike65

If the technology was worth a damn it would have been submitted to the following for peer examination.

http://www.nature.com/index.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/

Not waffle about off the record testing.

Mike.

zuutroy

This is all smoke and mirrors media hype. Possibly a investment drive. These guys must be laughing their heads off that it's gone this far. That patent application is for a low power relay, nothing more. Nothing scientific in anything I've read.

kiffer

Hobbes wrote:

Before you continue on I should point out that the patent you can see they claim has nothing to do with this perpetual motion machine.

They are aware it is a perpetual motion machine and that you can't get a patent for that, so they have instead submitting patents for portions of the so called invention which haven't been published yet.

This was mentioned on thier forums.

As I said, I've looked through the patent, I can see it's not a patent for a perpetual motion machine... it's a patent for a device which sheilds a magnetic field, using a small amount of energy to do so. I'm guessing that this is what they think[1] will alow them to get energy out of their contraption.


They do not have a patent for a perpetual motion machine... but they have publicly stated that they have invented perpetual motion machine, which is a crazy thing to state.
If you had a working one of these you would avoid the words "Free Energy", "Perpetual", "For ever" and so on.

It's a crazy thing to say.
[1] I'm pretty sure that they know it won't work and this is some sort of hoax...

This whole situation has made me think...
I'm now working on my own design for a over unity device... basicaly it's a ridged pendulum with a magnet as a weight, just beyond the high point of the swing, on either side, there is a magnet, at first this magnet is positioned such that it attracts the magnet on the pendulum bob but when the bob gets close the magnet is flipped over and pushes it away! Then the pendulum swings back across to the magnet on the far side... and the same attract/switch/repel action takes place...

now the attraction/repelling to/from the magnets fights off the effects of gravity by adding to the swing of the pendulum, which is good... in the middle of the area swepped by the pendulum is a small coil of wire ... when the magnet on the pendulum bob passes this an electric current will be generated ... this will slow the pendulum slightly so the amount of current must be finely tuned to allow the bob to continue to the point where the magnets will do their magic.
Of course the whole thing would be in a evacuated chamber to remove any drag caused by the air, and the top of the pundulum would be a frictionless magneticaly levitated joint.

It would continue for ever... because I don't know how the micro currents in the magnets would be affected by this ... and I'm hand waving away the mechanism by which the magnets get flipped over [2].
Of course at the start it'll need a battery to provide the power to flip the magnets but with your funding I'm sure we can refine it to the point where the amount of energy we get out is greater than that which we put in... and that even includes the power needed to make the magnets ... which don't weaken over time ... even though their magnetic fields are generated from the movement of elections in microcurrents within the magnet, those microcurrents never ever ever degrade in any way... unless you heat the magnet and/or drop it... you see thats why we call them permanent magnets because they last for ever ... they have an infintly high energy density.

[2] I'm handwaving away my flipping mechanism ... but it servers the same perpose as the patented actuator above... they claim that their manget sheilding device is super effecient... The then go on to claim that using this super effecient dodad you can get power out of magnets ... which to be blunt you probably could... but not more than there is in them, and probably not at a fast enough rate to power the actuators themselves...

Argh... will my dream of an unlimited supply of energy never become a reality!

zuutroy

kiffer wrote:

Of course the whole thing would be in a evacuated chamber

And to keep the chamber at a sufficient vacuum, you'll need vacuum pumps, which will use way more energy than you'll harvesy. Looks like back to the drawing board!

kiffer

flogen wrote:

I'm very sceptical about this whole thing and believe that it is indeed some kind of marketing campaign, PR hoax or scam to get investors however I am also not scientifically minded and have to ask a possibly dumb question...
The whole problem with their claim is that it defies the laws of thermodynamics and would basically smash physics to pieces... there is the rule that you cannot get out more than you put in etc. and you cannot create energy from nothing, it has to be energy transfered etc.

So; when you attract a piece of metal to a magnet it creates kinetic energy as it travels (to the magnet)... what is this being created from? Is it something like magnetic energy which is slightly depleated every time the magnet is used or something else?

The magnetic field of a magnet is created by the microcurrents ( or rather the spin of magnetic domains) in the magnet...
there must be a set amount of energy in any magnet. ( the total amount of spin ) using this energy must have an effect on it. ( changing the spin )
More over, it is in a very ordered from... all the magnetic domains are lined up in the same way ... producing a net magnetic field. Nature loves entropy and if you are heating the magnet and changing the spin over time you will end up demagnetising the magnet... unless you get rid of the entropy that is generated.

Energy can not be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another.
Magnets change kinetic energy from the spin in the magnetic domains in to magnetic energy and then when that magnetic energy causes something to move... it produces kinetic energy again. of course there is waste along the way... heat builds up in the magnet and the object being move.

I'm dragging all this out of half remembered physics lectures from a few years ago...
so I don't think it's very accurate. Argh I give up... I wish them the best of luck with their crazy plan.
I can't wait to see how this turns out... I want to see what investors get suckered in to this and what they say on the day that the whole thing falls apart.

I thought that the movement in the magnetic domains was that of only electrons which is why I was calling them microcurrents, but looking at The Wiki it seems its more to do with quantum spin of electrons, neutrons and protons... I don't remember that part very well... I'm off to re-read two year old physics notes now.

kiffer

zuutroy wrote:

And to keep the chamber at a sufficient vacuum, you'll need vacuum pumps, which will use way more energy than you'll harvesy. Looks like back to the drawing board!

If that was the only problem got with the design I'd be laughing all the way to the bank...

you could just create the vacuum and then seal the chamber. sure creating a hard vacuum would need a lot of energy up front so to speek ... but once the you've done it then you'd gett it all back over time...

the flipping the magnets part would take up a lot of energy... and heat would build up in them from the interactions with the field of the moving magnet.

It's a horrible machine that might run for a while producing a small amount of current... untill the batteries that are needed to flip the magnets over run dry ... then the thing would grinde to a halt. I don't think it could ever produce enough to keep those batteries charged let alone enough power to be of any use. this thing would be a net user of power, not a souce. you'd be sticking fresh aa batteries in it every day... and it might light a hand full of LEDs
but even then it would only produce a current as the pendulum passed the coil so the power would be alternating... with no power being produced most of the time.