LECTURE NO. 23
MENTAL INERTIA AND NEW ENERGY TECHNOLOGY
Copyright © Harold Aspden, 1998
INTRODUCTION
These comments were compiled as an aide memoire
some two to three days prior to my participation in a discussion meeting on new
energy topics held in London on May 10th, 1998.
They constitute a brief
summary of points which I feel need to be made in a general debate on how to
progress in the task of awakening interest in new and revolutionary energy
conversion techniques which, at this time, challenge orthodox science and so are
not welcomed by those who advise on research funding.
CONCERNING THE TITLE
In the above title I refer to 'Mental
Inertia'. What is meant by this is the difficulty of deflecting the thought
processes of the vast majority of physicists concerning heat and power
generation, which seem to move forward relentlessly following a single track,
that which conforms with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Heat dispersed
into space is somehow lost forever. It has no destiny except infinity. As a
result, the minds of those who ponder upon such questions, drift off themselves
into that wilderness of infinity. Why not pause and surmise that,
notwithstanding what we do achieve by building and testing heat engines, which
spend energy, Nature has her own secret ways of processing spent energy and
forcing it into a temporary holding condition, a 'quantum dance', before it can
be packaged as a proton and released back into our real world. We see matter all
around us. It is built from protons and electrons. Somehow it was created,
necessarily from energy. Where did that energy come from? If you think the
universe is a one-off product that came off God's production line some ten or so
billion years ago, then you are not thinking as I do. I think each and every
proton is created by an ongoing mass-production process fed by energy tapped
from that dispersed throughout space. If those who advise on energy research
know otherwise, then they should explain how they know! It is an important issue
warranting debate.
Apart
from that issue I am also suggesting that scientists have developed a mental
block by relying too heavily upon their Second Law of Thermodynamics. They
suffer from 'mental inertia' and it is to the detriment of progress on the 'New
Energy' front.
THE ENERGY SOURCE
Energy cannot be 'created'. It can only be
converted from one form to another. Ignoring the usual energy sources, whether
oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydroelectric power, wind power and even solar power,
there is new energy territory to be explored. There are two sources latent to
our environment. One is the ambient heat, the energy stored in our atmosphere
and the other is the energy stored locally in the quantum underworld of the
vacuum state.
Concerning the first of these sources, physicists reject
the notion that exploitation of ambient heat is possible, because they live
under the spell of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As to the second of these
sources, they refuse to believe that there is any energy in space other than
that which is an extension of the matter form owing to what they term the
'fields', the electric and magnetic action of matter upon nearby space. Whether
it is Einstein's theory that has brushed the aether aside or quantum theory that
provides them with pacifying answers, they choose not to recognize these two
important sources of energy.
Now, for the purpose of these notes I can
only comment briefly on the major source, that vested in space, so I will do
that first.
Simply put, that source of energy hidden in the quantum
underworld is the power house which creates the protons and electrons from which
all matter in the universe is formed, whether as hydrogen atoms or as transmuted
atoms formed from those protons and electrons. I can prove that proposition by
showing how an understanding of the process involved can explain the precise
value of the mass of the proton in terms of the mass of the electron. By precise
I mean fully in agreement with the degree of its precision measurement, a part
or so in ten million. However, that is mere theory.
When we come to view
this in the context of the real world, we can look at the phenomenon of 'cold
fusion' and ask how it is that two atomic nuclei, that of hydrogen and that of
heavy hydrogen, namely the proton and the deuteron can come close enough
together to combine or transmute their forms in such a way as to shed energy.
You might say that all those atoms were created long ago in something called the
'Big Bang' which is an event far removed from what can be happening here and now
in the space local to body Earth. However, in that case you too would then be
indulging in mere theory.
In the obituary of Sir Charles Frank, reported
on page 25 of the British newspaper THE TIMES of Monday, April 27, 1998, there
is the statement that he was 'an inspirational physicist who worked in a wide
range of fields, from earthquakes to cold fusion'. There was a later comment in
the obituary which referred again to cold fusion, by saying that:
"Charles Frank was the first scientist to think of the idea of
cold nuclear fusion. In 1947 he suggested using an elementary subnuclear
particle, a muon, to catalyse the fusion of deuterium and tritium. It would
take the electron's place and allow the nuclei to approach some 200 times
closer than usual, and so help produce fusion."
The problem with
that idea is that the muon, which is otherwise known as the 'heavy' electron,
just as the deuteron can be said to be the 'heavy' proton, is a mystery in
itself. In fact, it has a 'ghostly' existence, to my way of thinking, because it
is the primary 'stuff' which accounts for the energy of space, but that fact is
not appreciated by the world of science. I know that to be a fact because my
explanation of the creation of the proton involves the combination of those
aethereal muons!
So the evolving cold fusion scene will, I expect, one
day make us appreciate the existence of that energy source in space. Meanwhile,
however, I shall myself pursue another route aimed at gaining access to that sea
of energy in space, namely by the process of magnetic induction designed to
involve 'magnetocaloric cooling' of the vacuum medium. That introduces my
interest in certain forms of magnetic reluctance motor, but to explain that in
detail is also just a little too specific for the immediate purpose of these
notes. So, apart from referring below to the problem of testing 'over-unity'
performance, I shall here restrict my onward comments to the somewhat related
subject of extracting energy from ambient heat in defiance of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics.
THE SELF-GENERATING HEAT ENGINE
It is not 'perpetual motion'
in the sense of a machine that runs on no power but delivers power. No, it is
simply a machine which absorbs heat from the atmosphere and generates an
electrical power output. It is the ideal of a kind of air-conditioning system
which cools but yet uses the heat extracted to produce useful power as output,
sufficient power in excess of that needed to run the cooling system, so that the
surplus is provided as 'free energy' output.
That might seem to be an
impossible ideal, but it is possible, given two heat engines connected
back-to-back, if one is a conventional engine operating as a reverse heat
engine, namely as a heat pump, and the other is an engine which feeds on heat
but is not governed by Carnot efficiency limitations.
I may add here that
I have even secured grant of a U.S. Patent which includes the description of
such a system and has a claim pertaining to that very proposition. It is the
last claim of my U.S. Patent No. 5,101,632.
It is noted that the subject of that patent has been introduced earlier in these
Web pages as Lecture
No. 17.
To implement an energy generating process such as this,
however, the main requirement is to have a device which does convert heat into
electricity without the Carnot restraint imposed by compliance with that Second
Law of Thermodynamics. The structure proposed in that U.S. patent would need
extensive development of a technique of fabrication of a cellular mirror
structure that deploys internal heat radiation.
An alternative which
warrants development is a technique based on the fabrication of a laminar
structure composed of ferromagnetic metal films or plates. This is also
described in the patent literature (U.S.
Patent No. 5,288,336 and U.S.
Patent No. 5,376,184) but it is felt that scientists generally need to be
enlightened concerning the technical reason why the device functions,
notwithstanding that Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Now, instead of
describing such a device in detail, I will point my finger at something that is
occurring throughout the energy world everywhere, namely a phenomenon present in
every electrical power transformer. This is the fact that there is an electrical
power loss in the transformer that is a complete mystery to those who design
them, including the university professors who teach those
designers.
Every power transformer that has a laminated steel core is
subject to what is called 'iron loss', the magnetization losses which are
ongoing when the transformer is connected in the power transmission circuit.
There is a component of that loss which is attributable to magnetic induction of
currents which circulate in each core lamination. Those currents involve higher
losses than one expects from theoretical calculation based on a knowledge of the
resistivity of the steel. For that to be the case there has to be something
wrong with the theory underlying the calculation. Yet the electrical theory
involved is a fairly exact science and errors of calculation as such can be
ruled out, which leaves us having to face up to the fact that some physical
phenomenon is present but not taken into account.
That phenomenon is the
fact that heat flowing from the transformer by passage through those laminations
is being regenerated as electrical drive power which augments those circulating
eddy currents and increases the loss which develops that heat!
Now, the
temperature difference between the centre of a transformer core and the surfaces
across which it cools is little more than 10 or 20 degrees C. A conventional
heat pump can elevate heat through such a temperature and require only one tenth
as much energy as input to power the heat pump as is transferred between those
temperatures. So one might suspect that the opposite applies when it comes to
heat regenerating electricity, meaning that, at best, only one tenth of the
normal heat loss could be converted back to electricity to augment that eddy
current flow. In that case the eddy current anomaly factor, meaning actual eddy
current loss, as measured, in relation to the theoretical eddy current loss
would be a factor of ten or so per cent above unity.
However, if that
were the case, the 'eddy current anomaly' would never have been significant
enough to be noticed. The overall eddy current anomaly factor came to attention
when the technology of fabricating electrical steel laminations developed to the
point where attempts to reduce eddy currents were confounded by the measured
anomaly factor being 2 or 3 and sometimes higher, though 1.5 was the tolerable
norm. In my own experiments as part of my Ph.D. research on this subject in the
early 1950s I measured factors as high as 5 and 6. That is an additional loss of
400% or 500% and not a mere 10% extra loss.
That can only mean one thing,
now that I can see the evidence in retrospect, some 48 years on, and am no
longer blighted by science orthodoxy pertaining to that Second Law of
Thermodynamics. The heat generated is, in part, indeed for the most part, being
regenerated as electricity inside the metal lamination. There can be no doubt
that the conversion efficiencies involved exceed by far those set by the Carnot
criteria which govern the conventional heat engine. I would suggest also that
the so-called 'warm superconductors' are highly conductive because they are,
internally, regenerating as a forward electrical action 100% of any heat shed by
resistance effects.
Based on such evidence those interested in new
methods of generating energy must surely see the scope for exploiting the
phenomenon. Its underlying cause is known in physics as the Nernst Effect, the
thermoelectric effect by which heat flow through a magnetic field develops an
electric EMF at right angles to the heat flow and the field direction.
A
device which I believe worked on this principle, has been demonstrated by John
Scott Strachan. It is the subject of that U.S.
Patent No. 5,288,336 mentioned above. It was shown to be able to run an
electric motor, the only input being the temperature differential of a melting
ice block such as one might put in one's whisky glass. It was shown to operate
in reverse, freezing water efficiently and rapidly when fed by an electrical
power input.
TESTING OF 'OVER-UNITY' DEVICES
One of the major problems
experienced by inventors of energy devices which exhibit anomalous power
generation properties, is that of convincing an observer viewing a
demonstration.
Investors and those who advise investors and corporations
who might develop the invention need absolute proof of viability of the
technology. Demonstrations are suspect. Consider, for example, the problems
confronting Dr. Paulo Correa and his wife Alexandra who have invented a glow
discharge tube which delivers d.c. power output in pulses in amounts exceeding
the electrical d.c. input power. The proof, so far as the inventors are
concerned, resides in the fact that a battery of many electric cells supplies
the input power and the output power charges an exhausted, but similar, battery
of electric cells. This takes time and, if measurements are made for short
interval runs, the energy involved, whether as input or output, is dependent
upon simple d.c. calculations based on measurements of d.c. voltages that change
by a small amount and a prior calibration of the cells to determine energy
stored as a function of voltage.
Ideally, one needs to measure the
instantaneous energy activity to compare input and output in an ongoing manner.
However, the pulsatory nature of the output, even when monitored by
oscilloscopic means, makes it difficult to have trust in such
measurements.
A similar situation arises where one tests an electric
motor that needs input energy to keep it operational but develops its output
power mechanically by feeding a load, which, however, may be an electrical
generator. That compounds the measurement problem because much depends upon the
efficiency of the generator, rather than that of the motor. This applies, for
example, to the motor developments of Dr. Robert Adams in New Zealand. It
applies also to my own motor measurements, where to satisfy myself that
'over-unity' performance was in evidence I had to calculate the heat loss
generated by pulsing the drive windings of the motor.
Note that where
input or output power involves transients and pulses one cannot rely on normal
measuring instruments to give the relevant reading on a dial. One has to be sure
that an energy anomaly is in evidence and one really needs a way of
demonstrating that fact to others who witness the tests.
For this reason
I think it worth suggesting that tests in such circumstances can suffice as a
demonstration if the power input to the machine is d.c. as drawn from an
electric battery source, or normal a.c. if the source waveform is not distorted,
whilst the output is all converted directly into heat. Then, by encasing the
machine and/or the load in a thermally insulated enclosure, albeit one that does
convect the same rate of heat from its surface without acquiring too high a
temperature, one can monitor the internal temperature of that enclosure to see
how it depends upon machine operation.
Suppose, for example, that the
test machine draws 100 watts of input power when delivering electrical output
power to a load located outside that enclosure. It will, after a short period
have settled to its operating state, meaning its own temperature will have
stabilized. Meanwhile, by controlling the delivery of a calibrating power input
to a heating resistor inside that enclosure one can see what stable temperature
is reached by precisely the same amount of power, 100 watts, as is being fed
into the test machine.
Then the test consists of switching off the
calibrating power input and switching the output from the test machine to supply
heat input to the enclosure. If now the temperature being measured increases one
has 'over-unity' operation as between test machine output versus input, not
allowing for operational heat loss from the machine itself. To allow for the
latter, the test machine needs to be located within the enclosure as
well.
In summary, therefore, with such a test procedure, given that one
can measure electrical power input with little difficulty and the test then only
depends upon watching a thermometer to see if its temperature goes up, I can see
no reason why demonstrations of 'over-unity' performance cannot be made
convincing. Besides that, such tests would not involve the need to disclose
know-how or design details or even the principles of how the machine or device
under test operates. The test could be adapted to estimate the degree of
over-unity once its existence has been proved. For example, if the device
delivers twice as much power output as it takes as input, then the calibration
could be at 200 watts to see if the test temperature can be held with the 100
watt device input.
On the other hand, if, to convince investors, the
demonstration is intended to display a commercially viable working prototype
ready for market production, then that is another story. I tend to believe that
the real problem is one of convincing academic scientists and development
engineers that 'over-unity', in the sense of generating excess power, as if from
the environment alone, is a real possibility. If the test protocol I propose
would not suffice for that purpose then that problem I call 'Mental Inertia' is
worse than I could have imagined.