Nois fopro toa sutafo

Greentheo… we just got bested!  Forget the Stalkerator!  These guys can generate around 2000 kWh/year with a 30′ vertical wind turbine.  The article does not say what kind of windy knob you have to live on to do that, but the Mariah site says you only need an average wind speed of 12 mph!  The sample home they showed seemed to be in a reasonable location.  http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008/gallery/mariah-power-windspire-photo-gallery  With a 30′ height, small footprint, and quiet operation, they can get past a lot of neighborhood restrictions… probably not in my current location though…  (only 8.8 dba in 50mph wind!)   I could not find a price.  They had a “nice” cost-saving calculator on the site, but alas, one of the fields you had to put in was the cost of the unit… duh…

I first learned about vertical turbines years ago when I read about Darrieus turbines which were invented in 1931 by French engineer Georges_Jean_Marie_Darrieus. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine)  The Mariah unit seems to be a close cousin, or maybe a nephew!

Greentheo and I have been blogging about several energy producing and saving ideas and have noted several examples of homes that only needed 1000 kWh/y.  With this turbine you could splurge and watch cartoons on Saturday morning! OK Greentheo, I am ready to go build my papercrete elliptical dome in the boonies with my own little power source!  I hope the wind is blowing on those cold Colorado nights!

 I have read quite a bit about the water ice found on Mars.  I have read a lot about the prospects of life on Mars, but not much about something that immediately struck me when I heard it… Fuel to go!

As I have blogged about elsewhere, a big problem with distant space travel is carrying enough reaction mass to propel the craft.  It takes an incredible amount of O2 and H2 to get our big payloads off this planet, so we must keep the amount of fuel we carry to a minimum.  On the other hand there is a big difference between carrying fuel and carrying energy.  A lot of energy can be carried by using nuclear sources, but what can you do with that energy if there is nothing on board to use the energy to throw out the back – ya know?

Enter ICE.  Yep, good old ice.  You can get several kinds of ice on Mars including water ice and “dry” ice (CO2).  So, one of the really important aspects of finding ice on Mars is that we do not need to schlep our reaction mass up there for the return flight!  All we need to do is take the energy!  Actually, we could even capture some of the energy while we were on Mars by using solar panels.

How could we use the ice?  Well I know of a couple of ways.  One would be to  melt the ice, then use hydrolysis to split the water into H2 and O2 (or Brown’s gas).  That could go into standard rocket engines to blast off and return.  Other folks are working on ways to use high energy fission products to heat gas for use in rockets.  In that case, all you have to do is start the fission, then throw in either kind of ice and ZOOM!

I suppose reaction mass is not as sexy as finding life, but I think it could get us boots on the ground a lot faster if we did not have to lift fuel for the return flight.  What do you think?

Mars colony mining ice.  http://www.redcolony.com/art.php?id=0401070

americium-242m high energy fission products for space travel:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/01/010103073253.htm

Over the weekend the weather in Denver was very cold!  Wouldn’t ya’ know it, the heat in our house started acting up… that could fill a book!  So, let me just tell you about one problem… a dripping air release valve.

Over the years the little valve occasionally spits and sputters a bit, which is it’s only job in our hot water heat system.  Last week it started dripping… oh bother!  I put a little metal lid under it to catch the water where it could evaporate.  I quickly found out that the drip was too fast for that and it overflowed the lid.  I put a larger lid under the valve and it only required a paper towel spunge and a few trips to the nearby sink to dump the lid.

Saturday night the drip got so fast that it needed dumping every 2 hours… it was 3:00 AM and how was I going to sleep???  I decided to try a siphon wick to see if that would save me from hving to try to seal a hole around a tube to take the water from the lid into the floor overflow drain. 

Siphon wicks are often used around machinery.  Basically you have a cup with oil in it and a stand tube from the bottom of the cup up the center.  a wick is dipped into the oil, is fed down the tube onto a bearing and the top is allowed to fold over the lip of the tube and dangle into the cup of oil.  So, one end of the wick is in the cup of oil and the wick goes up over the tube edge then down the center of the tube and out the bottom of the tube above the bearing.  This configuration causes a slow steady drip of oil from the wick and can empty the cup!  Amazing!  It works by cappilary action.  If you think that is not strong enough, think about the fact that the same force pulls water up 200′ to the top of a tree!  http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/mccoy/wick.html

For my applidation, I changed the configuration some.  Like I said, I did not want to punch a hole in the lid and try to seal it – if I wanted to do that, I could just install a tube drain.  So, I took some flexible clear plastic tubing with 1/4″ id.  I tore a 12″ x 3″ strip of paper towel and rolled it up into a semi-stiff rope.  I pushed the dry towel rope into the tube while twisting it until only a tiny end stuck out.  I used some scrap copper wire to tie the tube end into a “J” and hooked that ofer the edge of the lid so that the wick got wet.  The tube went over the edge of the boiler case and down to the floor drain.

To my great amazement, the wick immediately pulled the water up, over the bend and started soaking the wick the rest of the way down the tube.  The next issue was whether the water would drip off the end of the wick and on down the tube to the drain.  It took a while and I was a little nervous because the water was rising in the lid!  Soon I saw drips going down the tube!  Woo Hoo!  Was it fast enough? 

It was.  Actually, I got another surprise.  Every now-and-then the water would start to make little “plugs” in the tube rather than running down the tube.  That scared me at first until I saw that the tubes were slowly moving down the tube with new plugs forming above.  As soon as there were enough plugs, they would weigh enough to actually start a regular siphon that drained the entire lid very quickly.  Then, the system would go back into it’s slow drip mode.  This tided me over until I could get my heater guy over to take a look on Monday.  He was very impressed by my siphon wick gadget and very glad that he was not called at 3:00 AM!

While snooping around for other examples of siphon wick applications for this post, I found the quintessential case… enjoy reading about a siphon wick used to dispense “bear repellant”…  

http://www.ultimatesportsmen.com/stories2/curley.html

I have an amazing ability… I can fall asleep from being wide awake in just a few seconds… but only if I am driving.  ugh.

You can imagine that this skill has created some interesting times on long driving trips and even occasionally on my short commute to work.  What’s a guy to do???  I had a sleep study done and found out that I have sleep apnea.  I got a CPAP and that helped tremendously with my daytime sleepiness… except as soon as I touch a steering wheel!

Driving sleepiness is a big problem.   http://www.drowsydriving.org/ is a site devoted to helping people be more aware of the dangers.  It is a dangerous as driving drunk! Here are a few highlights from the drowsy driving site:

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 police-  reported crashes each year are the direct result of driver fatigue. (NHTSA)

• Each year drowsy driving crashes result in at least 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in monetary losses. (NHTSA)

• Approximately 11 million drivers admit they have had a crash or near crash because they dozed  off or were too tired to drive. (2005 Sleep in America poll)

• According to NSF surveys, half of Americans consistently report that they have driven drowsy and approximately 20% admit that they have actually fallen asleep at the wheel in the previous year.

So, I am not alone.  Some states have moved toward serious consequences for sleepy drivers.  In Massachusetts in 2007, Senator Richard Moore pushed for a law to make it vehicular homicide if a sleepy driver causes a fatal accident.  If passed they would join with New Jersey in charging sleepy drivers.

I “got my wake up call” in a little nicer manner.  One year as we were loading up the car to start a long trip my wife set a cold spray bottle on the console between us.  She looked me in the eye and said “go ahead, make my day”.  The fear of having my ear filled with icy spray was enough to keep me awake!  It also reminded me of a Japanese invention I read about that I can not find by searching the internet… weird.  It was a pair of glasses that had a small refrigeration unit – possibly electrothermal cooling – that cooled the g-jo acupressure points (http://www.g-jo.com/) on the forehead to reduce sleepiness.  Try as I did, I could not find anything about the right g-jo points either!  ..maybe I was dreaming…  (Now the Japanese have a new thing with glasses.  They sense the tilt of the head and if you nod off they vibrate in your ear!  It interrupts the sleep inducing alpha waves!  They say it tickles too!  If I get sleepy in a meeting, I crunch on carrots! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1522985/How-the-Japanese-are-getting-a-buzz-out-of-falling-asleep-at-work.html, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/30/mydo-bururu-glasses-vibrate-your-dome-to-prevent-sleep/)

Anyway, here is what I did to significantly reduce my drowsiness – after working on my sleep problems of course!  I decided that I did not need some fancy glasses to cool my pate!  Instead, I would use a swamp cooler!  That is how I cool my house, so why not my head?

I got a cheap, light brown terry cloth towel and cut it into a long rectangle about 4″ by 12″.  I folded the short edges in to the middle, then folded it in half again.  Now, I had a nice neat 4″ x 3″ terry pad.  I got the pad wet and let evaporation do the cooling.  I put the pad on my head and enjoyed a very awake and comfortable trip — no spray in the ear!

I sometimes put ice in the upper fold to jump start the cooling, but usually it is not necessary.  I keep the pad quite wet – just short of it dripping.  I now carry a pad and a re-filled bottle of water in my car at all times.  I think it has saved my life!  If I see a sleepy driver on the road, I want to roll down my window and tell him about the no-nap-cap, or maybe grab a spray bottle.  : )?

btw… One person was bugging me at work about my cap idea and how it would not work for him.  I agreed.  He had a very thick head of hair!  I told him that memories are processed during sleep and that the more intelligent you are, the more your brain heats up and wants to sleep.  That is why God gave older and wiser men a bald pate to help keep their brains cool.  In some cases, the intelligence was so extreme that even the bald pate was not enough to cool the brain, so it takes a little help from a moist pad.  He just walked away.  I suppose it beats slapping someone.

Hi stalkerator fans! …Ah… Nois… what is a stalkerator???

Don’t you read all of my posts throughout all time???  And the comments???    : )?

In the responses to my post “Kepler, what a buoy!” I revealed my invention of a generator based on a stalk of grass.  One reader, greentheo, liked it so much that we continued discussing it in the comments.  The design went through several stages and I have now gotten some numbers together… Oh buoy!  (Actually, the same idea could generate electricity on a buoy.)

The current design is to have our pseudo stalk be a graphite kite tube about 4′ tall, perhaps with a ping pong ball on the top for extra drag – like a thistle stalk (make it a steel ball on the buoy).  About 3″ – 4″ from the bottom you attach some kind of gimbal to hold the stalk while allowing it to bob in the wind as stalks do – ya know?  Below the gimbal you build a coil around the stalk and glue a nail up the tube shaft inside the coil.  below the nail you attach a floating magnet so that the bobbing stalk flops the magnet around under the nail – Cool! An inductance generator!

OK, fine, so would it be any good?  I decided it was time to do a little experimenting.  I had a nail on a coil from some earlier experiments (Gary’s “Gary Effect” was a little far-fetched I think… the nail was just following the field lines… another post another day…) If I put the nail end near a stack of my Neodymium super-magnets, I get a measurable current.

Last year or so I tore apart some computer hard drives and saved the very strong control magnets.  They are mounted to steel plates which I think is to strengthen the magnet so they do not explode under their own stress.  They are polarized with the two opposite poles near the middle of the bar with maybe some “dead” space between them.  I decided to try the induction coil on that and got an interesting sensation… The nail head was big enough to span the DMZ, so it just felt like 2 strong magnets, but the nail point gave a different result.  The dead zone almost felt like repulsion as I moved the nail over it.  I do not think it was actually repelled, but I was having to hold the nail away from the magnet, so the reduced pull in the DMZ gave the sensation of repulsion. As I moved the nail point across the zone it snapped sharply across to the other side!  Ah ha!  Just what the stalkerator needs!  I can get up to 16 mV even with my poor coil set up.  I did not measure milliamps.

I grabbed my stack of tiny Neos and made 7 stacks of 4 each.  I arranged 6 of them in a circle around a heavy iron washer with #7 up the middle.  I tried having all the same polarity up, but the nail just sort of smooshed from stack to stack with not much generation.  So I flipped every other stack.  That was better, but what ever pole I picked for the center stack still created sort of a magnetic plateau for the nail to ride.  I eliminated the center stack and got much better action.  The nail seemed to hop from one stack to the next as it had hopped across the DMZ on the HD magnet.  Also, if it did go across the middle it now had a “hole” with significantly lower field strength, so I got some generation even while crossing the center.

With the final configuration and just holding the nail in my hand I easily got 10 mV and .25 mA.  I just measured it with my voltmeter, so these numbers would need to be confirmed with a known load to get accurate results.  Anyway, using those numbers, .010 V x .00025 A = .0000025 Watt.  Wow!  That’s Some Pig!  Let’s just say that with a great coil, great magnets, and optimized construction we can get that up to 100 times that… why not?  That is .00025 W.

OK, so according to “The Physics Factbook” (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/BoiLu.shtml) the average house uses a bit under 9,000 kWh in a year!  Ugh! There is a long way between those decimal points!  However, one guy cited got that down to 1,000 kWh per year.  If we assumed that we can generate power about half the time and save it until needed, we have 365.24 x 12 = 4383 hours for generation. That would require generation of 228 W (plus change).  Lets see, at .00025 W/unit, that is only 912,617 units!  OK, 1,000,000 units.  (1.09575 Watts per unit per year)

If I put a stalk at the corner of each square foot I could have 1000 stalks in a 100′ x 10′ plot. Woo Hoo 1 W/year!  Let’s suppose I build a papercrete house and a bunch of greentheo energy savings strategies to reduce my need to 1,000 kWh/y.  That is only 1000′ x 1000′ for the 1,000,000 units!  Gee… if it takes me 1 hour to make, connect, and install each one (after getting the parts and the bridge rectifiers…), then if I have to repair each one after x hours of operation…

My goodness… this is not going well.  A common solar cell gives 1.2 W for each 4″ square!  That one cell working for a year would make just over what 500 square feet of my “grass” would make… with no moving parts… not good news for the stalkerator…   : )?

My post about the SMOT had several comments.  In one response I mentioned Brown’s Gas and got a request to blog about that… so…

Brown’s gas is the electrolysis output if do not use a partition so that the hydrogen and oxygen are separated.  So, the hh and o are all mixed together… kabOOM!!!   No, not really.  It does take something to ignite the reaction, but still it is highly explosive.

One of the cool things about this explosive mix is that you can make it on the spot with really simple, home made equipment.  A favorite setup I have seen is to buy a bunch (10?) of steel switch plate covers from the hardware store.  You stack them up and clamp them together, then drill one of the hole stacks to about 1/4″.  Next you unclamp them and flip every-other-one around so that the holes are stacked small-big-small-big… Next you assemble the reactor core by using threaded rod or long bolts with insulating 1/16″washers.  So, you screw the bolt through a washer, then the first hole, then a washer, 2nd hole, washer, 3rd hole, etc. finally you put on a washer and nut to finish the stack. After you do both sides you have a stack with each bolt in contact with every-other plate on both sides… does that make sense?

If the right screw touches the first plate it misses the second plate then touches the 3rd, etc.  At the same time on the left, the bolt misses the first, touches the 2nd, misses the 3rd, etc.  If you apply 12v DC with right + and left -, then the plates alternate +, -, + ,- etc.  All you do is put this core into some water with a little baking soda, apply 12 v and you get Brown’s gas!  ( 15 – 20 amps) You should bubble the gas through a water valve so that if it does ever flash back, only the gas in the tube will burn, not the larger amount in the reactor… little boom is good.  Here is an example… there are many… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDpNUtXbz9U

So, what do you do with the stuff?  Some people are making car kits that use the alternator to generate hho near the air intake.  BG creates water when it burns, so you get the cooling and steam expansion benefits of water injection but with the added power of the burning hho.  Some people hope to make the system so efficient that you can drive forever on just water… uh guys… remember it takes energy from the alternator to run the electrolysis core…  One person said that the energy going into the core was just waste energy that would be going to heat.  If that is true then this would be a great advantage indeed.  However, it seems to me that whatever energy being used by the core will put additional drag on the engine – have you ever tried to light a bulb with a hand generator???  The energy to make the gas has to come out of the engine power via the alternator.  I suppose you could charge a deep cycle battery at home, then use it to generate hho to burn.  That can not be as good as just doing an electric drive.  Plus in the electric scenario you could use regenerative breaking to recover a large percent of the kinetic energy you put into the car.  http://www.runyourcaronwater.com/,  http://www.hytechapps.com/, http://aardvark.co.nz/hho_scam.shtml

I am not planning to use hho in my car, but it sure seems like it would be great around the shop!  If you have a small unit on your bench you can use a simple brass tube nozzle with a flow control.  It burns clean and hot.  There are a lot of stories about the unusual properties of the flame.  For example, it seems to only heat certain things, like metal.  You can cut a piece of steel, but not burn yourself if you touch the tube.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKoU1Fp3gs&feature=related

Near the bottom of the “runyourcarononwater” site there is another very interesting device.  They have some sort of electrolysis catalyst cell.  The unit is about the size of a drip coffee maker.  You buy a “cell” and fill it with any water.  Then, for about a month you can plug in devices up to 270 Watt-Hours!  After that, you return the cell to the store for a replacement for about $20.  (A standard AA battery has about 2.6 WH. http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.html)  If you buy several cells, you can take them all with you and just swap them out for continuous power. – Very cool!   That would sure be a lot lighter to carry than my 60 lb 105 WH deep cycle battery up to the camp site!  : )?  http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/portable_power.htm

Per Wikipedia: “Maxwell’s demon was an 1867 ^[1] thought experiment by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, meant to raise questions about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

I remember studying the demon in high school and thinking how “cool” it would be… and impossible, to have a little “demon” that could sort air into hot and cold molecules! Wow!

Years later, before cyclonic cleaning was common, I learned how a vortex could be used to clean machine cutting oil. I first figured out how it worked at a manufacturing convention when I was a quality engineer at Gerry Baby Products (now defunct… remember the umbrella baby strollers and baby-backpacks they invented?) They had a display with a clear cylinder and dirty cutting oil going in the top. the oil spun and formed a vortex that went back up a center tube in the opposite direction. The oil stopped momentarily then violently spun in a vortex up the center tube and out. With the slowing at the turn and the spinning vortex the fine metal particles were thrown outward and could not go up the inner tube. Voila, clean oil! We see this same idea all the time now in cyclonic, bag-less vacuum cleaners.

Wait, you say! You were talking about Maxwell’s demon… how did you get off onto vortex cleaning??? Well, because the vortex is the demon! Just think, it can separate the heavy metal particles from the lighter oil molecules. Interesting. Later, still at Gerry, I discovered that that cleaver demon can indeed be used to sort air molecules into hot and cold sides, just like Maxwell proposed! Incredible!

Here’s how it works… you hook up “shop air” at around 80 psi to a vortex tube. Generally the air enters at one end off center so that it spins. Near the far end some of the air turns a corner and goes up a center tube and out while some continues to the end of the tube and out an adjustable hole. Sound familiar? What is amazing is that the “cold” molecules, that is the slower ones, are more likely to be able to turn the corner and spin up the center, while the fast ones can’t quite make the turn, so they exit. See the demon at work? You don’t? He just sorted the air molecules into two streams with the cold ones coming out the near center and the hot ones going out the far edge. Very smart that demon.

Vortex cooling is used a lot for various things like spot cooling machining operations and cabinet cooling. Check out one vendor http://www.vortec.com/vortex_coolers.php They even have vortex cooled vests that let people work in 200 degree environments! (with protective clothing.)

Maxwell did not say that the demon did not use energy to open and close the tiny door. It was just that the demon was not putting energy into the air to heat it. One side got cold and one got hot but neither heat nor cold was created by the demon, both were already present in the incoming air. What sort of efficiency do you suppose this process gets?

Heat pumps are similar in that they use some energy to move heat from one place to another rather than creating the heat. A refrigerator is a compression-cycle heat pump that takes heat energy from inside the cabinet and pumps it into your kitchen air. Heat pumps for home heating use an almost identical process and apparatus to move heat from the outside air into your house. You could just as well use a thermoelectric cooler or a vortex cooler. However, the good old compression method is around 65% efficient while the thermocouple is lucky to make 8%! Vortex coolers can drop the air temperature by 80 degrees with an efficiency of up to 16%… not bad I guess… (http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/43646/1/hdl_43646.pdf).

You could try to use the heat differential to do work. However, if the hot and cold side are in a fixed volume, then the pressure on the hot side would increase. The demon would need to operate the door more and more, and thus use more and more energy to run the door to keep those fast molecules from passing through to the cold side. A vortex demon needs a free flow of air, not a fixed volume. You could use the hot and cold air streams in the open on a thermocouple to make electricity, but then you would suffer from the poor efficiency of the thermocouple. Hummm… maybe you could use a Sterling cycle engine! Theoretically they can be 100% efficient, but for now, 30% is good… not so good…

Maxwell talked about sorting the molecules, not creating the energy… so if the energy that the cleaver little demon needed to open and close the door was small enough, maybe he could harvest a little heat differential from the hot to cold side to run the door mechanism, and then I could use the rest of the differential to do other things. I could heat my house in the winter and cool it in the summer by just changing some dampers! That would not be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics any more than using some sunlight to power a photocell (about 10% efficient), after all, sunlight heated the air – right? OK, so it looks like the little vortex is a demon, but he needs too much energy to operate his door… do you know any other demons looking for work???

I thought I had found a great resource about EV – Electric Vehicles until I spent some time on their site.  I found a link to EV info in an article at “Popular Science” about capicators for use in EVs  at http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2008-10/what-comes-after-batteries.  As it turned out they provide reports at a cost, which could be OK except for their criteria for inclusion.  Quite a bit of it was reasonable, but one criteria is not good.  They will not consider EVs that have less than 50 miles of electric-only range.  If you have been keeping up with EVs you know that both Chevy Volt (GM) and ENVI (Chrysler) EVs are due out in 2010.  All of those models have a 40 mile electric only range, so they will be eliminated from the reports!  I think that is poor form indeed because I have great hopes that real products from GM and Chrysler is exactly what we need for our economy, saving the car industry in America, saving our environment, and having new toys!  I would be very happy with an EV that went all electric for 40 miles and would be all electric most days for me.  I tried to find a “contact us” link on their site to give them my-2-cents, but alas, they did not want to hear from me.  I wonder how their customer service is if you buy a report…  In case you are interested, check them out at http://electric-cars-today.com

I love to read about “free” energy… zero point energy… you know… crazy stuff…

I do not believe in free energy.  However,  I do believe that we are bathed in a sea of energy fields.  If we can just tap them, then we would have “free” energy – right?

There are a large number of new “wireless” energy devices now.  They work by harvesting radio energy that is broadcast from a nearby plug-in source.  However, I remember using a crystal to harvest energy out of the air… it was called a crystal radio – anybody else remember those?  Tesla wanted to put 12 large antennas around the world (vertexes of an icosahedron as I recall) and broadcast huge amounts of electrical energy for all to use.  Just connect a device to a ground, and voila free energy!  Except that huge generators had to make the field… oh that…

I am especially interested in magnetism and gravity.   (Actually, I think gravity may not be real, but that is another post.  Clearly something causes an effect that looks like gravity – sort of like centrifugal force which does not exist either!)  Magnetism is the effect of the nuclear energy of charged electrons spinning – nothing new there.   So, if that energy is being radiated into space as some of the original energy of the universe, why can’t we harvest some of it?

Think about what Tesla and others did with an a true energy collector 200 years ago.  You just put a metal plate high in the air, run a wire down near the ground, connect another wire to a grounding rod and put a spark gap and capacitor in the path.  Instant free energy!  The capacitor charges all by itself!  Today, we have to deal with this with any improperly grounded antenna system.  Is that “free” energy from nowhere?  It seems to be, but not if you think about the energy source, which is the earth’s huge electric field.  We are just shorting across it and harvesting the energy that is there.  Otherwise, that energy just dissipates into space.  Isn’t magnetism like that?

Most of the time people who make “perpetual motion” machines are just crazy.  They are just overlooking or misinterpreting a simple explanation.  However, there are plenty of perpetual motion machines if you do not think about their energy source.  That is, if you restrict the closed system to exclude the energy source – like the antenna charge.

So, what is a SMOT?  It is a Small Magnetic Overunity Toy.  You can check it out at  http://open-encyclopedia.com/SMOT .  Basically, it is 2 magnetic rails that pull a ball up a ramp.  The idea is that if the ball overshoots the ramp at the top, then the ball will fall.  If it does, then it can land on another ramp and start over.  Thus, gravity is providing the force needed to “re gauge” the magnetic ramp.  If you arranged the ramp series into a circle, the ball would roll around the circuit “forever”.  I have not tried to build one yet, and I think I will not hold my breath.  However, I think I will try it !  Do I think the SMOT could be a perpetual motion machine?  Sure, why not!  It is easy to try to find out.  But, can the ball be heavy enough and gain enough momentum to escape the magnetic attraction that pulled it up the ramp?

Around 25 years ago or so, I made a significant design improvement in a proven, working permanent magnet motor that I saw in “Popular Science”.  I have never heard another thing about the motor, so they must not have gotten my memo.  Oh well.  The original design had a difficult to machine spiral cavity in a strong non-magnetic metal.  the spiral was lined with strong magnets all arranged with the same pole facing the center.  A rotor is mounted inside the spiral with strong magnets and the same pole facing out.  For now, imagine a single magnet on the rotor.  You press the rotor into the track and let go.  Because of the spiral track the magnetic repulsion will cause the rotor to turn in the direction that increases the separation between the magnets.  Cool… perpetual motion???

No perpetual motion here.  When the rotor turns around to the widest separation, it hits a “wall”.   It faces the narrow separation at the start of the spiral.  There is no way that the magnetic “ramp” can accelerate the rotor so that it will have enough momentum to squeeze  it into that narrow opening.  (There is no gravity force to re-gauge it in SMOTese.)  So, the inventor put an electromagnet there to give it a kick through the gap.  After that, the  rotor turns on its own and gains speed until it must once again be pressed through the gap on the next circuit.  You can add lots more magnets to the rotor to smooth the operation.  So basically the electricity needed to re-gauge the magnets is turned into rotation, like most electric motors.

My improvement eliminated the complex spiral machining.  All I did was make a circular cavity and a circular rotor, then set the rotor slightly off center.  From the narrow-to-wide half of the circuit the magnet polarities were opposite so that the rotor magnet was repelled toward the biggest gap.  Then, I flipped the polarity of the permanent magnets for the second half of the circuit.  In this configuration the now opposite polarity rotor magnet is pulled toward the narrow gap.  See!  No spiral is needed!  It worked great, but of course, the electromagnetic pulse is still needed to push it through the magnetic wall at the nearest gap where the cavity magnets change polarity.

I have thought about trying to use the Gary effect to push the magnet through the gap, but I am not convinced that the effect is real.  I question some of his observations and have not succeeded in getting the balance “just right” as the Gary proponents say you must.

Now I wonder about SMOTing the thing!  I wonder if a SMOT ramp could lift a magnet over the gap, then drop it on the other side!  Actually, you could make one long circular ramp with a magnet on a spoke rather than a ball.  As the magnet is pulled around the circuit it is also raised (using up some the the energy.)  Then, when it gets to the narrow repulsive side,  it falls down into the narrow gap to restart the system!  If a SMOT can do it, why not this motor?  Hummmm it seems unlikely… if a rotor magnet is heavy enough to push back into the magnetic gap, would it be too heavy for the system to lift?… I will have to think about this for 10 years and then never get around to actually trying it… as I usually do.

Finally!  I have waited for so long!  An electric drive vehicle with a small gas engine to extend the range beyond battery power.  Sound like the Chevy Volt?  Nope!  I get to keep driving a Chrysler Mini Van!  Woo Hoo!  That is all I have driven since 1985 and I love them!  Chrysler says they should be available by 2010.  I think the Volt was saying 2015.

Unfortunately, I just bought a used 2009 Mini Van… duh… but I did not see the price on these ENVI guys (say “envy”)… so I might have to save pennies for a while anyway.  Maybe there will be a tax credit from Uncle Sam!  Hey, if we are borrowing money from China to buy oil, why not send that to millions of US families to buy ENVIs!

A few thoughts:

- The vehicle has a single electric motor driving the front wheels.  I would prefer 4 wheel electric drive. You do not need a transmission or differential/transaxle with separate motors.  I am sure that will come later.

- One of the big opportunities with electric drive is regenerative breaking.  This was invented 60 years ago on electric street cars.  Some engineer realized that they could save a lot of brake linings by letting the drive motor become generator and dissipating the heat via a bank of resisters.  Then, duh… someone finally said, “Ah… boss, why do we waste all that energy to heat when we could charge a battery and use it to accelerate later?”  The boss probably got very rich… or maybe his boss…  The ENVI system uses RB!  Double Woo Hoo!

- Just like the Chevy Volt, the ENVIs have about a 40 mile electric range.  So, for my normal day I will never hear the gas motor turn on.  I just drive to work, then home, and plug it in.  Hummm… I wonder how long that gas will stay good in the gas tank?  Will it sludge out?  Rust out?   Ugh, always something.

- 60 mph in 8.7 seconds ain’t bad for a Mini Van!  With over 100 mph top speed, I will have  just a little extra for highway passing acceleration, ya know?

Check it out:

https://www.chryslerllc.com/en/innovation/envi/specs/chrysler_vehicles.php