leafme
Well-known member
Being a power systems engineer myself for the past 31 years I agree with you wholeheartedly Phil. He is unclear and inconsistent in the terms he uses and flips switches to act like he has something special going on. I just can't imagine you get something from nothing as he is purporting (or he is simply lying to us with his fast fingers and has an energy storage device hidden under the table we don't get to see). The funny part in all this is he actually believes he's got something going on. Put that motor under any real load and the whole thing will grind to a halt. I think he's mistaking current for power. The guy ought to buy a nice power quality monitor or two and hook it up to his contraption. That will tell the real story.Ingineer said:I suspect there is some sort of resonance occurring in his rig. He's using a Variac to limit speed on a single-phase AC induction motor. This is probably where the "sneak" is, and he may honestly think it's "free" energy. It basically is distorting the AC waveform and sneaking more power through his current meter to increase the speed of his induction motor.
If he is honest, I bet you anything if he switches to a DC motor running from a battery (where it's super-easy to see if you are over-unity), his setup fails to produce similar results. Connect a standard brushed DC motor to a 12v battery, and put the rest of his test setup in. It will fail without the complex resonant circuit formed by the AC, the induction motor, and the Variac.
AC can do all kinds of sneaky things, that even surprise seasoned engineers. I suspect his power factor is terrible and nowhere close to 1. You put a power factor meter on there and you'll see the power factor go into the abysmal range when he's doing his "boost". Those coils probably work together along with the 60hz AC to sneak misaligned current pulses through his test setup that enable them to speed up the motor, but it's far from free!
This is why the power company measures power factor on large industrial users and penalizes them with fees if they aren't close to unity. In residential areas, they don't bother, but they often have automatic "correctors" throughout the system that switch in banks of capacitors when they are needed. This ends up being counted as transmission loss.
-Phil
Malcolm