Hi All,
Welcome to the PNS list! Here I will be reviewing a large and mostly unknown literature on parametric devices, noise tapping, and switching anomalies. The creation of this forum is prompted by experiments from ION and centraflow that I feel are directly connected to this area.
Here I will only list the possibilities I've seen in the literature, without a lot of detail:
Direct rectification of noise. Yater developed this approach early on, and it is technically doable but depends on arrays of very small diodes and things like that. However one guy I discovered recently, has used a transformer to step up the voltage of the noise and tap it through a diode. Since he gives complete details of the transformer and diode used, it might be worth examining this approach further.
Barkhausen noise. This has already been mentioned once, but I don't believe it is what was going on in ION's choke circuit. It is of course one component of the noise available, if one has any noise to electrical converter. At the same time, using a large volume of material like Nickel Iron (known to have mega B-noise because of very large domain size) and stimulating it, with for instance, the Earth's magnetic field, or a weak tickler coil, might develop considerable electrical noise energy along another axis from the tickler field, and this could be tapped. Bob Shannon did build something like this where the B-noise energy source was supposedly stimulated by impinging scalar waves, but I think thermal noise can account for most of this effect.
"Conventional" parametric oscillators and amplifiers. It's universally known that oscillations can start up in a tank circuit if the L or C are varied in harmony with the tank frequency. No electrical energy need be put into the tank, just the reactance variation. This conversion of information (the electronic 'inertia' of the system) to energy still seems a bit miraculous to me. The conventional argument is that it takes the same amount of energy to amplify as the energy that is created, yet a couple of examples seem to challenge this notion. I'm especially interested in presenting a lot of magnetic control devices that don't seem to be too worked over by researchers already.
"Quasi" parametric oscillators and amplifiers. It's been discussed in several places that it's possible to vary only a resistance and see a change of reactance in the circuit. If this reactance can be changed rapidly with only switching costs, then OU can result. There are a number of examples of this in FM tuning circuits, transmission lines, etc. The great electronics inventor Tellegen has the most explicit description of how this might work in an OU device. I think at first glance that this is what is going on in IONs and centraflow's gadgets, where inductors are switched in and out of relation to one another. This switching represents a very lossy parametric process in most cases, but always one that has almost no energy cost. Any noise source that is present is 'fuel' for it. I'll present the Barrow paper already mentioned, and hope to see how this relates to their devices and others like them.
Artificially Cold Resistors. This is an electronic method developed in recent times mostly by Robert Forward, the well known physicist. His devices, mostly for use in gravitational wave sensors, are easy to apply electronically, and can eliminate almost all the noise in a region of a circuit by using various forms of feedback. Interesting enough in itself, but in researching this I found a previously forgotten patent by Harold Black, the inventor of the negative feedback circuit, from just before World War 2. In this little-explored patent, he describes an experiment where he was able to extract electrical energy from thermal noise of a resistor by using a negative feedback loop with a gain of 1 amplifier, and a hybrid transformer. Although the noise energy extracted was not as much as required to run the circuit, the temperature did drop, and the electronics could certainly be improved.
There are also some "quasi-thermoelectric" devices that bear consideration as noise converters. Marinescu ,Stratton, and others discovered that semiconductors in close contact and put in a heat bath would generate electricity even when there was no temperature differential.This phenomena has been reported over and over, and I think belongs here rather than in the Thermoelectric discussion I'm (slowly) having in another list, since these "heat bath" devices don't involve a heat differential.
Finally, there are some devices from a forgotten American genius named Acheson that seem to cohere thermal noise into an electric current by subjecting the current carrying conductor to heat, and then sending a changing magnetic field through the conductors so that it is parallel to the current (B II E, or I). This could also go in the Thermoelectric forum, since it may use the Nernst Or Ettingshausen effects in some strange way, I don't know.
Well, that's enough to start. 7 is a good number. I can inform any project that wants to continue on any of these lines.
I would like to hear from you about which of these areas you think are interesting to pursue, and what other areas you could suggest that I haven't covered. Then together maybe we can design some new experiments.
orthofield
@Matt
QuoteTo be honest orthocoil, I'm still very confused and intrigued by the experiment you did with J.L. Naudin. I cannot imagine for the life of me how switching two coils with no input power develops any sort of output. Is residual magnetism required to get this process started? Does this appear to be a gain limited phenomena or are you inclined to think it is scalable?
I once read an article about a very old means of signaling where a vertical wire with about 30 feet of elevation was switched to ground and could be received by an identical setup up to 25 miles away. No power source of any kind just a vertical wire switched to ground. I like the old literature because there was so much interesting phenomena that just faded into history.
AC
Quote from: Matt Watts on 2015.03.01, 06:47:26
To be honest orthocoil, I'm still very confused and intrigued by the experiment you did with J.L. Naudin. I cannot imagine for the life of me how switching two coils with no input power develops any sort of output. Is residual magnetism required to get this process started? Does this appear to be a gain limited phenomena or are you inclined to think it is scalable?
I will have to do some experiments to get my feet wet, because it's one of those things I'd have to see it first hand to believe it. The way my brain is wired it seems completely counter-intuitive.
I do understand the tank circuit area you listed. I've done a fair amount of study of Dale Pond's Sympathetic Vibratory Physics to know that very tiny oscillations can cause a tuned circuit to begin oscillating with considerably higher amplitude just by being in proximity. When you dig into this rather deeply, what is found is the "noise" isn't pure white noise, it's instead known as pink noise because it contains patterns the resonant circuit is able to tune into.
Unless the reed relay coil was carefully shielded it could have been induction from that coil. Reed relay coils are open ended solenoids rather than tightly closed magnetic paths and as such will radiate quite a bit into the test coils.
Quote from: Matt Watts on 2015.03.01, 06:47:26
To be honest orthocoil, I'm still very confused and intrigued by the experiment you did with J.L. Naudin. I cannot imagine for the life of me how switching two coils with no input power develops any sort of output. Is residual magnetism required to get this process started? Does this appear to be a gain limited phenomena or are you inclined to think it is scalable?
You might find it instructive to read up on the old super-regenerative circuits. Whereas inductive energy, capacitive energy or both when in a resonant circuit will naturally decay exponentially in the presence of positive resistance, if you can create negative resistance that decay inverts to become a build-up. The waveform changes from an e
-x to an e
+x where x is of course t/tau, tau being the time-constant. You can create negative resistance using positive feedback and this then creates oscillation. It is the e
+x build-up of those oscillations that is used in super-regenerative receivers and you can ask the question, in the absence of a signal what does it build up from? The answer is thermal noise. Of course if there is a signal present it builds up from that signal, and the old receivers did this build up many times at a fast rate by "squegging" which is really just a sampling rate. The point being that the magnitude at the end of each build-up is related to the magnitude at the start so you get a large output signal related to a small input signal, all from one transitor (or vacuum tube in my early days). Ortho's parametric device does the same thing, the tank energy builds up from thermal noise. The parametric pumping does the same thing as a negative resistance, it creates negative damping.
Smudge
Quote from: Smudge on 2015.03.01, 16:07:51
You might find it instructive to read up on the old super-regenerative circuits. Whereas inductive energy, capacitive energy or both when in a resonant circuit will naturally decay exponentially in the presence of positive resistance, if you can create negative resistance that decay inverts to become a build-up. The waveform changes from an e-x to an e+x where x is of course t/tau, tau being the time-constant. You can create negative resistance using positive feedback and this then creates oscillation. It is the e+x build-up of those oscillations that is used in super-regenerative receivers and you can ask the question, in the absence of a signal what does it build up from? The answer is thermal noise. Of course if there is a signal present it builds up from that signal, and the old receivers did this build up many times at a fast rate by "squegging" which is really just a sampling rate. The point being that the magnitude at the end of each build-up is related to the magnitude at the start so you get a large output signal related to a small input signal, all from one transitor (or vacuum tube in my early days). Ortho's parametric device does the same thing, the tank energy builds up from thermal noise. The parametric pumping does the same thing as a negative resistance, it creates negative damping.
Smudge
Dear Smudge.
Is this what TH Moray was up to ?
Cheers Grum.
Maybe more like this:
http://www.tfcbooks.com/articles/tws5.htm
Hi Matt,
--Yes, it was a weird experiment, Matt. Nobody seemed to think it was too significant at the time because it was widely believed that either the switching noise was responsible, or the energy output was 'too small' to be bothered with.
I don't know if residual magnetism was needed to get it started. A residual noise current would be required for sure. No spontaneous para oscillations will start without it.
I don't know whether the gain is limited or not. I list three loss mechanisms below that exist in these switched C or L circuits, and if these are eliminated, then there should be good results.
I agree that resonance is important to maintain ultra-efficiency throughout, but this isn't the same thing as para amplification. This kind of reactance power amp. can take place without resonance, in a switched circuit at 60 Hz, but is made much more useful with resonance because energy is recycled and re-subjected to the parametric step.
Resonance is its own highly important thing, and my adiabatic list is grappling with this subject right now. Everyone knows that resonance improves efficiency, but Why?
Yes, not only is noise composed of an infinite number of frequencies, but some sort of broadband tuning seems to be possible. The noise energy is limited by the bandwidth that the noise receiver can absorb. Or, and this is probably much easier, you can tailor a noise source whose energy is concentrated in a certain band. I think circuits with 'tickler' elements are useful here, to excite the diode, or transformer core, or whatever noise source is used, to make it generate a lot more noise, with no net reaction on the ticker current or voltage, since noise is equal in EMF in either direction. For instance, there are probably some noisy diodes that generate a lot of excess noise when they have a reverse bias. Why not 'stir up' their noise levels while trying to tap them?
A later experiment on a switched capacitor quasi-parametric circuit was done in 2001. I didn't take a lot of notes, but this is the upshot. A 555 timer was used to connect and disconnect two capacitors while in a tank circuit. The switching was done with a Hexfet opto-isolator unit with very little switch noise, either in theory or test.
The results were highly anomalous. It turned out that the absolute value of the capacitors and the ratio of their values determined the intensity of the output. Unfortunately, I've lost the discussion of those cap values, since that computer bit the dust. I do still have a brief report on the test results. A 5-? mV ringing pulse with an internal frequency of about a Mhz and a repetition freq of 8.3 Khz was seen across a 100 ohm load, when the tank was resonated at 100.6 Khz with a tank frequency of 50.3 Khz.
According to parametric oscillator theory, we would see oscillations at the tank frequency. We didn't see that, but we did see these seemingly unrelated pulsations at other frequencies.
This only made sense if the ringing pulsation was a weak subharmonic of some very high harmonic-- if that makes sense :-)
He estimated this to be around 33rd harmonic from his knowledge of music.
In a black box thought experiment, an LCR meter will register the same change in C at the terminals of the black box, whether there is a switched capacitor set or a biased varactor in the box. The 'parametric amplification' is the same in either case. But if you put a voltmeter or ammeter at the terminals you will see they're very different. So I theorized from this that parametric change does happen with switching, but that other parts of the process interfere with this, and create losses. In the usual case, the loss is exactly the same as the gain, which is why every switched capacitor or switched inductor circuit is not overunity. The possibility of getting energy from switching came from reading the Barrow paper I'll be posting here today where he shows that a lot of these loss mechanisms can be designed out of the process.
The losses in the switched tank circuit are very large compared to the parametric one. They can be listed from most obvious to most obscure:
1) The disconnected L or C component may actually carry circuit energy in field or charge, and this energy may not be returned to the circuit during the rest of the tank cycle. This relates to your question about residual magnetic energy-- does it take a little bit to restart the process again? This sort of loss can happen especially with the inductor version, because when it is reconnected to its brother inductor, it has lost some of its field energy.
2) The disconnected component may be returned to the tank circuit where its own polarity or current is opposite to that of the tank, thus neutralizing the tank energy. This can be seen when the inductor is reconnected to the tank when it is opposite in flux to the other inductor, or opposite in EMF to the other capacitor. There is a cancellation of energy just like putting two batteries positive to positive.
3) The discharging component has a built in thermodynamic loss that happens when one reactance is discharged to another. This is known from the two-capacitor paradox. If you take two capacitors, one starting with a known voltage, and connect this one to a discharged cap, the final V of each capacitor after charge distribution will be about half that of what it started with, and as a result, the total energy stored in the capacitors is reduced by half. A lot of fancy physics has gone into explaining where that other half went!
Because of these known and hidden factors, the switched capacitor circuit is incredibly lossy. If you took an actual saturable reactor and replicated the L changes in JLN's experiment you would see much more output, but at of course a much higher cost in energy to drive.
I basically think, and centraflow and ION can differ with me on this, that something like this is what is going on in their circuits. I'm going to spend Monday studying both their circuits in detail to make sure I am not comparing apples to oranges.
In doing experiments, remember that parametric phenomena can be finicky to develop in the best of times. It takes patience. (The standard parametric transformer is not hard to replicate). As I mentioned above, I know that in the later capacitive experiments the ratio of the two caps used was not 1:1, but really not sure what it was, or if this is also true in the inductive case.
Sorry for the length of this letter, I've been thinking about this weirdness for a long time, and the thoughts have kind of built up :-)
orthofield
Matt said:
To be honest orthocoil, I'm still very confused and intrigued by the experiment you did with J.L. Naudin. I cannot imagine for the life of me how switching two coils with no input power develops any sort of output. Is residual magnetism required to get this process started? Does this appear to be a gain limited phenomena or are you inclined to think it is scalable?
I will have to do some experiments to get my feet wet, because it's one of those things I'd have to see it first hand to believe it. The way my brain is wired it seems completely counter-intuitive.
I do understand the tank circuit area you listed. I've done a fair amount of study of Dale Pond's Sympathetic Vibratory Physics to know that very tiny oscillations can cause a tuned circuit to begin oscillating with considerably higher amplitude just by being in proximity. When you dig into this rather deeply, what is found is the "noise" isn't pure white noise, it's instead known as pink noise because it contains patterns the resonant circuit is able to tune into.
[/quote]
Quote from: Grumage on 2015.03.01, 16:18:03
Dear Smudge.
Is this what TH Moray was up to ?
Cheers Grum.
That looks like a triode used as a detector tube preceded by a RF tuned circuit connected to the antenna, and followed by a two stage audio amp feeding the loudspeaker. A slight improvement on the crystal set. The top circuit has some feedback from the audio stage to the RF stage which might be an attempt at super-regen. For super-regen the feedback should be at RF. I suppose the audio feedback might control the squegging rate and I do see a difference on the connections to the detector tube that might be RF feedback. So yes, perhaps the top circuit is an early super-regen receiver.
Smudge
Quote from: ION on 2015.03.01, 16:58:12
Maybe more like this:
http://www.tfcbooks.com/articles/tws5.htm
That really deals with regeneration using positive feedback that is just below the point of oscillation. With super-regen you actually allow the circuit to oscillate but then switch it off again, and keep doing this at a sampling rate that will not destroy your audio. Then the train of oscillations themselves contains the modulated signal, which in those days was always AM.
Smudge
Quote from: ION on 2015.03.01, 14:02:25
Unless the reed relay coil was carefully shielded it could have been induction from that coil. Reed relay coils are open ended solenoids rather than tightly closed magnetic paths and as such will radiate quite a bit into the test coils.
Quoting myself here, there is also the possibility that the reed switch contacts act like little antennae, picking up the sudden change in potential on the coil when the relay contacts open at nearly the same time that the coil is de-energized. Of course it will be a millisecond or so later and the reverse is also possible, the coil is energized, but the contacts are open and by capacitive coupling pick up a bit of energy from the sudden change of potential on the coil a millisecond or so before the contacts close.
This is a very difficult test to insure there are no stray pickup sources in the entire circuit. It requires a shielded reed relay, electrostatic shields between the switch contacts and the reed coil and electrostatic and magnetic shields between the reed coil and the circuit under test.
@orthofield
Quote3) The discharging component has a built in thermodynamic loss that happens when one reactance is discharged to another. This is known from the two-capacitor paradox. If you take two capacitors, one starting with a known voltage, and connect this one to a discharged cap, the final V of each capacitor after charge distribution will be about half that of what it started with, and as a result, the total energy stored in the capacitors is reduced by half. A lot of fancy physics has gone into explaining where that other half went!
This is the most common mistake made by beginners and experts as well. A capacitor cannot be charged/discharged without invoking I2R losses however the losses can be negated by adding an inductor in series. The process is actually very simple and all we have to remember is that current flow causes I2R losses, conductor heating. When a cap/inductor charges or discharges the current flow is not resisted/dissipated it is impeded by Lenz Law and a magnetic field impeding electron flow causes very little dissipation. Where a resistance will always dissipate energy proportional to current flow which is why I never use them anywhere if possible. I understand a resistance is cheaper and easier however it is by no means better as the "resistance space heater" is based on this very concept, just think of every resistance in the circuit as a small space heater and you will have the right view point.
Another thing to remember is that a discharging inductance will always raise the voltage in proportion to the resistance it encounters. So here we have a mechanism whereby the discharging inductor minimizes current flow losses through any resistance in the circuit by increasing the voltage in proportion to the resistance. Imagine that, the discharging inductor will always find the perfect ratio of current/voltage to minimize losses. I just have to shake my head when I see people charging caps directly from a battery then discharging them in a low resistance circuit because it is the worst possible scenario, you couldn't do any worse in my opinion.
AC
Quote from: orthofield on 2015.03.01, 03:54:57
Welcome to the PNS list! Here I will be reviewing a large and mostly unknown literature on parametric devices, noise tapping, and switching anomalies. The creation of this forum is prompted by experiments from ION and centraflow that I feel are directly connected to this area.
Add Chet's (or Peterae's) experiments to that list. They involve unexplained crackling in pulsed wires.
Hi Smudge,
I will certainly read up on the super-regen circuits. I didn't realize that negative resistance was created by positive feedback, but it explains a number of results I've seen. I had considered negative feedback (simulating a noise free positive resistance) but had not considered the reverse.
The Harold Black patent attached is highly significant in this regard, for it shows that electrical energy can be extracted from thermal noise through a negative feedback loop using a hybrid coil. You can see in Fig. 1 a tube amplifier fed back to a signal through a hybrid transformer. Pg. 9 should be read in full, and says that, using something similar to this fig. 1 circuit:
"I have discovered that feedback action can abstract heat from a body. When a resistance is connected to an amplifier, feedback action can be made to abstract heat from the resistance or cool it. For example, if an electric conductor or resistance be connected across resistance of the type described above as free from resistance noise, the effect of making the connection is to abstract heat from the ordinary resistance or cool it, the ordinary resistance receiving no energy from the other resistance but giving up energy of thermal agitation to the other resistance in the form of an electric current. To observe the cooling effect the resistance to be cooled can be heat insulated. If it is not insulated, the small losses due to thermal agitation are readily replaced from the relatively vast reservoir of heat surrounding the unit."
In this case you are using the creation of a noise free region of the circuit to create a 'noise sink', and this technology has been used for this purpose in some microwave devices in the last decade. This technology was much developed by Robert Forward in the 80s, but neither he nor anyone else mentions this claim of heat extraction through negative feedback of electrical noise.
I don't believe the heat energy extracted was high, and certainly not as much as needed to power his amp, but there are some fascinating possibilities. The mention of super regeneration-- repetitively applied positive feedback-- seems like a missing piece to make these energy gains much larger, and I will begin an investigation of this in old patents as soon as I've finished some current research tasks.
I agree that parametric amplification must be involved in such devices that switch inductors and capacitors, but it is not supposed to happen at all in that case. You are treating an anomaly as conventional. Mandleshtam and Papaleksi mentioned Barrow in a footnote as a case of "what not to do" because he switches his capacitor in and out of the circuit with a motorized contact rather than varying the C in a smooth fashion. That's how I found out about Barrow, already mentioned in that forum.
You might find it instructive to read up on the old super-regenerative circuits. Whereas inductive energy, capacitive energy or both when in a resonant circuit will naturally decay exponentially in the presence of positive resistance, if you can create negative resistance that decay inverts to become a build-up. The waveform changes from an e-x to an e+x where x is of course t/tau, tau being the time-constant. You can create negative resistance using positive feedback and this then creates oscillation. It is the e+x build-up of those oscillations that is used in super-regenerative receivers and you can ask the question, in the absence of a signal what does it build up from? The answer is thermal noise. Of course if there is a signal present it builds up from that signal, and the old receivers did this build up many times at a fast rate by "squegging" which is really just a sampling rate. The point being that the magnitude at the end of each build-up is related to the magnitude at the start so you get a large output signal related to a small input signal, all from one transitor (or vacuum tube in my early days). Ortho's parametric device does the same thing, the tank energy builds up from thermal noise. The parametric pumping does the same thing as a negative resistance, it creates negative damping.
Smudge
[/quote]
Hi Smudge,
Whoops, forgot to attach the Black patent!
orthofield
Hi Ion,
Yes, there was definitely a possibility of that with the reed switch JLN used, which I wasn't quick to catch at the time.
The later test was done with a hexfet photo-isolator module and switched capacitors, and there a very tiny (uV) response from the switch in the absence of one of the capacitors, probably, as you say, related to both switch noise and some tiny potential on the capacitor.
TT Brown showed that there are continuous changes on capacitors even isolated from sources of potential, and these could also result from noise coherence, although they seemed to have a cosmic origin since there are diurnal and longer cycles. So possibly potentials that exist when these sorts of circuits are closed could be a genuine mechanism.
If the reed switch does act like an antenna to potential on the coil, then the energy available across the coil open ends is enough to merit examination in its own right :-) Switching, as is well known, can be done with theoretical zero dissipation, so more and more efficient switching circuits could be made to access this coil micropotential, until it reached the threshold of usefulness. That's absurd in one way, but points out the fact that any energy that is in the tank in JLN's test has to come from somewhere other than the switch supply directly.
orthofield
Quoting myself here, there is also the possibility that the reed switch contacts act like little antennae, picking up the sudden change in potential on the coil when the relay contacts open at nearly the same time that the coil is de-energized. Of course it will be a millisecond or so later and the reverse is also possible, the coil is energized, but the contacts are open and by capacitive coupling pick up a bit of energy from the sudden change of potential on the coil a millisecond or so before the contacts close.
This is a very difficult test to insure there are no stray pickup sources in the entire circuit. It requires a shielded reed relay, electrostatic shields between the switch contacts and the reed coil and electrostatic and magnetic shields between the reed coil and the circuit under test.
[/quote]
Hi AllCanadian,
Yes, probably just the electrostatic potential between wire and ground will do that, or for that matter supply small motors, etc.
http://www.rexresearch.com/jefimenko/jefimenko.htm
"The earth is an electrical conductor. So is the ionosphere, the layer of ionized gas about 70 kilometers over our heads. The air between is a rather poor insulator. Some mechanisms not yet explained constantly pumps large quantitites of charged particles into the air. The charged particles cause the electrical field that Jefimenko saw demonstrated. Although it varies widely, strength of the field averages 120 volts per meter."
In the old means of signaling, the wire that taps the electric field also is the antenna, which is very clever! The shorting to ground of more than a kV is more than enough to electrostatic or transverse waves at that distance. Electrostatic induction waves may travel faster than C, too.
You are very right about the many phenomena that get lost through time. Inventions, and whole major discoveries become the roads not taken, and are forgotten completely. By big data searches I have found so much weird stuff it makes my head spin. It's like there is a whole lost civilization in my head :-)
By my reckoning we should have reached energy independence from oil in about 1920, and our technology has been mostly reactionary since then.
My daughter is into the Steampunk style of science fiction, and it is remarkable how much the real technology of that time is actually like that! It's like the kids are picking up on a parallel time stream where this stuff was really developed.
orthofield
I once read an article about a very old means of signaling where a vertical wire with about 30 feet of elevation was switched to ground and could be received by an identical setup up to 25 miles away. No power source of any kind just a vertical wire switched to ground. I like the old literature because there was so much interesting phenomena that just faded into history.
AC
[/quote]
Hi AllCanadian,
Yes, the I2R losses are (nearly) negated by adding an inductor in series with the two caps. This keeps the current at a minimum through the whole process. The strange thing to notice is that in a CR circuit, the R value does not affect the amount of energy loss.. if the capacitor could charge for an infinite period of time, the resistive loss would be zero. So loss is based on the time frame that the process is required to take place in. Charging a capacitor over 10 time constants reduces the loss to 1/10 of what it is if you just connect it to the voltage source. It would seem that we must sacrifice speed for efficiency, and that is true to a certain extent, but it doesn't really tell the whole story, as I talk about in the adiabatic list.
Since you want to avoid resistance whenever possible, you might be interested in something I haven't talked about before, and this is the concept of a 'virtual resistor'. In cases where you would use a resistor to control some aspect of the circuit, you use a switched converter that appears as a pure resistance across the terminals. These types of converters are called Power In Power Out converters by the inventor Singer, see attached. Although this 'resistor' is a lot more complicated than the usual one, it doesn't dissipate heat, as it is internally very efficient, and the output is usable power instead of loss. I've even seen some versions that are completely passive, appear as a resistance, and have an output power more or less equivalent to what the 'resistor' should have dissipated.
orthocoil
This is the most common mistake made by beginners and experts as well. A capacitor cannot be charged/discharged without invoking I2R losses however the losses can be negated by adding an inductor in series. The process is actually very simple and all we have to remember is that current flow causes I2R losses, conductor heating. When a cap/inductor charges or discharges the current flow is not resisted/dissipated it is impeded by Lenz Law and a magnetic field impeding electron flow causes very little dissipation. Where a resistance will always dissipate energy proportional to current flow which is why I never use them anywhere if possible. I understand a resistance is cheaper and easier however it is by no means better as the "resistance space heater" is based on this very concept, just think of every resistance in the circuit as a small space heater and you will have the right view point.
Another thing to remember is that a discharging inductance will always raise the voltage in proportion to the resistance it encounters. So here we have a mechanism whereby the discharging inductor minimizes current flow losses through any resistance in the circuit by increasing the voltage in proportion to the resistance. Imagine that, the discharging inductor will always find the perfect ratio of current/voltage to minimize losses. I just have to shake my head when I see people charging caps directly from a battery then discharging them in a low resistance circuit because it is the worst possible scenario, you couldn't do any worse in my opinion.
AC
[/quote]
Hi All,
I mentioned this very interesting paper by Barrow before, in the Mandleshtam and Papaleksi thread. That didn't get a lot of reads, so I thought I would repost it here, where it is relevant to parametric amplification by switching.
In one of the M&P papers posted there, there is a footnote criticizing Barrow for believing that he could get parametric oscillations with only switch capacitor (Barrow used a motor to commutate a capacitor's connection to the tank circuit. They claimed that his result violated conservation of energy and thus the oscillations were an artifact of the circuit he used. Of course, this got my interest :-)
I finally got a copy of this and it is well worth studying.
Pg. 4 shows the circuit used. A regenerative vacuum tube circuit is used to maintain a zero- resistance state in the LC tank. The inductor is fixed and the capacitor is varied by switching.
Pg. 6 shows a nice picture of the oscillations gotten from this device with one setting.
Pg. 8 is the most important part in terms of 'gain from switching alone'. You will see three currents measured at three points in the circuit, in the regen circuit, in the tank circuit, and in between the two capacitors. The Y axis is current in mA, and the X axis is the frequency of oscillation, with the little arrow saying w0, the switching of the capacitors at the tank frequency. As in all parametric oscillators, the peak oscillations happen when the tank is oscillated at 2w0 (or 2F) the so called 'degenerate' case, where all the reactive energy gain is dumped in at the tank frequency, without overtones.
You can see the current Ip the plate current of the vacuum tube, remains more or less the same, showing that more energy is not necessarily being drawn from the regen supply to maintain oscillations. There is a peak in the inter-capacitor current at just above 2w0, where it is around 150 mA. At the same time the tank current is around 12 mA , and the plate current is about the same.
You'll also note that there are frequencies where there is no current at all in one of the test locations. These are places where the switched capacitor is returning a voltage to the other capacitor which cancels the stored energy. Pg. 9 at bottom discusses this phenomenon. This page also shows an oscillograph of what happens when the motor that controls the capacitor connection is sped up. As expected with parametric oscillations, there are phases of unstable and stable oscillations at different freqs.
These are of course current and not power measurements, but according to the conventional wisdom the switched capacitance cannot give any energy gain, and yet there does appear to be such. You can see this by imagining the tank circuit with fixed L and C: with the regen circuit it would "squeal" at the tank frequency and probably no other. So the shifting capacitor value is adding something to the equation, for sure.
orthofield
Regarding Fig.2, it appears there is an external power supply feeding the RF choke, the feed in end of which is labelled B+
Where is the return for the power supply connected? Or if this is an output terminal, where is the ground return reference?
Hi ION,
Good question.
I read this circuit as a classic Armstrong regen amplifier driven at the center tap, much like a push pull amp. B- goes to ground, but is not shown. The amp certainly does feed energy into the tank circuit, but Barrow is attempting to just compensate for resistance.
I'm doing a little studying up on the circuits of that era. The radio diagram attached is not too far away from Barrow's regen, using the same center tapped coil tied to the cathode. It also doesn't show the ground, just the B- of the battery.
orthofield
Looking closely at the schematic you just posted it is an interesting wire within a tubing affair, a co-axial transformer, with the inner wire supplying the grids with it's own center tap, and the outer part of the tubing supplying the plates with it's own center tap. So it is a push-pull oscillator.
The coaxial transformer minimizes interference into the grid circuit and also creates a very high coupling factor to the plate circuit.
Looking a little further this seems to be a "Mesny" Oscillator.
http://www.r-type.org/articles/art-106.htm
QuoteTo overcome most of these disadvantages, the push-pull circuit shown above and generally ascribed to R Mesny was used. Here the valve inter-electrode capacities are effectively in series as regards the tuned circuit, and a high degree of electrical symmetry, which is very desirable, is attained. But the latter objection urged against the Hartley circuit still exists. Also, on account of the fact that only half of the tuned circuit is effective as a load in the anode of each valve, the effective anode load decreases much more rapidly with a decrease of wavelength than in the case of the single-valve circuit, though this is partly offset by the smaller effective inter-electrode capacities.
The Mesny type of circuit is usually successful down to about 3 metres with ordinary valves. Note that the effective reaction coupling in this case is partly electromagnetic. If the coils are constructed the wrong way round (uncrossed), the two reaction effects (electromagnetic, via the coils, and electrostatic, via the valve inter-electrode capacities) may cancel out and no oscillations be obtained. A suitable single-valve circuit, apart from avoiding the necessity of pairs of matched valves, can, if properly designed, be made to operate at shorter wavelengths than the Mesny type of circuit.
Hi ION,
Thanks for the info about the Mesny oscillator, or transformer. This is definitely off topic, but I think this might be useful to study in relation to the Chancy Britten patent, US1826727, showing a free energy device using a similar coaxial transformer with a battery connected directly between the antenna and the central wire. Britten is reported to have run his house with this device.
orthofield
Hi all,
Getting back to the coherence of noise energy, the attached patent application by Shanefield reveals a straightforward strategy that is based on stepping up the noise voltage until it can overcome the voltage drop of the diode rectifier. He specifies the transformer material, diode, etc, and indicates that pn diodes are better than other diodes for tapping the noise voltages because under very low current conditions, the voltage drop is also very small:
Another factor Which can make a silicon PN
diode useful for rectifying noise pulses is that very small
minumum voltages can go forWard through the diode, When
ever currents smaller than 1 milliampere are involved. In
fact, at extremely loW currents, the forWard voltage drop is
also extremely small, and moderately strong random noise
pulses can pass through, to charge a capacitor. Therefore a
silicon PN diode was found to be better in the circuit of the
present invention than germanium or Schottky diodes,
although this might not be true of different specimens.
If someone wants to try replicating this simple circuit, I also have the EU patent which goes into some more details.
I find the idea of stepping up noise voltages in a passive transformer to be very interesting, and I see a relationship between this and the Black patent, where the ratios of the hybrid transformer determine the extent of the noise-free condition of the circuit.
There are also magnetic rectifiers, that use permanent magnetic fields to saturate the flux along one current path, but not the other. Tesla invented the first one, but others came up with more. These could be used to rectify noise currents as well as any other signal, and they have no voltage drop of course, except for the wires themselves.
orthofield
Hi Orthofield
I looked over both patents.
would need more info on the Britten patent to understand, short of that it looks simply like a HF filter on the antenna input to a receiver. The coaxial wire in tube is like a transmission line for certain frequencies filtering others.
The Shanefield patent is certainly true, but what can you do with a maximum of 0.1 volts at unknown but very low power. Everytime you step up the voltage further, you reduce the current and the power stays the same. Over a long time you may accumulate a Joule in the capacitor if you are very patient.
I think Moray had been down this path when he discovered something novel that allowed much higher energy levels to be drawn and accumulated. He lit large banks of lamps, and that's a lot of Joules
Regeneration may hold the key, if the energy can be accumulated in the detector circuit itself, and not used until it has bootstrapped to a much higher efficiency of operation (adiabatically)
Hi ION,
The Britten patent is hard to understand and is better discussed at another point in time.
True, the Shanefield patent is not immediately useful in any way, but as a phenomenon it is interesting. I think we don't realize how far outside the mainstream getting any output from such a setup is. Yater struggled for many years to get acceptance of his diode scheme, and himself believed that the effect would only occur where circuit capacitance and element size were very small (see attached).
So for Shanefield to get anything in his circuit is a violation of thermodynamics, a Maxwell's demon.
However, the main reason I put up this patent rather than some others that certainly get more power output, is the connection between transformer turns ratios and positive and negative impedances seen in the various patents. It seems quite possible to take a small amount of power from an output, passively step up the voltage of this output a great deal, and feed it back at a different point in the circuit, to excite the noise process. I see both Black and Shanefield doing this in a way. I'm not sure if the feedback loop can be passive, or if it must be active.
Passively taking the output circuit and passing part of it around the primary in a loop, and using the tiny currents to 'tickle' any Barkhausen noise in the core. Or just align the core to the earth's magnetic field to do that.
Also, the mention of the PN diode suggests making Shanefield an active device, by putting a small DC bias on the the diode. Even though energy is used to get the noise over the voltage threshold, much more of the noise will then be rectified. This bias + noise energy would then be captured in the capacitor. There are also implications in some patents that heated pn diodes can generate electricity of they are biased.
There's no question in my mind that Moray was tapping into some source of radiant energy, probably not noise as such, unless the noise hides it.
In general, I find that free energy inventors tend to ignore small, certain gains, in preference for large, possible ones. If one of our principles is to maximize the conventional efficiency as much as possible, so too should it be to utilize any definite gains, no matter how small. Just like static electricity in the 17th century, we have no idea where this will go...
orthofield
From Orthofield:
QuoteIn general, I find that free energy inventors tend to ignore small, certain gains, in preference for large, possible ones. If one of our principles is to maximize the conventional efficiency as much as possible, so too should it be to utilize any definite gains, no matter how small. Just like static electricity in the 17th century, we have no idea where this will go...
I agree we should explore and develop even small effects, provided we have not already explored and mapped out the absolute practical limits and found them to be unworthy of further pursuit at this time. They may need to await an advance in material technology.
Quote from: ION on 2015.03.05, 18:35:57
From Orthofield:
I agree we should explore and develop even small effects, provided we have not already explored and mapped out the absolute practical limits and found them to be unworthy of further pursuit at this time. They may need to await an advance in material technology.
Well, to study the topic you can start with bringing power transformer near Tesla coil's inductor or other high voltage capacitor disharge pulses source. Like in following video it shows resulting energy amplification effect and drop of power usage in primary circuit:
The second use case is when you recycle reactive power back to circuit and inject it as supporting magnetic field in resonant way:
These leads can be very exciting when you begin understand fundamental principals behind it... :)
Cheers!
Hi T-1000,
Interesting tests!
I've seen different versions of the kind of "reactive power" device in the second video a couple of times, and know from my own experiments that it can be done.
But the first test is a strange one. It reminds me most of the Correa's more recent work, where they suggest that 'massfree' Tesla longitudinal waves arise from the monopole HV antenna or electrode. At least some part of these waves are not electrical, and this part can modify matter and conventional energy. Here's quote from the difficult to follow US patent US7053576:
"Essentially the first subtype or variant consists of longitudinal massfree waves that deploy electric energy. They could well be called Tesla waves, since Tesla-type transformers can indeed be shown experimentally to radiate massfree electric energy, in the form of longitudinal magnetic and electric waves having properties not reduceable to photon energy or to 'electromagnetic waves', and having speeds of displacement that can be much greater than the limit c for all strictly electromagnetic interactions."
But even on 'just' an electrical level, your probe can be seen as one plate of a capacitor, with the wire as the other plate. The subject of electrical fields and charges on the surface of a conductor is not well known, but it's true that the surface charges and fields control the current in a closed circuit. See the interesting article by Jeffimenko attached. It should not then be surprising that additional fields such as provided by your probe into the transformer would change this current.
I think the conventional explanation for the null effect of an outside E field on a current assumes the added E field is a dipole, but I'm not sure that this is the case in your test, where it seems the E field from your probe (or one-wire transmission) into the coil is more of a monopole, with the other end somewhere distant from the coil-- is that right?
In the case of a monopole E field inside the coil, it could have an effect on the surface charges. Hmm, especially if the oscillating single wire E field is 'pumping' current across the whole coil in some way..
A guy named Elouard did some seemingly similar things in France in the 40s, where he fed static electricity from an antenna or Hv generator into a cone shaped assembly and used it to 'accelerate a current'. I can't retrieve that patent at the moment..
Then there is also a patent from Burke for a wire around a radioactive coil that generates has more current going through it. Burke is attached:
"this invention relates to the amplification of electric current by the emissions from radioactive material through which current is caused to flow, and also is that the electric discharge of the radioactive material is enhancedby causing an electric current to flow through the radioactive material. It is not known how this amplification physically occurs, but it is thought most probably that the radioactive material excites or stimulates the input current. In any event, the term amplification is intended to mean merely that the output current from the radioactive material is larger in terms of amperage than the input current as from source 4 in FIGURE 1."
Even though radiation is a bit different from oscillating E fields, both of them do seem they could be carriers for 'mass free fields'.
This is pretty off topic for this list, so I've started a separate thread for discussion of the anomaly shown by T-1000 in his first video. Or perhaps there is already a thread on this, because it looks like an interesting topic...
orthofield
More on same thing:
It is Tesla coil primary from the left and push-pull inverter from the right in video. With capacitor discharges in the left that coil is making explosive impulses which affect transformer and interrupt "normal" sinus wave flow which is making bulb to be lit much more brightly.. If you will repeat that experiment there will be good starting point to make other attempts with same principle eventually leading to unknowns... ;)
Cheers!
Hi ION,
>I agree we should explore and develop even small effects, provided we have not already explored and mapped out the absolute practical limits and found them to be unworthy of further pursuit at this time. They may need to await an advance in material technology.
Yes, I realized that my statement before was not a balanced one. When effects are known to be small in magnitude, it may not be worth the man hours to investigate them, relative to other areas that may be lower hanging fruit.
Shanefield itself is not as promising as other things.
So I return to the general subject at hand...
We've discussed a couple of different concepts that can convert noise or thermal energy into usable power. I see several possibilities for a powerful thermal or noise coherence device, but the one that seems most promising to me right now involves transformed feedback loops, as shown in the Black patent.
There is the possibility of a variety of regenerative or feedback effects possible, which may result in energy gain. The condition for genuine energy gain in Etotal - Efeedback supply > COP 1, and I consider this even possible for an active device.
This energy gain can exist due to the noise from an amplifier connected to a resistor being amplified and transformed and fed back to the original noise. But I also noticed that even feeding back a part of an transformer's sine AC output to a third coil that opposes the primary and secondary fluxes, improves the transformer performance. This is the principle of the Cobb Energy Conservation circuit:
http://www.affs.org/html/the_energy_trimmer.html
and the attached patent. This device was in commercial use to reduce electric bills in California. (I don't know if it still is..)
Feeding back current to a third coil opposed to the primary increases the primary input impedance, and decreases the secondary output impedance, to the advantage of the output power:
"Since the third winding produces magnetic flux in a direction opposing the magnetic flux of the primary winding, the presence of the third winding increases the impedance in the primary winding. This increased impedance results in a reduced current flow in the primary winding, thereby reducing the current drain from the public utility power supply lines. Since the current flow in the secondary winding is induced by the current flow in the primary winding, the secondary winding acts as a load with respect to the primary winding. The electrical current flow in the primary winding produces a magnetic flux in the core which causes a flow of electrical current in the secondary winding. Since the third winding also acts as a load with respect to the power coming in, the flux induced in the core by the flow of current through the third winding is in a direction opposite to that of the secondary winding. This flux produced by the third winding reduces the impedance in the secondary winding so that the electrical current in the secondary winding is not reduced by the reduction of current in the primary winding that results from the presence of the third winding.
The presence of the third winding on the load isolation transformer produces a magnetic field which decreases the energy input from the primary winding, but keeps the energy output in the secondary winding the same."
Feedback in this sense has possibilities that go well beyond what can come from noise power, even at high BW. The odd part about the above is, taking the patent logic to its conclusion, ALL the primary and secondary fluxes could be cancelled in a transformer, without any expense in the output! In this case, the primary input impedance is infinite, and the secondary output current is the same, since the output impedance is zero! Of course this cannot happen in reality without feeding some energy in, making the system not passive. But how close can this be approached by using feedback windings, perhaps transformed in the ways I see used in the Black patent?
Consider that coil 26 in the Cobb patent is usually directly coupled on the pot core to oppose the secondary and primary fluxes. But I can imagine improving the output characteristics even more, by magnetically uncoupling coil 26 from the pot core, using a new winding with a few turns around 26 and a few turns coupled to the pot core and primary and secondary. This new coil steps down the voltage from 26, getting a higher current which can then be set by turns ratios to to match the primary current. The reverse flux of the third coil can completely cancel the first coil's flux.
Is this possible?? Or have I finally lost my marbles, as many claim? ;-)
In any case, the important thing to note in my wanderings is that the Cobb device is a passive feedback loop. It doesn't require an amplifier in the middle of the transformer chain as does the Black Patent. This implies that there are unexpected possibilities even in passive feedback loops, without noise.
orthofield
Hi All,
I'm restarting this thread after re-evaluating the attached patent. I think it's relevant to the topic of parametric amplification through switching of an inductance. Those who've read earlier posts on this thread know that Jean-Louis Naudin did an experiment I suggested and got a mV sine wave result from two switched inductors, with no power input. Later the test was repeated with an opto-isolated switch and got similar results with high harmonics indicating parametric processes. Further, the Barrow research from the 1930s referenced earlier in this thread indicates that switching of a capacitor can induce oscillations in a tank circuit when using a regenerative circuit to maintain low dissipation.
I still consider this a fruitful path for cohering thermal noise vibrations into useful power.
I've had this patent in my files for a long time but somehow the significance never came to me.
The Variable Reactance Element was patented in 1968 by Lucio Vallese and assigned to ITT. The device is intended to be used in a Parametron, or parametric oscillator that was in development at the time for computer logic and RAM. After pointing out the drawbacks of varying reactance with vacuum tubes and magnetic materials with nonlinear BH curves (what we would call mag amps or parametric transformers), he goes to the operating principle, described on pg. 3, col. 2, line 10:
"Therefore if a value of the variable resistance element 5 is chosen such that the total secondary loop resistance
is equal to the self-reactance of inductance element 4, small variations of the resistance element 5 from this value
will result in corresponding variation of the reflected capacitive reactance X, while having substantially no effect on the reflected resistance R'. It may be readily shown that the capacitive reactance X is always less than the self-reactance of inductance element 3, so that the reactive component of the driving point impedance seen looking into terminals 1 and 2 is always inductive."
He goes on to say that this basic circuit has low Q due to the reflected resistance at the primary, and provides several solutions using a negative resistance in first the secondary, and then in both secondary and primary circuits.
From a computer logic standpoint this makes sense, but if we are looking for amplification it's not ideal. Fortunately he provides a final solution which is perfect for our experimentation. On pg. 4, col. 3, line 30, he says:
"FIG. 3c shows an alternative technique for compensating the reflected resistance R. In this approach, each of the inductance elements 3 and 4 is divided into two operating portions 8 and 9 and 10 and 11 respectively. The sign of the mutual inductance between portions 8 and 10 is opposite to that of the mutual inductance between portions 9 and 11. The circuit parameters are selected so that the real components of the reflected impedances cancel while the imaginary components add."
So to sum up, Vallese provides a method for varying the L of a parametric oscillator using only switching power, where the resistance is not reflected into the oscillator. The Q of the oscillator is then mostly dependent on whatever load in included in it.
Since power in such oscillators is dependent on the frequency of oscillation, it seems likely that at some rate of inductive variation, the power in the oscillator will be greater than the power needed to drive the switch.
(The gain is limited by the Manley-Rowe relations but this can also be circumvented by including another switch in the circuit run at quadrature to the switch in the secondary loop, as described in papers I can make available to anyone who wants to try this out.)
Fred
Hi All,
More evidence that L or C in an oscillator can be changed by only switching or varying resistance, without energy being lost in separation of flux or charge, and without the varying resistance reflecting into the oscillator.
The thesis "The Use Of Transmission Lines As Frequency Modulators" by Earl Dennis Scott, University of Washington, 1933 is about this exact topic. The author proves mathematically that this is possible, in a similar fashion but at much greater length than in the patent by Vallese, and then tests the concept with an artificial 1/8 transmission line consisting of wire wound around a dowel covered with aluminum foil and waxed paper.
His claim is:
"It therefore seems possible that a line might be chosen of such a length that a change in resistance alone of the terminal impedance would result in a change of reactance alone at the sending-end impedance. If the sending end of such a line were then associated with the tank circuit of an oscillator, and the terminal resistance were varied, frequency modulation of the oscillatory current would result without amplitude modulation."
You can see that this is precisely what the Vallese patent does through other means.
As with the Vallese patent, he shows test results. It's difficult to see in the attached image, because of a defective Xerox machine, but as the R at the receiving end of the artificial line is varied from 260 to 340 ohms, the other end varies from an Xc of about 30 ohms to an Xl of about 60 ohms.
Although he uses this for frequency modulation of a Hartley oscillator, it could just as readily be applied to creating oscillations in a tank circuit without any other input. Using only the L or C range of the T line, one creates an oscillator with fixed C or L, and some small R, and commence to rapidly vary the R at the other end of the line, at twice the tank frequency. A basic parametric oscillator. As with the Vallese patent, the varying R is not reflected into the tank circuit, so only whatever load is present reduces the Q of the oscillator.
I have other documentation that more obscurely shows the same results. I take it is as a given now that parametric oscillations can supply a load with power, with the input power only that needed to vary a resistance (ideally between closed and open circuit).
It may be objected that it takes a minimal energy to switch, and that the output power of such an oscillator is limited by this minimum. This is called Landauer's principle, and is directly related to the second law of thermodynamics, and to the existence or nonexistence of a Maxwell's Demon.
It has been demonstrated experimentally that Landauer's limit can be violated by using processes similar to those in adiabatic computing. The attached article shows that one can indefinitely decrease the energy consumed by moving charge to and from a capacitor well below the thermal dissipation predicted by Landauer. Adiabatic computing circuits do this as a matter of course. As the synopsis of the article concludes, "This shows that there is no fundamental lower limit to energy dissipation in moving charge."
It is only for someone with more building skills than myself to build such a circuit and observe the results. The results, I predict, will be an operating Maxwell's Demon of high efficiency that will cohere noise power into useful power, with limited energy input.
Fred
Quote from: Orthofield on 2022.12.03, 17:24:16
...
So to sum up, Vallese provides a method for varying the L of a parametric oscillator using only switching power, where the resistance is not reflected into the oscillator. The Q of the oscillator is then mostly dependent on whatever load in included in it.
Since power in such oscillators is dependent on the frequency of oscillation, it seems likely that at some rate of inductive variation, the power in the oscillator will be greater than the power needed to drive the switch.
...
Fred
Hi Fred
I don't think so. The author uses the classical equations of a circuit to obtain his equation (1), .i.e
as if the resistance were constant.
If R' is not constant but varies only slowly with respect to one period of the signal, its equation is still valid.
But if we hope to make R' vary at a rate of the same order as the frequency of the signal, equation (1) becomes false, we can no longer speak of a resistance R' nor of a capacitance C', we have to go through the integration over a period of the signal, of the instantaneous relations between V(t), I(t) and Z(t).
So his idea is good for the use he wants to make of it, for example to modulate a reactance as we can do it to make frequency modulation because the modulation signal is slow compared to the carrier signal. On the other hand, all the calculations have to be redone if we intend to use the circuit for parametric amplification, and then I don't think we'll find any energetic interest in it.
Another point, I agree with the Applied Physics Letters paper : we can charge a capacitor with less losses than Kb.T.ln(2) (but as the authors have shown, at a slow loading speed).
Hi F6FLT,
Thanks for reading my long posts.
Certainly you could be right about the Vallese patent. Several factors work against a purely mathematical dismissal. It would have to be tried to be certain.
1) The patent is intended for uses in a parametron. Why would ITT have bothered to patent it if it didn't work in parametrons? I have another patent that does more or less the same thing, that's assigned to the US government. These are not gullible investors paying for a golden unicorn.
2) In the first few paragraphs the inventor specifically mentions that reactance tubes, magnetic cores, and electromechanical reactors are only suitable for low frequencies, and his device is a replacement for them. The other patent, yet to be discussed, makes the same claims.
3) parametric oscillations-- and gain-- are easily achievable at frequencies of a couple of Mhz, or even below-- the same frequencies as frequency modulators. And it's possible to get gain in even a one shot application, at quasi-DC. It simply won't build like an oscillation would. For instance, resonant transfer circuits where energy is shuttled between two capacitors through a variable inductor, or vice versa, are commonplace in the literature of this time period (50s-70s approx.)
4) This isn't a case of having a theory and looking for evidence of it. Barrow's experiments at MIT in the 30s were my original inspiration. The paper is earlier in this thread. In those experiments he saw parametric oscillations in circuits using a capacitor shunted in and out of the oscillator with a rotary switch. These experiments were done at a few kHz at most. They were critiqued in a footnote in a paper by Mandelshtam and Papaleksi as violating the law of conservation of energy, so of course I went looking for them :-) They used a regenerative circuit to maintain a dissipationless state, so they were not complete proof, but other details indicated that parametric oscillations were forming under far from idea conditions-- for instance where half the charge stored in the capacitor was being lost with each switching operation. My own experiment with Jean-Louis Naudin was crude but showed a clear sine signal in the mV range at the switching frequency, with no source of power. It was rightfully critiqued for using a relay which could have injected energy into the circuit. so it was later repeated with an opto-isolated switch, once again showing high harmonics typical of parametric oscillations. I recently found a few more details on this test and was planning on posting it here.
5) My experience in several experiments with various parametric devices is that oscillations WANT to form. Although controlling them or getting the frequencies you want is not easy, the natural phenomenon of parametric oscillations arises readily in many situations. So looking for difficulties where they have not already presented themselves is going against the flow of the observational record. It's saying, no, parametric oscillations won't form here, although they seem to occur in many situations, wanted or unwanted.
Of course, you may be right, and only more experiments will show for sure. Unfortunately, I am a dyslexic experimenter with limited equipment. I'm still working on getting some simple steps in my thermoelectric test correctly. As much as I can understand a paper or patent, I get the black wire mixed with the red wire on a pretty consistent basis. I'm really bad at the test side of things! I could build the device but would not be able to measure power output accurately. So my posts here, like really all my posts, are intended to 'sell' the idea and get people interested in the possibilities. In other words, I'm just happy if someone reads it and responds, and you are the first to do so.
In terms of the Boechler paper, you're right that it's about the speed of the charge transfer. You can charge a capacitor with zero thermal losses (including the wire or other resistance in the circuit) if you take an infinite time to do it. Losses can be reduced appreciably even if the process is just done more slowly than usual. The interesting thing to me is that 'slow' is only relative to the internal clock of the system, in this case the RC time constant. People get stuck on the word 'slow' as if it were absolutely slow, but it's only relatively slow. In my opinion, many technologies can be made far more efficient than they are by using these principles, which so far have only been used in adiabatic computers, and a few supercapacitor charging circuits. There's no reason they couldn't be used in long distance power transmission, for instance. But that's another topic, which I've covered in a thread in my bench here...
Fred
Hi All,
Continuing the discussion about energy gained through switching, I have fragments of a bit of research conducted some 22 years ago now. Unfortunately large chunks of it were on computers that bit the dust years ago and I didn't think to recover them. I apologize in advance for the missing details.
But basically, first Jean-Louis Naudin and I did the test described here:
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/tep62par.htm
As you can see there is no power output in the tank circuit, consisting of L1, L2, and C1. L1 and L2 were the two halves of a transformer.
L2 is switched in and out of the circuit with a reed relay. The observed output across the tank is around 2 mV p-p and in phase and same frequency as the switching impulse.
Some said that the sine wave arose from some energy coming into the circuit from the reed switch. So I looked for an opportunity to repeat the test with a better switch. Eventually, the test was repeated with some modifications.
Rather than inductors, capacitors were used. Several were tried with different ratios of C1 and C2, with varying results. Unfortunately the values and types of capacitors that got the best results are lost in time.
An opto-isolated mosfet relay was used in place of the reed relay.
I don't remember or have record of the fixed inductor used, but the tank frequency without C2 was 50.3 Khz.
The relay was driven by a 555 circuit at 100.6 Khz with a 50% duty cycle.
The output were a series of small ringing pulses. Each individual pulse had a frequency of around 1 Mhz-- but the odd thing was the pulse frequency was 8.3 Khz--which is the 6th subharmonic of the tank frequency!
It occurs to me now that the peculiar frequency may be related to the value of one capacitor without the other, but can't check that now.
Measurements were made across a 100 ohm resistor.
It's yard to tell the size of the sine wave from my very poor images (not worth reproducing here) but assuming the gradation I see is 1 mV, then once again these waves were about 2 mV p-t-p.
Without clear information there's no point in measuring the power dissipated in the resistor, but it was more than nothing. Perhaps peak .01 uW if the p-p amplitude is treated as 1 mV.
In an attempt to find error, we sent the 555 output directly into the resistor through the relay without the tank, and this only reproduced the output signal with a bit of additional noise.
The presence of a ringing pulse in the circuit at a frequency completely distinct from the tank or switching frequency is a strong indicator of parametric oscillation in my book.
Once again, I apologize for the missing details.
Fred
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/tep62par.htm (http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/tep62par.htm)
I did something similar about ten years ago.
Only the circuit was more complicated, and the inductance was with one winding, but there were two switched capacitors. And during one inclusion something happened, the circuit went into spacing and burned out.
It was the only time in my life when something incomprehensible happened.
And that I can not give an explanation until now.
p.s.
This layout was partially restored, but not destroyed or taken apart so that I would not be accused of lying.
But there were no more experiments.
TR1 is not powered, where does the energy seen on the scope come from?
It's quite obvious: from the capacitive coupling between the coil of the X1 reed relay and the contacts it controls.
Switching a non-powered inductor has no effect. For example, one might think that short-circuiting a few turns of a coil through which the magnetic flux of a permanent magnet passes amounts to varying the quantity of flux to which the coil is sensitive, which would generate an induced current. This is not the case. Connecting together points of conductors that are already at the same potential, or doing nothing, is the same thing.
In any circuit, any circuit, there are current fluctuations, for example, thermal noise.
We can amplify them parametrically.
Hi F6FLT,
Yes, this was the explanation given by several at the time of this test, and it was certainly a possibility.
That's why the test was later repeated with an opto-isolated Mosfet switch, and this test also gave rise to anomalous pulses/oscillations. Putting the voltage from the CMOS directly into the tank circuit didn't result in oscillations.
These pulses were at a subharmonic of the tank frequency, and with a 100 ohm resistor, so had to arise despite considerable impedance.
This is the paper by W. L. Barrow that led to my interest in the first place.
https://www.overunityresearch.com/index.php?topic=2265.msg45496#msg45496
I'd be interested in your comments on this paper.
The test setup is on pg. 4. Note that the rotating element is a switch, not a rotating capacitor, as one would expect in a rotating parametric generator.
Pg. 8 shows current in the test circuit at different frequencies of capacitor switching. Note that the highest current is at approximately twice the frequency of switching.
Fig 1 on pg. 3 and fig. 9 on pg. 10 can be compared to validate that the device shows oscillations where parametric theory would suggest they should be found (stable and unstable solutions to Manley-Rowe relations).
There's no question that parametric oscillations arose in this circuit when the capacitance was merely switched, rather than varied in value. The sticking point is that a regenerative circuit was included to eliminate dissipation. It can be argued that this regen circuit supplied power to the circuit above and beyond what was needed to cancel resistance. However, the circuit also has two sources of loss or attenuation that could be eliminated or reduced under other conditions. First, as in all parametric circuits, any nonlinearity in circuit components will result in the limitation of the amplitude of oscillations in 'unstable' regions, which would otherwise grow without limit, and the regen circuit has these limitations. Second, at certain frequencies, the capacitors have opposite charges when they reconnected and there is a loss of energy in those regimes. Eliminating some nonlinearities in the circuit, and using a dual push-pull topology so that charge is shuttled to another similar circuit rather than being dissipated in opposition would improve the performance.
Something like this test has now been done three times with different setups, and each time there have been oscillations. So there's no reason to dismiss this line of research, and reason to pursue it.
Fred
Quote from: chief kolbacict on 2022.12.11, 17:47:28
In any circuit, any circuit, there are current fluctuations, for example, thermal noise.
We can amplify them parametrically.
The noise is several orders of magnitude smaller than the signal we see, and it is random so that it cannot be parametrically amplified with a signal of constant frequency.
Quote from: chief kolbacict on 2022.12.10, 16:04:14
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/tep62par.htm (http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/tep62par.htm)
I did something similar about ten years ago.
Only the circuit was more complicated, and the inductance was with one winding, but there were two switched capacitors. And during one inclusion something happened, the circuit went into spacing and burned out.
It was the only time in my life when something incomprehensible happened.
And that I can not give an explanation until now.
p.s.
This layout was partially restored, but not destroyed or taken apart so that I would not be accused of lying.
But there were no more experiments.
Hi Chief,
That's very interesting! And was this circuit unpowered, as in the Jean-Louis test?
Fred
F6FLT,
I forgot to mention a key point in the Barrow paper. Fig. 6 on pg. 8 shows three currents. Ic is the current between the fixed and switched capacitors. The tank current is It. Ip is the vacuum tube plate current. Ignoring the capacitor current, there is still a difference between the current supplied by the tube and that existing in the circuit as a whole, implying another current source than the regen circuit. At peak resonance, twice the switching frequency, the plate current is around 15 mA, and the tank current is a bit more than 40 mA.
Fred
Quote from: Orthofield on 2022.12.11, 18:59:46
That's very interesting! And was this circuit unpowered, as in the Jean-Louis test?
Fred
Hi.
My old circuit consisting of an inductor and one of the two capacitors swayed slightly at its resonant frequency.
The frequency was chosen around 30 hertz, so that the reed relays had time to work.
The relay switched the second capacitor, synchronously with this frequency.
At one moment there was an anomalous increase in the amplitude of oscillations of the power circuit contur.
This led to the burnout of the CMOS logic circuits, which were separated from the power part by the relay.
I still don't understand how this could happen.
Quote from: Orthofield on 2022.12.11, 18:00:56
...
There's no question that parametric oscillations arose in this circuit when the capacitance was merely switched, rather than varied in value. The sticking point is that a regenerative circuit was included to eliminate dissipation. It can be argued that this regen circuit supplied power to the circuit above and beyond what was needed to cancel resistance. However, the circuit also has two sources of loss or attenuation that could be eliminated or reduced under other conditions. First, as in all parametric circuits, any nonlinearity in circuit components will result in the limitation of the amplitude of oscillations in 'unstable' regions, which would otherwise grow without limit, and the regen circuit has these limitations. Second, at certain frequencies, the capacitors have opposite charges when they reconnected and there is a loss of energy in those regimes. Eliminating some nonlinearities in the circuit, and using a dual push-pull topology so that charge is shuttled to another similar circuit rather than being dissipated in opposition would improve the performance.
Something like this test has now been done three times with different setups, and each time there have been oscillations. So there's no reason to dismiss this line of research, and reason to pursue it.
Fred
Hi Fred
I agree with your analysis. The author uses a UX-112A triode. I found the datasheet here on page 25 of the text, 29 of the pdf.
https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~reese/RC10/rc10.pdf
The gain is 8.5, which is low compared to modern tubes but can go well beyond loss compensation. Inter-electrode capacitance can be neglected at the frequencies it uses.
The circuit can very well be seen as an oscillator with gate/anode feedback. If the feedback level is insufficient for oscillation, then there may be only loss compensation, but this is impossible to ascertain. One could also have oscillation with C0+ΔC and not with C0 only, or vice versa, I hope the author has checked all this, I don't have the impression that he has specified it.
Also the tube characteristics are not very linear. We would have to put all this into LTspice and see what happens, but just creating the triode as a component for LTspice is tedious.
I don't think I can be very helpful because there are too many uncontrolled parameters because of the tube, and we don't know the currents in the two halves of L. I don't see why the tube should be considered a simple loss compensation device when its amplification beyond that is the most likely cause of oscillations.
Hi F6FLT,
Nice find! I never thought to check for the characteristics of the tube.
Since this paper and the one before it were specifically a theory and test of the 'dissipationless' situation, he certainly was aware of the deviations from the perfect state. Barrow does discuss the 'dissipationless' circuit on the same page as the schematic, and the next. He acknowledges that the circuit only provides an average value of zero resistance through a cycle, and suggests that is the reason why oscillations were not seen for higher ratios of capacitance variation, where they should otherwise have been more likely.
Interestingly, Barrow seemed to think that switching a capacitor was the same as rotating a plate capacitor, which is certainly not the case. Later papers used a rotating variable inductance, rather than a switching scheme, so he must have been made aware of his 'error'.
As a temporary conclusion to this line of discussion, here's the original comment by Mandelshtam and Papaleksi on pg. 40 of their paper "Report On Recent Research On Nonlinear Oscillations" that led me to make considerable effort to track down the Barrow paper:
"W. L. Barrow wrongly assumes that his experiments shows the capability for the parametric excitation of an oscillating circuit by periodic variation of its capacitance. He causes the variation of not only the capacitance of an oscillating circuit, but the ohmic resistance of a shunt containing a condenser. Now, the variation of a positive resistance can be carried out (and is carried out) without expenditure of energy. This device therefore does not allow, by its principle alone, supplying to the circuit by mechanical work, of the energy necessary for the excitation and maintenance of oscillations. There is no doubt that Barrow has observed in his experiments not only the parametric excitation of oscillations by periodic variation of the capacitance, but also phenomena owing to the presence of an electronic tube and regenerative feedback."
My comment on their comment is that this is true in Barrow's circuit, but Vallese's patent and the Scott transmission line thesis, as well as another patent I haven't presented, show quite clearly that under certain conditions the ohmic resistance can be fully reflected into a pure reactance, so that variation of the resistance alone can cause oscillations in the reactive side of the circuit.
Even if this is done in a quasi-static fashion, there is still an energy gain from the process of changing the parameter.
That's where it ends for now, until I can get an oscilloscope and do some tests on (probably) Vallese..
Fred
I agree! O0
Here is that "хрень"
It was broken nothing.Might continue.
Hi Chief,
Just some basic details would help.. what were you trying to do?
Fred
In the oscillatory circuit, weak oscillations were maintained at its resonant frequency.
No more than 1 volt. By supplying this frequency from this board through a resistor with a large resistance.
And the switching of capacitors was carried out synchronously with this frequency using a relay.
Moreover, the DIP switches, which are visible on the board, changed regulated the duration and delay relative to the
phase of already existing oscillations.
And at one moment, the amplitude grew abnormally and smoke had appear... ;)
@Chief
Whenever I feed anything with a fixed frequency AC current, even a relay, any circuit tuned to that frequency and placed nearby will show a signal of the same frequency or ringing harmonics. Capacitive and magnetic coupling are inevitable and without extreme shielding precautions, no conclusions can be drawn.
Could you provide a detailed diagram of the device you experimented with and the data?
I will definitely try in the near future.
Damn, that was ten years ago.
There was no paper scheme then as well, everything was born immediately from the head.
Could you tell us why you didn't continue, when the effect is supposed to be so extraordinary?
I don't know. Probably a fool...
I remember that it all started with the verification of Zubkov's patent.
https://patentdb.ru/patent/2386207 (https://patentdb.ru/patent/2386207)
But as always, I do it in my own way, as It is see me it would better.
But later the understanding came that switching, switching capacitors with the
help of relays, thyristors, transistors, and anything else is not good.
This not only changes the total capacitance of the capacitor, it also takes some of
the energy along with the disconnected part of the capacitor.
And Zubkov's patent is a fake.
But my construction was different from that, and something really happened.
Unfortunately, it is natural for a person to do illogical things, otherwise he would be a computer.
Hi Chief,
I appreciate your humility.
Thanks for referencing that patent. I read the English translation but the end, where the diagrams got explained, got cut off.
As with the Barrow paper, he makes no mention of the fact that moving capacitor plates is quite different from switching a capacitor.
I have two of Mandelshtam and Papaleksi's very long papers and have seen no reference to "The increase in amplitudes occurred not only with a decrease in the inductance or capacitance of the circuit, but also with their increase, which contradicted the classical energy theory of [parametric resonance]." I'll take a look again.
I thought it was interesting that his device used a square loop core for the inductor. This would tend to stabilize oscillations but also limit them, as any nonlinearity will do in a parametric circuit.
It's certainly possible to switch a capacitor without taking any energy from it. Or adding any either. But it may not be as easy as it looks.
Why do you say Zubkov's patent is a fake?
It seems a very simple replication could be possible, using two capacitors, one three times higher than the other as Zubkov suggests, an inductor, an opto-isolated switch, and driver.
As long as the switch is truly isolated, any energy in the circuit, besides noise and EMI, is indication that it's worth going further.
Fred
Quote from: Orthofield on 2022.12.13, 22:34:03
As with the Barrow paper, he makes no mention of the fact that moving capacitor plates is quite different from switching a capacitor.
Exactly. This is the fundamental difference between high-frequency parametric amplifiers, which are known to work and have been used for many decades.In these amplifiers, the varicap plates "seem to move apart and move apart" doing work against the Coulomb forces and consuming the energy of the RF pump generator.
The difference from all kinds of "patents" with switching part of the cap with using contacts and other things.
I figured this out very well for myself. And how to change the capacitance of the capacitor without affecting the energy that has stored in it at this moment, I do not know yet. Except for one option, when the change in capacitance occurs at the moment when there is zero voltage on it.
Quote from: chief kolbacict on 2022.12.13, 19:56:13
...
Unfortunately, it is natural for a person to do illogical things, otherwise he would be a computer.
O0
But be careful not to go overboard by using incantations rather than a soldering iron to make it work! ;D
Quote from: chief kolbacict on 2022.12.14, 08:32:01
...And how to change the capacitance of the capacitor without affecting the energy that has stored in it at this moment, I do not know yet. Except for one option, when the change in capacitance occurs at the moment when there is zero voltage on it.
That's the problem. If two points are at the same potential, they can be connected together by a conductor, or not, it doesn't change the situation. So there would be no effect due to the switch at the moment of switching.
If there is OU, it would therefore be later, but we don't see why changing the switch towards which we direct the energy flow would increase it.
If there is an energy gain, I would rather think that it is a transient effect (abrupt non-linearity) at a time when the voltage is not zero.
Quote from: F6FLT on 2022.12.14, 16:07:36
So there would be no effect due to the switch at the moment of switching.
Exactly. In parametric RF amplifiers. The plates "push apart" when there is maximum voltage on them, thus adding energy into the system.
Hi Chief, F6FLT,
I have much to say about varactor parametric amplifiers but I'm going to think deeply before responding, because I know F6FLT will pounce on any flaw in my reasoning-- that's what he's good for :-)
Fred
Here's what I found. Did you have it?
https://energyscience.ru/download/file.php?id=19249 (https://energyscience.ru/download/file.php?id=19249)
The term "Self-Excited" oscillations is misleading. The effects of non-linearity on a sine signal, due here to the magnetic iron core, cause components to appear at different frequencies, but their energy is taken from the main signal coming from the generator, it is the generator that "excites" them.
Perhaps so. So this is different, than Mandelstamm-Papaleksi had.
Quote from: chief kolbacict on 2022.12.20, 18:37:37
Perhaps so. So this is different, than Mandelstamm-Papaleksi had.
Not perhaps, surely. Winter-Günther says so: "oscillating circuits containing a closed iron-core coil, which is
driven by an exterior sinusoidal EMF, can self-excite additional oscillations whose frequency is not necessarily equal to that of the exterior EMF". This paper is rather academic, it does not invoke any signal from nothing.
chief kolbacict
QuoteExactly. This is the fundamental difference between high-frequency parametric amplifiers, which are known to work and have been used for many decades.In these amplifiers, the varicap plates "seem to move apart and move apart" doing work against the Coulomb forces and consuming the energy of the RF pump generator.
The difference from all kinds of "patents" with switching part of the cap with using contacts and other things.
That's a good example and we need to be conscious of the qualities any given form of energy may have.
For example, I charge two plates with opposite charges and the plates are pushed/pulled together because there is an electric field between them. However if we set the same electric field in oscillation this motion can induce eddy currents in the plates which drives them apart. Similar to the notion that sand or water can be set in oscillation changing the density thus buoyancy of objects immersed in said fluid.
In this respect the qualities and form any given volume of energy takes is important to note. This is never an all or nothing proposition but infinite shades of grey. This is true because forces at play are never a truly uniform gradient. We like to pretend nature is uniform so we can calculate stuff but this is seldom true in reality, reality is messy.
AC
Quote from: Allcanadian on 2022.12.20, 22:58:17
However if we set the same electric field in oscillation this motion can induce eddy currents in the plates which drives them apart. Similar to the notion that sand or water can be set in oscillation changing the density thus buoyancy of objects immersed in said fluid.
Only it seems to me that to create this vortex inside the capacitor, it turns out that as much energy will be spent on creating this vortex as it will be at the output. As in the case of parametric transformers, in which the same amount of energy is consumed to change the magnetic permeability of the core material as we have at the output.
But it's still worth considering...
If the capacitor itself reduced its capacitance with increasing voltage on the plates.
Without resorting to external influences and using energy.
However, there are ceramic dielectrics for capacitors that do this.
The energy in an oscillatory circuit with such a capacitor must increase with each oscillation.
Up to the explosion of the oscillatory circuit. Why isn't this happening?
Quote from: chief kolbacict on 2022.12.22, 20:04:01
...
The energy in an oscillatory circuit with such a capacitor must increase with each oscillation.
Up to the explosion of the oscillatory circuit. Why isn't this happening?
The most common cause is that in parametric amplification, the more energy the system stores, the more difficult it becomes to vary the parameter.
For example, the capacity of a varicap is reduced by increasing its inverse voltage. If the variable voltage becomes of the same order of magnitude, or even greater than the voltage that determines the capacitance, the system no longer functions.
Please tell me, the so-called varicondas, I don't know how it will be in English, is it possible to find it in your country?
I have a lot of all kinds of radio components from all over the world, but there is not a single one like this.
In the last century there were quite a lot of them, now such radio components have become extremely rare.
Hi Chief,
This appears to be just the Russian name for a variable capacitor/ varactor/ varicap.
Here's a Russian patent where the term is used, and refers to a variety of different varactors as varicondas...
https://patents.google.com/patent/RU2550090C2/en
I spent a good amount of time reviewing many parametric amplifier patents over the last week, and couldn't eliminate the possibility of excess energy operation.
It's certain that the reverse bias on the varactor does charge it as a capacitor by displacement current, and this charge is mixed with the signal at the initial stage.
And it's also certain that this charge is then carefully isolated from the signal, usually by dissipation in a tank circuit at the pump frequency. The charge used to change the C is not added to the signal but is wasted. Designers were very careful not to let this the pump energy enter the signal path, since their focus was on lowest noise and distortion possible.
You can see an example of this in the attached patent, which is simpler than most designs. In Fig. 1, the pump energy is sent into the varactor circuit by winding 18 and circulates in loop 1 containing the varactors, not passing beyond node B into the signal tank 10. The pump energy is dissipated in loop 1.
In theory it would be possible to reuse some of the pump energy by reducing extraneous resistance in loop 1 and the pump circuit (for instance resistor 16), paralleling varactors, or more radically, somehow making sure the varactors never see a forward bias, which is the main loss in loop 1. Then possibly putting a useful load in this loop.
If the pump signal is at twice the frequency of the signal tank 10, then the amplifier becomes a 'degenerate' oscillator, and the signal source can be eliminated and inductors 6a and 6b simplified. Spontaneous oscillations will then form in 10 if the load at node 14 is correct.
Then the question becomes, how much power can the varactors provide at node 14 ? This has a lot to do with the C ratio of the varactors. All previous experiments have been done with varactors with C ratio of .5- 2.5, the range usually used by the parametric amplifier designers-- but the hyperabrupt tuning varactors can have C ratios of as much as 22, over a bias V of for instance 15-30 V. These type are never used in amplifiers because the signal will of course be highly distorted, but this doesn't matter if we're just trying to get as much power as possible.
The experiments that Roberto Notte and I did using another patent (from Gunn) did appear to generate excess energy, although it didn't get self running due to some impedance issues. That circuit used varactors with a C ratio of 2.5.
Fred
Quote from: Orthofield on 2022.12.26, 15:44:47
This appears to be just the Russian name for a variable capacitor/ varactor/ varicap.
A varicap is usually just a semiconductor diode specially adapted for this purpose.
This capacitor is a capacitor with a special ferroelectric dielectric.
They have really become extremely rare radio components now. :-\
Hi Chief,
Yes, it's an older type of varactor used in what were called 'reactance amplifiers'. Not based on the depletion layer of a pnp junction, but also requiring much more power to operate, and operating at lower frequency, and much more susceptible to temperature and vibration. There's also been some work done with similar things as a thermodielectric energy harvester. This usage has been known since the 1950s.
https://www.overunityresearch.com/index.php?topic=3453.0
Fred
Quote from: Orthofield on 2022.12.26, 19:17:49
There's also been some work done with similar things as a thermodielectric energy harvester. This usage has been known since the 1950s.
https://www.overunityresearch.com/index.php?topic=3453.0
Fred
Hi.
By the way, using the heat of the environment is a really working way.
Convert heat into electricity by taking away from the medium at the moments when the ferrocapacitor cools down.
And it doesn't contradict official science. only that engineering and technical difficult to implement.
At high frequencies. Thermal inertia is a slow thing.
Hi Chief,
Yes, it works for sure. It's a very general principle of an L or C change due to some effect of the environment. There are all kinds of different versions, both L and C, using heat, pressure, sunlight, etc.-- but most are low power because of the slow change of parameter.
Light is easiest to use with a PV cell or photodiode whose C changes with light intensity, but you have to chop the light for best results.
It should be possible to generate power from the varying E field of the Earth. At around 300 V per vertical meter, there's plenty of voltage to vary the C of a varicap array. The variations happen over a wide frequency range...
Fred
Quote from: Orthofield on 2022.12.27, 11:02:59
but most are low power because of the slow change of parameter.
Unfortunately that's the way it is... :'(
Quote from: chief kolbacict on 2022.12.23, 19:21:04
Please tell me, the so-called varicondas, I don't know how it will be in English, is it possible to find it in your country?
I have a lot of all kinds of radio components from all over the world, but there is not a single one like this.
In the last century there were quite a lot of them, now such radio components have become extremely rare.
Hi Chief,
Do you have a datasheet?
The four-legged component is very strange, I have never come across one in the devices I have collected here and there.
While searching on this subject, I came across this video where a guy talks about this component. But without a translation, it's impossible for me to understand what it's about:
https://www.chipdip.ru/video/id000289209 (at 0:48)
Hi F6FLT,
Naudin included a data sheet here: http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/varicond.htm (http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/varicond.htm) http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/polcurves.htm (http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/polcurves.htm)
and see another data sheet from this site: http://www.155la3.ru/datafiles/vk2_vk4.pdf (http://www.155la3.ru/datafiles/vk2_vk4.pdf)
Some more pieces of information from here: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B4 (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B4)
A varicond (vari(able) - variable and cond(enser) - capacitor is an electrical capacitor, the capacity of which varies non-linearly within a wide range depending on the voltage applied to its plates.
Variconds use special ceramics that have the properties of a ferroelectric or paraelectric material as an insulator. The dielectric permittivity of such material changes significantly with variations in the strength of the electric
field in which it is located. As the voltage increases, the dielectric constant (and therefore the capacitance of the capacitor) rises to a certain value and then decreases. Variconds are available in capacitance ratings from 10 pF to tenths of a microfarad. The capacitance of variconds can be varied by a factor of 4 to 8. Variconds are used in AC and DC amplifiers, frequency multipliers, voltage regulators and other devices.
The advantages of variconds - high mechanical strength and moisture resistance. The disadvantages are unstable capacity, limited operating frequency and temperature range.
Some more details: https://ldsound-info.translate.goog/varikond/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl (https://ldsound-info.translate.goog/varikond/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl)
The inventor turns out from here: http://alexfrolov.narod.ru/varicond.htm (http://alexfrolov.narod.ru/varicond.htm)
Gyula
Hello.
And for what, in fact, no one explains the four conclusions.
Vervitskaya says about it, they uses an additional two outputs to change the permeability of the capacitor.
But this is for high-frequency capacitors of small capacity. 0.22 microfarads is not suitable here.
So I don't know.My guess is that the two pins are connected in parallel.
Hi Gyula,
Thank you for the documentation, it is now clearer.
However I don't understand why 4 electrodes, and how they are used.
A varicond being a simple nonlinear capacitor, two electrodes should be enough. Should we understand that the electrodes are connected together two by two or that we have a double varicond or what else possible? Any idea?
Quote from: F6FLT on 2023.01.03, 10:23:16
Should we understand that the electrodes are connected together two by two
That's exactly what it is.
They explained to me today.
On variconds, you can actually make a perpetual motion machine based on the absorption of heat from the environment.
But it will be just a toy with no practical application.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRjGm9G4ivc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRjGm9G4ivc)
Like my "Lazarev kolcar", which works, but there is no practical use. C.C
My understanding from the links is that 1 wire pair serves for DC bias to vary the EM field inside the dielectric material and the changing capacitance
can be utilized between the other wire pair. (So I suppose that the four wires are electrically isolated from each other.)
I base this on this quote from the wiki link I gave:
The dielectric permittivity of such material changes significantly with variations in the strength of the electric field in which it is located. As the voltage increases, the dielectric constant (and therefore the capacitance of the capacitor) rises to a certain value and then decreases.
These devices were intended for low frequency operation.
(I have not used such devices.)
What Frolov wrote about it back in 1995 http://alexfrolov.narod.ru/varicond.htm (http://alexfrolov.narod.ru/varicond.htm) has not been proven, at least I am not aware of reliable test reports.
Gyula
It's a pity,that i have not this component. I could answered you exactly. Using conventional tester.
Although a huge of stuff came through my hands. It's really rare component. :(
Quote from: gyula on 2023.01.03, 21:31:54
My understanding from the links is that 1 wire pair serves for DC bias to vary the EM field inside the dielectric material and the changing capacitance
can be utilized between the other wire pair. (So I suppose that the four wires are electrically isolated from each other.)
I base this on this quote from the wiki link I gave:
The dielectric permittivity of such material changes significantly with variations in the strength of the electric field in which it is located. As the voltage increases, the dielectric constant (and therefore the capacitance of the capacitor) rises to a certain value and then decreases.
...
It is still not clear. If the control voltage can be applied independently of the signal to be controlled, it is because it uses (at least) one additional electrode, and therefore the varicond is not just a capacitor.
Quote from: F6FLT on 2023.01.04, 13:12:07
If the control voltage can be applied independently of the signal
Yes, these two circuits are galvanically separated by direct current.
But these components were used in high frequency devices.
0.22uF cannot be used here. So it is written in Vervitskaya's book.
Quote from: chief kolbacict on 2022.12.13, 19:56:13
I don't know. Probably a fool...
I think there is another reason. It's the fear of being disappointed. I saw it with my own eyes, even ten years ago.
And the hope lives in the heart that it can work. And if you go back to that old device, and there is some simple explanation for the effect. Some kind of my own mistake. And the dream will be shattered.
Nevertheless, it must be done to put an end to this story.