Benches > orthofield
Parametrics, Noise coherence, and Switching
Orthofield:
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
Allcanadian:
@Matt
--- Quote ---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?
--- End quote ---
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
ion:
--- 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.
--- End quote ---
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.
Smudge:
--- 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?
--- End quote ---
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
Grumage:
--- 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
--- End quote ---
Dear Smudge.
Is this what TH Moray was up to ?
Cheers Grum.
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