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Author Topic: Parametrics, Noise coherence, and Switching  (Read 22531 times)
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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


   
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@Matt
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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 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


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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.


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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.

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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.


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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.


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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!


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


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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.
   
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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]
   
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Hi Smudge,
Whoops, forgot to attach the Black patent!

orthofield
   
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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.
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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
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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
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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.

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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?


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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.

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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

Quote
To 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.
« Last Edit: 2015-03-04, 15:18:51 by ION »


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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.

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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


 
   
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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)


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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 


   
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