hello my name is peter lindemann welcome to electric motor secrets i've been fascinated with electric
motors and generators for more than 30 years in that time i've studied this subject
extensively i've also built and tested hundreds of experimental models
but i'd like to share with you today are the findings of that 30-year study but before we go into the lab and hit
the books let me give you a little bit of history if you are under 40 years of age you
probably missed out on electric motor shop in college that's because in the 1970s most of the
major universities in the united states closed their motor labs to make room for the new computer
science departments since electric motor design had not changed in the last 50 years it was
reasonable to believe that it wouldn't change in the future so there's no longer any reason to give
new students hands-on experience with these machines when one semester of book study would suffice
but remarkably in the 1990s motor design did start changing again
big breakthroughs came on a number of fronts first the cost of the super powerful
neodymium iron boron permanent magnets dropped dramatically this made it possible to build motors
that were smaller and more powerful for their size next high-speed brushless electronic
commutation methods were developed and perfected this allowed the sparking commutator to be eliminated in all dc motor designs
even the idea of superconducting wires was revived so electric motor efficiency was on the
rise again today fractional horsepower dc electric motors are approaching 95 percent
efficiency this is a range of performance once left only to tesla's three-phase ac induction
motors above 50 horsepower these new motors are so small powerful
and lightweight that they have all but taken over in the model airplane field from the little gas engines
so what's left to do is there only one or two more percent efficiency left to ring out of these
designs before the electric motor reaches the pinnacle of its development actually the answer is no
tremendous improvements in electric motor performance have already been proved by a number of inventors
to bring you up to speed on these developments i'm going to focus on three main topics
these are one the true function of the back emf in electric motors
two alternatives to direct induction for the production of motor torque and 3
methods of recovering some of the electrical energy input to do this i have to lay a little bit of
boring groundwork so everyone can follow along so please bear with me if you know some
of this stuff already we'll get to the good stuff soon study of electric motor efficiency
requires the use of a dynamometer or something that can measure the mechanical energy output
for those of you who don't know the dynamometer is a calibrated breaking mechanism invented by a french
mathematician and engineer named gaspard duproni in 1821. even today
small dynamometers are still quite often referred to as a duproni break so let's go into the lab
build a dynamometer and use it to test an electric motor then we can see exactly what it does and
why here's how it's done if we want to understand how to measure
the efficiency of electric motors we have to be able to measure the mechanical output
for that we need a dynamometer now they don't build small dynamometers
for small motors so we have to build our own so what we're going to need is a wheel
of known circumference a leather strap two spring scales
a tachometer a volt meter an amp meter and a calculator
let's see what this looks like the first thing you need is a wheel of known circumference in this case we have
machined this one so it's exactly one foot in circumference
and you need to have it to have a hole and a set screw in there so you can attach it to your
motor and every time it turns around then we will have a calibrated
length or distance that it's traveled so the first thing you need is a wheel
the next thing you need is something to create a resistance against that wheel and in this case we have used a thin
strip of soft leather that and we've put a hole in each end of this so we can attach our spring scales to it
so the next thing you need is a small piece of soft leather
the next thing you need are two spring scales and these are calibrated small sprite
calibrated spring scales that you can buy at edmond scientific or a number of other different kind of scientific
supply stores and these are adjustable so that you can get these to be relatively accurate so
you need two spring scales the next thing you need is a tachometer
something that's going to measure how fast your motor is turning when you take the measurements of the resistance to
turning it so you're going to need a tachometer you will also need to
measure the volts and amps going into the motor so we can
understand how much electricity we are using to drive the motor so this will
measure our inputs so you need a voltmeter and an amp meter
and finally you'll need a calculator something that we can take all of these numbers that we have
taken and run them through an algebraic equation to determine the efficiency of the motor
so again this is what you'll need a wheel of known circumference
a piece of leather two spring scales a tachometer a volt meter and an amp meter
and a calculator and from these we can build our own dynamometer
okay here we are with our setups we have the power supply
driving the motor with our wheel attached and we're going to
run the dyno test now what we're going to have to do to do this is we're going to have to take four
measurements simultaneously we're going to have to read the bolts and the current
while we also read the rpm and the deflection on
the spring scales so here let me show you as we do this
what this is going to look like got the spring scales here
i'm going to wrap the spring scales around here and what's happening is is that you can see maybe you can see
maybe you can't see but that the
the one in the back deflects down whereas the other one is relieved because it's it's turning in that
direction so the front scale is still sitting at zero but the back scale is is
reading about 600 grams deflection and as you can see it slows down and the
current draw rises so you can get an idea of what's happening here you can tell
the motor slowing down because the sound changes you can see that the
current rises so we're going to take all of these
measurements simultaneously get an idea of the efficiency of the motor
so here's another shot of the dyno test showing that there's
almost no deflection on the front spring and about 700 grams on the back you can
see how much it's pulled the back spring down and how much it's relieving this one it's still sitting basically at zero
okay so let's take some measurements and see what we get
we'll put the strap with the spring scales on
and you can see where i've got them i'm holding them both with one hand
and i've got the tachometer here and i'm going to shine my spot on here
i'm going to bring the current up to 7 amps right like that
and there's my readings
1864 about 1868 i have a deflection on the scales of 700
grams and there's my readings before my strap gets too hot
like so you have to take all four
measurements simultaneously and now we can calculate
okay so here are the measurements we saw on the bench our input was
12.1 volts at 7 amps and that comes to a total of
84.7 watts input we know that 1 horsepower is 746 watts
so when we divide our our measurement here 84.7 watts by
746 watts per horsepower we get uh that our electrical input was the
equivalent of 0.1135 horsepower our outputs were measured as
1864 rpm and 700 grams of deflection on our
spring scales now the first thing we have to do is convert these two quantities to what we
need and we're going to measure the horsepower mechanically in foot pounds per second so we have to first convert the rpm into
feet per second so we know that our wheel is one foot in circumference so
one revolution equals one foot so uh rpm is revolutions per minute so
if we divide that by 60 seconds per minute we get revolutions per second and for our wheel
revolutions per second equals feet per second so we can take our rpm 1864 divide by 60
and get 31.06 feet per second the second thing we must
do is convert grams into pounds one pound equals 454 grams
we measured 700 grams so when we divide that by 454 grams per pound we get
1.54 pounds so continuing we take our
31.06 feet per second multiply that times 1.54 pounds and we get our total
mechanical measured output at 47.88 foot-pounds per second
so we know that one horsepower equals 550 foot-pounds per second so when we
divide this we get our total measured mechanical output at .087
horsepower efficiency equals output divided by input so here are our outputs and inputs and
when we divide these quantities we get this fraction 0.767
we multiply that times 100 so we get our measured efficiency of 76.7 percent
not bad for a one-tenth horsepower motor test
okay you just saw me demonstrate the dynamometer test you may have noticed it is pretty hard
to take all four measurements simultaneously by hand obviously i could have gotten a more
accurate measurement if the spring scales were hanging from a fixed bracket with a preset tension
then it would be simple to speed the motor up to the point where the front spring scale read zero and all the tension was on the back spring scale
an rpm reading could be taken with a tachometer at this point with all the values remaining stable for
accurate recording but right now i'm just trying to demonstrate the fundamental effects so
precision measuring is not absolutely required if you were watching closely you might
have thought that the current reading was slightly higher than 7 amps but for our purposes the numbers i'm
using are adequate and our calculations are pretty close so let's go back into the lab and
explore some more of the other behaviors of our direct induction electric motor
okay in this experiment we have this power supply dialing up just with a half a volt and a little over a half an amp
and all i'm trying to do is show the polarity
of the applied voltages and the speed and the generating and the motoring action so we can clearly see
that this motor is turning in this direction when we apply the the
proper polarity to it based on its own wiring
schematic in other words it wants positive to the red wire and negative to the black wire
and it will turn in this direction i'm going to disconnect this
and i'm going to hook the meter up with the exact same polarities
and i hope you can see this this meter now i'm going to turn this in exactly
the same direction as we did when we hooked it to the power supply
and what you see is it looks like it's generating a voltage in the same polarity
you see that this is a positive value on the meter if i turn it in the opposite direction immediately the minus
sign comes up okay so what does this mean in other
words when i turn it in the same direction that it turns
it looks like it's generating a voltage that adds to it but the fact is
is now this is acting as the source and the negative is coming out the black
wire and the positive is coming out the red wire whereas when it was hooked up to
the power supply it was exactly the opposite the negative was going in the black wire
so actually what this shows is when it when i turn it
in the same direction it is actually generating in the
opposite it's generating the voltage in opposition
to it's trying to feed it back out whereas before we were feeding it back in
so i just want you to understand that when it turns in one direction it motors
but it generates in opposition to itself
this is another experimental setup that i've put together for this
educational video it consists of two identical permanent magnet dc
electric motors one of them will be run as a as an electric motor from our power supply
the other one will be run as an electric generator turned through this shaft coupler
here's our next setup we have the power supply again connected to
the small drive motor it's mechanically driving the second
drive motor to be run as a generator and then we'll be looking at the the voltage generated by the second
motor on this meter here so i'm going to turn this on and we're going to use this
demonstration to explore the activities
going on inside these motors you saw in the other demonstration when
we did the dynamometer test
that when we mechanically loaded the motor to pull the to get our
measurements we noticed that the current reading went up now many people believe
who have not studied these things that that is caused by the back emf
actually that is not what's happening and to understand
what the back emf is doing in these motors and generators i've set up this little demonstration
what i'm going to do is i'm going to dial up enough voltage here to run this at 4
volts these are little 12 volt motors and i don't want to overload them so i'm
i'm turning this one as the motor and using
four volts and it's drawing about three amps so this total situation here is about 12 watts so low
amount and all i'm trying to do here is we're not trying to do any efficiency tests or anything else as far as
power production but i want to show you what the back emf is and how it works
now the reason you can't build a self-sustaining combination of a motor
and a generator using this type of equipment this is what's called
a direct induction machine it has a permanent magnet field and it works equally well as a motor and
is in a generator so here this one i'm using as a motor this one i'm using as a generator and i
want to show you what's going on inside this one it's working as a
generator in opposition to its motoring activity
and this is what is called the back emf in other words depending on how fast
it's going it's generating a voltage and we can see that by just running this one we're not
drawing any power out of it so we're not creating any load but we just want to look at the voltage that it's generating
i have these two directly coupled and they're the same exact style of motor so we can be pretty sure that if this one
is generating a minus 3.18 volts at this speed so this one is also
producing 3.18 volts inside of the armature
that is in opposition to the four volts that we are applying
this both of these machines generate voltage in direct relationship to the speed so
you can see on this meter which is now creeping up to as it as the bearings warm up and it's
able to get a turn a little bit faster we can see that the generated voltage is rising slightly
that's because the speed is rising slightly for the same amount of applied energy
so that's typical of these types of motors
now what i want to show you is exactly what causes these effects to happen
many people believe that when you load the motor
the mechanical drag is what causes it to draw more energy
but actually what's happening is is that as you load the motor it's
turning slower as it turns slower it generates less reverse voltage
and it then draws more current because the resistance that it's going through
with less reverse voltage simply draws more current
many of you haven't studied these things and here's a perfectly good book called basic
electricity this was developed by the navy to teach new recruits
the the new science of electricity and electronics in the 1950s
in in the back of this book there's a section on electric motors and here
is the page where they talk about counter electromotive force
and you can see in this diagram here here's a north pole here's a south pole and you have a winding that goes through
it and the diagram shows basically you have the resistance of the armature winding
and the counter emf is shown as a battery something that can generate a voltage in
opposition to the applied voltage so you can see through the commutator
brushes so you can see that as this turns faster and faster this
applied volt this counter emf is generated which which opposes the
applied voltage this is what causes the current to drop
through the fixed resistance of the armature winding so actually
the counter emf or the back emf in a motor like this is actually what
causes the current to drop to its lowest possible
value when the motor is unloaded so it's the back emf that causes
the motor to have a very very low idle current
when it's unloaded as it's loaded it slows down
generates less back emf and
draws more current which makes the motor stronger this is a wonderful setup
because it makes these motors it makes them self-regulating notice if i slow it down
at all it starts drawing more current over here i've got it up to four
four amps here and you can see that the amount of voltage at this speed that it's generating is down to 2.85
but i let it go back up to speed and it generates more
if i slow it down at all it generates less counter voltage and draws more current
so this is how these motors work this is how the back emf works
in the motor mode
so this is completely understandable and it's standard right out of the books as
we as i showed in the section from basic electro electricity
now by calling this back emf it tends to obscure what it is
and what i want you to see is is that the back emf when this thing is driving as a motor
the back emf is really just the reverse direction
generated voltage back emf emf stands for electromotive
force so really what the back emf here is the reverse direction generated voltage
okay and you can see it the reverse direction generated voltage and this is
created simply because of the speed that this thing runs this thing is turning as a motor because
current is moving through it but it will generate the reverse voltage
simply because it's turning at a particular speed now when we turn this around
let's look at the generator size if we ask this right now there's no there's no real
current moving in this we're just looking at the voltage that's generated but now if we actually ask it to
generate some current okay i'm going to ask it to light up this little light bulb a little bit
you can see that it draws more current here and you can hear it slow down
you can hear the tone change okay
and as it slows down it generates less reverse voltage
do you understand so here now the current is moving in it it's starting to motor
it's starting to motor against itself in the opposite direction so when the machine is running as a generator
we'll call the back emf the reverse direction motor torque
when it's running as a motor we will call the back emf the reverse direction
generated voltage so what you can see now is
that this is exactly the same machine and you can bias
which effect you're looking for if you actually force current through it like
from our power supply it motors ahead and the and the motoring effect gets ahead of the
reverse generation in this situation where we're mechanically forcing it to turn
the generation effects get ahead of the reverse motoring effects and therefore
it will push electricity out of the system to light external loads but both effects are happening in both
machines simultaneously so now let's go back to the book
and take a look at the symbolic representation of what we just saw on the bench
here in our diagram it says the illustration represents
the back emf as a battery opposing the applied voltage with the total armature resistance shown
symbolically as a single resistor so this is this is a symbolic
representation so that we can understand the functions going on in the circuit and in fact this is the exact physical
arrangement of our test motor we have a permanent magnet field
on both sides of a current carrying conductor that happens to be in the slots of the
armature we have commutator sections here with brushes going out to our dc voltage supply
and as this thing spins faster and faster and faster in the field this value of the back emf or what they're
calling the counter emf becomes a larger and larger value
which opposes the input voltage and so what we see is that the
the resistance of the armature winding which may represent an r motor maybe 20 20 feet of
of magnet wire between the commutator sections that represents a very very
small resistance and so this it represents both the
resistance of the armature coil wire and the brushes so
this uh value is rising and so the motor regulates up to a
a top speed now let's take a look at what the book
says about this situation so here is a blow up of the paragraph
that is directly underneath this diagram that i just showed you and here's what it says
what actually moves the armature current through the armature coils is the difference between the voltage
applied to the motor minus the counter emf thus the applied voltage minus the back
emf is the actual voltage effective in the armature
and it is this effective voltage which determines the value of the armature
current since generally i equals e divided by r from ohm's law
in the case of the dc motor the applied current is equal to the
applied voltage minus the back emf over the armature resistance
also since according to kirchhoff's second law the sum of the voltage drops around any
closed circuit must equal the sum of the applied voltages
now i must admit that i agree with absolutely everything this says
so this is how this motor works
now let's take a look at another analogy
so here is our simple back emf analogy and this is set up very similarly to
what we saw from the book basic electricity
what we see is we have an applied voltage and in this case we're just going to say these two six volt
batteries give us a 12 volt supply so that's our applied voltage
and what we're going to do to simulate our back emf is we're just going to take another 6 volt battery here and put it
in opposition to the first battery so that they have a negative common ground
and so what we see is is that this point in the circuit is plus six volts
potential and this position is plus 12 volts potential
and then we have our little load device in this case it's a resistor with a little bit of light coming out of it so
we're going to call this a little six volt light bulb and then here we have an amp meter
with a zero to six amp scale and it's just on the first notch here so we're going to say that there's one ampere
moving in this circle so by what we just read in the book the
applied voltage minus the back emf gives us our effective voltage so we can
see very obviously that there's six volts running this and since there's one amp here by ohm's
law we can calculate that the resistance here is 1 6 of an ohm
so what we see is is that this
thing here our little load is doing a number of things first of all
the voltage here is the difference between the applied voltage and the back emf
and the resistance here uh in relationship to this effective
voltage here is what determines the amount of current running in the system so this the resistance here is
the regulator in the system so we can clearly see now that we have
all the values we see 1 ampere we see 1 6 of an ohm we see 6 volts
on the load we see 6 volts back emf we can clearly see that there are 12 watts
moving through the system 12 volts times 1 ampere and 6 watts of energy are dissipated
here at our load and six watts are represented here now
if this is a real battery what's happening is that this this six watts here is actually charging
this battery it's in opposition to the discharging battery so obviously this six watts represents
six uh six watts of charging potential for energy being stored at a
rate of one ampere so this regulates the charge rate of our
battery here so let's now go back to our
motor analogy and see how all of these things fit in
okay so here is our back emf analogy
again and i've used almost the exact same drawing except now i've plugged in the values that we saw
from our back emf demonstration and the motors where we clearly saw that our applied voltage was four
four volts right on the power supply meter and our current running in the system was three amps
again on the power supply meter and here the back emf we saw on the
the yellow meter which was the voltage being generated by the second little motor
it was turning at the same speed as our primary driving motor
so we have all of these quantities by measurement we have this on the meter this on the meter and this on the meter
so we can solve for the other two things and so we can clearly see by the book that our applied voltage
minus our back emf creates our effective voltage so we can clearly see that 0.8
volts was the effective voltage on the armature and now since we have 0.8 volts
and and the current we can solve for this quantity
so again using ohm's law we can see that the resistance is going to be
equal to the voltage divided by the current so 0.8 divided by 3
gives us a resistance here of 0.26 ohms
now um this is where the books stop
and um there are two fundamental corollaries here which are
never mentioned in the book so this is the first big secret
about back emf and that is that you saw in our
light bulb analogy that i just showed that we can figure out how much energy
is dissipated here at this section simply by multiplying this
times our current and so what that means is is that the energy
dissipated in our armature winding is 0.8 volts times 3
amps or 2.4 watts
secondly we can look back here at the back emf and we see that it is 3.2 volts
but in this case this is just a a voltage on the winding and there's no
storage mechanism involved with it so there's no way to store this energy in
opposition to our applied voltage so what this does what the back emf does here is it simply destroys
3.2 volts and the fact is is that only 0.8 volts
gets through the system so here's what we see we see
that 3.2 volts times the 3 amps or 9.6 watts of energy is destroyed
by the back emf and 2.4 watts of electricity is what
creates all of the mechanical energy that the motor puts out
that is the secret of this problem
that the back emf in this case is destroying eighty percent
of the energy that we are applying are four volts times 3 amps is 12 watts
9.6 watts is destroyed and 2.4 watts is what creates all of the
mechanical energy the motor puts out so
with this in mind let's go back to our
dynamometer test and see what this implication means about the efficiency of the motor
so here are some revised figures for our dynamometer test and as you can see here on the second line motor under load
these are the values that we saw it was 12.1 volts drawing 7 amps and it had slowed the
motor down to 1864 rpm now i went back
and actually looked at what the motor was doing when it was idling and it was drawing the same 12.1 volts
but it was only drawing 1.1 amperes and it was turning at 2235 rpm
so another in order to understand what kind of back emf the this motor might have been generating at our test speed
here i went back and actually just powered up the the motor in an unloaded
condition and just put in enough voltage to turn it at that speed and what it drew was 10
volts now we've seen in this motor because of the
the voltage drop on the carbon brushes and what little uh resistance there is
left on the armature windings but typically the back emf uh has been running
approximately a volt below the applied voltage
in unloaded conditions and it was even slightly higher than this in the smaller motors running at lower
voltages but i think it's fairly safe to say since i didn't have the complete setup to run
both motors and uh like motors of that type
but i think it's reasonable to believe that um at this speed
the back emf generated by this motor is approximately 9 volts
so the effective voltage running our motor under our load test was
by the book the applied voltage minus the vacuum f equals the effective voltage or 3.1
volts was what was driving our motor forward under our load test
and so this gives us also the beginning of an understanding of
the possibility of developing a coefficient of performance for these motors based on the function of the back
emf so if we look at our effective voltage which is what
motors the motor forward and divide that by our applied voltage which is the
what we actually have to spend to get it we can get a sense of what a cop is or a coefficient of performance of the motor
based on the back emf function and what we see is is that the cop of the motor
under this circumstance is .256
so we have to ask this question what is the real power driving our motor
during our load test because this gets back to what the efficiency really is
so if we look at the fact that what drove our motor forward was the difference between the
applied voltage and the back emf so that's our effective voltage times our current that was drawn at the time
so there's reason to believe that what drove our motor forward under our load test was
21.7 watts of course we had to put in 84.7 watts to get it
but this is what drove the motor forward now if we look at
uh converting that again to horsepower 21.7 watts divided by 4 746
so our real input was 0.029 horsepower if we plug that into our efficiency
equation what we come up with is that the motor is actually 300 percent
uh efficient at providing mechanical energy production from
effective input so and this is by the book
so if we look at the real efficiency which is 300
and we multiply that back by the effect of our co the effect of our back emf
which is this the .256 cop then we come right back to
the original number that we calculated during the first calculation of our
dynamometer test which is 76.7 percent efficiency
so there is at least reason to believe not only in the numbers but on the bench
that we must draw this conclusion that the back emf in the system masks the excellent
performance of the motor and is actually in the process of hiding it behind a very low cop
now this also leads to a clear understanding of exactly why most dynamometer tests for
induction motors of this type it is recommended that you slow the motor down to one half of its idle speed
to take the measurement and now we can see why this is such a good idea because it
raises the cop to about twice what we we saw here in other words if the back emf
is dropped by 50 then we can get a lot more effective
power creating mechanical energy and uh with the cop up to 0.5
then these numbers can quite often you know get up into the upper 80s and
maybe even low 90s for a little motor like this it's not uncommon
so here we have a very interesting situation
which tells us something very important about the back emf and what its function is
in the motor okay now before we get all goofy and think
that off-the-shelf electric motors are producing 300 efficiency
let's get away from our analogies and our symbologies and our representations and get back to the back
emf reality and the reality is um and i've i've got this drawing here
set up uh to have the values that we just saw in
the dynamometer test again so we have an applied voltage here of
12.1 volts our amp meter now is reading 7 amps
and here's our little brush commutator sections and here is our inductor
and we can see that both the forward and the backward emfs
are distributed evenly throughout the inductor so
these aren't a series event as we saw in the analogy drawings
so in the analogy drawings it was obvious that we that these were separate events
but here they are concurrent events in the machine
and so they can't be separated because they're actually happening on the same component in other
words when current moves through this winding in the magnetic field
it produces a mechanical action which motors the motor forward
when that happens it actually starts moving these coils through the magnetic field
and that generates that generating action generates our back voltage
so what we see is is that both the motoring
and the generating effects look like mirror images of each other
and they're quite often taught to be mirror images of each other
but actually they aren't they aren't mirror images of each other
and this is very important to see in fact they are actually reciprocals of
each other and we saw this on the bench we saw that when the
back emf was the highest the motoring effect was the weakest
it would have been the fastest but it was also the weakest so the mechanical
energy production was the weakest when the back generated voltage was the
highest as we started slowing the motor down the back emf dropped
and the motor torque rose into the load so the mechanical energy production
was getting stronger as the back emf
was getting smaller so you can see that they aren't mirror
images of each other they are reciprocals of each other
and this tells us that they are not the same thing they are happening in the same component
in the same location in the motor at the same time
and that is why they cannot be separated from each other in this configuration of motor
the only thing keeping them from being separated in this situation
is the geometry of the motor
so there's two things that i want to bring to your attention
the first is and this is an ordinary electric motor when we put electricity in
this applied mechanic or electrical voltage and electric current
do two things and that is they produce a mechanical energy manifestation out as torque on
the shaft and it generates electricity
it does two things it produces mechanical energy output and it produces
an electrical energy manifestation in this case the electricity is applied against our input
and subtracts from it now
the question is is it possible to create an electric motor
that takes advantage of all of these things in other words we put electricity in we're going to get mechanical energy out
and we're going to get electricity produced and is it possible to create a geometry of machine
that will allow this electricity to come out as a positive quantity
and not act against our applied voltage
and the answer is yes this is possible but we can't do it with this
geometry of machine we have to look for something else now this is a repulsion motor in other
words when current is applied to this this coil it creates a pushing action
against the magnetic field and it's very strong right in the middle of the field and it pushes its way out of the field
and what we're going to look at is the opposite situation we're going to look at
an attraction process because it's in the it's in the opposite process not not a
repulsion motor but we're going to look at an attraction motor and see if this won't allow us to
separate these effects and create a much more interesting
result this is the cover of
the 1940 edition of the boy electrician by alfred p morgan
and this book was a hands-on book for young boys who were learning about
the new science of electricity it is filled with a wide variety of
model building exercises and so on and what i wanted to do is i wanted to
show you a an electric motor from this book
so here are pages 308 and 309 from the boy electrician
and in on these pages it begins a project on how to build an electric
engine and what i'd like to do is i'd like to read to you from
this this page right here and i'll give you a blow-up shot of that next
so here's what it says an electric engine is really a form of electric motor but differs from the most
common form of motor in that the armature instead of revolving moves back
and forth like the piston of a steam or gasoline engine electric engines are not as efficient as
electric motors from the standpoint of the amount of power derived in proportion to the current used but
they make very interesting models various forms of electric engine were made before the first practical electric
motor was invented they amounted to little more than curiosities and could only be used where
the expense of electric current was not to be regarded
so let's take a close look at this dinosaur from the past and see if there aren't anything
isn't anything here that's usable
first of all we have a situation where we have two coils one here and one here and each
one of them has an iron core and then there is an iron keeper that
comes around this is a pivot point right here and this is an iron member and then this is of course
connected off to a crankshaft and that's connected to a flywheel and behind
the flywheel which is not shown is a small commutator which allows us to
turn these coils on and off at the right time so the way it works is this
is that when the iron member is as far away as possible from this coil this
coil would be turned on by the commutator and it would attract this iron bar over so that it would push on the crank and
turn the crank as soon as it got as close as it possibly could be to this one it would
shut off and then this one would turn on and attract it back so you get two power strokes per
um revolution and um it consists of a situation where there's
only one magnetic field on at any given time and it's simply attracting a piece of
iron and because this situation does not
have two magnetic fields which are interacting with each other this this situation does not generate any
current by induction so in that sense this little arrangement
as terrible as inefficient and as barbaric as it may seem does allow you to make a motoring mechanical
energy torque with no back emf so this is
at least the beginning of the understanding of the topology that we're looking for and that is we're just going
to turn one electromagnet on attract a piece of iron and turn it off
and let it move away then and that is the topology
of building a no back emf motor so let's look a little deeper into this and see
if we can't find anybody who has taken this beyond the toy stage
so here is a photograph of a model of an electromagnetic engine
that was designed and built in 1840 the full 100 years before the boy
electrician reported on it and this is essentially the same design as they showed it shows two u-shaped
uh electromagnets one behind and then there's a pivot
point here and a bar of iron going across and this is connected to a crank which is connected to a flywheel and
there's also a commutator system behind and so what happens is is that you can
see on the the bar on the back as soon as it's at the highest level like this
the back magnet would come on and attract that piece of iron down you can see they're using as a
small and as short a stroke as possible because what they early found out was that the magnetic field only produced
extremely strong forces at extremely close distance so one of the problems with this type of
arrangement was that when the
the the uh forces the magnetic forces pulling this
down were at their strongest uh you were basically at the top dead
center or bottom dead center of the crank which is the place on the crank where you had
the least uh efficiency of energy transfer in other words all of your
forces were being pulled pair are perpendicular to the shaft and they weren't being applied
tangential to the shaft you need forces that are going to apply force tangential to the the wheel to to
transfer the energy efficiently and so what you can see in this geometry here is that when the force
gets very strong uh it's really just creating a force that's pulling down on the shaft and not actually applying
rotational force and this has been the problem with these
systems from day one here's an early rotary design
by charles wheatstone the gentleman who figured out how to measure resistors using the wheatstone
bridge but here we have a
fixed ring of electromagnets and these are each stationary and then we have mounted on a shaft a ring of iron which
is mounted eccentrically as you can see it's closer to these than it is to these
and so what happens is that when it's just when the when the ring is just approaching like this this one here it
would turn this a magnet would turn on and it would rotate the ring around to the point
where it would be the closest again but again when when the gap was largest and the
forces were were attenuated dramatically because of the air gap you could get a fair tangential force to
draw it in but as soon as the forces started getting strong in here in other words when we
get to like this position here if this magnet was still on all it could do is if it just stayed on it would just come
around to this position and lock in place because all of the force then becomes radial
perpendicular to the shaft and again in spite of the fact that this doesn't have crankshafts and other things like
this it still suffers from the same problem that
you turn the magnet on when there's a huge air gap when the forces are the weakest and that's when you can get a
tangential force and as soon as the gap gets smaller and smaller and smaller and the force gets very very large what
happens is it rotates out from being tangential to being perpendicular
and so this motor had the same exact problems as the
uh linear um ones that were cranked off to a crankcase a crankshaft
well literally hundreds of topologies were tried and no one seemed to be able to figure
out how to [Music] make this type of situation work
here's a patent from 1885 and this
inventor has finally said okay this this effect is essentially a toy and so what we're going to do is we're going to just
put a dowel on a swing and with a little iron bar here and we're going to put a a
little bit of a a commutator up in the up in the top of the swing here
and so every time the uh the dowel gets very close to these we're
going to turn it on just for a very short brief moment and it will cause the dial to swing back and forth and back and forth and back
and forth and here is actually a working model of the original device
from 1885 and many many people came to this
conclusion and tried to take it no further
so there were a few uh intrepid inventors and motor designers that refused to give up on this
method of just attracting a piece of iron into a magnetic field
and here's a patent from 1920 showing three
electromagnets and basically this is an iron piece
which is slidable along this axis and then there's a crankshaft here and so this this begins
to show a topology which has been generally referred to as a solenoid engine
because basically what he's got here are three electric solenoids and and this is
the iron keeper in here and it goes all the way to here all the way past halfway down and around
and so what what he wants to do here because all of the lines of force are
going to be in here so he's concentrated the lines of force in a very very short range
and um and the there's a very very small air gap on
this edge here and so all it has to do is when this this coil turns on this iron piece is
drawn up into there to complete the magnetic circuit and to
displace the air now again you can see uh when the the
iron piece is all the way extended as it is in this situation
uh the the force at the end of this stroke should be fairly considerable and uh since since one of these is going
to be um pulling all the time at least one of them will
be pulling all the time this this motor probably had a fair amount of mechanical energy
and so there were ways of starting to work with these ideas
that people continued to work with throughout this entire period
so here we have another patent from 1936 and here we see the radio
solenoid engine taken to its maximum development
and so here we have actually 12 solenoids all the way around and these
so this is the the master cylinder and master crank and then all of the slaves on that
radial section are attached to it and we can see from the
commutator symbology here that he has about three of these solenoids pulling
at any given time so approximately uh one quarter of the
cylinders are pulling uh all the time and uh the others are resetting
and actually if i uh go out a little bit you can see in the
bottom here that he's actually planning to have uh three rows of of this radial
arrangement at 120 degree offsets which you can see here in the
crank so here's the main crank for the one that we're looking at but then there's a main crank for the next row
and a main crank for the next row and so what we're looking at here is obviously
not a toy design this is designed for the production of
real power and so it proves that not everybody had
relegated the the idea of the magnetic attraction engine or in this case the electric
solenoid engine uh to obscurity uh there were people who
believed that this held a promise that other motor designs didn't hold
and people worked on it throughout this entire period
now i probably never would have taken the electric solenoid engine seriously had i
not run into this van this is the work of
benjamin robert thiel generally known as bob teal and this this patent was issued in 1978
again looks like a a the kind of radial design that we've
seen in the earlier models and he's got a a master uh piston here and three slaves
and he actually has two of these next to each other so this becomes a an eight cylinder engine and um
but unlike the other um motors
the claims that were made for this motor were really really quite extraordinary and what i'd like to do is show you some
of that right now now here's a close-up shot of bob teal
in 19 in mid-1970s in front of one of his eight-cylinder
radial uh solenoid engines electric solenoid engines which he
called the magnapulsion engine and let me just this is the cover
of a piece of company literature from his company called the magnateel industries
and on the bottom here he has this quote from voltaire and it says
there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come
so let's go into the company literature of
the magnateal industries incorporated and find out about bob thiel's magna
pulsion engine what he calls tomorrow's energy today
now one section of this document from magneteel industries is
presented as a question and answer session and so what i would like to do is
pull a few brief excerpts from this section of the document
and bring them to your attention and the first question here in this section is what is the
magnapulsion engine and the answer is an engine that is motivated by electromagnets
which serve in a manner similar to pistons in an internal combustion engine
it receives its initial power from a car battery there is a continuous charge of energy
without any supplementary source other than the battery
the capabilities of the magnapulsion engine are relatively unlimited
we know it can power automobiles air conditioners home power plants
machinery or anything which utilizes fossil fuels or electric motor drives
and here's question two why hasn't this inexpensive practical and powerful energy concept been
discovered before this the answer is the field of magnetics
has not been explored comprehensively by the scientific community
what has been done in this field before the arrival of the magnapulsion engine
has been spasmodic to the inventor of magnapulsion these
forerunners missed the mark considerably by not harnessing the principles now
patented in the magnapulsion engine
so here we have direct statements which basically say
that he seems to have found the secret the way of getting the power out of this
arrangement of just attracting a piece of iron into an electric coil
he is claiming to have figured it out and he's also claiming
that the amount of energy that comes out of it will not only run the motor but
apparently keep the initial battery charged so
let's see what else bob teal says
and here question number seven how does magnapulsion compare to current
standard engine concepts the magnapulsion engine may be described
as superior to any other engine concept known to the inventor
including the present internal combustion engine and electrical engines
and again here is question 15. can i bring my engineers to discuss
business with your company the answer is yes
prospective buyers and their engineering staff are welcome
but they must be prepared to see and learn of a new and revolutionary
discovery which some in the scientific community consider contrary to
established laws of physics and or electrodynamics
and here is question 24. what is the main difference between
magnapulsion and other engines which use electricity to power machinery etc
the answer unlike electrical motors which take a continuous supply of
electric power the magnapulsion engine runs continuously on relatively minute
quantities of pulsating current
here's a couple pictures of some of the working models
and then questions 29 30 and 31. the engine emit any pollution
no the engine is pollution free is there any noise to the engine when in
operation negligible and here's the big bad heresy
is there any reason to believe that the magnapulsion engine is incapable of
taking over for the internal combustion engine and present electrically powered motors
and here's the answer the principle proving the utilization of
energy from magnets has been fully and completely proven in our shop
magnapulsion is convertible into relatively unlimited horsepower
and therefore can be used wherever these other power sources are currently
used so here are some photographs of some
of the working models this was one of the original four-cylinder units from his first
patent here is uh an eight cylinder unit
from the second patent and so on let me just give you a quick close-up
here of some of these models
so he had multiple working models of a very extraordinary
a magnetic attraction solenoid engine
so here is the diagram from his second patent showing the
four cylinder radial construction and so we see that he has
four electric solenoids and um this is the master
uh piston here and the master crank and so the other slaves are connected to
it and what we see is that when the the crankshaft is at top uh
top dead center uh the the movable plunger is uh completely inside the coil
and then uh when the um
crank is at bottom dead center which is what it is for this one it looks like the movable plunger is approximately 50
percent withdrawn from the system so to see what it would
do okay here's an example of the kind of
motor we just saw from the boy electrician this is a
a magnetic attraction motor and in the form of we have a coil here that has four windings on it and as you
can see i can stick my finger down here it has a hollow core and um underneath here this is a piece
of iron and it's attached to this crankshaft and what happens is you turn the
coil on and it draws the mag the the magnetic field in here draws the piece
of iron up up to it and then the commutator on the back turns it off
and then the iron can fall out unopposed
so that's the motoring cycle so the coil turns on here it sucks it up turns
off here and it lets it drop out electrically when the coil turns on it draws power from the power supply and
when it turns off the circuit allows the discharge of the magnetic field to create an inductive
collapse and that energy is siphoned back through a secondary circuit to
charge this battery in the back so we can not only create we can take electricity from here create
mechanical energy here and get electricity back over here and that all we have to do is stagger these events in
time to uh so that they don't oppose each other at any given time
so let's uh see how it works
so i've got the power supply dialed up to about 12 volts and you can see that
the current is is jumping around because this samples faster than this is turning on and off well you can see that we've
already pushed our battery up from where it was before and it continues to climb
now the amount of energy that this this draws
is specifically related just to the resistance of the wire in the coil and the duty cycle of the commutator
so no matter how fast or slow this turns it's going to draw exactly the same amount of energy
now there's a number of things that determine how much mechanical force is
produced and primarily it has to do with the efficiency of the magnetic circuit right now this is in its absolutely
worst condition because uh the magnetic field is wide open to the environment so it's but it
still is enough to draw the piece of iron here now what we've done is we've
uh built this little iron keeper here this is just to get it um we can put
this directly around the coil and this is just uh some plastic pieces that we
filled up with iron filings and glued together so we can
stick this down here and start folding this magnetic field down around itself so we can get a
better magnetic circuit going this is just a piece of
junk that we pulled off the shelf but it has some iron here and as soon as i put this on the top i really start folding
this magnetic field down you can see that it speeds way up now
what this means is is that the coil is turning off more often
many more times per second the faster this goes the more times the coil turns off per second and so it
charges the battery faster even though we're still not drawing anymore from over here and now you can
see that at this speed we can see that the current has really settled down to about 2.3 2.4
amperes and that's what the system draws
to uh to run the motor now what i'd like to do is
and we're pushing the battery up to 13 volts now this battery is fairly well
charged so it's it's not too difficult to push it up here because this battery is almost
fully charged as it is but this illustrates the point now the other thing i want to show you
is you can see that the current basically is centering right around
2.3 and if i if i raise the voltage just a little bit and make it go a little bit faster
then we can get it to stabilize at say about 2.3 2.4 and so that's where
the current is now we saw with the other motors a minute that i would try and
slow this down at all then it would it it would
the current that it was drawing would jump up completely but now on this motor if i try if i slow
it down you see that the number doesn't just go up it also goes down so
it's still jumping in the same range and again we're into that sampling problem again but basically what happens
is is that the duty cycle of the resistance of the
the resistance of the coil stays the same and the duty cycle of the commutator stays the same because
it's on the same amount of time same percentage of time whether it's going fast or slow
so the total amount of current is is determined by those two factors and those two factors alone and not in
relationship to what the mechanical load is so here we have a much more interesting
motor that shows the principles that i was talking about when we were looking at the standard motors
here we have a way of taking electricity creating a motor tour
and getting some of the electricity back with in a way that doesn't generate electricity against itself and cause a
reverse motoring effect that slows the motor down or makes
the motor draw more current when we mechanically load it
now what i'm going to do next is i've got this little uh belt and i'm going to attach this belt to our flywheel over
here and attach it to this little permanent magnet dc generator over here
so i'm going to start driving this as a generator from our motor okay
and okay so i'm going to do that
okay and so i've got this at about 16. maybe i'll crank it up a little bit more
and what i want to show you i've got this running at about 17 volts
and as you can see the the current it's drawing is right around
3.3 but now what i can do is now see we're
turning it off and on so so often it's really starting to push this battery but now what i can do is i can ask this
generator to run a load
and as you can see it slows it down actually acts to do
work but the total amount of current that is drawn from the
power supply stays basically in the same range stays centered in the same range
so again it doesn't doesn't immediately jump to twice or anything else and so this this is a perfectly good
demonstration that shows that it is possible to build
an electric motor that creates mechanical energy
gives you the elect some of the electricity back and operates with no back emf in the sense
that as a motor it's only a motor
now the reason this doesn't draw more energy when it's
drawing a load is um that
one it doesn't act as a generator i can i can twist this all day and all night
and it doesn't generate anything okay generates over here but
this this process of moving an iron shaft in and out of a coil will never
generate any electricity so this is only an electric motor and it is not a generator in reverse
so the fact is is that the only thing determining how much
energy this device will draw is the resistance of the coil and the duty cycle of the
commutator it has nothing whatever to do with how much mechanical energy i can
harvest from here it's completely out of the equation okay
now this motor is not particularly efficient and one of the main reasons you could see that when i put this
the top around here it started going a lot faster without drawing any more electricity and shows you that
the amount of mechanical energy i can get out of this is really somewhat independent of the amount of
electricity that it draws now we're probably missing out on about 50
percent of the mechanical energy that this thing could produce because when we built this originally
you can see that we glued the coil directly down to this piece of plastic so there's no way to to finish
folding the magnetic field down around the bottom of the coil so that we can
really tightly wrap this magnetic field all the way around so that it's very very
efficient we could probably get 50 to 60 percent more mechanical energy out of this for
the exact same amount of electricity burned if we were able to do that with this model so again this shows a number
of very important aspects to this but again this particular model has problems
which can be corrected by an adjustment in the design
so here we have excellent evidence that the motors that we were looking at
originally the kind you can buy off the shelf and that they are behaving the way they're behaving
because of the geometry of the parts and this one clearly shows that
and in fact all motors and generators behave the way they behave because of the geometry of their component parts and
not because they're limited by some you know definite need to
follow the laws of thermodynamics or anything else each one of these devices is specifically
designed to behave in a particular window and that's what they do and they do that because of the geometry of the
materials as they were designed into the motor design itself
so here is a close-up of one of the sections of teal's
eight-cylinder solenoid engine and you can see that this has essentially the same construction of the
machine we just tested on the bench you can see it's sideways and ours was
vertical but that's a minor consideration so you saw that our moving member would move about 50 percent
outside of the coil at the downstroke and it was on a crank and
it would pull all the way up to the top and we saw a number of things
first of all we saw that of course it worked with no back emf in other words when we mechanically loaded it it didn't
draw more current or generate any uh energies against itself and we also saw
for the first time that the electricity part of the
event that could come back out of it was now not being reapplied against the
input but now because it was happening at a different time and under a different set of circumstances
then it could also be shunted forward by reversing the circuit with
some diodes and we could actually recover that energy for a use a second useful output
so so here is evidence that our initial
analysis of the back emf problem can actually be re-engineered and that
we saw that this machine had an electrical input but also had a
mechanical output and an electrical output both of which were working now
for the first time in the positive direction and none of these events were working against each other
one of the things we saw in our working model was that we could recover
some of the electrical energy and certainly if teal was recovering some of his electrical energy
then that would make his motor more efficient so let's take a look at the circuit
that he used to power this machine now we saw in the question and answer
period where teal says that he is running this engine on extremely short duration
current pulses so i wanted to show you the commutator section from
the first patent and this is figure six
these are the commutator wheels and he's using a very simple arrangement of
looks like just contactors and you can see if this is the wheel
here he's just got this little nub right here and it's going to push when it goes
by it's going to push on this this mechanical contactor and just make a very very short duration contact
to turn on his coils so this is the commutator section for
a one of the four cylinder systems and let's take a look at the full
circuit so here we see a blow up of
figure 5 which is essentially the circuit that he discloses that runs the
machine so like he says he runs from a a battery
and this uh device here is a rheostat something just to control the current it's got a little
amp meter here and then he shows uh you know four parallel arrangements
um and so the these coils would be the uh the solenoid the coils and the
solenoids and then this uh contactor here 61
is repeated here so here is the mechanical contactor he shows in each one of these things
and then there is a bypassing circuit around the commutator which looks like a standard
type of snubber type of arrangement consisting of a capacitor and a resistor
so this circuit um is obviously able to
do two things he can dial up as much current as he wants for the coils so he can throttle the
engine and um he can also basically uh suppress the sparking
that would normally show up at these contactors using these little snubbers
but beyond that it doesn't look like there's anything remarkable about this circuit and it it
doesn't appear that at first glance at least that there is any mechanism
to recover any of the energy from the collapsing inductors when they're turned off
so in order to understand this type of circuit a little bit better
let's dig up a little more history on this type of circuit
now here is a patent from 1974 and it was issued to roger andrews
and it's called novelty electric motor and this is the basis of many of the
very successfully marketed executive desktop novelties from the 1970s and 1980s
so what i'd like to do is give you a close-up of this very interesting circuit
so here is the cute little masterpiece of roger andrews
and this shows in the drawings figure one and figure six uh two of the most uh
successfully marketed versions of this toy and we can look at this one in
particular this consists of a plexiglas kind of rail like this and
this wheel has a number of magnets on it and a very small shaft and it will roll
back and forth and back and forth and this was very successfully marketed as an executive desktop novelty called
the space wheel and what i'd like to show you is this little circuit the one above
was presented as a little table that had a top that would spin on it and
what was novel about this is that you'd start spinning this you could start to spin
this top and it would spin for eight months uh on this little thing and it
looked like a perpetual motion machine almost uh it would just spin and spin and spin and spin spin
and um uh the circuit in and of course this would rock back and forth and rock back
and forth uh for literally seven or eight months on a battery and he was just using a nine
volt uh little radio um battery uh for to run these things and
essentially if we look in figure 1 we can see that
the circuit consists of a battery uh a single transistor and an inductor with a split winding and that's the
whole circuit and uh how this operates is this is that
there are magnets in the wheel or in the top this is the
version that has the top and the the table was slow sloped down and had a
low point here which was in a ring and then a slight rise in the center and
then rise out to the center to the other edge this was a circular table
and so the top was free to kind of move around anywhere but its preferred location would be right here in this low
dip and what that would do is it would put one of the magnets periodically right
over the the central inductor and what would happen is that when the
magnet would go by it would induce a small current in this coil
and that would place the proper inductive
polarity on this transistor and turn it on for a brief moment at which point uh current would be
conducted from the battery through the coil it would reverse the polarity of the
magnet magnetic field in in the inductor give a little bit of a kick to the
top to keep it spinning and then that reversal would also
reverse the conditions on the base of the transistor so that would turn the transistor off
so then the uh current would stop flowing and the magnetic field would collapse and uh generate a little bit of
a back pulse and of course with this transistor off there was really nowhere
for this energy to go the only other component
that it was connected to was the battery and so what would happen is
there was a fairly long relaxation time between pulses as far as duty cycle goes the the the on time for the duty cycle
of this was probably maybe five or ten percent and so there was a fairly long period between the the
back the back pulse and the next forward pulse when the transistor turned
on again when the magnet came around and
so let's take a look at the claims made for this very interesting design
now normally i would dissect a patent for extreme minutia but in this case
the opening sentence has everything we need to know and it says this invention relates to electric
motors and more particularly to a novelty electric motor which appears to
have no source of power now certainly
in a country where patenting a perpetual motion machine is essentially illegal
this is about as provocative a statement as any inventor
would dare make and the fact is is that
roger andrews makes this statement for one simple reason and that is
that when you do the math when you figure out how many amp hours of energy are in the battery and you
figure out how many pulses it it puts out from the inductor to drive the
the little top around the table for six to eight months what you find is is that the the toy
runs for somewhere between two and three times longer than it should in other
words it appears that something is being kicked back to the
battery because the battery just lasts a ridiculously long period of time
something that is way beyond anything that could be [Music]
understood so the other thing i'd like to show you is
this so here for figure 10 we see that this
is also a very very good circuit for driving a little pendulum so it's good for clocks and things like this but here
figure 11 figure 11. now all of a sudden this isn't a toy
he's showing that this can be made into a motor that can drive a generator and
all kinds of things and that this has
implications for power production that are really soft pedaled
in the patent now roger andrews simple circuit relates
to a family of circuits that are similar to it and one of the
most similar is the standard dc to dc step up converter we see that
it has a single inductor and a single transistor and
the the supply here could be a battery or or anything else but in this case instead of being
triggered by a magnet going by this is just triggered by some sort of a pulse train
and instead of trying to kick the energy back to the initiating battery what this is trying to do is actually build a
charge to a higher voltage over here so just
by setting the circuit up in this way with a single extra diode then
the voltage can be multiplied from our initiating source
so this is another very simple one transistor one inductor
circuit which has energy kickback similarities to roger andrews
now certainly no one has done more work on this simple little phenomena of charging an inductor getting a little
bit of motor torque out of it and re-capturing the
inductive collapse than john bedini this is the cover page of his 2003
patent for what he calls the monopole motor and let me show you that schematic right now
so here is the design of what john calls the
monopole motor and he calls it the monopole motor because on the wheel here that is the motoring member
only north pole magnets face outward and so this this inductor is only being
subjected to north pole magnets and the cells are kind of inside the wheel here and they never interact with the
inductor so here we sh we see that all of the functions are
separated and distinct so we can see the full action of this simple type of
arrangement that was at least partially embodied in roger andrews
executive desktop novelty we see a battery and we see a number of coils on the inductor
in this case there's three separate coils and they're all wound tightly together in what's called a tri-filer
winding it's a there's very tight induction between the windings
themselves we have a movable wheel here andrew's used either a top or a little
pendulum or something else but john says no this is just a wheel that has magnets on it and can be
looked upon as a motor and so what happens is that the magnet
will come by here and magnetize the core and when it starts leaving
what it does is it induces a signal in this trigger winding which turns this transistor on here
when that happens um the battery conducts current through the coil
through the transistor and back that same simple uh inductor transistor battery
arrangement and in this case it reverses the magnetism in in here and further kicks the magnet out
so in this sense it works just like andrew's silly little
novelty but now there's a whole provision here to
capture the energy when the magnet magnetic field in here shuts off and so
here we have a third coil connected across a full wave bridge rectifier to charge this little
capacitor the idea ultimately is to charge this battery and so when this capacitor
gets up to a certain voltage above the battery then a little um some sort of little timing mechanism this is shown as
a a commutator and brushes uh we'll drop the contents of the capacitor onto this battery so this
battery charges the motor motors and this battery runs the situation so
here we see the beginnings of an understanding of
what we thought might be possible when we saw
how an ordinary motor works in other words there's an electrical input there's a mechanical output but there's
also an electrical output and now here we see the topology where all of these
things are working as stated all in the forward direction
so that we can really understand these things very clearly
so here we have a simple diagram where we show all four of these ideas right next to each
other first uh over here we have roger andrews
simple little toy motor where a magnet comes by causes an induction turns on a
transistor and it produces a pulse back out and somehow some of this energy even though
there doesn't seem to be a current loop here when this is off some of this energy seems to be forced back into the
battery to make it last a very long time
down here we have the dc to dc converter and here we clearly show that the battery is is is charging and
discharging an inductor and we have some sort of little pulse train turning our transistor on and off and then the
current is all shunted over and charges this
capacitor here so again these these things um
are getting very very efficient uh you can buy little chips now that operated
in the 93 94 efficiency for little circuit boards and things for
dc to dc step up situations and this is a this is a boost converter
here we have john bedini's basic circuit this is the circuit that's been all over the internet for quite a long time
and um itch this is the what would be called the simplified schoolgirl motor
patent and again showing the very s extreme similarity to a simple dc to dc
converter got the battery charging an inductor turning on and off you've got a winding that shows some sort of feedback
mechanism when the mechanical trigger comes by and then instead of
uh having a common ground between the supply and the uh eventual
uh collected energy he shows a split situation so that
basically this this battery and this battery are not in parallel they're actually in series
and so what happens is is that this over here in the dc to dc converter
this draws power all the time so whether this is charging the inductor or discharging the
inductor current is coming out of this system all the time whereas in this situation it acts more
like a bucket and dipper system where a charge will come out of this battery it will charge this inductor and when this
shuts off that ends the current loop with the the charging battery and then this becomes the source and it
discharges into this battery so it basically takes it scoops some energy out of here invests it in creating the
magnetic field that magnetic field then can do work on the wheel and then when
this turns off this discharges and is as much of it as can be recovered and is
put into the second battery so now let's take a look at bob teal circuit and see if any of these types of
activities could be going on and it looks like they could here he has his basic um
[Music] mechanical contactor as a commutator here and so when this is shut
uh the the solenoid will will only act as a snubber arrangement to suppress
sparking here but it can also act as a small storage system that can hand that can transfer energy in a in an ac
pulse so if this charge is up too many times higher than the battery and then so if
if this is positive and this is negative then this is going to be the negative side of the of the capacitor and this is
going to be the positive side of the compensator so this side of the capacitor rises to many many times the
battery voltage and so it's possible to transfer a
a pulse of current in the charging direction back to this battery using this circuit
so it is possible when this system turns off that this system can kick back some
of the energy back to the battery to make his battery last a very long time so this may be one of the things that
bob deal was doing to make his motor perform with the superlative
performance characteristics which he was describing now we saw on the bench
that you could get a certain amount of the electrical energy back out of the machine
but to get up to the level of performance that bob teal is talking about here
we probably have to look very carefully at his solenoid design as well
because we saw that the more you folded the magnetic
energy down into a closed path around the movable member
the more mechanical energy it produced without having to put any more electricity in and we saw that on the
bench so let's suppose and let's
let's imagine that uh teal figured out how to
maximize this process and that that is a very very important aspect of why his
solenoid engines worked so much better than anything else anyone else has ever reported
so here is a close-up shot of one of the four-cylinder
machines and we see here the solenoid
and we can see a couple of things one we can see that the movable plunger comes out
essentially or up to the top at the end of the stroke we can see that
the coil is completely enclosed in a magnetic keeper and
that the dimension across the keeper to the movable plunger it
looks like the movable plunger is approximately one-third the diameter
of the total [Music] solenoid
so let's take a look at some other photographic evidence
so here's a side shot of the 8 cylinder magnapulsion engine model
and if we just zoom right in here we can see that
um we can look down the the throat of these little solenoids here and we can also
see a side view and we can see the crank system here and what we see is
that it doesn't look like that these are built on the design from
the second patent and in fact it doesn't look like
that they are the the movable member ever comes out of the structure at all that this is just
the connecting rod uh in in any of the positions and
and again we see that the the magnetic keeper
looks like it's about two-thirds of the diameter and the movable plunger
is about one-third of the diameter so
this suggests that the design that we tried in our motor based on the drawings from the second
patent really weren't what he was doing so
let's go back to the first patent because in the first patent there's another drawing that shows a different
construction so here is figure five from the first
patent and this looks a little bit closer to what we were seeing in the photographic evidence
the the main discrepancy is it doesn't show an open top here but for the most part it does show that
the movable plunger kind of stays within the structure and then up at the top here when the
when the throw is all the way to the top then the connecting arm would be rather deep
inside the structure so let's take a look at one other drawing
as part of the first patent so here are figures one and two from the
first patent and what i'd like to show you here is if we come in on a real tight shot we can see that the
uh the solenoid design uh here is um much more similar to the drawings
that i just showed you and the actual physical
photographic evidence which uh the pictures of the working model shows so
basically what we have here is a solenoid piece that that stays deep
within the structure for its entire movement and
so now what we need to do is we need to understand how
he gets these solenoids to create so much physical
mechanical energy so let's take a look at the probable
internal design of this system now we know from the earliest reports of
people trying to develop a magnetic attraction engine that the
magnetic force only creates a very large physical force
when the air gap is the smallest and the the best and the brightest motor
designers of the last 170 years or so struggled with getting the topology
right we're quite clear that bob teal figured this out
and here is essentially the essence of what he found
by uh essentially adding this little uh extra lip at the top
of the keeper here what we see is
that we can turn the coil on
at this point this is the midpoint the point at which you're at the midpoint on
the crankshaft in other words where you can apply the the most direct tangential force to
the crank and when we turn the coil on at this
point essentially the magnetic keeper is already completely made in other words
the magnetic field can act at the closest possible range
and this means that the force on our movable plunger here is going to be
maximum right from the start
but because there is slightly less iron down at the end here and slightly more
iron up here moving upwards will will
allow for the creation of an even more advantageous magnetic circuit
and so that is the direction of the force generated
so let me just back out here and let's just take a look at the entire
design of the magnapulsion solenoid
so we saw from the photographic evidence and from the diagrams in
teal's first patent that the movable plunger never really leaves
the structure so here at the bottom dead center of our crank we can see that the plunger is
essentially at the bottom of the structure and here at top dead center of the crank
we can see that the plunger is essentially at the top of the structure so that the the plunger basically moves
within the structure and it stays within the structure at all times and this keeps the physical side forces and other
things at a minimum so that a relatively low friction sliding movement can be generated in
here so what we want to see here is
that um the the situation is designed so that
uh the coil would be turned on when the
plunger is halfway through its movement and because at that point we can apply the
greatest tangential force to our rotating member
and to do that we need the the magnetic circuit to be uh already
in its condition where the least air gap exists between the moving member and the
non-moving member and that the moving member can move in
such a way that it produces an even more advantageous magnetic circuit as it
moves forward along its path so these are the fundamental conditions
which allow the magnapulsion engine to produce tremendous amounts of mechanical energy
for the electricity applied now let me give you uh just a quick
example of what i'm talking about here we saw in the commutator circuit that
his contact the magnetic field would collapse again and that
electric pulse could be recovered so
it's important to see over here in the full extension drawing here
that this is where the the solenoid is trying to get to
we know that if you take any kind of movable piece of iron and put it in a coil it will always try and center in
the coil and this is true whether there's a keeper there or not and you can run as many experiments as
you want but the fact is is that the the keeper or the the movable piece
will try and center itself within the coil so when we turn it on here it's trying
to get to this position and uh it will if we just left the coil on it would
rise to the top and stay there so um this is the basic
secret this is the fundamental design of teals
system and my reproduction of it my reconstruction of it
but even if this wasn't the exact design that he used his design
fulfilled these requirements and therefore it is essentially the same
so now we can put all the pieces together and come up with what i'm calling here
for this purpose the lindemann solenoid engine because this has features in it which i derived
from a number of different sources first of all we see that we have this basic structure
and we have a crankshaft but that this um when it turns on it is
the magnetic field's already made so we can expect that this solenoid is going to give us the biggest bang for our buck
when it comes to producing mechanical energy we have a very simple circuit here and
that this is the run battery and it goes through a the coil
and a single transistor and then back to that battery and then we can control when it is on using the commutator
arrangement and this commutator could be a brush or it could be a magnetic reed or it could be an opto
isolator with a shutter or anything like that and uh but or or a p device of some sort
that was controlled by something else and then we just have a voltage bridge two resistors here
that put a little bit of positive energy on the when we want to and when this shuts
off then this is just a connection back to the negative so this would clamp
the uh the transistor off very rapidly
when the commutator went off so now if we simply uh apply electric energy
in this in this quadrant here so we can pull up here and then we discharge electric energy
in this quadrant here so the the magnetic field is rising and collapsing
and we can use the entire magnetic field to cause our attraction process because
it doesn't matter whether it's delivering current or whether it's running on current the magnetic field is
there and the ampere turns are there and
so we can power this motor now not only from the energy that is coming from our
run battery but also we can run on the energy that we are returning to the
second battery because uh the field is the field and the field is causing a mechanical
attraction process which doesn't really alter the electrical
processes much at all so here is a very very high cop
zero back mf electric motor
so learning from bob teal's success we can now take the idea to its full
manifestation of a rotary design and get back to a true motor
instead of running it like a piston engine so here's what i call the lindemann
rotary attraction motor featuring the s rotor and let me just zoom in a little
bit and so we can get a closer view of the structure
basically we're using the same circuit as we were with the
the solenoid engine in the last slide but now we've replaced uh the piston
and crank mechanism with this and this basically is just a single coil with a c
type of core and what i'm calling the s rotor
and the s rotor is uh just made out of iron it could be cast iron or
selectron laminations anything that will magnetize to a high degree but then let go of its magnetic
field completely when the impressing field is gone
and so what we see is like the extensions coming down into
bob teal's solenoid design what we have is basically an iron
beam here and we know that if that's all that was there if we turn this coil on this would want to
rotate around and come in line with this but now what we do is we put
two arcing extensions onto that and we make it thinner and thinner and thinner
out to the edge and the reason we do that is what we want to do is we want to produce two effect effects the first is that we
want to give the magnetic field um a path through iron
100 of the time so for instance if we turn the coil on right here
um there's only these two small air gaps right here so the magnetic field in the iron or in the movable piece
can be maximized secondly what we want to do is we want to make sure that the magnetic force
creates a tangential force on our moving member and here again as long as we bring these sweep
these way out to the end we can get a very strong tangential force
when the coil comes on and of course what it's going to want to do is as
the magnetic field is established in here it's going to want to create what's called an attraction
action and that means that the lines of force are going to want to get shorter that's what attraction is
attraction is the lines of force between two poles getting shorter so uh the lines of force in this
situation they're 100 in iron but they can get shorter and they can get shorter by rotating this beam around
until this member here is straight across here that would be the shortest path
so it's going to do that and it's going to do that with extremely strong forces and they're
they're applied to our rotor in this case in a in a completely
uniform way so that um
all of the forces are balanced on the beam on the bearing system and on the shaft
all of the forces are evenly distributed so that um the only the only real
weakness here is that of course when this thing comes on it's going to want to just uh bend these arms
outward so that's basically the the only weakness in the design and of
course that can be mechanically restrained so that's the one small concession we make
to this situation and so what we're going to do is um
we're going to let me just widen up this shot again
so um what we're going to do is we're going to turn the magnet on in this
position and then we're going to um allow the the rotor to rotate approximately 45
degrees until this beam is approximately in this position and then we're going to turn the power off
so we let the magnetic field rise in strength to that point and at
that point we let the magnetic field discharge and again we have the same
uh run battery through the coil back through just a single uh on off switch
back to the battery and now our commutator can have two on strokes per cycle or per revolution
because we have a situation where the rotor is symmetrical and 180
degrees and therefore we can every time we go around one half
of a revolution we're basically in the same position so we can do it again so um
when the coil discharges of course it discharges back to recharge this battery
but essentially now what we've done is we we have accomplished everything that we had hoped we could accomplish
when we looked at the back emf problems in our initial traction motor and that
is is that the electricity event uh is happening here in the coil so that
when we put the electricity into here that's happening here in the coil and when we get the electricity back out
that's happening here in the coil meantime over here is where the
mechanical energy is produced so now we have created a physical separation so that the mechanical energy is being
produced in a different member by a different process than the electric
induction in other words this is just being attracted by this field when it is when it is present
and that field is present as long as there are ampere turns uh in other words as long as there's amps moving in this
coil there's a field here and so we can get um if we put in power
to this point so the inductance of of the coil here
will cause a current ramp that will have some duration and let's say it's um
three milliseconds until we can when we apply at this voltage
until the magnetic field strength is is approaching our optimum point
at that point we can shut the transistor off and because of the inductance and because this battery is essentially
similar to this battery then this will uh discharge in a similar time frame
so let's say this charges up in in three milliseconds and it will probably discharge in about two and a half
milliseconds so now we have a magnetic field here there are ampere turns in
this coil for a total of five and a half milliseconds
so that is the period during which we can get an attraction cycle and convert
that to mechanical energy we can see that now we are producing mechanical energy
strictly by the action of the magnetic field and not and so that's indirectly
in relationship to the electrical input so again we've created a more of a
separation between these two events we've made them happen in different components using different processes at
different times so here we have
finally realized our hope that we saw hidden within the
the traction motor or the induction motor at the beginning of this movie
and so this solves the fundamental problems
of the electric motor we can produce tremendous amount of mechanical
energy here it is only indirectly related to the amount of energy that we put into it
when we load this it will slow down but what we can do is
if we we can design this we can impedance match all of these things so that let's say
we want to run our loads let's say at 3600 rpm
what we can do is we can set up the uh the rise time of the inductor and everything so that it matches that speed
point in other words so that we get to our maximum point here and and collapse when the rotor is
turning at that speed so when it speeds up to a higher speed than that what will
happen is that it'll start cutting off before it gets fully magnetized
and so then this will so as it speeds up from this point it'll start drawing less and less power
like an ordinary motor and then you can when you put a load on it
it will start magnetizing to a higher and higher and higher and higher degree until it gets
to this um maximum benefit point so it will it will ride the the magnetic
uh or the mechanical energy creation will rise into the load as it slows down
to meet this perfect point at which point it can deliver power
at its maximum rated speed and so all of these things can be engineered into it so that it will have
similar characteristics to a normal motor but still run on these principles so
here we have a situation where we can put a certain amount of energy in
probably get elect at least 85 percent of the electricity back out and we can create motor torque
on both what we put in and what we get back so this is
uh the secret of the electric motor of the future
and um there's only a few other things i'd like to show you at this time
so let's do a quick cop analysis of our new motor topology
if we assume [Music] in system assumptions here if we assume
that our electrical recovery can be 85 and 85 for a dc to dc converter or one of these
systems is uh certainly achievable um many people have built systems based
on john bedini's ideas where recovery is higher than this so let's also assume
that our mechanical energy production is approximately 70 percent which basically means we can produce 70 percent
mechanical energy from our electrical input now obviously this is all totally
under unity this is not an over unity machine so let's take a look at a hypothetical
cop analysis if we start with an electrical input of 100 units of energy
and we can get 85 units back then our net electrical input here is only 15
units of energy if our mechanical energy produced is 70
percent of the total magnetic field available for the attraction process then
the attraction process the total magnetic field over here is equal to our
input and our output so this is the total magnetic field so we have 185
units of magnetic field energy so if we have 185 units of magnetic
field energy times our 70 percent uh efficiency we get 129.5
units of mechanical energy produced if we divide our
output by our input here we see that the machine is capable of producing a cop of
8.6 now this is starting to look good remember
the cops of our permanent magnet field induction motor was .25 so this is
something on the order of 35 times better cop than
the off-the-shelf motor now i was introduced to the work of bob
teal in 1979 by 1983 i was working in santa barbara
with a group of people on a number of these ideas and here are some documents from my
files uh these this was drawn in june of 1983
but this motor was fully designed and
conceived of by march of 83 and i was calling it the flux motor at
the time and you can see here in this diagram on this
piece of paper here the opening statement says an electromechanical device to convert
magnetism into useful work and electricity you can see the basic idea here we were
going to use uh c cores of like transformer laminations
put a pulse of dc into it attract the iron piece and then turn the power off
and get the pulse back by transformer action so you can see
uh over here in the diagram to your left we have four of these uh c-type cores
this is the top view and the rotor had five
uh sections uh iron sections in it running the full length of the c core
and these would just rotate in so if if this coil was turned on it would very
rapidly attract this this iron section into alignment
so the on time here could be very short turn on turn off and get the kick back
this had a mechanical brush type commutator and so the combination of four coils and
five sections on the rotor meant that there were 20 individual attraction strokes just to
get the rotor around one time and this motor was just ferociously
powerful unfortunately it was under development
right at the time we were in the process of trying to raise money and we were unable to raise any money
so this this system was never fully developed
here's an actual uh photograph of the model of the flux motor that we built in 1984
and you can see the the brush commutator on the top here and the four uh coils going in towards the central
uh member and the the rotor was deeply embedded inside here
so this is the photograph of the only working flux motor that we built at that
time this is myself and the machinist who built these
amazing machines with me uh michael knox here we're testing a variation on a
similar uh four coil arrangement this is set up as a variable reluctance generator and
it's powering the light bulb bank on the side from this
normal type of motor so we were working on the development of a special kind of motor driving a
special kind of generator to produce a power plant so here then we see
the the s rotor applied to the flux motor topology
where we have four of these um c c type coils
and cores arranged around this is the top view this is a side view
and so uh these coils can turn on and advance
the rotor until it's 90 degrees past here and then these coils can turn on and advance at the
next 90 degrees and so on so this is becoming the beginning of an engine where the
power is applied most of the time obviously the the magnetic
forces are are kind of moving in pulses
but still in all the the total amount of mechanical energy produced by an engine of this type is is
very significant and using the circuit that i showed or some other variation or some other
methodology a very very high percentage of the electrical energy can be recovered
while producing tremendous amount of mechanical energy well
now you know today's electric motor holds a variety of secrets
the first big secret is the true function of the back emf we saw and i carefully explained that
the back emf is neither a reflection of the mechanical load on the motor nor a convenient method to make the motor
self-regulating its real function is to destroy most of the energy that the operator is forced
to apply to run the motor without creating any benefit whatsoever the back emf in a motor is nothing more
than the recognition that the direct induction electromechanical machine is always a motor and always a generator
and that these two opposite functions cannot be separated in this design topology its performance is not limited by the
laws of physics but rather by the behavior of the forces as they are constrained by the geometry of the
design the second big secret is that motor designs that produce no back emf have
been around for 170 years but they've always been described as being archaic and inefficient
these designs use a single electromagnet to attract a piece of iron and never use
permanent magnets at all in the 1970s bob thiel studied this
process in depth he eventually solved each and every one of the historic design problems that
limited its mechanical energy production in the process he built and tested the
most powerful electric motors ever designed that ran on magnetic attraction
the third big secret is that electric motors run on dc pulses can be configured to return up to 90 percent of
their input electrical energy without affecting the production of their output mechanical energy
roger andrews stumbled into this process in the early 1970s and successfully
marketed a bunch of toys but john bedini independently discovered this process and after 30 years of
in-depth study perfected and patented the simple circuitry that allows this to be
understood and maximized when all of these discoveries are put together
the electric motor emerges as an astonishing machine with unparalleled power and performance
i showed you a number of my own designs that bring these ideas together but these concepts are universal
and can be applied to hundreds of design topologies even more exciting is the fact that
electric generators can be designed to provide no back emf operation as well the possibilities are without precedent
quite simply we're on the threshold of a new electric age
we're being told that our planet is warming up and that we must reduce the amount of co2 released into the
atmosphere increasing the efficiency of electric motors is one way to help
i encourage each and every one of you to experiment with these ideas
thank you for your time and attention