Mach Effect progress

[93143]

Momentum and energy are not the same thing. If you can produce constant thrust at constant power without expending local reaction mass, it can be shown that it is possible to produce a machine that powers itself with extra energy left over.

Example: A flywheel with radius R, with Mach-effect thrusters of thrust efficiency E positioned tangentially on the edge. Power (P) is torque (T) times angular velocity (w), so given a thruster power p, the output power of an ideal generator hooked to the flywheel is P = Tw = (pE)Rw, and if ERw > 1, well...

This is not a perpetual motion machine of the first kind, because the thermodynamic system is not closed; there is interaction with the distant universe, which is where you're farming the energy from. Whether or not it is a perpetual motion machine of the second kind is less clear, but I'm too lazy/busy to try the calculation right now, especially since I'd probably have to brush up on basic GR and M-E theory first...

This doesn't work with ground-contact vehicles because as the ground speed increases, the power required to produce a given thrust increases, such that you can never exceed breakeven even in the ideal case. (You could move the ground, but that takes energy too, and you're back to square one.) It doesn't work with rockets, because you eventually run out of propellant, which is where the energy is coming from. But if you had a car that the ground automagically moved along with, or a rocket that never ran out of propellant, you could do the same thing. Interaction with the distant universe could allow such a thing; there's always a more than sufficient supply of reaction mass at a low relative velocity.

...
M-E technology, if it works, and works as well as the proponents hope, would make most of my Ph.D. research obsolete - and I wouldn't mind at all...

[Giorgio]

How is that figured? Wouldn't momentum be conserved? You still need to apply power to the thing to get it to create motion.

Locally you will apply few watts generating much bigger forces, hence you could extract part of the power in a self sustaining loop. According the theory than, the momentum will be conserved with an energy exchange with the rest of the mass of the universe.

I also have big doubts, but I like the way they are proceeding in the experimental set up and procedures, so I consider these tests worth of being followed.
In a case or the other we will learn something.

[GIThruster]

Actually, both the extremes--thinking it "trivial" to extract energy from the thruster and thinking it cannot operate in an over-unity condition--are probably wrong. M-E thrusters operate from harvesting momentum. When they are operating in an over-unity condition, meaning the mass fluctuation is greater than 100%, then the contribution of the negative mass' negative inertia, ought to make it possible to harvest more energy than it takes to drive the thruster. Jim Woodward has never designed a thruster intended to operate in this "wormhole territory", where dm/m>1, but Paul March has and it is possible this is the reason Paul's thruster created the large forces reported. (I say "possible" because Paul's tests did not include important controls like vacuum, so it is best to reserve judgement here.)

Tom, to answer your question about the ARC Lite, the specs are fairly complex. To be sure, a single kind of control like the one I mentioned is not enough to ensure veracity. There are many controls used. When the latest paper is released I'll see about posting it here so you have better answers, but in short, the force was generated as a pulse because it occurred when the device was swept through the thruster's mechanical resonance. Jim isn't rushing to publish the results because he's not finished with them--he ran out of time this last season and will pick up where he left off in September for a few weeks. After that he hasn't quite committed but we're all hoping to see higher frequency/higher force designs on the balance. It is possible Jim will be working in wormhole territory for the first time in October or so.

Paul will also be back to work on his MLT in September so we may hear from him in the Fall. He'll have access to a new lab at JSC so he doesn't need to work on the lab setup--just the thruster and power system , which is a battery operated, "self-contained" design. (I know engineers like this more, but the fact is one gets far less data from such designs. They're pretty much on/off with no ability to sweep, etc., unless you do this on the bench before putting it on the balance.) There is also one other accomplished PhD experimenter who is doing his own replication. He'll have to remain nameless until he decides he wants to show his work--that's not up to me. I think it's fair to guess though he decided to jump into the fray because of the limited results Jim shared a couple weeks ago.

[Giorgio]

(I know engineers like this more, but the fact is one gets far less data from such designs. They're pretty much on/off with no ability to sweep, etc., unless you do this on the bench before putting it on the balance.)

True, but it gives a clear evidence about the theory being sound or not.
Once that is proven and established you can create all type of different set ups to extract data from. Budget won't be an issue anymore.

[93143]

Actually, both the extremes--thinking it "trivial" to extract energy from the thruster and thinking it cannot operate in an over-unity condition--are probably wrong.

I thought it was pretty clear:

A flywheel with radius R, with Mach-effect thrusters of thrust efficiency E positioned tangentially on the edge. Power (P) is torque (T) times angular velocity (w), so given a thruster power p, the output power of an ideal generator hooked to the flywheel is P = Tw = (pE)Rw, and if ERw > 1, well...

QED.

Nothing to do with "wormhole territory", except in terms of what minimum value of E is required to produce a practical engineering design.

[GIThruster]

GIThruster wrote:
(I know engineers like this more, but the fact is one gets far less data from such designs. They're pretty much on/off with no ability to sweep, etc., unless you do this on the bench before putting it on the balance.)

"True, but it gives a clear evidence about the theory being sound or not.
Once that is proven and established you can create all type of different set ups to extract data from. Budget won't be an issue anymore."


Agreed. I for one am happy that both approaches are being pursued simultaneously. I was just mentioning because people don't appreciate the battery-operated approach has serious limitations. For instance, the ceramic's natural resonance is a function of temperature in both the MLT and UFG, and you want the oscillator to resonate for sure. When you can't sweep the thruster, best you can do is bench test it for resonance and then plan to power it at that frequency, but as soon as you start to run it, the temperature changes. (In the MLT, the change in temp likewise changes your inductor, so thermal is a worse issue.) So sweeping while on the balance turns out to be fantastically useful.

Later on, when we're working on pre-prototypes, one expects we'd add active thermal management. TM isn't really a research activity though, so you have to make accommodations that you have a loose variable--the natural resonance. That's easiest done with the power system off the thruster. Likewise, one can have active feedback and phase locking, but again, that's not a research activity. Like it or not, these self-contained approaches are almost exclusively on/off. You don't learn much from a failure with this. If you're 1 Hz off the resonance and you don't know, you have no idea what went wrong. That's what Duncan was saying, that Dr. Fuerst had obviously misinterpreted.

[GIThruster]

Actually, both the extremes--thinking it "trivial" to extract energy from the thruster and thinking it cannot operate in an over-unity condition--are probably wrong.

I thought it was pretty clear:

A flywheel with radius R, with Mach-effect thrusters of thrust efficiency E positioned tangentially on the edge. Power (P) is torque (T) times angular velocity (w), so given a thruster power p, the output power of an ideal generator hooked to the flywheel is P = Tw = (pE)Rw, and if ERw > 1, well...

QED.

Nothing to do with "wormhole territory", except in terms of what minimum value of E is required to produce a practical engineering design.

Well yes, you were clear and you were also correct, that to solve this you need GR. I've seen half a dozen people tackle it in various blogs over the years and none have ever done what you suggest is going to be difficult, and solved it. I'm sure someone will get the answer. There are a couple physicists actively working on modeling this stuff, so perhaps they'll give an answer soon. Otherwise, the explanation of the wormhole boundary is the best I think we're going to have. Different concern to be sure, but certainly easier to understand.

[93143]

My comment about GR was in regard to trying to figure out if the device violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is a side issue, and can be ignored if the device works at all.

If it works at all, under the Copernican principle it should be reasonable to treat it as a black box that generates pE newtons when p watts are supplied to it, regardless of its velocity state. Using this assumption, along with basic Newtonian mechanics, I have shown above that in principle, an over-unity device can be constructed regardless of the value of E. You do not need GR to do this.

It seems to me that the only possible argument against this is that the motion of the flywheel couples with the operating mechanism of the thruster. However, since both R and w are variables, the motion of the thruster can in principle be specified to minimize such coupling. All that's necessary for over-unity in this case is that the thruster's velocity exceed 1/E. So that argument doesn't seem to hold water.

The value of E only comes into play as a practicality consideration. It is theoretically irrelevant.

[GIThruster]

As I said, what you've shown has been shown several times over the years. You didn't invent it. You first saw it same place I did, over an NSF. The trouble is there are indeed relativistic concerns. It is more complex than you're portraying, and since you didn't solve it, you can't say much about it. There are two PhD professors working this as we write about it. Lets wait and see what they come up with.

Certainly you put your thumb right on the issue from the very first when you wrote that momentum and energy are not the same thing.

[93143]

since you didn't solve it, you can't say much about it.

Actually, yes, I did solve it. Just today I derived the expressions I've posted from scratch. It took me about two minutes.

Read my last post again, carefully (I've been editing it to be clearer). Follow the math from my previous posts, and tell me where relativity could possibly enter into this. (Keep in mind that both R and w are free, which means the size of the flywheel is theoretically unconstrained for a given power gain.)

I'm not claiming credit for the idea. I may indeed have 'invented' it (I posted it a long time ago on NSF), but it's also possible I saw a similar idea even earlier and forgot about it. Either way, it's a really obvious idea once the possibility of a thruster like this is considered, so I would be very surprised if I were the sole originator.

[EricF]

Certainly you put your thumb right on the issue from the very first when you wrote that momentum and energy are not the same thing.

I haven't had first year physics yet so bear with me I'm trying not to conflate intertia, momentum and energy.

The reason I phrased it as momentum instead of energy (mass and momentum being components of total energy E) was because the entire system involves motion. Tell me where I'm going wrong here: The whole thing runs off electricity, the electric current was created by moving charges at some starting point having a total energy E. That electricity is used to apply a different kind force to the M-E thruster, which then becomes motion again. So if the total momentum out (and hence, energy, since a moving M-E thruster has more energy than the same one at rest) is greater than the total energy that went in, doesn't that violate conservation of momentum? Or is that delving into thermodynamics?

[93143]

So if the total momentum out (and hence, energy, since a moving M-E thruster has more energy than the same one at rest) is greater than the total energy that went in, doesn't that violate conservation of momentum?

a) You can't do that. Energy is quadratic with velocity; momentum is linear. Comparing them directly gives you garbage, every time.

b) No. The idea is that this thruster pushes on the "Far-Off Active Mass" that is (according to the underlying theory) the source of inertia. You can disregard the details of the theory for now; the upshot is that the thruster is pushing on a lot of mass that just doesn't happen to be nearby. The thruster goes one way; the rest of the causally-connected universe goes the other. Momentum is conserved.

And, of course, since the causally-connected universe is a lot more massive than the thruster, the thruster moves more. It's like jumping in place - the Earth moves too, but not very much.

[TallDave]

b) No. The idea is that this thruster pushes on the "Far-Off Active Mass" that is (according to the underlying theory) the source of inertia. You can disregard the details of the theory for now; the upshot is that the thruster is pushing on a lot of mass that just doesn't happen to be nearby. The thruster goes one way; the rest of the causally-connected universe goes the other. Momentum is conserved.

And, possibly, slightly expanding the space between it and all the other causally connected matter, thus reducing overall temp and increasing overall entropy by more than the postulated M-E flywheel locally reduces entropy, and thereby not violating 2L?

I don't have any idea how that would happen, though theory often trails observation. Extraordinary claims, etc. Just trying to establish what it could conceivably be doing that wouldn't violate the known laws...

[GIThruster]

Now that I think about it, the first time I was exposed to this argument was when I first joined the Woodward group, about 5 years back. Andrew Palfreyman has been making this observation for as long as I've known him (and probably several years longer). It came up at NSF about 4 years ago, John Cole at NASA brought it up in 2007, and it came up at NBF about six months ago. I think too it came up here about 2 years ago.

I don't have an answer for you. I see the trouble and I see you're correct, about how energy is quadratic, etc. This is usually the first insight to the observation. Andrew has been saying that given enough time, no matter the efficiency of a thruster, it will ALWAYS go overunity at some point in time. That doesn't though, have any real world numbers. After all, there is just so fast a flywheel will turn. The force opposing it turning climbs with the speed it turns at. I think there's some part of the real world situation missing from the example but I'm just not sharp enough to know what it is. BTW, you get the same trouble with the flight of a rocket in space, so it's not a matter of friction in the flywheel.

I can tell you though, Jim was very adamant that to do the calculation, you have to use a particular kind of math that is used in GR, and I believe this is because you're working in an accelerating, non-inertial frame. That may be why you can't do the math as you're proposing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-inerti ... ence_frame

A non-inertial reference frame is a frame of reference that is under acceleration.[1] The laws of physics in such a frame do not take on their most simple form, as required by the theory of special relativity.[2][3] To explain the motion of bodies entirely within the viewpoint of non-inertial reference frames, fictitious forces (also called inertial forces, pseudo-forces[4] and d'Alembert forces) must be introduced to account for the observed motion, such as the Coriolis force or the centrifugal force, as derived from the acceleration of the non-inertial frame. [5] As stated by Goodman and Warner, "One might say that F = m a holds in any coordinate system provided the term 'force' is redefined to include the so-called 'reversed effective forces' or 'inertia forces'."[6]

As I recall, Jim said the way to do the math is to sum up an infinite series of instantaneous frames of rest.

Please don't ask me what that means! but it does need someone adept in GR.

[GIThruster]

And, possibly, slightly expanding the space between it and all the other causally connected matter, thus reducing overall temp and increasing overall entropy by more than the postulated M-E flywheel locally reduces entropy, and thereby not violating 2L?

I think that's right. That's what Jim talks about when the conservation issue comes up.