Noble Plasma Engine

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

ScottL wrote: You think they'll let us look in their black box? Too Rossi-esque haha.
I think any reasonable person considering endorsing the thing would need to know what's inside the controller. If the inductor is lifting and lowering the piston, there can't be vacuum in there. These are the sorts of things that are easy to check so just saying, doesn't seem a plausible explanation. after all he needs to pull a vacuum and such things are easy to check.

I'm still siding with Tom though I think he's skipped over the hard parts by saying plasma behavior is complex and interesting. If the plasma is expanding and pushing the cylinder up, but then contracting and pulling it down, we have a completely unexplained phenomenon here. Like Tom says, no reason to consider it over-unity and especially lacking any sort of theory how it operates, but a science mystery to be solved. Too, it would be good to see how it operates without the isotopes in the electrodes, just so one can rule out the smoke and mirrors. Very simple test. . .empty the buckets.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

ScottL
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Post by ScottL »

GIThruster wrote:
ScottL wrote: You think they'll let us look in their black box? Too Rossi-esque haha.
I think any reasonable person considering endorsing the thing would need to know what's inside the controller. If the inductor is lifting and lowering the piston, there can't be vacuum in there. These are the sorts of things that are easy to check so just saying, doesn't seem a plausible explanation. after all he needs to pull a vacuum and such things are easy to check.

I'm still siding with Tom though I think he's skipped over the hard parts by saying plasma behavior is complex and interesting. If the plasma is expanding and pushing the cylinder up, but then contracting and pulling it down, we have a completely unexplained phenomenon here. Like Tom says, no reason to consider it over-unity and especially lacking any sort of theory how it operates, but a science mystery to be solved. Too, it would be good to see how it operates without the isotopes in the electrodes, just so one can rule out the smoke and mirrors. Very simple test. . .empty the buckets.
Reasonable persons would, however; even reasonable people can be fooled if you stack demonstrations and other "witnesses" on. I view it as an illusion in a sense, giving the audience or potential investor a false distraction. I think what you'll find is the minute a well known investor offers to put up for the project, the whole thing will dematerialize either through unrealized promises and/or conspiracies of intentional cover-up.

I'm willing to listen if more evidence is presented in a more meaningful way, but so far, as stated before, I'm not impressed in the slightest.

Torulf2
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Post by Torulf2 »

I trust Rossi a bilion times more than this people.
And I not trust Rossi special much.

paperburn1
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Post by paperburn1 »

GIThruster wrote:Are you referring to the patent? Rohner did say that Papp was the paranoid sort, so it's possible he intentionally mislead people with the patent.

What is it you're looking at and what would it disable?
Maybe he was paranoid and did not want to "show the way" 74ls221 would not oscillate and most likely let out the "magic smoke" hooked up this way/. :( inputs tied together wrong on other parts and an eprom driving a spark gap and after the first five mins of looking at it I did not bother to go any further. There was a program out there called circuit lab and you could build a system and test/see the outputs with it if your not an EE.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Okay so you're talking about Papp's patent? And is there any reason to believe the controller would switch polarity of the inductor periodically?
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

ScottL
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Post by ScottL »

GIThruster wrote:Okay so you're talking about Papp's patent? And is there any reason to believe the controller would switch polarity of the inductor periodically?
What is in the patent and what is built can be 2 totally different things. I suspect the patent if built to spec does nothing, but that is only my suspicion.

paperburn1
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Post by paperburn1 »

GIThruster wrote:Okay so you're talking about Papp's patent? And is there any reason to believe the controller would switch polarity of the inductor periodically?
yes, his patent, the schematic provided on the link earlier. Like I said I only spent five Min's on it, missing a lot of info to decide anything might possibly work if wired different so I dropped it as not worth my time.

tomclarke
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Post by tomclarke »

The point about these people is that they are not claiming anything extraordinary. They think its extraordinary, but they admit they have no evidence for this and a closer inspection makes it not extraordinary.

So I agree it could otherwise be a scam but I see no need.

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Well, Bob is saying he has 150% OU and that Papp had 400% OU, but he hasn't said anything about how they made those measurements so though they have made some extraordinary claims, they haven't specifically supported those claims so far as I can see. Too, their behavior is not like someone who thinks he has an OU device. Bob is talking about irrigation pump applications, not power generation. If he really believed he had fusion, or OU, wouldn't he be looking to connect with a power company for tens of millions? Papp supposedly landed 6M this way.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

easyBob
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Post by easyBob »

GIThruster wrote:You're saying all the people sitting at the table behind the presentation, there to lend support of the project are all scammers or they're just too stupid to understand what you and I easily pick out from a video?

There are lots of stupid people in the world. With graduate honors and post doctoral work, one wouldn't expect McKubre to be on that list, so you're saying he's risking his career over a cheezy scam we can identify from the vid?

I'm sorry but explanations like this don't wash. People running the kind of scam you're describing would never make a public presentation where a critic could debunk what they're doing. Likewise, you're ignoring guys like the one in the audience who claimed to be a student of Feynman at CalTech. Do you think the's part of the scam too?

These people may be wrong, and they may be so invested they'll fudge some facts from time to time--Bob said Papp's engine ran at 400% OU which is hard to believe--but these are not professional scammers. They believe what they're saying.
I'm saying that logically, titles and experience doesn't automatically make something true. Facts and evidence do. So far all that vid showed me is they have this thing that they've worked on for years, built a couple of models of, and yet can't explain how it works, or haven't done any experiments to figure it out.

It's fishy.

Kahuna
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Post by Kahuna »

Even Sterling Allen has seen the light and now thinks Inteligentry is a fraud.

http://pesn.com/2012/08/21/9602163_Part ... eligentry/

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

GIThruster wrote:
I am not much interested in the personal antics involved with all this stuff. I'd much rather have an answer to how/why the cylinder demonstrated by Bob Rohner compressed more quickly than gravity could have caused.

I think this notion is more the product of suggestion by Rohner than observation.


GIThruster wrote: Unless that inductor was on a time delay, and was used to slam the cylinder back down, I can't understand what could cause that.
Consider that an object given an upward impulse will initially accelerate, then decelerate to apogee. ( I am referring to the weight on top of the piston.) The Weight will operate in the manner of the thrown ball, while the piston has an additional force upon it which the weight does not have.

The piston receives it's impulse from the shockwave created by the plasma discharge. As the piston moves outward as a result of it's impulse it's inertia will eventually produce (In what was a prior state of one Atmosphere) a momentary vacuum which will eventually arrest and reverse the direction of the piston's motion.

Headers for automobile engines have long relied on this principle as applied to the inertia of air traveling down a pipe. How much stronger should this effect be with an actual moving inertial mass of perhaps several pounds?

GIThruster wrote: It does indeed appear that the gas inside the cylinder expanded with great force, and then contracted once again, but I know of no known process that could account for such a thing.

Are you familiar with the pulse detonation engine?


I think this thing is a plasma discharge variation on the same concept.

I think a plasma discharge creates a shockwave which travels up the tube and impacts the piston thereby imparting an impulse to it. The piston then transfers the impulse to the weight atop it. Once the piston is moving, it travels forward until the vacuum created behind it slows and reverses it's direction of travel. The weight, being unencumbered by the vacuum drag continues forward ballistically.

I suspect that all the energy imparted as a shockwave is equivalent to the electrical energy discharged into the plasma. Rohner mentions that he has two 3 ohm wire wound resistors which are getting hot as a result of the few times he's fired the device. Other diagrams indicate that heavy duty (20 watts perhaps) wire wound resistors are included in some of the engine designs he showed in his slide presentation.

Since his resistors are so quickly getting hot, it becomes apparent that his plasma discharge is requiring a great deal more energy than would an ignition spark for a gasoline engine.

At this point, I highly suspect that all the energy demonstrated in the impulse applied to the piston/weight combination is imparted by the equivalent electrical energy being discharged into the gas, thereby creating a plasma induced shock-wave.

Another clue is when he demonstrates a plasma discharge in air. Ordinary ignition spark discharges do not produce such explosive pops in ordinary air. Judging by the effect he produced in air, I would suggest he is using a very powerful electrical discharge. The requirement of having a capacitor would also be indicative of this.


Now his argument is that this whole apparatus produces more energy than it takes to drive it. I remain highly skeptical of that claim. The pulse detonation effect produces a higher efficiency in converting heat energy to mechanical motion, (The temperature at the center of the discharge is perhaps 10,000 degrees or more, thereby improving on an ordinary combustion produced temperature differential) but it is definitely not over unity.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

I think you're missing the vital issue here.

For a gas that has been ionized to suddenly expand is not great mystery. For it to contract just as quickly is a mystery.

Now you can say that the gas is being ionized or turned to plasma by these huge currents and there's no surprise here. this is just what the device is supposed to do. You might too posit that the electrodes then conduct the pulsed power back out and tis is the electrical power out of the device that Rohner mentioned.

What doesn't make sense is the gas not being hot, and contracting so quickly. I'm not aware of any circumstances where a gas collapses back to an unionized state instantly with no appreciable thermal dissipation. This is why I'm saying we have an unexplored phenomenon here. Would be good if we had someone better versed in plasma physics weigh in. This is certainly nothing like a detonation engine since there's no combustion.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Aero
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Post by Aero »

GIThruster wrote:I think you're missing the vital issue here.

For a gas that has been ionized to suddenly expand is not great mystery. For it to contract just as quickly is a mystery.

Now you can say that the gas is being ionized or turned to plasma by these huge currents and there's no surprise here. this is just what the device is supposed to do. You might too posit that the electrodes then conduct the pulsed power back out and tis is the electrical power out of the device that Rohner mentioned.

What doesn't make sense is the gas not being hot, and contracting so quickly. I'm not aware of any circumstances where a gas collapses back to an unionized state instantly with no appreciable thermal dissipation. This is why I'm saying we have an unexplored phenomenon here. Would be good if we had someone better versed in plasma physics weigh in. This is certainly nothing like a detonation engine since there's no combustion.
That the plasma collapses supersonically is no mystery, see:

http://www.jetpletters.ac.ru/ps/1473/article_22464.pdf

It is not a gas that collapses, but a plasma that collapses into a gas. The engine is driven by a cyclic phase transition from gas to plasma and back to gas. It may be that there is no great mystery here at all. But of course it is a mystery to me. :?
Aero

GIThruster
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Post by GIThruster »

Mystery solved. Thanks Aero!
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

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