 |
& TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH ORGANISATION Adelaide Branch |
| |
& TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH ORGANISATION Adelaide Branch |
Welcome to the new financial year, and with it a new committee! Thankyou to Ashley and Peter for their tremendous effort as committee members for the past year. Both have contributed a lot that is not seen by the majority to make this group a success. Also thanks must go to Michael for standing in as Treasurer for the last couple of months while Peter has been overseas, and also to him and Lesley for providing the terrific venue for our meetings.
ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Once again this was a very quick affair, with one nomination for each position, which automatically eliminates having to vote for the preferred candidate. The results were as follows.
CHAIRMAN: Ashley S. nominated by Bruce, seconded by Ken.
TREASURER: Michael P. nominated by Ashley, seconded by Cedric.
SECRETARY: Andrew G. nominated by Ashley, seconded by Andrew S.
Continuing on from the previous page, since Andrew is the new Secretary, he will also be writing the meeting report for the preceding month under the guise of a Secretary's report.
I feel it is good to get some input from people other than myself into this newsletter, so here is the first one! Of course if YOU would like to write an article about your pet project or whatever, then I'm sure it would be most appreciated by me and the rest of the group.
SECRETARIES REPORT - JULY MEETING
The meeting began at 8.00pm with 43 people in attendance. Our stand-in treasurer, Andrew, reported that we have $539.77 in the bank, [due to newsletter subs]. Andrew S. produced some photocopy material and talked about his car and his progress. Ashley gave away some electronics mags and books. Athol showed us an old flag stone merchants photo. Ashley held up newspaper clippings of a u.f. o. and a fuel cell.
Cedric talked about a gravito magnetic device and his Bedini motor. Ashley added a Roswell update tape to our library as well as a Tesla mag and talked about an alien abduction workshop. Jan talked about an inventors club in Burriside village and has "ten commandments for patents". Anonymous showed us his latest book on Tesla from Tesla Society. Roger talked about organic gardening in Aust and NZ course. Lindsay showed us his paramagnetism meter for measuring soil, cost $420US through a magazine called Acres. Peter talked about Jock
Lawrie and a Sydney Internet access inventor. Ashley introduced Bob Grace who spoke on magnetic fields in therapy.
NEWS SNIPPETS & RUMOURS
For anybody interested in hydrogen research, I recommend a recent publication called the "Hydrogen Brief - Book V. This document which is written by Barry Hilton, (rotary engine designer in Melbourne) describes Stan Meyer's work and also the work of Joe 'X', who has been going about the search for running a car on water in a totally unconventional way. Also included are the Carl Cella plans and information on other hydrogen researchers. The "Hydrogen Brief' is available from
Ian Hacon at P.O. Box 255, Ivanhoe, Vic. 3079 for $29.95. Any profit made from this book is going back into further research by Barry and
Ian, so I suggest you get behind them and buy a copy.
The latest rumour on Jock Lawrie is that he has sold his patent to an overseas interest for a couple of million more than the $5 million offered to him by a local backer. Let us hope that this is not the case as it would be another good invention lost to this country, and possibly the world, depending on who has bought it. If anyone has definite information on this, please contact me and
I will pass it on through this newsletter.
PHRENETIC PHRASES
I am sure we have all felt like this at some time!
THE GYROSCOPIC INERTIAL THRUSTER
David Cowlishaw from Oregon (USA) has come up with an invention for a possible antigravity device called the Gyroscopic Inertial Thruster or GIT. Below are some excerpts of an article written by him in June 1997. Sounds a bit like a TOMI device without the magnets!!
"I stumbled onto this idea (the basic theory of the GIT) in 1986, after trying to find a UFO book on the Roswell incident
I had read as a high school student in the early seventies. I recall the story of one soldier that had been a witness and had described balls that rolled around a raceway in the craft. Wondering how balls that orbited in
a propulsion became a focus of my thinking, and I built a simple device to look closely at a "geared" ramp for a soccer ball, cutting a 6 by 4 sheet of plywood the long way, then relieving both pieces of a matching set of parabolic smiles along their upper edges. By placing this set of tracks so that one end was one inch apart, and the other ends about six inches apart,
I observed that the ball would start rolling down the slope at the narrow end, rolling past the bottom, up to the other side, then back again, oscillating back and forth as the motion died out, just as it should.
What caught my attention with this set-up was that when the ball reached the end of the track that was spread apart, it would be moving more slowly, but it was spinning it's way up to the reversal point at a noticeably lower height in the track.
The pendulum had a distinctly J shaped swing! If I started the ball at the high spin end of the parabolic trackway, it would end up higher (with greater potential energy) on the narrow end of the track, an impossible result, but it was staring me in the face!
I frankly looked at this project as a possible energy capture device that requires only gravity and a minimum velocity (over the loop speed) to generate motion, then free energy! Since the GIT produces an accelerative force by the action of it's parts, the reverse may very well be true, that if accelerated by an outside force (such as the ground pushing you away from the centre of gravity), an increase of the motion in it's parts is possible."
This explains the principle behind the GIT, the next step David did was to build a couple of circular devices to prove the theory. The secret behind a rotary version of this device is to have the tracks coming closer together on one side of the loop and going further apart on the other. This then uses the principle of the "J curve- shown above so that the ball going up in the loop is contributing spin energy to help lift it to the top. He built some very basic test devices using plaster rings and driven by a turntable motor. He reported that these units wobbled their way along a table in one direction proving the theory that the geometry of the parts in the device caused motion in one direction. For more information look up
"http://www.open.org/davide/gitworks" on the Internet.
SOME THOUGHTS ON "FREE ENERGY RESEARCH"
I began my search for the elusive "Free Energy" machine 11 years ago, back in 1986, although
I had thought right from early high school days that there must be another way for doing what we do in this world regarding energy production and usage. My first attempts at securing information on these mysterious devices came by way of an American catalogue called Rex Research, in which was listed hundreds of inventions and F/E devices. Naive me
thought great, all the information I have been looking for Wrong! Many hundreds of
dollars later, I began to see a pattern emerging from this stack of photocopied paperwork that
I had forked out my hard earned cash for. This was that either the F/E device was actually
only an idea, somebody's theory, or if it had been built, details of it's construction and testing
were very sketchy, or only half the information was there to begin with anyway.
About 5 years ago, having gotten tired of trying to fathom this stuff out on my own, a small group of us got together a couple of times to discuss F/E and associated subjects. These meetings were held in North Adelaide and arranged by John
McGovern, who was the person who got me interested in this scene to start with some 7 years before. A couple of other people at those meetings were Dino and Peter M, both of whom still attend ASTRO today. It was probably another 6 months before
I took the bull by the horns and formally set about getting ASTRO officially off the ground here is SA. As a source of information and new ideas it has been an unqualified success and I feel it far exceeds the interstate groups for it's quality of meetings and the experimentation that people here are doing. The other VERY important aspect of the ASTRO SA group is the amount of sharing of ideas and information at meetings. There are still some "secretives" for whatever their reasons, but overall most people are very open about what they are trying to do.
Last year a small contingent of us Adelaide ASTRO's went east to visit like minded people interested in similar projects to us. We found some very nice people willing to share their stuff, but also found a lot of egos, backstabbing and paranoia along the way! These negative aspects of peoples personalities unfortunately lead me to ask whether their "great invention" actually exists or indeed does work? The principle of sharing your information as you progress along with your research makes the possibility of being silenced by whatever external interests much less a possibility. I'm sure this does happen, but the cynical part of me asks whether the conspiracy theory can also be another excuse for saving face if the device doesn't actually work. Unfortunately there are a lot of false claims, either made for personal or monetary gain and still a lot of people miss the point, you can't sell F/E machines! If they do exist, and
I really don't know if they do, after all this time, where are they?
To sum up, I have spent a lot of hours and thousands of dollars searching, reading, building and testing my own devices with my only success being with the fuel saving technologies.
I used to think that maybe I could "change the world" with this stuff, but nowadays
I consider F/E research just a hobby as the bottom line is that 99.9% of people out there don't really give a shit anyway! Enough of the negative. In recent months there has been an influx of new people into the ASTRO group, with a lot of "doers" instead of "dreamers". This has been of great encouragement and inspiration to me, seeing a new group of enthusiastic people with a wide age group range, really going for it. There is still a strong interest in magnet motor technology, but the real big one these days is the various water technologies - it seems that
people have really latched onto good old H20 - keep up the good work! Bruce.
CHRYSLERS HYDROGEN CAR
Chrysler in America is developing a hydrogen fuel cell with a difference. Its aim is to maximise fuel economy and minimise emissions while still using petrol. Fuel cells powered by hydrogen have been demonstrated recently by Mercedes, Volvo, Mazda and other major car companies. However they have all come up against the same problem of storing the gas and finding sources of gas for refuelling cars on the road.
The Chrysler approach first converts petrol to hydrogen, which the fuel cell then turns into electricity by combining it with atmospheric oxygen. The electricity powers a hybrid drive train, with a lead-acid battery "buffer" used to maximise efficiency while electric motors provide power to the driving wheels. The petrol conversion system is adapted from commercial processes where the fuel is vaporised and partly oxidised to create hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Steam is added to a catalytic section of the system to convert the carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide and further oxidation completes the process, leaving carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The water used in the process is partially recycled from the fuel cell.
Chrysler's new system is expected to yield a 30 improvement in fuel efficiency compared with a conventional petrol engine.
That's roughly equivalent to efficiencies from direct injected engines, but the big difference is fuel efficient power produced with considerably less noxious emissions.
FROM THE PAST
Once again, innovation from the1950's....look out BOC Gases!!
MINIATURE TESLA PUMP.
Engineers at the University of Washington have created a microchip-sized pump with no moving parts, exploiting a 75 year-old patent held by Nikola Tesla. This pump design was known as the Tesla valve. "I was surprised at how little application this (pump design) had had," said Fred Forster, a
UW professor of mechanical engineering. Forster and his associates had been struggling to build a tiny pump for use in medicine, electronics and any situation in which very small amounts of fluid must be pumped without the poorer reliability and damaging interference of moving parts. Nothing they came up with worked until one night when Forster remembered a college course he took some 30 years ago. His professor had shown the class a Tesla pump.
Tesla, Forster said, had built a gas engine pump without moving parts. The pump featured two complicated series of loops for the intake and outlet valves designed to favour flow in one direction over the other. This
"leaky valve" approach to pumping is not very efficient in terms of overall flow rate, Forster said, but it has the advantage of being simple in construction and highly reliable. When Forster suggested the Tesla pump approach to his UW colleagues, they just stared at him. "Nobody had ever heard of it," he said, but the UW engineers, with graduate students Nigel Sharma and Ron Bardell, pursued the idea and found
Tesla's 1920 patent. Then they created a variety of tiny Tesla-style pumps by patching silicon wafers in the same way
computer chips are created. The intake and outlet valves, each a series of pretzel-like loops on each side of the pump
chamber, are about the width of a human hair. The central pump chamber, also silicon, is maybe 1 quarter-inch in diameter and
one tenth of a millimetre thick. A small electric charge applied hundreds of times per second to the pump chamber makes it flex, forcing the fluid to move. Because of the design of the valves, the fluid tends to move in one direction.
Some $200,000 in private and public funding was made available to the UW engineering team now working to perfect this micropump. 'We expect miniaturised fluid systems to be a major breakthrough in new technologies," Forster said. If so, it's another breakthrough credited to a man once called "the greatest inventor the world has ever known."
This story originally appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on October 16, 1996.
ROTARY VEE ENGINE
Keith, from Murray Bridge, brought along information and a couple of demonstration models of the 'Rotary Vee Engine' to the June ASTRO meeting, so 1 thought it would be good to include an article on the engine in this month's newsletter.
The basic figures on this engine are impressive, with a weight of less than 1/2 pound per horsepower, it has 10 or 12 tiny cylinders of just over 1 inch in diameter, is nearly vibrationless, has a fuel bum rate of about one half that of conventional engines and has a torque curve of a straight line from zero on up. Ninety percent of the engine is made up from simple aluminium castings and only has 8 moving parts out of a total of 15 in the entire unit and runs a compression ratio of 16:1 which enables it to bum fuel with an octane rating down to 80. Because of it's high thermal efficiency, the engine does not require any external forced air or liquid for cooling. An engine weighing 1 101bs would develop 300hp at 3,00Orpm and is expected to go for many thousands of hours between overhauls.
The engine consists of
two rotating cylinder blocks with five vee shaped pistons, each end of which fit into
the cylinder blocks.
This whole mechanism rotates at
90 degrees to the plane of the motion of the pistons in an outer
casing as shown in the diagram and
photograph. The combustion chamber size is varied by utilising the fact that as the unit rotates, the distance between the cylinder
blocks changes. The engine is a "2 stroke" and as the cylinders reach their closest point, the
maximum compression is achieved, the spark plug fires and the power stroke begins. Once
they reach their furthest point apart, the exhaust cycle starts until the closest point is reached
once again and the whole cycle starts over again. The vee has an angle of 135 degrees and
this accounts for 35% of the power while the pistons contribute the other 65%. Each piston
has two compression rings near the end with a slot cut in the end to control the valve action.
The rings are the only place where any wear can take place since the screwing action of the
pistons keeps the cylinder walls polished smooth and they remain perfectly round.
Finally, lets look at the centre part of the engine where the apex area of the piston vees are rotating. The difference in distance between the apex of the inside vee and the the outside vee lets the pistons act like a Roots blower. The petrol/air mixture enters this area from the carburettor, is compressed, and enters the appropriate cylinder pair when their respective intake
ports are open. The spark plugs are in the end of the cylinder blocks and rotate with them, so there are no spark plug wires connected to them. The plugs are fired at the correct time as they go past a cam type sensor with no points, using a solid state ignition system as a
power source. Cooling air also enters at the centre of the cylinder blocks via an annular slot around the central shaft. It then goes into the hollow interior of the cylinder block where it cools the engine before being centrifugally expelled through a grille arrangement in the cylinder blocks and out through slots in the external casing.
This engine is still being persued as a commercial possibility by people at the Snyder Machine and Welding Shop in Okalahoma, America who have been working on several prototypes since 1986. This group also build small aircraft and so are looking at the "Rotary Vee" as a possible powerplant for these aircraft. The benefits being the ease and low cost of construction, reliability, high power, linear power output with an associated low weight and small external dimensions. Meanwhile, back home here in Adelaide, Keith is looking for anyone who is interested in developing the engine here as he has gone as far as he can with it. If you are looking for a challenge you can contact Keith at the "Big
Clock", a tourist attraction at Murray Bridge.
NEXT MEETING
The next meeting will be, as usual, on the second Fniday of the month, this time being:
FRIDAY 8TH AUGUST
The meeting will start at 8pm, while the doors will open at 7.30pm.
This month we will be showing a video called: THE FREE ENERGY UPDATE
This video is of a talk given by Ian Hacon earlier this year about where the FE scene
is heading, with particular reference to Australia.We should also have some more member's projects on display and hopefully a surprise guest, (i.e. it will be a surprise to us!) so come along, I'm sure you won't be
disappointed. Don't forget your $3 admission and something to share for supper. See you there!!
PHRENETIC PHRASES ANSWER: Backed into a corner.