Japanese Inventor's Motor Uses 80% Less Power 1095
novakane007 writes "A Japanese inventor named Kohei Minato has created a new kind of motor. It uses magnetism to perpetuate the motor motion. As a result the motors uses 80% less energy than a conventional motor, while still maintaing the same horsepower. "Minato assures us that he hasn't transcended the laws of physics. The force supplying the unexplained extra power out is generated by the magnetic strength of the permanent magnets embedded in the rotor. 'I'm simply harnessing one of the four fundamental forces of nature,' he says."
On top of the energy savings the motor runs cool to the touch and is significantly quieter than a tradtitionally powered fan. Sound to good to be true? Well he's already started selling the fan to a chain of convience stores in Japan. Hopefully soon the design will make it in to your home PC, allowing them to run much quieter."
Not for PCs (Score:1, Insightful)
Summary is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
The noise in your pc is caused by air turbulence caused by the fan blades. Even if the motors inside your fans were 100% efficient, your computer would not be significantly quieter.
Big Oil (Score:2, Insightful)
Definitely a violation (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheers,
Justin
the truth will set you free (Score:3, Insightful)
Too Good to be true? (Score:0, Insightful)
Impressive (Score:2, Insightful)
IFF this can be verified (beyond the orders) and is not so prone to failure as to preclude it being used on a massive scale, we are talking about a revolution in available power reduction.
I'm impressed
Bullshit is this weeks magic word (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm.. Simple reason why. If you supply power to the motor using a carnot engine
and use the power from the motor to drive a carnot refrigator.
Then there will be an overall flow of heat from cold to hot..
Breaking the second law of thermodynamics..
Bullshit is word of the week.
Simon.
Re:Conversely... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazingly enough, if you had read the article before posting, you might have gotten your answer:
That alone makes it sound fishy to me, but IANAP.
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually I find it odd that this is the first application that occurred to the poster.
Gentlemen, this new motor design will make battery-powered cars a reality, reduce industrial energy consumption by a third, possibly save the world from global warming
Re:Just to be clear.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm curious if the motor IS better than usual, just not to the extent claimed, or if it's ALL hoax. I cannot get to the site myself... japan.com surrendered to the
Re:Just to be clear.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In this article, we do not violate the laws (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fake if this is true, I can't get to the article to verify myself.
-Jesse
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, 80% less power consumption is going to shave one heck of a lot of battery weight off a 100% electric car, or give the hybrids way better mileage. Hell, it might even bring us a little closer to solar powered vehicles.
Amazing crap (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't believe Taco fell for a free energy hoax.
Re:*MAGNETIC* fans in my PC? (Score:5, Insightful)
-B
If it violates the laws of thermodynamics, (Score:3, Insightful)
Extrordinary claims require extrordinary proof, and this is a very extrordinary claim.
Produces more energy than it consumes.... (Score:3, Insightful)
A conventional electric motor motor uses at most 1.6 Joules of electric energy to produce 1 Joule of motion energy (German Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]). If you reduce that by 80%, you use only 0.3 Joules to produce 1 Joule... nice perpetuum mobile.
Magnetic Forces do No Work! (Score:3, Insightful)
So the permanent magnets don't do ANY work. They can accelerate charged particles by changing their directions, and maybe they can increase efficiency by reducing friction somehow (like maglev trains). But they are not putting work into the system.
Greg
Re:In this article, we do not violate the laws (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just to be clear.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In this article, we do not violate the laws (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the exact same argument every peddler of perpetual motion machines uses to claim that his invention is not a perpetual motion machine, but is somehow harnessing external power which is just hanging around out there to be used.
The Earth's electromagnetic field is a popular choice among these hucksters. With this guy, it's magnets.
The very fact that this showed up on the front page of /. shows that they've given up all pretense of caring what they publish here.
fucking dumbasses! (Score:3, Insightful)
The claim that the extra energy is coming 'from permanent magnets' is risible. It's like claiming to extract energy from the gravitational field of the earth.
MAYBE he has a very efficient motor (though I haven't seen any independant evaluation of that claim). But he certainly doesn't understand how it works, and his claim that he can extract more energy from a motor-generator configuration than he put in is obvious fraud.
I'm not sure what's worse, that the journalist who wrote the article is so credulous, or that the people here (who should damn well know better) are.
Re:Just to be clear.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'no formal training' genius.
Power out > Power in
Use of the words 'over unity'
A tale of skepticism from scientists
Little guy vs. big guyes woes
Failing to identify the 'fundamental force of nature' that is being harnessed.
But in the end, you don't need to look futher than the violation of the laws of thermodynamics.
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, none of the flash memory densities have really scaled like this, and are just being left in the dust, sadly. I'd love to have an iPod with a SD/MMC card reader so that I could exchange songs with a friend at school if they wanted me to listen to something really quickly, or so I could pull data off the iPod and put it into a computer.
Speaking of putting an SD/MMC card into a computer, when will Dell start shipping memory card readers in their machines that have dumped floppies, or are they just going to chalk it up to rewriteable CD drives and abandon solid state memory cells altogether?
Re:Definitely a violation (Score:5, Insightful)
Asside: For those who arn't EEs you can use magents to spin things in various ways: induction, rotating fields generated by coils, reluctance, etc. Reluctance motors are 10-20% more efficient they their syncronous counterparts, but tend to be limited in size, hard to manufacture, and difficult to control. A lot of research has gone in to the different ways to make the magnetic stator to make the motor easier to make, control, and scale up.
At best he's invented a particular rotor/stator combination that creates a really odd magnetic field that he can actually control. My guess is that the motor he has made runs syncronous after spinning up and that his particualar arangement of magents makes it possible for the motor to get enough torque to spin up at non-syncronous speed (i.e. start when you plug it in, and possibly give it a spin).
IF this does work, IF he can get the reliability to the level of syncronous motors, IF it runs at a reasonable power factor, IF its reasonably EMC, AND IF it doesn't require complicated or expensive control mechanisms, he will have a good product on his hands. This would likely be used in a lot of factories, and in HVAC systems in cars. It's probably not that useful for speed control based applications (if it's a reluctance based motor, it's running at syncrous speed) so that excludes it from replacing induction motors and DC motors, unless it's so much more efficient that adding a variable AC supply to the control equipment leaves it still more efficient.
Honestly though, I think the countless posts here are probably right: he invented something and only THINKS it works.
Re: Free engergy (Score:3, Insightful)
Notice that he blames both 9/11 and Enron for not wanting to deal with large companies. Maybe smaller companies are easier to fool and less likely to be able to expose him?
This sounds like a scam to me. I hope it isn't, but it sounds like one.
Re:In this article, we do not violate the laws (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Conservation of energy is not true. Highly unlikely.
2. The energy stored in the permanent magnets is being used up. This is the most likely (and probably actual) phenomenon. Any magnetic field has stored energy. You can get this energy out by demagnetizing the magnet. I don't know how much energy is in these magnets, and as I can't read the article I can't see if there are any comments on the longevity of the magnets. My guess is these motors would "work" for a while, then suddenly drop down to worse than normal functioning electromotive devices (due to adverse effects of eddy currents, etc). I'd put my wager here. (Especially since it sounds like it only works with large (i.e., lots of stored magnetic energy) magnets.
3. The device somehow draws energy from the environment in some new, undiscovered manner. The combination of moving electromagnetic fields could somehow convert some other energy source (i.e., background radiation) into mechanical forces. Highly speculative and unlikely. If the device were really "creating" energy from the magnets, you could start one up, turn a generator, start another one up, then chain the output of the generator to the input of the motor, then keep them going forever. That would be a neat experiment.
In summary, there is probably a well-understood phenomenon here, and it's nothing out of the ordinary. I applaud the marketing prowess of the "inventor" here, in any case. If the device does work, I look forward to seeing the interesting results as the basic conservation laws are reexamined and we end up neat things like warp drives, levitation, and all the other stuff I've wanted since I was 4!
Sounds like a RMS / Peak power confusion (Score:3, Insightful)
As most meters are designed for a 50Hz sine wave, his pulsed system could very easily cause confusion.
The acid test would be to run a conventional motor and the new motor from a fixed quantity of joules, e.g. a battery.
Riiiiiight.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, what would you do if you invented it?
Bzzzzt, wrong answer. The right answer is sell 40,000 fans to a Japanese convenience store. ROTFL.
Sigh. In the age of Google, can't people even bother to look up the history of all these "over unity" machines...
My first physics lesson... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup -- I bet it's AC phase issues. (MOD PARENT UP) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Battery-powered cars arn't realistic because of power density issues with modern bateries.You can already make some damn efficient motors. If put a fully electric power train together, you get too much weight and cost to realistically market the vehicle. You can BUILD a working electric car with today's technology (and it will work well); it'll make a porsche look cheep though.....
Also industrial consumption won't go down much, there's ton's on manufacturing processes and techniques that we can't do because they take too much power, this just opens up the ability to use them.
All of this of course assumes that the inventor actually made something and isn't scamming people. While I'd like to think that someone finally made a realistically-working reluctance motor, this article reeks of violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Re:In this article, we do not violate the laws (Score:5, Insightful)
5. Someone is deliberatly measuring actual power incorrectly so he can sell crappy motors for more than they are worth.
Magnets wooho! (Score:5, Insightful)
Magnets, to many people, can explain anything, becuase they do not understand them properly. Just as you can not construct a perpetual motion device using magnets, however, you cannot raise efficiency using magnets as an energy source. Magnets can only raise efficiency by acting as frictionless bearings, but that is not the case for these motors. This is blatant fraud, and I cannot believe these people fell for it.
Re:In this article, we do not violate the laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Or they think that pointing out incredible claims for scrutiny is a good way to test them. Note the "from the skeptical-eye-on-the-science-guy dept." tag on the article rather than, say, "from the holy-shit-give-this-guy-a-Nobel-quickly dept."
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:5, Insightful)
The claim is that the new motor uses 80% less energy (I assume they left out per unit of power). Ergo, an electric car would need 20% of the a current model's energy storage. If that is true, since a modern electric car is almost viable, then one built with this motor will absolutely be practical.
Re:Amazing idea (Score:5, Insightful)
And for this you got +5 Informative?? Are there actually that many people on /. that would for even one moment believe that this device actually does what the "inventor" claims.
There have been hundreds of these bogus devices trotted out in the past. They never quite seem to work, but the inventor always promises that it just needs a little more tweaking, once he gets enough investors lined up. Not one has ever accomplished anything beyond emptying the wallets of the suckers that invest in these scams.
Minato doesn't sound like he's just made a measurement error, he sounds like a fraud. The fact that he fooled the reporter doesn't make his invention any more real.
this article deserves the foot, not einstein (Score:4, Insightful)
What do they draw a paycheck for again?
Re:Judge for yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
torque? (Score:3, Insightful)
Non-PC (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Permanent magnet motors start at around 80% efficiency (for tiny motors) and get much better from there. Ergo, generating the same mechanical power output from only 20% of the electrical input - which is the principle claim in the article - puts this firmly in the realms of a perpetual-motion claim. Show me the requisite extraordinary proof...
2) The motor ain't the major source of noise in small fans. It's white noise from the inefficiency of a small rotor stirring the air at high speed - effectively a mechaincal-impedance mismatch.
3)IF I could do what the article claims, I'd run and sell out to the very largest industrial installations first - traction, pumping etc , where saving MWH contributes to the bottom line. And retire *loaded*, in a year or two.
Sounds very much like snake oil to me. What this is is doing on a News-For-Nerds website I have no idea.
(and no, I'm not as 'new around here' as my ID no. suggests...)
Martin.
Re:In this article, we do not violate the laws (Score:3, Insightful)
That was my thought. I was wondering what the input and output waveforms were like and what method they were using to measure them since they almost certainly aren't DC.
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wouldn't this motor work by demagnetizing itself? The article is /.'d right now so I can only presume, but if this thing is running on %20 of the amps that would drive a conventional electric motor -- which can easily be %80 efficient -- then the missing energy has got to come from somewhere. I'd guess it's what's been bound up in the permanent magnets in the first place. That makes these motors the pragmatic equivalent of an "electric rubber-band".
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Battery capacity is not constant, independent of current. Most batteries will deliver fewer ampere-hours if the load draws higher current. One could still estimate an upper limit, of course. I bet it's way more power than he claims.
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:3, Insightful)
The energy density in a tank of gasoline is incredible. While it's still around, we may as well make use of it. It would be nice if we could find another chemical reaction that could produce greater power per pound of fuel, but I'm not holding my breath.
Umm, you might have a better chance of lasting to see one if you did hold your breath.
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Could you explain this? It's far too counter-intuitive for me to take on faith.
The modern internal combustion engine is one of the most efficent forms of power generation we have.
Well -- to be pendantic, since I know what you mean to say -- the internal combustion engines we're talking about replacing aren't being used to generate power. They're being used to transform stored energy into kinetic energy. Regardless, this statement struck me as being so counter to "conventional wisdom" (I mean come on now, you might as well claim that incandescent light bulbs are efficient at turning electricity into light) that I immediately went here [google.com]. Within the first ten links the best figure I could find was %52 -- for a 90,000HP diesel marine engine. Everything else reaffirmed what I had already believed before I hit that statement in your post. Internal combustion engines can expect between %15 and %35 efficiency. The vast majority of the (chemical) energy (I mean, we're not gonna nuke the stuff right?) stored in gasoline is spent heating the engine block and the exhaust. It isn't anywhere near the efficiency of an electric motor and I think Carnot might have a proof that can show it never will be. Even if such an engine were possible we can't make gasoline out of polution by cranking a drive shaft so regenerative braking is lost with the contemporary vehicle.
If you own a LEV (low emmissions vehicle) in Los Angles the air coming out the exhaust is cleaner then the air that went into the engine.
Wow! So on those smog alert days asthmatics should hook a gas mask up to a tail pipe! (I mean on a running car of course.)
If you want EVs to happen. Invent a box roughly 1ftx1ftx2ft that holds as much energy as a gasoline tank the same size and weighs the same or less.
Well, that's what every would-be Edison is shooting for aren't they? No one takes the notion of using batteries in an EV seriously. That's why GM was trying to make that mini gasoline cracker that would allow us to treat octane like liquid hydrogen.
I think that ultimatly you just want to point out that electric cars as they stand aren't a panacea, but you sound really intent on shooting the fundamental concept down.
Re:Quiet PCs? (Score:1, Insightful)
Most electric cars would be charged during off-peak hours. In fact, they can actually help the grid by sending power back into it if there's an incredible spike of demand.
Re:Not neccesarily. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Definitely a violation? (Score:4, Insightful)
If he hooks up the miracle motor to generator and uses that generator to power up the motor and it keeps running (should be easy with 330% efficiency, you can also draw infinite amount of energy from the circuit while at it) then he has either found the invisible and so far unexplainable power source or has proven that laws of thermodynamics don't work and perpetual motion machines are possible, you can bet that million physicists will swarm in to observe it and everything we though we know will be turned upside down. He'll also be worlds richest person in no time.
Carefully observe how he fails to do that, and instead relies on (probably wrongly calculated or rigged) simple electrical meter. Now ask yourself why? Simple answer: because it doesn't work, and this is nothing but a con.