Please note that I am reporting this with the utmost skepticism – but a small Irish technology firm has announced that it has accidentally discovered a method of “generating clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields”, and has sent out an open invitation to scientists to come forward and test the equipment concerned. If it turns out to be true, then a huge number of our problems as a race have vanished overnight. Personally, I think it’s about as likely as me becoming world leader by universal decree, but there you go.
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I watched their video and their little animation makes me skeptical. It shows three horseshoe magnets in a triangular configuration around a small green circle. Of course, horseshoe magnets can’t be turned on and off the way they’re showing in the video, so I guess it’s just a symbol for three electromagnets. The magnets turn on and off in a sequence which moves the green circle around in the region between them. This is almost identical to the way a three-phase motor works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-phase_electric_power)
Now they say they can get a net gain of energy from this thing, but all it’s doing is moving an object around a circular path with changing magnetic fields. Since some energy will be lost to friction, this system is clearly under-unity in performance. Of course, their actual idea may be much more complicated than the animation indicates.
The problem is, they haven’t given out any experimental procedures or any theoretical proof, so it’s impossible to verify their claims. This is one of the classic signs of a crackpot. Another sign is that they’re already trying to get capital, before ever demonstrating that it can work. It’s almost certainly vaporware, and also goes against the idea of science for the benefit of everyone when such a revolutionary technology (forget clean energy, we could build entire universes out of nothing if they could violate conservation of energy as they claim) is kept private for potential profit.
Going back to the animation, in a frictionless environment, the system they have performs at unity — the energy is perfectly converted from electricity to magnetism to kinetic energy. That’s still not free energy, even WITHOUT friction.
It’s strange that people make free energy claims all the time, but this one particular claim gets all the press. At least some of the others have a Rube Goldberg quality that takes time to debunk. There’s nothing to this one at all, yet.