Turquoise Energy Newsletter #68

Turquoise Energy Ltd. News #68
Victoria BC
by Craig Carmichael - October 4th, 2013

www.TurquoiseEnergy.com = www.ElectricCaik.com = www.ElectricHubcap.com = www.ElectricWeel.com

Headlines:
** CMBR: Abundant, omnipresent, free radiant energy is real and it can be tapped!
** High energy storage Mn-Mn Batteries are working! - High self discharge drops off 'all by itself' over weeks.

Month In Brief (Project Summaries)
- "Discovery" of free, abundant, omnipresent radiant energy: it's well known to astronomy as "Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation" (CMBR or CMB). ...So that's what all those 'free energy' people have been groping for without being able to name it! - Other stuff - Mn-Mn battery project - More other stuff getting left behind - Thermoelectric Fridge performance update - 3D printer repair.

In Passing (Miscellaneous topics, editorial comments & opinionated rants) (none)

Electric Transport - Electric Hubcap Motor Systems
* More Mazda - NiMH Battery Tube Stuff: reduced from 3 to 2 NiMH batteries, increased them to 90 AH each.
* Front suspension adjustment (it adjusts!) - new brake pads & shoes
* Cable to monitor any single battery: uncovers 2 unexpectedly weak batteries... that tested 'okay' when the car wasn't going.
* Replaced: 2 "new" ("reconditioned") batteries increase range & reserve (8-9 miles/13-15Km?)
* Quick defoggers: small 12v heater-blower dies fast with small battery. 120v hair dryer before starting works well, windows stay clear surprisingly long.

Other "Green" Electric Equipment Projects (No reports)

Electricity Generating
* Vertical axis wind turbine from PVC pipes, my motor shafts & bearings, lawnmower motor as generator. (Sigh, not finished)
* VLF Radio Wave/power line waves Power Pickup unit: made one - little bang for the buck.
* "Space Energy", "Zero point energy", "Vacuum energy" etc, etc... Really means CMBR !?! - Wow!
* CMBR = "EHF" radiant energy, between microwave and far infra-red bands, centered on 1.8mm, 160 GHz.
* CMBR is "omnipresent", comes from all directions, and penetrates Earth's atmosphere.
* CMBR constitutes "most of the radiant energy in the universe". (Wikipedia)
* Tesla, Moray, Markovitch, and quite a few others: CMBR energy pickups/converters/electrical generators?
* Simplest pulsed coil "TPU" CMBR harvester - has been replicated by third party.
* Dropping other electricity generating projects? - Geothermal.

Electricity Storage - Turquoise (MnMn) Battery Project etc.
* The high self discharge gradually drops off (maybe ceases?) by itself over a period of weeks. All you need to do is wait!
* Mn-Mn, permanganate-manganese, batteries may now be considered to be working!!!
* They can be used from 2.5 volts and gradually drained down to as low as 1.5 volts without damage.
* The negode appears to remain more negative than zinc for the entire discharge (so theoretically the zinc current collector and zinc powder additive won't corrode) - it's more the poside that loses voltage.
* Utilization of active substances and performance could still be a lot better.
* Improved soldered NiMH dry cell battery packs. (well... improved over my previous techniques...)

No Project Reports on: DSSC solar cells (will probably abandon), LED Lighting, Pulsejet steel plate cutter, CNC Gardening/Farming Machine (sigh, maybe summer 2014?), Woodstove/Thermal Electricity Generator (will probably abandon), Peltier & vacuum pipe heat pumping, Ultra-efficient torque converter transmission, individual EV battery monitor (will probably cancel).

Newsletters Index/Highlights: http://www.TurquoiseEnergy.com/news/index.html

Construction Manuals and information:
- Electric Hubcap Family Motors - Turquoise Motor Controllers - Nanocrystalline glaze to enhance Solar Cell performance - Ersatz 'powder coating' home process for protecting/painting metal

Products Catalog:
- Electric Hubcap 4.6KW BLDC Pancake Motor Kit
- Electric Caik 3KW BLDC Pancake Motor Kit
- Sodium Sulfate - Lead-Acid battery longevity/renewal
- NiMH Handy Battery Sticks, 12v battery trays & Dry Cells (cheapest NiMH prices in Victoria BC)
- LED Light Fixtures

(Will accept BITCOIN digital currency)

...all at: http://www.TurquoiseEnergy.com/ (orders: e-mail craig@saers.com)

September in Brief

CMBR

   A fantastic development occurred in September. I saw the term "space energy" that we should be able to harness easily, from a source I deem credible. I started thinking about all those vague, undefined and unexplained terms people were using: "vacuum energy", "source energy", "zero point energy", "radiant energy", the "cosmic carrier field". Skepticism and incredulity about such things is inevitable when none of the proponents of such ideas are able to identify any source of such energy.
   As I looked into possibilities, somewhere my mind made a seemingly obscure connection: I thought of the "cosmic microwave background radiation" ("CMBR" or "CMB"), well known to astronomy. Every time CMBR is mentioned, the next phrase is about how this radiation is "left over" from the supposed "Big Bang", and hence "is evidence for" this specious theory about the start of the universe. It sounds so trivial. AFAIK it's never been discussed for its own merit or in any other connection, still less ever mentioned as a potential source of energy. In Wikipedia I read through many paragraphs of this, but found a few gems buried within all the blather. The best one was this: "Most of the radiation energy in the universe is in the cosmic microwave background." Bingo! This was what all those vague "free energy" buff terms were groping at. There is indeed a free radiant energy other than sunshine, available throughout the universe, and this was it.
   The CMBR has some interesting properties. It's called "microwave", but its frequency band in the electromagnetic spectrum is five octaves above the "microwaves" used in microwave ovens, the center wavelength being around 1.8mm rather than several centimeters. (So... why are they called "microwaves" rather than "centiwaves"?) That's much greater than the difference between ultra-violet and infra-red, which have considerably different radiative effects.
   The CMBR penetrates Earth's atmosphere to the ground, but it obviously doesn't cook everything or kill life. It seems to be all around yet unseen and having no notable effect on anything. Being a few octaves above typical microwave frequencies and a few below the far infra-red, it occupies its own unique frequency band in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Apparently, the energy available from CMB rays is perhaps 50 times
as strong as that from sunlight - or from any other radiant energy.

   Knowing that there actually is a radiant energy available, and that the likes of Tesla and a fair number of other more recent inventors have managed to turn it into electricity - and seemingly abundant electricity - puts a whole new complexion on trying to harvest "free" energy, and a whole new focus on what might be best for me to attempt to create next. Energy saving devices and greater efficiencies, while valuable, take a second place to the likelihood of being able to make very substantial levels of electricity on demand, day or night, in any weather.
   Techniques and circuits for harnessing this energy aren't entirely trivial and obviously from the many terms describing it, it hasn't been very well understood even by those who've successfully made electricity from it. Tesla understood it was "radiant energy" he was harvesting, and someone recently told me that in addition to lighting light bulbs, Tesla drove around a Detroit Electric (electric car) with no batteries, using his energy receiver for power. This is an amazing story I hadn't heard before. Others have said it was "EHF" energy, but again without naming a source for that energy.

   So far it seems that all such technologies have been ruthlessly quashed by the gangster-parasites who have controlled our society, before much how-to knowledge about them spreads, with typical stories of vandalism and threatening, beating and probably murder of the inventors over the decades. The US patent office even "lost" a patent for a working 50KW device in the 1930s.
   As the days went on, every thought and conversation about solar collectors, wind power, efficiencies and effectiveness of systems, and the ubiquitous topic of batteries and vehicle range, became a graphical illustration of what a game changer free radiant energy would be: electric camping stoves and coolers, quiet electric cars and buses with unlimited range, electric trains with no overhead wires or electrified rails, quiet electric aircraft, power for spacecraft, the speedy end of gasoline powered vehicles, eventual elimination of ugly overhead power lines and electric bills... and doubtless I've missed many more subtle improvements to our lives.

   These are a few of the things we've been missing out on for many decades because our society has tolerated fear, greed and corruption and somehow allowed ruthless gangsters and their sycophants to rise to the positions of power and influence and run roughshod over us and over our real elite: those with ideas, ideals and drive for making a better world! What could our world be like if these people were in charge instead?
   But the day is almost upon us that the inbred family cliques who today control 80% of the world's economy will have no more power to force everyone to buy their dirty energy products and live lavishly off the backs of the productive. The internet is starting to expose their dirty little secrets, and the coming financial collapse will eliminate their power bases. And some of them are even now changing their own attitudes and beginning to realize that not only everyone else but they themselves and their children will live better, happier lives with a reframing of our society and its institutions as well as long overdue energy technology advances.

   I've decided to go ahead with a relatively simple demo unit based on a 2007 "open source" design that was apparently duplicated by another party from the PDF instruction file. It has a double ring 'collector coil', three 'control coils'/transformers at 90° to the collector loop for magnetic interaction, and a rather complex and poorly understood driving circuit of two or three independent sharp-edged square waves at frequencies in the x100 s of KHz range. Probably in the complex interactions and harmonics of these distributed signals is hidden some heterodyne (beat) frequency that converts 160 GHz to some far lower frequency that flows through wires, and that electrical and electronic devices respond to.

My start at a CMBR energy harvesting/collecting/converting unit.
The secret is doubtless more in the control frequencies and driving
electronics than in the exact physical configuration. (The yellow
iron-powder cores are for the control coil-transformers, which have
yet to be wound.)

   Shortly before I got onto CMBR, I had started thinking about resurrecting an ocean wave power project with the highly effective, safe, economical design I'd seen last December (see TE News Dec. 2012). A fixed tower installation by the shore would need to be built if it's to be properly tried, and it should be properly tried if it's to be tried at all, or else the skeptics will point to one more failed or marginal attempt to harness a new energy source and it'll be doubly hard to try the next time. But at what point does one make an approach for support with an untested idea?
   On the other hand, what is a million dollars in research & development investment if it proves the same power can be made for 2 or 3 billion dollars instead of the 8 billion or more for the Site C Peace River dam, and done in incremental stages instead of the "all or nothing" dam?

   About the same time, as a personal power making project, I cut 8 vanes for a simple vertical axis wind turbine ("VAWT") from PVC pipes I already had, and formed them into the apparently optimum "J" shape, softening the plastic in the oven at 250°f. This could mount in the attic of the house when completed, with just the turbine part above the roof peak, via a small hole in the roof for the shaft. The DC lawnmower motor planned as a generator would feed the low voltage box in common with the solar PV system -- which virtually stopped producing later in the month as clouds and rain set in.

Layout for the vertical axis wind turbine.

I also made a little circuit I saw on line that harvests low frequency radio and powerline waves, reputed to be able to charge cell phones. I only got a volt out of it, and no measurable current. (It probably works best with the antenna right next to an electrical cord of an appliance drawing a lot of current.) A tuned circuit - tuned to the strongest AM radio station - should do better for radio waves. There wasn't much "bang for the buck", but it did demonstrate picking up radiant electromagnetic electricity out of the air.
After the ocean waves, wind turbine, and radio energy harvester, I found the CMBR and it seemed like a better thing to invest my time in.

"RF Energy Harvester" circuit connected to 10' antenna wire - here up to .836 volts and slowly rising.

Another major development was that the battery made in August, "PJC1" (Plastic Jar Cell 1), gradually started holding more and more charge longer and longer. That this would happen could only be hinted at in my previous short lived cells. In August I identified the self discharge process and the logical conclusion was that my chelation idea wasn't working well enough to use. Still, they seemed to slowly improve, and finally I have a cell that's lasted long enough to see the process continue for a while - I won't say to complete.
It does seem it just needs time and charging to gradually take effect. Seemingly, all one has to do is charge and wait for good performance. It might take 2 or 3 months to reduce the discharge to "trivial" levels.

Improving charge retention with time, with a 'reset' when I opened the cell and made a change.
(Y: cell voltage after ~8 hours; X: September date)

   A possibility for a swiftly ready cell would be Ni-Mn at "moderately alkaline" pH, but further tests on that combo at pH 14 in a Changhong cell showed that the Mn doesn't seem to hold a charge, even in the fridge. If it can be made to work, I haven't proved it yet. At lower pH it should work, but it won't have the higher amp-hours of Mn-Mn. And I haven't actually tried it yet.

   I also made up a couple of soldered Ni-MH dry cell battery packs, there being no other way to fit the cells in place. However, I made two great improvements to my previous soldered packs:
1) I cut pieces of tarpaper and wrapped each cell. If the cells get overheated and melt the thin plastic sleeves, they won't short together and the pack go up in smoke.
2) I soldered them together with some flex: curved lengths of #16 stranded, insulated wire, instead of the solid, heavy "bus bar" pieces that were gradually breaking loose their solder joins with vibration in my previous soldered packs.
   I trust the new packs will be safe and last long.

A view of a 12V, 20AH soldered pack, one of two for a 24V cordless lawnmower.

   And of course I did a few things to improve the electric Mazda RX7 and keep it running. I got the front-left suspension up off the bottom, and changed the front brake pads, which were worn right down and had started a grinding noise. Defogging with a hair dryer before starting seems to keep the windows clear for the duration of a trip.
   I didn't make a monitor to monitor and display every individual battery while driving, but I did make a cable to plug any one battery into a voltmeter so it could be watched while driving - just unplug its charger and plug in the meter cable. This disclosed that a suspected battery was okay, but a couple that seemed okay when the car was stationary had to be replaced. The replacement improved the range to the best yet, probably 8 to 10 miles. So far I've only gone 7.0 without a charge, but it seemed to have some range left. Anyway, best to have some reserve to retain longer battery life. Five of the nine Pb-Pb batteries now have sodium sulfate to improve their life span. The others are either "sealed" types or are at mid-life, a time when it's inadvisable to add it.
   Of course removing the batteries and putting in a CMBR energy receiver(s) for indefinite range would make an individual car battery monitor unit obsolete, so again my time is probably better spent doing the CMBR project. If I make good progress on that, I'll cancel the battery monitor unit project entirely.

CAT plug to voltmeter pins cable allows watching suspect batteries while driving,
tho only one at a time.

Other projects continue to get left behind. The pulley for the Sprint car transmission has sat on one side of the workbench all summer, no new LED globe lights have been made, and (even having bought the desired threaded end stoppers in August) I haven't evacuated a pipe to try improving the thermoelectric fridge and eliminating the fan. (Fridge performance update: I've been letting it run 24 hours for a while, and in the cooler weather the outside of the melting ice tray has frosted up and it's 1°c at that end of the fridge, and 7° at the top at the far end (the lowest yet). Occasionally I leave it off at night and some of the ice melts, cold side temperature rising to 4 or 5°.)

After a last attempt to get the 3D printer working again which produced only a scary (but fortunately curable) failure of the netbook computer when I plugged them together via USB, I ordered a replacement "Melzi" 3D printer control circuit board. It hadn't arrived by month's end.

Electric Hubcap Motor Systems - Electric Transport

More Electric Mazda stuff:

Individual battery monitor, battery replacements - NiMH Battery Tube Stuff - Low front suspension, brakes - Quick windshield defogger?

Batteries

   I finally considered that if the NiMH batteries seemed to be the ones limiting the driving range, probably by not getting fully up to 14.0 volts and a full charge, and now having instead overcharged and damaged some of the cells with the new charger taking them over 14.0, that I would drop one of the NiMH batteries from the car, leaving room to expand the other two from 70 AH to 90. (One drawback: it now needs quite a long wire to connect from the far end of the NiMH tubes to the next battery in the string. But the extra long #2 AWG wire that I happened to have handy doesn't seem to get warm. Another drawback is that I can now fit only 11 batteries again instead of 12.)
   I know the available amp-hours drops considerably at the sort of high currents needed for a typical electric car, but it seems almost incomprehensible that I can only drive 10 or 12 amp-hours of distance from batteries rated for 70 or more amp-hours. In disassembling the NiMH batteries, I discovered that yet another tube had come unglued and probably wasn't contributing - just a small piece of the answer. It was the "+" end as always, leading to the thought that I invariably glue on the "-" end first and set it aside to harden. The "-" ends have been 100% reliable as best I can recall.
   When I do the "+" end, I push on the end cap by hand to put some tension on the battery connections. This probably means it gets moved around a bit while it's hardening. So, new procedure: put a weight on the end to apply the pressure and don't move it until it's solid. Actually that's the original procedure... I just put the awkward weight jig aside somewhere and stopped using it - I guess I got lazy, and I didn't think it mattered. Evidently it does.

   With the two remaining NiMH's now at 90 AH each I went 6.8 miles/10.9 Km on one charge on the 10th, using 16AH. (That's 16 * 132 volts = 2112 watt-hours.) One NiMH and one PbPb were pretty much down to 12.0 volts. The other nine could have gone farther, and 2 or 3 of them were still like unused (12.7+ volts) and obviously could have gone much farther. It would seem those are the sort it needs for real range. In the meantime the one lead-acid should probably be replaced and the one NiMH should have slightly higher charge voltage applied or maybe some of the sets of cells should be replaced.

   I still ask, why do 80-95 AH batteries only give 16 AH of driving? One can't hope for anything like 80 at high discharge rates, but why not 25 or 30?

Individual Battery Monitor

   If I haven't been able to get going on the microcontroller ciruit to have bar graphs for each battery's voltage, I could at least make up a fairly long adapter cable from a CAT socket to voltmeter pins, to check one battery at a time while driving, with the meter on the dash or passenger's seat, and perhaps get some answers to the above question. For batteries with only one plug, I simply unplug the charger and plug in the voltmeter for the test. This shows a real advantage of having standard 12V plugs & sockets, ie, the "CAT Standard". Of course, large aligator clips onto the battery posts would probably work okay too - at least for the batteries with posts.
   This did indeed give answers. When the overall voltage started dropping rapidly, after only 2-1/2 miles by the time I made the cable, I found two identical PbPb batteries labelled "Workaholic" that read fine when not under load, but one dropped to about 7 volts and the other as low as -2 volts when I pressed the accelerator while driving. Somewhat unexpectedly, those were the ones now limiting the driving range. These were donated by Jim Harrington and I'm grateful I was able to use them for some months. But they're 'sealed' cells so I don't think they can be renewed.
   Replacing them with earlier 'renewed' batteries only made it worse. One 'deep cycle' one that I had previously been using in the car for a while dropped seriously in voltage under load, eg to 8 or 9 volts, even when it was fully charged - it simply couldn't handle high currents. I had been unaware of that all along. There was virtually no way to know it without an individual reading while driving.

   So I bit the bullet and bought two "reconditioned" batteries which were quite new and put them in. The first test drive of 3 miles showed less voltage drop. Then, since they were both still quite new, I put sodium sulfate in them.
   The two remaining NiMH batteries, now expanded to 90 AH but which I was still worried about, tested fine. Probably now the range is limited by the two size 24 PbPb batteries that are at the front-left where two size 27's won't fit. However, a 7.0 mile drive showed there was still some reserve, so it'll probably go 8 to 10 miles now if I need to stretch it that far. But it's better for the batteries to have the reserve and not discharge them to the max. It's still an "in town only" car.

Suspension

   I got the left front suspension cranked up off 'bottomed out'... literally. Under a plastic center cover, there's a nut at the top of the strut/shock absorber that you crank and crank and crank, and gradually the corner of the car rises. The shop manual doesn't mention that adjusting the front suspension is possible and I've never heard it anywhere. I only found out that's how it works by buying a deep socket to fit into the recess and trying it, after noticing that the nuts were greased, which is unusual. The one on the other side takes a different size socket wrench... so the left one was apparently replaced after the accident (before I got the car), by a different type... and evidently never adjusted afterwards. The left side still sits an inch lower than the right, but I turned it a long way I don't know how far to dare to go. The main objective, suspension!, is accomplished and the car rides much nicer.

New Brake Pads

   I also bought new front brake pads on the 11th. I was getting some increasingly nasty grinding sounds lately when I braked hard - and there's no regenerative braking or any other way to stop the car if the brakes don't work, other than the hand brake. The brake pads were indeed worn right down, with metal rubbing on the disk in one spot.
   I had trouble getting the seized tires off. Just as I finished the whole job, a mechanic happened to walk by and said "That's easy! Just loosen the wheel nuts a bit, get in and turn the steering wheel back and forth. They'll pop right off." Ahrg!
   I figured the rear brakes doubtless needed doing as well, and that won't work for them. I loosened the nuts a bit and drove back and forth a bit, punching the pedal in low gear and reverse. A wheel came off fine, but the rear brake shoes were almost like new. Too bad I had already bought new ones. It'll be a long time before I need them.

Windshield Defogger?

   Quite a while back I got a small heater that plugs into the cigarette lighter. The heater installed under the dash by the original converters of the car evidently had almost immediately blown its internal fuse and wasn't very accessible. Naturally I want to replace this with a Peltier module heat pump rather than spend time on a heater that uses up a lot of power. For a quick means of defogging the windshield now that fall is here, I decided to mount the little heater on the dash and aim it at the windshield. (Aim is adjustable.) Unfortunately the cigarette lighter doesn't seem to work. Sigh! I threw a 12v NiMH tray battery with a cigarette lighter socket soldered to it into the car. Then I decided not to bother mounting the heater, either, and just have it handheld. It works. Hopefully need for it will be rare.
   A 120 volt heater, eg 300-400 watts, placed in the car and turned on to warm the car up and (hopefully) defog prior to a trip while still plugged in/charging should do the bulk of the work.

Mazda Project Eats Time

   The "Derelectric" RX7 is getting to be a pretty decent car now (except for the still non-functional heater-defogger), but I consider that if all the time I've spent on it, or even a good portion of it, had been spent on the ultra-efficient variable torque converter transmission, I'd probably have it and the Chevy Sprint running by now. On the other hand, I've been driving on electricity, and I've learned a lot of useful EV details.

Electricity (Energy) Production

Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

It looked like I had most of the parts for a wind turbine already. Later in the month clouds brought solar collection to low values and I couldn't charge the electric Mazda from it. I felt that between solar, wind, and a woodstove thermoelectric generator, I might attain some minimal level of electrical output most of the time. Of course, power by magnets or some other "free energy" device would be a better answer, but wind power seemed immediately attainable.
The rotor needs to be mounted on something solid so it won't blow away. I decided that since the logical place for the unit was at the peak of the roof of the house, the roof and the rafters would also constitute the mounting stand. The bearings and the generator would be in the attic and nothing need protrude through the roof except a hole for the 1" shaft.

The vanes roughly in position (I may fill those vent holes)

   I had 4" PVC pipes about 2' long left over from the "super battery stick", a design which proved inadvisable. On about the 13th I split them in half. Then I put them in the oven (2 at a time - one fit on each rack) at 250°F for a few minutes to soften them (to floppyness). I pulled them out and used a weight to flatten one side and butted the other side against a 4"x4" board to keep it from sagging. The shape attained was a "J" shape, which apparently is something like optimum vane shape. Many people just use half circles from whatever tubes they use. The shapes were a little rough and varied, but all this only took a little over an hour one morning. If I did a proper forming jig, perhaps shaped out of wood, they could be fairly uniform and it would go even faster. If I could figure out how to make the rest of the job so quick and easy, VAWT s might be a pretty simple thing to produce for sale.
   As I see it, the round outside sluffs off wind on the side of the rotor heading into the wind, the shape generates lift like a wing (in the correct direction) in the windward area, and the inside of the "J" catches wind on the side pushing away from the wind. The downwind side probably doesn't do much of note. Thus from a little before the front to almost the rear, thrust is in the positive direction, without very much counterthrust from the vanes on the other side.
   One might make most efficient use of the wind with vanes that swivel to always present their optimum face to the wind. But a slightly bigger turbine with fixed vanes can give the same power output with less complexity.
   My plan was to glue a bunch of PVC pipes together and to the PVC vanes to form the entire rotor assembly. On the 15th I got the idea to run bands/rings, perhaps of PVC, around the outside of the vanes, too. This would help make it all more solid (the PVC pipes have considerable flex to them), and ensure nothing could fly off by centrifugal force. At least, not unless the force was strong enough to rip the plastic itself. If that happens, at least light plastic parts should be less hazardous than metal or wood.
   But I do have plans to prevent over-revving. First, the generator load will go up with RPM. If the wind gets too high, I can use the excess to heat water or air. That will probably be sufficient. If not, I have ideas for air-brake vanes that are retracted by gravity but pop open centrifugally if the unit is spinning too fast. This is somewhat similar to the way tilted axis tail vanes on propeller type windplants turn the unit sideways in higher winds.

Shaping the vanes after heating them in the oven at ~250°F - wooden brace, steel weight.

   But before I got very far making this, I discovered a known and powerful - but never considered - 24 hours a day, weatherproof, source of free radiant energy, and immersed myself in study.

Capturing Radio Signals & Powerline Fields

   I started an interesting exploration of ways to turn invisible energies into electricity this month, after reading a message dated February 2003 that contained this digression from a topic of oil and war to come in Iraq:

    "Long ago, the planet could have moved towards the use of a 'friendlier' fuel for your ever-increasing energy requirements. We greeted the wise use of hydropower with excitement. The safe and prudent use of water, and its conversion to clean, useable gasses was explored ages ago, and the discovery of space energy that constantly 'rains down' onto our planetary surface is also not new, and of the greatest potential and the cleanest available source when selectively applied by individuals and small groups.

    "The 'almost costless' electricity produced can fuel many a range of appliances. In the end, the most useful application will be in the desalination of seawater and it will make your fertile deserts bloom without the pollution that is slowly making the environment uninhabitable." -- ABC-22

   Since "space energy", if it existed, sounded promising, I started searching on that term and found an interesting site with what seems to be a novel method of generating electricity. For nearly a century Nicola Tesla's means for capturing energy "from thin air" has been suppressed and all but forgotten. The site claimed to reveal "Tesla's secret". There's a book for sale, and also a circuit shown on the web site.

   The "hojo motor", a diode bridge circuit, plainly couldn't work Tesla's way: an 'antenna' is used rather than a 'plate' or a 'hollow copper hemisphere', and the antenna input is coupled through two capacitors. AC current would flow through capacitors C1 and C2 and be routed by the diodes to make DC, filtered by C3 and C4. The video link shows the circuit, with an unknown antenna, charging up a cell phone. This is so simple that if it makes enough electricity to be useful you wonder why it hasn't been thought of and used again and again.

A simple diode bridge circuit for a radio wave powered electricity generator.

   Now, how close was that video done to a radio transmitter? We know that there are radio signals constantly traveling through the air. If you hold up a light bulb - fluorescent or sometimes even incandescent - near a transmitting antenna, it will light up, usually rather dimly, to varying degrees depending on the signal strength. No connections. I've seen this myself when I worked in radio in the late 1970s. Low to medium frequency radio signals seemed best, IIRC. (And I often hear what appears to be morse code and other LF data signals in my head when it's quiet, without any radio equipment beyond my ears - and perhaps fillings in my teeth acting as diodes.)
   All very well if you live right next to a radio transmitter antenna?... But light bulbs aren't even made to pick up radio energy. Their "antennas" are laughable. (or did the person holding the bulb have to hold a bulb terminal? I can't remember.) How far away could they work if they had good antennas to pick up the transmissions?
   There are natural radio waves as well as man-made, mostly at very low frequencies. Perhaps most of us simply haven't suspected that they may contain useful amounts of energy. I looked this up on line. From the graphs I saw nanoteslas of field strength, and nanowatts per square meter of energy. This isn't very auspicious for getting great gobs of power, but perhaps it was worth trying out. Since the anticipated frequencies are very low, one suspects the longer the antenna the better. Perhaps some tuned distance from the ground would be ideal.
   Here's some info I found at a web site about natural radio signals:

Natural Radio Lab [a web site]

Natural Radio is the VLF radio emissions that originate terrestrially from lightning and within the earth's magnetosphere through interaction with the Sun. These radio signals, sferics, tweeks, whistlers, chorus and others, occur within the range of human hearing, and can be heard with simple receivers as described on this site.
Natural Radio Lab also looks at Space Weather and the related solar activity that influences it such as sunspots, solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections.
Please explore this site. I hope you go beyond reading what's here and actually go out and take the opportunity to hear whistlers or the enchanting sounds of the dawn chorus.

Mark Karney, N9JWF
Webmaster

I found the "Tesla's secret" website with the diode circuit info here:
http://www.magnetmotorz.net/hojo-motor
Soon I discovered an identical website:
http://www.energybytesla.com/
   Then I found what may be the real source of the circuit, invented this year in April by Dennis Siegel, although neither the article nor Siegel's own web pages describe the circuit:
http://www.naturalnews.com/039814_radio_waves_batteries_charging_device.html
http://dennissiegel.de/electromagnetic-harvester/
   I noticed that Siegel's site shows him next to power stations and various electrical things... so he seems to be mostly harvesting 50 or 60 Hz power line energy - to charge small batteries. That's not exactly the sort of abundant 'green energy' or 'radio waves' I was thinking of, tho it's not limited to harvesting from power lines.

   Given that the name of the book is "Energy by Tesla", the first of the identical websites was probably copied from the second, where I found it looking for magnet motor designs. Now... what has the 47$ book got that the circuit on the web page doesn't... if anything? Does it expand on what the nuenergy.org site (below) has?

    The question is, what frequency should the antenna and capacitive components be tuned for... or is tuning something to be considered? Capturing 60Hz power fields would imply a long antenna (or one next to a power wire) and very large capacitors. I have some 2.2uF non-polar capacitors for C1 and C2 - non-polar doesn't get much larger than that. The site mentions germanium diodes, which are rare these days but have the lowest forward voltage drop... best to have if the voltages expected are low. (not to be confused with geranium diodes, which have big red flowers.)

   I decided to try out the circuit. If that yielded interesting results, I might order the book they offer and see if it's really practical to build something to generate more useful amounts of energy. (This was before discovering the CMBR stuff, below.)
   I talked to ham radio buff Ian Soutar. He said such devices used to work better when there were higher output radio stations around. Evidently some used to be up to 250KW. I remember 50KW as being the maximum allowed. Now apparently it's something like 5KW.
   Ian said that farmers living under high voltage power lines would make special transformers to harvest electricity from the magnetic fields, and power their whole barn (eg, lights and milking equipment) with them. This is certainly more than just powering a cell phone charger! Finally a specially equipped helicopter flew over all the power lines searching for magnetic field anomalies at barns, and all the farmers who had this equipment were fined for stealing power, even tho they had made no physical connections to the power lines.
   He also said calculations for DC ionic energy showed absurdly low powers for very large investments. However, this was probably for building solid plate structures sticking up from the ground, rather than for vast fields of coarse mesh chicken wire hung from high altitude cables strung between hills or skyscrapers. (Maybe even up where lightning originates.) The reason coarse mesh chicken wire should work as well as solid plate is that electron deficient charged ions will veer to strike the electron rich ground (wires) from anywhere nearby.

   This effect is strikingly illustrated on Saturn's moon Iapetus. Just 1440Km diameter, Iapetus orbits rather distant to Saturn, so it (like Jupiter's furthest moon Callisto (~4800-4840Km), which is about the same size as Mercury) hasn't been tidally churned to sink the good soil into the interior and leave glare ice on the surface (like, eg, Europa, Dione, Rhea...). Saturn's magnetic field drags ionized particles with it, creating a deadly ionizing radiation that strikes the rear ('East') hemisphere of all its moons from behind. Iapetus, with no sort of atmosphere or magnetic field, has no protection from this. However, the charged ions unerringly veer like lightning to strike high ground, leaving deeper crater floors and crevasses free of radiation.

Ion irradiated rear face of Iapetus. The edge of the dark, radiation free front face is seen at the right.
The dark vegetation can only grow in radiation free areas: deep crater floors, crevasses, near steep walls and under ice extrusions.
(Also it's evidently too cold toward the poles and on polar facing slopes
- this vegetation would be a migrant from Ganymede or Callisto, much closer to the sun.)

It seems remarkable that vegetation of any sort might grow on cold, airless worlds, but it's the only logical
conclusion that appears to explain various science findings about the dark surfaces such as the spectrographic data
(eg, "polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons" - definitely stuff of life), the diurnal temperature profile indicating a "very fluffy" surface
'that's penetrated by sunlight', a landscape which is 'rapidly resurfaced after meteor strikes', plus the
striking correspondence of the dark surfaces to the seemingly non-irradiated areas in the images.

But I digress... and then digress from the digression.

Radio/powerline field harvesting circuit: Slim Pickings

   On the 15th or 16th I put together the circuit with common 1N4148 silicon small signal diodes, 2.2uF non-polar capacitors on the input and 100uF capacitors on the output. I added a 15 volt zener diode in case the output voltage actually got that high. I soldered on 3 aligator clip leeds for "antenna", "+" and "-" connections.
   I clipped on a 10' wire for an antenna, grounded the board at my lab power supply, and clipped a meter to the output. It read 1/2 a volt and was very gradually rising. When it hit a volt after a couple of minutes I left the room. When I came back it was 1.5 volts... and falling. Whatever had been imparting energy to it seemed to have shut off. It fell to about 1 volt and stayed.
   Then I took it over to Ian Soutar's 40 meter dipole antenna. Ian said his back yard was very quiet radio interference wise, which made it a good place to make ham radio calls from. Results at best showed similar voltage increases with time, and other things we tried were worse. In a park away from power lines with a long extension cord for an antenna, not much seemed to happen at all. (But I'm not sure I got a good ground.) Ian did say that it definitely needed to have germanium diodes with their low .2-.3v forward drop instead of silicon at .6-.7v, since signal levels were bound to be very low.
   I went to buy some and was told that the forward voltage drop wasn't so low. I bought some 1N5817 schottky diodes instead, which are about .35v forward drop at low currents. It didn't work worth beans with those. It got up to about 2-1/2mV instead of 1.5 volts. My theory is that the 1N4148 s, being fast, small signal diodes, have lower leakage so they don't bleed off the accumulating voltage. Even the tiny voltage on the Schottkys dropped off quickly when the antenna was disconnected, indicating leakage current.
   It didn't seem at all promising, but not to leave any stones unturned I went back the next day (17th) and got the 1N34A germanium diodes. (Seeing just two digits instead of four after the "1N" ("1" semiconductor junction = diode) reminds one that these harken back to the very first germanium semiconductors of the 1950s. Silicon came later.)
   On the 20th I finally soldered them on. The voltage proceeded to drift negative to tens of millivolts. It didn't seem to care whether the antenna was connected. Ugh! I started to wonder if even the original results really meant anything.
   To find out I unsoldered the 1N37A s and put the 1N4148 s back on. Sure enough, when the antenna was connected the voltage began rising steadily in the proper direction, millivolt by millivolt, to over 1/2 a volt. With the antenna disconnected the voltage started dropping faster than it had been rising. The original 1N4148 s that I chose because I had them at the time, were the best of any I tried, and indeed the only ones that worked at all. But it looked like it would take a coon's age just to charge a cellphone, if I could get it to work at all. It might work with the antenna right next to something drawing a lot of AC power.
   As a last experiment I took off the 100uF polarized capacitors and replaced them with two more of the low leakage ceramic 2.2uF ones. I also removed the 15v zener diode since the voltage never got very high. The voltages changed much more rapidly with the smaller capacitance and attained higher values with the low leakage. It soon passed a volt and went up to about 1.2v. Setting the meter to milliamps showed .000mA short circuit current - not even a microamp. Ten in series with ten antennas would have supplied 12 volts at some infinitesimal current - or maybe 6 volts at a higher infinitesimal current.

   In the meantime I had started finding other versions of what Tesla had done on 'nuenergy.org' website, and then equating vague undefined terms like "space energy" and "zero point energy" with the "cosmic microwave background radiation" ("CMBR") known to astronomy. nuenergy.org got me started thinking about the Tesla and Markovitch energy converters. I abandoned the apparently fickle project of harvesting powerline and radio fields with an untuned circuit to obtain minute amounts of energy. Seeing the voltages rise on the meter illustrates capture of invisible energy out of the air -- but to get real energy harvesting, it would be better to tap the wavelength where the bulk of the natural radiant energy of the universe really is, with a circuit tuned to take real advantage of it!

Cosmic Microwave Background Energy ("CMBR" or "CMB") to Electricity Harvester/Collector/Converter

   There seemed to be a large discrepancy between the circuit and what Tesla was doing. According to the site, Tesla's thesis was that the Earth has a negative charge compared to the ions coming from the sun, or from atmospheric atoms ionized by the sun. This DC charge causes lightning. What seems less clear is whether this force can be harnessed with nothing more than a plate on a tall pole to charge with this ionic energy. Tesla said the current is 'feeble', but that the voltage builds up and up until it arcs across the capacitor plates.
   In his circuits he mentions a coil and an oscillator. This didn't make much sense: one doesn't usually use coils with DC circuits. It's commonly said that Tesla's power generator was 'very successful', but if current is 'feeble' and it takes considerable time to build up the voltage, that's not an indication he was getting very much power. Evidently many people since Tesla have done some calculations and decided that harvesting atmospheric ion energy wouldn't be worthwhile: building something large enough to harvest useful energy would cost far more than any returns obtained.
   But would it need a solid structure? A very large wire mesh strung on a cable between two mountains might provide worthwhile DC energy. For a relatively low cost, that would put a very large receiving "plate" up far away from the ground, where the charge is greater. It would probably be beyond the scope of any sort of home project, but perhaps an experiment using a wire mesh hanging from a skiing chair lift cable in the off season might give an indication of the potential of the idea.

Tesla's(?) idea: capture energy from the high voltage positive charge in the air.
But that idea doesn't explain some of the circuits.

Tesla said (among other things):

From the electric Potential that exists between the elevated plate (plus) and the ground (minus), energy builds up in the capacitor, and, after “a suitable time interval,” the accumulated energy will “manifest itself in a powerful discharge” that can do work. The capacitor, says Tesla, should be “of considerable electrostatic capacity,” and its dielectric made of “the best quality mica, for it has to withstand potentials that could rupture a weaker dielectric.”

“The sun, as well as other sources of radiant energy throw off minute particles of matter positively electrified, which, impinging upon the upper plate, communicate continuously an electrical charge to the same. The opposite terminal of the condenser being connected to ground, which may be considered as a vast reservoir of negative electricity, a feeble current flows continuously into the condenser and inasmuch as the particles are …charged to a very high potential, this charging of the condenser may continue, as I have actually observed, almost indefinitely, even to the point of rupturing the dielectric.”
- Nikola Tesla

    But this didn't explain what the coils were for. Another web site had quite different ideas of what Tesla was doing:
http://www.nuenergy.org/space-energy-receiver/
"
The device in question is one of a number of energy transducers that converts extremely high frequency energy to a form comparable to alternating or direct current electricity. The process involves in all cases, the utilizing of the instrument as a specially designed resonating cavity. This cavity can be composed of either a number of crystals, a series of coils, or a combination of the above. To understand how the unit operates, it is first necessary to briefly describe the nature of this energy source.

Research and experimentation have established that this energy is one that pervades the known universe and is constantly flowing through the Earth itself. It has been found to be quite dense, with enough power to light an American city of around 50,000 persons for a year. Because of its origins and immense power potential, this energy has been called “vacuum,” “cosmic,” “radiant,” or “zero-point” energy. Dr. Nikola Tesla, the discoverer of the electric age, may have used this energy to create his most fantastic invention-the “Magnifying Transmitter.”
"
   Sometime early on, it occurred to me that "space energy" and such names as those quoted above, and the "cosmic microwave background radiation" ("CMBR" or "CMB"), were probably - and soon I felt surely - the same thing. CMBR was doubtless the grain of truth behind all the vague, undefined terms.
   In the paragraphs above are the clearest concepts of what is being tapped. The "research and experimentation" have apparently uncovered the strong EHF energy radiance, but remarkably, without identifying its wavelength or realizing that this is the same energy that's known as the CMBR to astronomy. Here we have Tesla and others converting not DC ions but this EHF "Space Energy" to some usable frequency of electrical power. This explained the use of coils and tuned circuits. But part of the confusion is probably owing to Tesla himself not knowing exactly what he was doing: science wasn't as advanced as today and it's said Tesla didn't even believe in the new idea of subatomic particles at that time - notwithstanding that he was working with them.
   It was noted that the electrical currents flowed around the outside of the wire and not in the center, the "skin effect" consistent with very high frequency current. And it's noted that the frequency is so high that the energy only appears like 'normal' electricity in some respects, and unlike it in others. This sounds like an energy that needs to be 'stepped down' in frequency and form to turn it into something usable and essentially recognizable.
   Power from a 'space energy collector' device by Markovitch in the 1970 s was reputed to have produced 180V and 3A. Presuming that's both at the same time, it's 560 watts. Later I heard of the 50KW machine of the 1930 s. This sort of power sounds like something more more able to generate the story of Tesla's success that's been passed down through the decades. A "resonating cavity" sounds a lot like a "waveguide" as in a klystron or magnetron tube for radar and microwave frequencies. It takes knowledge and expertise to design and to build the requisite circuits (as well as some luck if your understanding of what you're doing is vague), which explains why Tesla's work hasn't more often been duplicated. Nevertheless, the nuenergy.org site provides a description of what needs to be made. There are a couple of pictures. Perhaps together with the text they're sufficient.

   Back to the CMBR... First, note that so-called "microwaves" are really "centiwaves". The ones used in radars and "microwave" ovens are several centimeters wavelength. Next, from Wikipedia article "Cosmic Microwave Background":

"The spectral radiance dE_ν/dν peaks at 160.2 GHz, in the microwave range of frequencies. (Alternatively if spectral radiance is defined as dE_λ/dλ then the peak wavelength is 1.063 mm.)" [the zero is surely a mistake and it's 1.863 or 1.63mm.]

   According to some definitions, that's above microwave frequencies - between them and the far infra-red. And, most interestingly for free energy: "Most of the radiation energy in the universe is in the cosmic microwave background."

   Here we have apparently a very substantial energy that pervades the known universe.

The graph shows the wavelength of maximum intensity as just under 1/5cm or 2mm. (1.863mm would probably agree with the 160GHz figure.)

CMB appears to be much more powerful (50x?) than sunlight.
http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/Introradastro.html

This broad spectrum view shows the CMBR (CMB) as having almost a couple of orders of magnitude more energy than any other frequency band. Unfortunately the term "sr" isn't explained and no meaning comes to mind as I write. Ignoring that, a microwatt per square meter at the peak doesn't seem like much, but there are claims of getting considerable power on the order of at least tens of watts and even tens of kilowatts (Tesla, Markovitch). A tuned circuit amplifies signals manyfold, and the energy collected isn't necessarily limited to the size of the collector surface. (And what is "sr"?)

The atmospheric absorption of energy at various spectra seemed interesting. Radio wave energy is a wide band that can come straight in from space almost unaffected by the atmosphere. However, looking at the chart above it didn't appear to include the 1 to 5 mm energy area of the cosmic microwave background. That seemed to more or less rule out harvesting cosmic microwave radiation... which seemed puzzling if it had been done. (The caption did say it was a "rough plot", but it also claimed absorption "above 20GHz".) So I searched and found another graph from another source, below. The difference was night and day! This one showed atmospheric transparency in the critical area of high energy, from about 2mm to 8 or 9mm. (1 cm = 10^⁸ ångstroms.) Really it only indicates for certain that "less than half" the CMBR energy is blocked at sea level, so both graphs may be somewhat misleading. Even according to the first graph it's not entirely blocked. But going by the second one, at least over half of the CMBR energy reaches sea level, and with the steep sides, it seems more likely that the bulk of it gets through. This was later confirmed by a third, more detailed, chart, which shows practically all the energy at 160GHz reaching the ground, albeit at a high desert elevation.

http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/Introradastro.html

   So it seems that the microwave background energy does reach Earth's surface, and thus it should be possible to capture it with a working system tuned to somewhere between a 1.4 to 2.5 mm wavelength, and that this is 'most of the radiation energy in the universe'. It could be harvested anywhere, including in space to power spacecraft, replacing solar power and RTEGs. It would appear from more than one source that CMBR is the free energy 'big fish', known yet unknown for a century!

   What's needed, then, is an assembly - parts of it can hardly be called a circuit - to capture this energy. The principles of working with wavelengths that are very short in comparison to the components (at least on centimeters scale) are reasonably well understood, and the striplines and resonant lines ideas will be noticed in common in the designs that follow. From Wikipedia ("Microwaves"):

"Open-wire and coaxial transmission lines used at lower frequencies are replaced by waveguides and stripline, and lumped-element tuned circuits are replaced by cavity resonators or resonant lines. In turn, at even higher frequencies, where the wavelength of the electromagnetic waves becomes small in comparison to the size of the structures used to process them, microwave techniques become inadequate, and the methods of optics are used."

   As I read more and more stuff, there seemed to be some common principles emerging - similarities between devices, with toroids or rectangular frames having transverse 'control' wiring, close parallel wire loops, sharp excitation pulses with solid state drivers, and so on.

   It seems that many people with dozens of designs have managed to tap the CMBR over the years - the invisible but 'brighest' radiance in the whole electromagnetic spectrum - without a clear understanding of what it was they were tapping.
   The CMBR's 160 GHz is at the upper frequency limit for radio techniques, a little below where optical techniques become more effective.

   What has happened in the century and more since Tesla first lit banks of light bulbs with power from the void? As a friend told it (from web info): "There was a man named T. Henry Moray back in the 30's or so who developed a "box" that could pull 50kW continuously out of "space". His device was witnessed by many scientists and engineers of his time, but he faced a lot of opposition and had his equipment and lab smashed etc. If I understand anything about it, the principle was some sort of resonant condition excited by a natural energy vibration in the ether." (His patent was apparently "lost" by the patent office.)
   Again it seems like the typical bitter experience of someone who had the temerity to try and lift mankind out from the clutches of the gangster-parasites who (so far) control our society, and to try to help us get clear of the intake hose of their greedy 'money vacuum cleaner' of "pay per fillup" and "pay per month" energy that's causing wars and gradually ruining the environment. I've read of worse.
   And again the "natural energy vibration in the ether" is doubtless explained as the CMBR. 50KW is the largest figure I've seen yet, and very promising to say the least. It would be plenty to power an electric car. I wonder how big the device was? Doubtless there's some figure for "[kilo]watts per square meter" of radiance actually available. If it's comparable to sunlight and 50 times as powerful, it would be 50 KW/sq.m since sunlight is very close to 1.

Performance of the Markovitch "Space Energy" harvester in the late 1970 s:
"According to reports the device is supposed to have worked, with maximum voltage of around 180V and 3 amps. Strangely both a DC and an AC component were found in the output. There were some pretty high powered witnesses to these experiments including scientists and technicians."

Unfortunately the 1970 s is a while ago now. It would be great to be able to find witnesses or Markovitch and learn more. Some key features appear to be a plate or globe perhaps 1/2 a meter or more in diameter and a gap to a needle point that the energy jumps across. Then some weird 'bifilar' coils maybe with some kind of crystals. That's pretty vague stuff to go on.

Tesla's "Bifilar Coil"
The signal travels from the outside to the center twice, with the second loop parallel to the first.
This was said to multiply the inductance manyfold.
(I note that the gap between the two wires is similar to the wavelength of the CMBR rays.)

Other 'Free Energy' Devices

   My present theory is that at least two "hidden" energies are available for harvesting:
1. Nuclear (or perhaps ambient thermal) energy brought from the atomic scale to the mechanical scale via magnetism.
2. Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

   Cruising through web sites looking for more info, one can hardly avoid finding more novel ideas for harvesting "energy from the void" and magnetic energy. At first I ignored anything that didn't look like what Tesla had done, but I started finding some free energy 'pulsed transformers' that looked interesting, and which were also probably 'harvesting' BMBR.

   Here's a "motionless electric generator" ("MEG") apparently patented about 2002 with a transformer that is supposed to resonate and have a "COP" of 5, producing 5 times as much energy as it consumes. http://jnaudin.free.fr/meg/meg.htm . It's supposed to be up to version "Mark 4" now. A mark 3 was made by another person, Naudin, showing that the design is replicable. But one suspects he got verbal instruction from Bearden beyond what's written in the patent. Now I've run across other units with similar themes. Again it would appear from undefined and unexplained terms like "Active Vacuum" that the makers, like Tesla and others, don't really know where the energy to make them work comes from.

The Motionless Electromagnetic Generator,
Extracting Energy from a Permanent Magnet with Energy-Replenishing from the Active Vacuum
from Thomas E. Bearden, Ph.D. James C. Hayes, Ph.D. James L. Kenny, Ph.D. Kenneth D. Moore, B.S. Stephen L. Patrick, B.S.

"MEG mk2" showing oscillator and coil driver components.

"..This one works beautifully and produces COP=5.0..." has said Tom Bearden

US Patent 6,362,718 : Motionless Electromagnetic Generator

   (The link on the site to the US patent office generates an error. I've put in one that didn't.)

   One wonders what has happened to these devices. It seems they've never been mentioned in the media, and it hasn't started replacing the power grid in over a decade of existence.

   On reading more about this device, it would appear to be a modified way to tap the CMBR rather than a magnetic power source. A permanent magnet may seem like an odd feature, but the magnetron, a well known microwave tube, has one, so use of magnets is commonly associated with microwaves. At first it looked like it might be the easiest unit to construct, but on the website, cheniere.org, maker Bearden speaks of 'nanocrystalline core material' and says it won't work with an iron core. Turquoise Energy Newsletters of the past show that I had no real success trying to create such cores (although the ilmenite in sodium silicate coil coatings improved the efficiency of the Electric Hubcap motors, and may well have application here).
   Funding, especially for advanced techniques probably needed to produce such cores, is evidently what's been holding up commercial production. Naturally, it's the corrupt that have nearly all the wealth, and they certainly wouldn't want to fund something that would let people make their own electricity freely.
   Perhaps the iron powder cores I have for Electric Hubcap/Caik/Weel motors could have application? If not, the maker (micrometals.com) does have other core material choices. But not the sort of transformer double "C" core shapes shown.

A Simpler Pulsed Transformer Design

   In my web searches I had clicked on many links, each opening in a new window. A couple of days after investigating the above unit, I found a window on my screen, hidden behind others, with another 'pulsed transformer' energy design. This one looked easy to make, using air cores, and the construction details were shown in a PDF document. An irritatingly tiny photo of the device on the web site turned out to be in fact 1280 x 960 pixels if downloaded, big enough to see a lot of detail. URL:
http://freetesla.blogspot.ca/2011/08/successful-tpu-ecd-replication.html

   The site was in fact showing someone's working replica of a 2007 design found in a PDF document at:
http://www.overunity.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2383.0;attach=9524

   There were also a number of links to videos, but none of them worked - the videos had been removed from the Google video site. Furthermore, a Wikipedia article on "Motionless Electromagnetic Generator" had been removed. Even if one doesn't believe in the possibility, the article should be there to enlighten the curious about what it purportedly is. ...more suppression?
   But the knowledge that the CMBR exists, is energetic and omnipresent, and obviously could be harvested in some manner analogous to a solar collector harvesting visible wavelengths, should serve to dispel the incredulity (including by me) that so far has surrounded such devices.

Original "TPU" Toroidal Power Unit from the PDF file
A pulsed transformer type of CMBR powered generator -
simple to the point of being "Mickey Mouse".
(Shown with outer loop opened)

A replicated TPU. This second maker also says it works.

That the site I found was about a replica is very promising, since it means someone followed the original instructions and got similar results to those claimed by the original maker. The power output was said to be about a kilowatt, but it would soon get too hot and quit working. (With that kind of power going through so little wiring, I'm not surprised!) However, it seems like a great, simple demo unit to start with!

It has a "mobeus strip" coil made of 'lamp cord' - two closely spaced parallel wires. It reminded me of Tesla's "bifilar coil" with opposing parallel wires. It occurs to me that the distance between two typical lampcord wires is somewhere around the CMBR wavelength of 1.8mm. That may have a lot of bearing on the tuning and pickup of the CMBR. This runs in a double loop around two circular forms of plastic hose. Again we see similar features between designs. The pulsed control coils are vertical, again at 90 degrees to the horizontal collection coil. And the vertical offset of the smaller inner collection coil gives it a profile similar to the hemisphere-dome shape of the collectors of the Tesla and Markovitch units.

   The operation of the unit is quite complex. I assumed the three control coils/transformers were energized in sequence to create a rotating magnetic field like for a motor. In fact, it appears that they're activated at two or three different frequencies, which would create a complex, not to say chaotic, pattern. The authors show many intricate patterns of signals they viewed on the oscilloscope. Somewhere in the correct relationship between frequencies must be hidden the heterodyne frequency interactions to convert 160 GHz to the sort of frequencies transformers and electrical devices can handle. (The frequencies used were in the x100KHz range, and could probably be synthesized, adjusted, and held at stable values more easily with a microcontroller than with two or three discrete oscillators.)
   Another feature saying some strange things are happening was that the heatsinks for the MOSFETs, placed near each driven control coil, got hot. But when the MOSFETs were removed from the heatsinks, they ran cool, while the heatsinks remained hot. This would be owing to the powerful magnetic field that was being created (as mentioned), that they were within. The authors said it didn't work until the aluminum warmed up, and felt that not only electrons but aluminum ions must be whizzing around the unit acting as a particle accelerator. I'm not so sure.
   Someone wrote in (to the 'freetesla' web site) that the device was merely a tank circuit with coils and a capacitor, that would have some specific resonance frequency. Of course, if that resonance was at about 1.8mm/160GHz (or perhaps some subharmonic thereof?) it would be tuned to CMBR energy.

I decided to try to make the unit as a 'proof of concept' demo.
This is as far as I got in September.
The electronics will be more of a challenge than the coil assembly.

Another idea of a pulsed TPU. Looks a lot more intricate to make.
Has the same idea of control coils at 90° to the single winding collector coil.

Abandoning other electrical generating projects?

   CMBR sounds like a very worthwhile, cheap continuous source of electricity, so despite the challenges I'll probably try to build one - especially having found a design with relatively complete instructions that's been successfully replicated. If I do, I think I should definitively abandon at least a couple of other electricity generating projects rather than simply add a new one to an ever growing list. In consideration of that:

   Ocean wave power is a project that should be done on at least a town-wide scale. It requires not only funding but decisions about waterfront and foreshore land usage... by people who don't seem to feel making such decisions has anything to do with them, or who are averse to making decisions that could get BC or Canada into a position of technological leadership. Apparently no likelihood of a smashing success that would enhance the energy future for everyone (and bring in ongoing revenue) is worth risking having a few small failures - learning curve experiences - for. So far it's always seemed to be like trying to row up the rapids to get anything happening. It would also be a 'power grid' source for which under prevailing conditions people would be billed monthly, probably with no benefit from it being cheaper to produce. Especially now owing to the the good chance that nothing would be working before the financial system collapses, ocean wave power seems like a good one to drop.
   Geothermal power would be another example of a highly promising community energy project, but obviously very difficult for an individual or an unsupported small group to implement. Promising and unpromising regions in BC and Canada to drill have been roughly mapped out, and even at least one dud oil well, already drilled, had the requisite boiling water temperature at the bottom. (It was filled in again by the oil company. Like I say, the corrupt are almost alone in having plenty of money - your money and my money - to do these things, but they don't want people to have cheap energy.) So far the required support hasn't been forthcoming in Canada to any group trying to push for geothermal power. (This is a highly promising area I've managed to not get involved with in any way, so there's nothing for me to drop.)
   Catalytic (or "cold") fusion sounds interesting, and it may work, but again developing it would doubtless be a major task for a dedicated group, and then it would likely be another 'charge per KWH' technology. (Another one for me not to take up!) I do like the idea that traces of several elements including silver were found after the fusion, since cheap silver would improve the performance of motors with 10% less heat in the coils than with copper.

   On the other hand, there are several forms of energy that are free after small, even individual, capital investment in the equipment and or development. In this category, solar, wind and woodstove thermoelectric electricity are time and weather dependent, although in some respects complementary weather-wise. Magnet machines and "space energy", if they can be effectively harnessed, generate continuously, and hence are substantially more valuable for any given 'nameplate' watts rating.

   "regular" solar I already have working. I've never tried my "sand pebbles" nanocrystalline titanium dioxide frit to cover solar collector cover glass with little lenses and improve daily solar collection by 20-40%, nor have I tried out ideas I have for better dye-sensitized solar cells. But if "CMBR converters" or magnet machines work, solar collectors seem like good projects not to expand further on, especially here on the cloudy west coast. (Dropping further expansion of "solar" wouldn't mean dropping the low voltage wiring system infrastructure & equipment projects. They aren't specifically solar related except insofar as that's what's presently powering the system.)
   The vertical axis wind turbine I now have the parts for, and putting them together poses little theoretical challenge. It could perhaps put out several hundred watts in a good wind... but not much for 90% of the time. I can do a "nowhere man" and set it aside until somebody else wants to lend me a hand with it.
   The woodstove thermoelectric generator as I have wished to implement it needs an evacuated tube radiator and a pressurized tube radiator. The evacuated tube needs to be done for other thermoelectric projects as well. The pressurized one should be simple enough in principle, but implementation with the TEG module heatsink plates is looking tricky. And it'll only put out around 100 watts for a considerable investment in TEG modules and heatsink & plumbing components. It might be a good one to set aside -- and then abandon if the 'space energy' converter makes as much or more electricity.

   Since they seem so promising, even if highly challenging, I guess that narrows it down to magnet machines and "CMBR" harvesters, with the wind turbine when it's convenient. The rest I'll probably drop unless I get nowhere with either of these for a considerable period.

Electricity Storage - Turquoise Battery Project (etc.)

Main Discovery Points for September:

* Using a strip of zinc as a comparison electrode in discharge tests, it was noted that at no point of discharge down to 1.5 volts was the manganese negative electrode equal to or less negative than the open circuit zinc electrode. There's some level of uncertainty because the readings on the zinc electrode kept varying, by as much as 1/4 volt, but taken at face value this means (a) that most of the decrease in voltage during discharge is occurring in the positive electrode (so the negative has substantially more effective amp-hours - which is theoretically the case - and or better substance utilization, also likely), and (b) that it should after all be okay to discharge the cells to 1.5 volts or less: the zinc shouldn't oxidize.
   I'd want to test this further and check the zinc terminal strip for corrosion and the posode for changes over time from such big changes in oxidation state, but if it's okay, that gives many (up to 67%) more amp-hours if one is willing to accept 9v from a six cell, nominally 12v battery that charges at almost 18 volts and has over 15 open circuit volts when fully charged. Again, a DC to DC converter might be employed to regulate the voltage. When the cell was accidentally run down to 1.29 volts, the negode voltage did appear to fall to the zinc voltage, so there does appear to be a limit somewhere not too far under 1.5 volts. It will depend on the ratio of active substances between electrodes, but these remarks should apply if "+" and "-" are the same volume, which gives considerably more amp-hours of dense negative material than lighter positive nickel hydroxide and permanganate.

* So far, I haven't been able to get a manganese electrode in a cell at pH 14 (in KOH) to charge and hold its charge, even if the cell is cool, eg in a fridge. (My own electrolyte varies from pH 7 to 12 or 13, seemingly drifting towards the upper ranges after a while.) In pH 14, the zinc test electrode is more negative than the "Mn" negode under load, so only the zinc 'conductivity additive' is charging and discharging.
   An electrolyte of KCl + KOH with enough KOH to raise the pH to 14 (or maybe it's just 13+) still doesn't work. Theoretically pH 14 won't oxidize the nickel plating on the posode pockets as a lower pH would. If it worked okay, Changhong batteries could probably make NiMn batteries of over 2 volts on their existing NiFe/NiCd 'Edison cell' production line (purchased from Varta). So far it doesn't look like that's viable.

* The MnMn cells hold more voltage and energy longer as they age or as they're charged, discharged or cycled. It seems to take some weeks, but the self discharge gradually decreases. (graph below.) If this is what needs to be done to get them working, it's worth the wait for the performance. If however the posode is disturbed, considerable self discharge returns and the process must start again. In the one case of this so far, the self discharge returned after I opened the cell and replaced the broken graphite terminal sheet/strip, removing the old one and slipping a new one into the electrode behind the perforated graphite collector sheet.
   The process has continued into October and I'm expecting the self discharge to drop to trivial or at least easily workable levels within maybe 3 months.

* The batteries are now effectively working, but from the amp-hours attained, the utilization of the active substances seems very low, perhaps only around 2 or 3 percent. Here is one more number that should be multiplied by 10 or so before the cells will compete with lithium ion in energy density. I don't understand why it's so low. Back in my researches I have had batteries that have put out an amp hour or so instead of 1/10th of one, if only at voltages below a volt. And in fact, these ones put out far more amp-hours if run down to a volt or less too, but that corrodes the zinc collector plates. At this point, it might be well to try to interest a manufacturer such as Changhong, since they may well be able to solve this problem without further effort on my part. But perhaps in making a few more cells I'll get better at it or figure out something.

Nickel-Manganese Alkaline Cells

   It occurred to me that it might be just possible that manganese negodes with both antimony sulfide and zirconium silicate would hold their charge in alkaline (pH 14) electrolyte. The -1.57 volt reaction potential would definitely stretch the limits of what's possible. If it worked, Ni-Mn cells just might be makable by Changhong batteries on their existing Ni-Fe/Ni-Cd assembly line, which could make 2 volt alkaline cells available quickly. Theoretical cell voltage would be +.49v - -1.57v = 2.06v - identical cell voltage to lead-acid.
   I tried it out using the case and nickel electrodes of a Changhong NiFe cell. It seemed to take a charge, but then to lose it again. I put it in the fridge and it seemed to hold it better, but still lost it overnight. Furthermore, the voltage dropped below the nickel-zinc charge voltage, so it wasn't just the manganese that wouldn't stay charged.
   So I rinsed the electrodes and changed the electrolyte, which had been sitting in the cell and not sealed from the air for quite some time. The Mn electrode had broken up after it was made, and it was made up of these broken pieces. A couple of them fell out during the rinse - not a very auspicious sign! But I hadn't tried to seal the top, only the sides and bottom. My plan had been to not fill the liquid to the top. I didn't see any rips. S.G. of the KOH was about 1.2. When I put the cell back together, the voltage was 1.95 volts: evidently the zinc was metallic, but the manganese, by and large, wasn't. The liquid was still quite warm from mixing in the potassium hydroxide, and the Mn wouldn't charge. With 300mA going in, it stayed just under 2 volts. I put it in the fridge. A while later I unscrewed the filler cap assembly and stuck a lab thermometer in the hole, so I was monitoring the voltage and the temperature of the electrolyte - about 22°c and 1.966 volts, ~300mA.
One hour: 16° - not charging. With the charge removed, the cell soon dropped to 1.87 volts - lower than when first filled, but reasonable for nickel-zinc. This would be the minimum voltage to allow during discharge - call it 1.9 volts - in order not to start corroding the zinc current collector.
   But why was it now working worse than when I'd first put it together? It wasn't taking any sort of charge above zinc level, but it had when first made, even at room temperature. The only thing I could think of was that I had tightened, a little, the tie-wraps pulling the electrodes together. But if that had caused a short, why would it hold any voltage?
   1-1/2 hours, 12 degrees, still no changes to voltage and current. 2 hours, 11°, still nothing. Overnight, 4°, still just nickel-zinc. What the bleep? All I'd done as far as I knew was change old electrolyte that probably contaminated with carbonate from CO2 in the air for a fresh batch. The devil must be in the details somewhere. Maybe I should have hung onto the old electrolyte to see what was in it!
   So far, pH 14 and Mn negatives don't seem compatible.

MnMn Too... finally holding a charge

   While I worked on the NiMn-alkaline idea, I also had my MnMn cell. I rolled out some clay to less than 1/8" thick and formed some into a ceramic 'box' with an open top, sized to put one of my electrodes into, as well as a couple of thin flat sheets. It was porcelain clay ("Laguna B-Mix cone 5"), but I only fired it to cone 06 (80 minutes in my mini kiln) which made it a porous ceramic (Earthenware). The fired thicknesses measured about 1.5 to 3mm - not very uniform, also pretty thin for pottery.
   I hoped the fine pores would allow chlorine and hydroxide through but block the heavier permanganate ions. I fired these on the 5th or 6th and put the posode in the box and into the cell on the 7th, with the liquid not quite up to the open top of the box. On the night of the 7th-8th things didn't look very promising: the cell held 2.16 volts or so overnight. At least it was better than 1.95. I charged it heavily a while in the morning. The lab smelled of chlorine: the ferric chloride if not the potassium chloride was gassing at the high charge voltage. I then went to do a 20 ohm load test. It worked nicely for a few minutes, then I was interrupted by someone at the door. I forgot about the battery for over an hour, and when I came back it was down to 1.3 volts - oops. I put it back on a low charge and left it.
   In the evening I disconnected it and it was soon down to 2.54 volts, but then ticking off the seconds per millivolt of drop, it looked promising. By morning, the 9th, 8 hours later, it was still at 2.38 volts. It didn't have much high voltage energy left and only put out 40+mA into a 50Ω load for 4 minutes before dropping to 2.0 volts.
   But it was much the best charge retention so far. If it continued to improve, if it held 2.5 volts, it could be a usable energy storage battery. The ceramic didn't seem to have helped much the first night. Was it improving because of charging and the various things I had done deliberately?... something to do with the gassing off of chlorine?... or was it because the overly heavy discharge had released zincate ions, which then perhaps spontaneously turned into Zn(OH)2 or ZnO and clogged the pores of the ceramic? Was the pH becoming more alkaline if the chlorides were gassing their chlorine? It was now rather difficult to take the top off and measure pH because the heavy clay box didn't turn with the lid and the electrodes were getting twisted. Perhaps further trials over a few more days before I risked that...
   That afternoon the cell seemed to be holding voltage even better than the previous evening. Something seemed to have happened that was now slowing the self discharge. A load test also revealed that the internal cell resistance was higher. From 2.55v the voltages dropped lower with a 20Ω load test (under 2.3v almost immediately) and showed only 40mAH, but from1.85v after 21 minutes it recovered to over 2.45, and could then run a 50Ω load with good voltage. (I only ran it for a couple of minutes - it might have gone 10 or more.)
   The cell seemed to have fairly even performance over the next weeks, capacity going up or down depending on charging conditions and how long it sat after charging before a load test.

Self discharge/pH/permanganate trapping clues

   Over the next few days it appeared to be holding about 2.46 volts for 8 hour periods. On the 14th it was up to 2.485. It still didn't run at over 2 volts for very long even with just a 50 ohm load, but the periods slightly lengthened each day, for example hitting 7 minutes on the 13th. On the 14th I ran it down to 1.7 volts over 40 minutes - still just 27 mAH. The zinc strip still measured about .2 or .3 volts less negative than the Mn negode. On the 14th-15th it held just over 2.50 volts for over 8 hours and delivered a few more mAH in the morning. In the afternoon after charging a while, it ran 33 minutes down to 1.9 volts with a 25 ohm load. (Of course it would have considerably run longer if I had drained it down to 1.7 or 1.5 volts.) Each few hours or a day seemed to disclose further gradual improvement in performance.
   Until on the 16th I opened it to check the pH, which I had wanted to do for some time. It was pH 12 - excellent place. But opening it disturbed the connections to the posode, and twisted things around a bit. I found that high self discharge had returned, notwithstanding that there was no apparent disturbance to the ceramic holder. This meant it [probably] wasn't the pottery that was preventing the self discharge, but more likely something building up over time and changing in the surface of the electrode itself, that was 'gluing' the permanganate into the electrode. That would probably be related to the organic sulfate and sulfonate compounds in the 'Lemon Fresh Sunlight' dishsoap. When that internal 'skin' is disturbed, the self discharge comes back until it heals. As the end of the month approached, the self discharge was down quite a bit, holding 2.50 volts for about 12-14 hours on the 29th.
   Other likely factors for gradual change and improvement are (1) the addition of the ferric chloride, painted onto the electrode and (2) the possibility that the nickel hydroxide and the manganese dioxide were charging together to some compound such as nickel manganate.
   I think next time rather than the ceramic, I'll try 2 layers of the heavy watercolor paper around each electrode instead of one, again with a piece of coarse macramé cloth in the middle. At least that's nowhere near as thick as a ceramic wall, so the current capacity should be a lot better. (I _should_ try this in a new cell, to make sure the ceramic truly isn't required.)

Date

Self Discharge Chart: approximate voltage retained after about 8 hours sitting, during September.
Below about 2.50 volts open circuit, the cell has little retained energy and will rapidly drop below 2.0 volts delivering a load.
After opening and disturbing the cell on the 16th(?), the chelation process had to partially start over again.
First readings after assembling the cell were about 1.9 volts; final one is about 2.52 volts.
2.55+ after days instead of hours would be a lot better. It'll probably get there.

Lower Voltages without zinc corrosion?

   On the 11th I contrived to slip a thin strip of zinc down the end of the slot for the negode terminal, so that I could measure the manganese negode voltage with respect to a zinc negode's open circuit voltage. To my surprise, at all times during a long discharge, it read at a minimum about .2 volts more negative - even when the discharge voltage was down to 1.5 volts. This would seem to mean that the manganese negode is holding its charge throughout, and it's mainly the plus side that's decreasing in voltage as discharge proceeds. It must be the one holding a low value of higher voltage amp-hours, and discharging through nickel oxyhydroxide (if that's charging up at all) and potassium permanganate to nickel hydroxide and manganese dioxide starting at 2.4 cell volts, then the MnO2 discharges to Mn2O3 at under 2 volts, then to Mn3O4 dropping to around 1.5 volts or less, and ultimately to Mn(OH)2 at around a volt. Disregarding the apparently pathetic percentage utilization of the active substances (but maybe only of the "+"?), this does actually make sense in that the heavier negode worked out to far more theoretical amp-hours than the posode.
   This means the cell can (*should* be able to) discharge to much lower voltages without oxidizing the zinc structural material. One could after all consider 6 cells for a nominal 12 volt battery, charging to 18 volts, then delivering starting around 15 volts (with a light load) down to around 9 volts without damage if it's useful and necessary.
   A somewhat suspicious aspect, however, is rather wildly varying readings of the zinc strip 'electrode', with readings often swinging from .2 to as much as .4 volts more positive than the manganese. If the actual case is anywhere in there, it's fine, but the variations cast some doubt on the validity.
   However, on the 26th I accidentally ran the cell down to 1.23 volts, forgetting about a 25 ohm load test that got left on for about an hour and a half, and the Mn negode voltage was then about equal to the zinc voltage, meaning the manganese was pretty much discharged and now the zinc was discharging. This shows that there is a lower safe limit, seemingly somewhere below 1.5 volts. This accidental run-down seemed to improve cell performance a bit, perhaps by zinc ions redistributing and making better connections with the -Mn particles. After a while however the zinc terminal trip would oxidize away and the cell would quit working, as with cell PP#2.

Nickel-Manganese: in KCl-KOH Cell

   Before mid month I decided to try Ni-Mn in something other than caustic KOH electrolyte, in which the Mn negode didn't seem to hold a charge very well. Rather than make a new cell, I emptied the KOH from the Changhong attempt, and refilled it with KCl electrolyte with enough KOH added to bring the pH to 14. pH is a weird thing. It doesn't take much to swing it wildly from extreme acid to extreme alkali, even while neutral salt is the bulk of the solution. _Theoretically_ the nickel plating wouldn't corrode off the nickel hydroxide electrode shells. Also _theoretically_ the Mn wouldn't hold a charge any better than in straight KOH. But on the 13th I tried it anyway since it was simple to do. The initial voltage was about 1.74 - nickel-zinc voltage from the zinc structural parts of the electrode, with the manganese completely discharged.
   I put it in the fridge and started charging it at 150mA. The voltage rose slowly, but it seemed hard pressed to bring it up above about 2.0 volts, and it soon dropped back to just over 1.9. Theoretical cell voltage was 2.06, so it should have gone at least a little above that on charge.
   Subsequent placement of a zinc strip confirmed that the voltage didn't stay much more negative than zinc: essentially the manganese wasn't charging, and it soon lost any charge that it did take.

   I didn't get around to making a fully homemade Ni-Mn cell with a lower pH, having redirected my main energies around mid month towards studies of devices to convert free CMBR energy to electricity.

Soldered NiMH Battery Packs

Replacement Soldered Battery Pack for e-Bike. Tarpaper replaces 'built-in' cardboard of original cells.

   I made up a soldered NiMH D cell pack for an e-bike, and then re-did an earlier one for a cordless electric lawnmower. Notwithstanding my reluctance to make soldered packs after previous experiences, nothing else was going to fit on the bike.
   I noticed the original cells had cardboard under the plastic outer cover. Aha! There was one part of the answer: if the pack overheated and the covers melted, at least the cells wouldn't short circuit against each other and cause the whole pack to go up in smoke, with the risk of fire or injury.
   I judged that the other thing I had been doing wrong was soldering heavy flat "bus bar" wire to connect the cells. It seemed the most solid, but the solder joins kept breaking with bumping and vibration under the weight of the cells. If instead I used lighter, stranded wire, the cells could move a bit against each other, and the wire would flex instead of putting stress on the solder joint.
   Tarpaper sheaths taped around each cell and thinner, stranded wire should solve the two main problems I had been having with soldered packs!
   For the bike pack I used #14 stranded wire, thinking of the heavy currents that would sometimes flow. But I began to realize that the solder wicked along the wire too far, making it much less flexible. For the lawnmower, I switched to lighter #16 wire. It soldered more quickly so the solder didn't travel down the wires much, and everything was much more flexible. I also used insulated wire, to make really sure no wire could short somewhere against a case part.

24V - 20AH cordless lawnmower battery pack (one 12V - 20AH half): wiring with flex should handle vibration best.

http://www.TurquoiseEnergy.com
Victoria BC