Noble Plasma Engine

[Aero]

Mystery solved. Thanks Aero!

Welcome.

[Diogenes]

I think you're missing the vital issue here.

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

You aren't following me. Perhaps I didn't explain it clearly enough. The gas is not expanding. It is creating a shockwave that is propagating from it's source at the plasma arc, through the tube and impacting the piston.

The gas in the tube isn't contracting, it is restoring to it's previous state of 1 atmosphere. The Piston's motion outward creates a lower pressure area in the cylinder which is subsequently restored to 1 atmosphere by the air pressure on the outside of the piston, when it pushes the piston back in.

Think about it. If you fill a cylinder with air at 1 atmosphere, then pull a piston outward, it will create a partial vacuum which will result in a force which wants to pull the piston back in.

Now you can say that the gas is being ionized or turned to plasma by these huge currents and there's no surprise here. this is just what the device is supposed to do. You might too posit that the electrodes then conduct the pulsed power back out and tis is the electrical power out of the device that Rohner mentioned. What doesn't make sense is the gas not being hot, and contracting so quickly.

A Shock-wave is only "hot" in the sense that it's wave front is "hotter" in the direction of motion than in other directions. The overall gas is not hot. Take a long pipe and slap the open end of it. You will produce a compression wave of air traveling down the pipe. When it gets to the end of the pipe, it will impart some degree of force to whatever is on the other end, but it will not appreciably heat the gas in the tube.

I'm not aware of any circumstances where a gas collapses back to an unionized state instantly with no appreciable thermal dissipation. This is why I'm saying we have an unexplored phenomenon here. Would be good if we had someone better versed in plasma physics weigh in. This is certainly nothing like a detonation engine since there's no combustion.

I think ordinary wave physics and gas laws are all that is needed to understand this phenomena. The assertion that it is producing excess energy has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction. Without being able to measure input electrical energy and the mechanical impulse imparted to the weighted piston, I cannot say that anything remarkable is happening.

The man said he was using a 72 volt battery. I recall neon lamps would fire at something like 48 volts. A 72 volt battery ought to produce a pretty hot discharge once the neon (one of the component gases) initiates a short when it breaks down. Couple that with the radioactive emitters and the threshold voltage is probably even less.

Now that I think about it, I suspect his 3 ohm resistors are the current limiters in a relaxation oscillator type circuit. It is the only way I can conceive that he is able to quench the plasma.

The Capacitor Charges till it reaches the breakdown voltage of the gas mixture, at which point it discharges through the plasma short. Once the current drops below the point at which the arc can be sustained, the Gas resumes it's higher resistance state, poising it for the next cycle.


Just a guess though.

[Aero]

Seems to me that there is still some confusion as to the difference between a gas and a plasma. They are different states of matter. Gas laws do not hold for plasmas nor do the rules governing plasma physics apply to gasses. The rules characterizing plasma behavior within magnetic fields are not generally well understood but a few companies should have expertise far in advance of Rohner Machine.

Look carefully at the construction of the machine. It includes a cylinder wrapped in a coil, and on the PAPP engine (but not the demo), the cylinder head is also magneticly shielded (published photo cira 1980). This structure starts to resemble a Polywell device physically but with variable chamber volume.

I suspect there are people at EMC2 who could quickly assess the functionality of this machine. I also expect that the required knowledge of plasma physics is widespread in Ad Astra, the company developing the VASIMR engine. In fact, Ad Astra would be highly motivated to develop a light weight, high power, long lived electrical generator to power the VASIMR engine if they thought it worked.

Over unity power is the holy grail. I hope it is discovered somewhere, and the sooner the better.

[Diogenes]

Seems to me that there is still some confusion as to the difference between a gas and a plasma. They are different states of matter. Gas laws do not hold for plasmas nor do the rules governing plasma physics apply to gasses. The rules characterizing plasma behavior within magnetic fields are not generally well understood but a few companies should have expertise far in advance of Rohner Machine.

You must be mistaking me for someone who thinks the entire chamber becomes filled with plasma. I said nothing even resembling this. A plasma is created between the electrodes and in that small volume of gas near them. I do not believe a plasma is created throughout the entire cylinder, I believe the bulk of the gases remain in gaseous form.

Look carefully at the construction of the machine. It includes a cylinder wrapped in a coil, and on the PAPP engine (but not the demo), the cylinder head is also magneticly shielded (published photo cira 1980). This structure starts to resemble a Polywell device physically but with variable chamber volume.

Regardless of what it looks like, I can say with pretty good confidence that if you fire off a massive electrical discharge in a gas, it will create an explosion like shock wave which will travel through the rest of the gas, and eventually impact whatever is at the other end of the tube.

I don't need to invoke plasma physics to postulate this result. As I said before, you don't get the sort of pops he gets (in the video) with plain air unless you are discharging a great deal of electrical energy.

I suspect there are people at EMC2 who could quickly assess the functionality of this machine.

I suspect anyone at a local community college physics class could quickly assess the functionality of this machine. Perhaps anyone at a local high school physics class.

I also expect that the required knowledge of plasma physics is widespread in Ad Astra, the company developing the VASIMR engine. In fact, Ad Astra would be highly motivated to develop a light weight, high power, long lived electrical generator to power the VASIMR engine if they thought it worked.

Over unity power is the holy grail. I hope it is discovered somewhere, and the sooner the better.

I am astonished that anyone with some knowledge of Engineering or Science would suggest that an over-unity experiment be taken seriously without some good measurements being made on whatever apparatus is supposedly producing such a result. At this point, I am highly inclined to believe that all the energy moving the piston and the weight is supplied by the electrical discharge into the gas in the cylinder.

The first thing anyone should think when presented with any over unity device is that this notions is immediately wrong. If it works at all, it isn't getting energy from nothing, it's getting energy from somewhere, and the effort should be focused on understanding how the energy balance equation works.

Now you may argue that this thing works by a nuclear reaction, but till I see some numbers from which I can calculate input energy and output power, I'm going to assume the thing is a fool's toy. I have a very strong suspicion that the output energy moving the piston/weight is approximately the same energy put into the device in the form of electrical energy from the battery.

[Diogenes]

I cannot emphasize this enough. The man in the video is not doing science, he is tinkering.


The Absence of data logging instrumentation demonstrates that the man has no clue how much energy he is putting into the gas, nor how much energy he is getting out of it.

Output energy can be calculated by the movements and displacements of the piston and the weight. (Except for any supposed electrical energy produced elsewhere in the device. That has to be measured.)

There needs to be data logged current and voltage measurements for his electrical input power, and without these measurements it will not be possible to determine if the output energy is exceeding the input power.

One or both of those physics guys sitting at the table ought to have insisted on this. It makes me wonder about their credibility. Measuring input energy is not hard to do. You don't have to buyLab View, you can cobble together plenty of low cost alternatives to accomplish this.


If you are serious, that is.

[paperburn1]

I cannot emphasize this enough. The man in the video is not doing science, he is tinkering.


The Absence of data logging instrumentation demonstrates that the man has no clue how much energy he is putting into the gas, nor how much energy he is getting out of it.

Output energy can be calculated by the movements and displacements of the piston and the weight. (Except for any supposed electrical energy produced elsewhere in the device. That has to be measured.)

There needs to be data logged current and voltage measurements for his electrical input power, and without these measurements it will not be possible to determine if the output energy is exceeding the input power.

One or both of those physics guys sitting at the table ought to have insisted on this. It makes me wonder about their credibility. Measuring input energy is not hard to do. You don't have to buyLab View, you can cobble together plenty of low cost alternatives to accomplish this.


If you are serious, that is.

sometimes I wish we had a "LIKE" button

[GIThruster]

Well, except that we have no idea what sorts of measurements Rohner have taken. They said they have 150% OU. One supposes if they're going to say that, then they must have used some sort of technique to measure. Assuming they don't based upon a presentation demo seems to me a pretty uncharitable assumption. Bob did say they ran up the demonstrator he had there just for that presentation. It's not research kit. It was designed so it could be disassembled and reassembled quickly. If you have to presume anything, I'd presume their measurement methods are flawed until they explain them, just as Tom has.

[Aero]

Well, except that we have no idea what sorts of measurements Rohner have taken. They said they have 150% OU. One supposes if they're going to say that, then they must have used some sort of technique to measure. Assuming they don't based upon a presentation demo seems to me a pretty uncharitable assumption. Bob did say they ran up the demonstrator he had there just for that presentation. It's not research kit. It was designed so it could be disassembled and reassembled quickly. If you have to presume anything, I'd presume their measurement methods are flawed until they explain them, just as Tom has.

sometimes I wish we had a "LIKE" button

[Tom Ligon]

I was not going to get in to this discussion ... the video is over an hour and takes a LOOONG time getting to the point, and there is a lot of wasted time looking for missing videos. But Diogenese is looking for an honest man, and for some reason thought that might be me. So I guess I have to look.

I've been going the other way lately, studying early steam engines developed circa the War of 1812. A few of the practitioners understood the thermodynamic principles of these things quite well. Watt actually had a plotting device that plotted the PV cycle by 17something-late. People like Oliver Evans had figured out the relationships between pressure and power intuitively and very well.

Somewhere in the process one article mentioned how much weight some small amount of fuel can raise. The number opened my eyes.

Looking up the energy in gasoline combustion, 35 MJ per liter, can convert directly to foot-pounds. The number is too large to be useful for this demonstration. So lets say there are 20 drops in a milliliter, and I get that a single drop will give 1290 foot pounds. So that one drop of fuel can raise a 10 pound weight 129 feet.

Criminy.

A gasoline engine is a "low temperature" system using gas at a few thousand K at the max, well less than half an eV. Maybe a quarter eV. So it is not terribly efficient and one drop won't really raise the ten pound weight that far. Maybe a third of that. But still, alarmingly powerful.

This gizmo is working on plasma ... in principle one could imagine that temperatures well above an eV are possible. The heavier gasses are "lazy", poor at transporting heat, which might mean low wall losses due to low collision rates with the walls, yet plenty of collisions between molecules. I can see that it might be pretty efficient, even using a conventional Carnot cycle analysis. And I'm not surprised to see it lift some weight.

But I'm 55 minutes in to the video and have yet to see any quantitative results presented. And he's having trouble remembering engine basics.

I'd love to see a clean quantitative video, but this is a really poor presentation.

As for a plasma heating up and cooling down quickly ... what is the mystery? For a rarified plasma where wall collisions dominate, they'll cool down in a couple of chamber transits. The miracle would be having them stay hot. But this particular mix, at around an atmosphere, would be relatively inefficient at carrying energy to the walls ... that's why they use the heavier noble gases in insulated windows these days. The mix is likely tailored to stay hot just long enough to run a cycle.

Watt's steam engine did NOT use steam to drive power to the cylinder as modern engines do. They allowed the cylinder to fill to ambient pressure and move out easily. Then the cylinder or a heat exchanger was chilled to condense the steam, and the force was produced by the atmosphere working against a volume. For the time, the effect was startlingly strong. And some versions of these engines worked by heating and cooling the gas in the cylinder, with no outside boiler.

Sterling engines are kinda like that.

[DeltaV]

Sterling engines are kinda like that.

The key to Stirling engine performance is the efficiency of the regenerator.

http://www.ohio.edu/mechanical/stirling/me422.html

[Torulf2]

http://pesn.com/2012/08/24/9602167_Nobl ... tromagnet/

[Tom Ligon]

If you get a magnetic field strong enough, you could even lift a non-conductive diamagnetic piston. It might take 20 Teslas, and if you could do that routinely you would have better things to do with your time than fiddle with this gizmo.

I used to hang around the chemistry department at Virginia Tech. A friend of mine needed help with an RF power source, running about 1 MHz and 30 watts, which fed a coil wrapped around a glass tube. I believe it operated at modestly reduced pressure, and I remember that it had to be scrupulously free of oxygen due to the nature of the reaction and product. If I recall the purpose of this device, you put carbon disulfide gas in one end and got carbon sulfide out the other. The product was of interest because its reaction with oxygen was one of the fastest known to chemistry. In operation, this simple device running at a modest power and frequency could light off a pretty blue glow in the gas.

I bring this up because if I wanted to use a coil to ionize a gas, I would be using RF, not some simple pulse. A short DC pulse would be more for directing current flow in an ion channel, or setting conditions for spiral electron or ion movement (ECR and ICR) to contain and concentrate their activity.

[Axil]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBWiWft ... ature=plcp

Russ has gotten the popper to work using hydrogen in a proof of principle exercise. The force executed by the hydrogen gas expansion is substantial and there also seems to be an electric charge feedback happening.

Video #11, tends to support my belief that the power, force, and speed of gas expansion is inversely proportional to the duration of the spark. When the duration of the spark is short, the compressive force of the gas grows large. A very short spark is a powerful spark. This powerful spark will produce a powerful and forceful expansion of the gas.

To get gas expansion to the maximum, the duration of the spark must be reduced to the minimum duration possible.

To optimize gas performance, I recommend a spark rise time under 50 nanoseconds with a very short duration to produce the most powerful explosive and forceful expansion of the gas.

Video #11 shows that a continuous high voltage spark does not cause gas expansion, but a short and powerful spark with a very short duration does.

It is not the energy that the spark carries in joules. It is how fast this energy is delivered to the gas.

This is analogous to how explosives perform.

Low explosives are compounds where the rate of decomposition proceeds through the material at less than the speed of sound. The decomposition is propagated by a flame front (deflagration) which travels much more slowly through the explosive material than a shock wave of a high explosive.

High explosives are explosive materials that detonate, meaning that the explosive shock front passes through the material at a supersonic speed.

Some theory

Because of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, no two electrons can orbit the atom on the same quantum level.

Electron degeneracy pressure is a particular manifestation of the more general phenomenon of quantum degeneracy pressure. The Pauli Exclusion Principle disallows two half integer spin particles (fermions, that is electrons) from simultaneously occupying the same quantum state. The resulting emergent repulsive force is manifested as a pressure against compression of matter into smaller volumes of space.

Electron degeneracy pressure results from the same underlying mechanism that defines the electron orbital structure of elemental matter.

When electrons are squeezed too close together, the exclusion principle requires them to have different energy levels. To add another electron to a given volume requires raising an electron's energy level to make room, and this requirement for energy to compress the material appears as a pressure.

A big spark packs large numbers of electrons into fixed volume in a very short amount of time and the gas explodes due to electrostatic increasing repulsion.

At any given instant, the more electrons that are added to a fixed volume of gas, the bigger the gas atoms gets in that fixed timeframe. This causes electrostatic pressure increase as all the atoms of the gas grow bigger at the same fixed instant of time.

If the spark pulse is short and powerful enough, an electrostatic shock wave may be produced that may then result in an intense level of compression and electron nuclear screening which then results in associated nuclear reactions.

It is well known the lightning produces gamma rays neutrons and transmutation of matter.

This electrostatic shock wave and electron screening of the nuclear barrier may be causing this type of nuclear activity.

Detection of helium in Russ’s gas will inform us that nuclear fusion is occurring.

We will need Russ to learn spectroscopic analysis of the gas flash.

Some info on plasma shockwaves

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Col ... shock_wave

[Skipjack]

Russ has gotten the popper to work using hydrogen in a proof of principle exercise.

And we are sure that it is not hydrogen reacting with some residual air/oxygen with the spark igniting it?

[Axil]

Russ has gotten the popper to work using hydrogen in a proof of principle exercise.

And we are sure that it is not hydrogen reacting with some residual air/oxygen with the spark igniting it?

I stated and also saw in the video as follows:

Video #11 shows that a continuous high voltage spark does not cause gas expansion, but a short and powerful spark with a very short duration does.

A chemical combustion process would not be senitive to the type of spark used.

Also the sparks was issued about 100 times.

You must not have watched the video...and you stout fellows always demand experimental data...what propaganda.