An energy harvesting project

[JulesP]

I have now completed the 'Battery Swapper & Timer Circuit' document that explains in detail how the CD4060 decade counter is used to precisely set the swap interval. This has been added to the Docs folder on the Mega link and is also attached here.

My plan to have a revised set of files for an updated PCB, based on my findings, is on track for early December. That should make life easier for some of you.

Meanwhile, I have an added set of experiments to undertake using a bank of supercapacitors instead of a battery to make measurements of the charging and energy gain. This should offset suggestions that the phenomenon is an artifact of battery chemistry. At the moment I have no idea how that will pan out but I will post results as and when I get them.

Happy reading.

Jules

[pearldragon]

Hi Julian, Thanks so much for posting all these docs! I'll be off the radar for a bit reading through them, will report back here once done

[JulesP]

Hi all,

In response to an inquiry about the essential elements of a generator, as opposed to all the elements that I needed to build in to test the phenomenon, I have added a couple of paragraphs on page 9 of the Suggestions doc to summarise what I believe are the essential ones. There is no point in building everything unless you are particularly keen to find out for yourself if they contribute much - and there is nothing wrong with that I have added that to the Mega folder as v2 and also attach it here.

Also, putting myself in the shoes of the keen 'garage enthusiasts', I have decided to try and design a revised PCB, together with guidance notes for assembly, before Xmas this year. This will consist of the circuit schematics and grabs of the PCB together with the Gerber files, so you can go to any PCB manufacturer and run off some boards relatively cheaply. There will also be a component list to aid construction. There will also soon be a doc on the setup of the timing circuit on the battery swapper using the 4060 decade counter chip that has worked very well.

Lastly, I feel it is only reasonable that I give some information about my background that has contributed and led to this work and so I have added a 'Mini Biog/CV' as well.

Happy discovery

[Gary Hammond]

Hi Julian,

Thanks for responding with the the above posts and attached files. This info will be very helpful to all of us experimenting with these devices.

Gary Hammond,

[JulesP]

While I'm putting material up, I have just written a sort of guide for those who have become 'stuck' and unable to get the CoP over 1 for this type of generator. It's just a set of suggestions based on the last three years of work and such details shouldn't interfere with my proposed scientific paper that I will write in the new year.

I attach it here in the hope that it may help some experimenters and at the end of the document there is a link to a set of folders that I put together for another forum with a selection of materials.

[JulesP]

What I mean is that I'm getting even busier than usual and don't want to get too bogged down in needless exchanges about semantics or other discussions but I'm happy to contribute to build details.

To answer your questions: My statement in brackets is an example of a calculation of discharging 1Ah in 1 hour and I should have specified 1A. But in practice, I used 3A for the battery to bring that down to 20-30mins depending on actually how much I wanted to discharge. With the 18Ah Li battery, I used 5A. Just depends on what's convenient but I will tweak the paragraph

Lithium batteries perform much better and give higher CoPs. They can handle higher continuous current discharges (for an external load as well as the circuit) and are more consistent regarding the voltages they get to after discharging and charging. The 7Ah LiFePO4 battery can handle 7A continuously or at least as long as the swap interval.

Regarding the PRF, I did some preliminary tests a while back and found 100Hz did quite well so I have focused on that area but I have also used up to 1k to get comparative values. When you start to plot them then you see a trend and so plan the next run to see if it goes higher or lower etc. and you gradually zoom in on the optimum values.

I attach a section of one of the summary tables from one of my many spreadsheets, where one experiment category might have several sub-sections each with its own spreadsheet. Even with two tests a day it has taken me over 5 months to get all this data. That does mean that I can start the power tests using settings that are optimized.

I can't recall if I attached my 'Load Testing' plan but here it is anyway.

[pearldragon]

Hi Julian, Gary,
First of all thanks for sharing your elaborate report.
I was wondering how rigid your statement is “I’m not going to distract myself with too much discussion on this forum”?
I ask this since I’d be very keen to try to reproduce your setup (and ideally your results); as mentioned on the other thread, my thought were already going in this direction. But I will have a ton of questions… Ask Gary; the thread were Gary talks about his results with his Bedini SG was 2 pages long before I joined the forum, now we are at 14 pages; that is 12 pages of just questions from my side and answers from Gary hahaha…
But the upside is I’m not a ‘an arm chair critic’ as Paul Babcock would call it; I build, and ask the question to understand and learn/improve what I’ve build. But judging on the (enormous) help so far I received from Gary, I’m sure he would be able to help out with quite some of my questions too .
I’ll await your response on the above before diving in, but have some small questions regarding your report:

Page 4
“2. Using the ‘Discharge’…. take about 1hour”.
Question 1: I read “…a discharge current of 3,000mA.”. That seems to contradict “…discharging 1 Ah….take about 1 hour”. I’d expect here -> Discharging 1Ah takes 20minutes.
Question2: I haven’t experimented with Lithium batteries so far, so not sure how they behave/hold up to such a relative big discharge current (3A) compared to their capacity (7Ah). Any particular reason why you used such a high current, in relation to its capacity?

Page 9 / 11
Table 3 / Table 5
Question / Remark: What a huge impact on COP does it have according to your data changing the pulse frequency from 100Hz to 108Hz… Just makes me wonder: You could have started at any number/frequency and be far off… but I assume you’ve done extensive testing at some point realized that in the area of 100Hz things got interesting…

Best regards,
Rodolphe

[JulesP]

Hi all,

For the last three years, I have been working to obtain unequivocal evidence that a Bedini-style generator can harvest energy from the local environment. In particular, as someone who trained and worked as a scientist and a science teacher in the UK and is now retired, my aim is to present clear evidence of the harvesting phenomenon and to publish that data in a suitable scientific journal. So far I have found nothing in the mainstream literature addressing this specific topic, probably in part for fear of ridicule.

To this end, I have built a ‘Pulsed Flyback Generator’ and spent a large part of this year testing it with regard to a range of variables that can affect its performance. Up to this point, I have focused on measuring its CoP and finding out the optimum settings for best-charging performance. (Thanks to Gary Hammond for his help on the measurement approach).

The testing is not complete in that I have yet to undertake power tests that bring any hidden factors to bear, and these tests will add further weight and confirmation to the CoP data already obtained.

My aim in all this is not to bring some form of generator to market but rather, as a ‘curiosity-driven’ project, to show the scientific community clear evidence that energy can be extracted from the ‘environment’ by an open electronic system. Particularly for many electrical engineers, an open system does not compute and the notion of using the term CoP outside of heat transfer is anathema.

What good data there is has usually been kept within the walls of interested groups and forums like this. However, with my aged links to the ‘establishment’ and universities, my long-term aim is to get further replication done and add weight to the issue of open systems and energy extraction from the quantum vacuum, what Tesla and others have referred to as radiant energy.

My project does not directly examine where the energy comes from and the mechanisms involved (such as vacuum biasing) but it is of course natural to speculate. In my view, the only viable source of the energy gain is the quantum vacuum and I’m in contact with Tom Valone and others in the US on that aspect. It will probably require a specially designed experimental setup to investigate that hypothesis but in the meantime, my own view is that the theories of Ilya Prigogine on ‘far from equilibrium’ states and negative entropy as well as the Geometrodynamics of John Wheeler are relevant in this phenomenon.

I plan to write the scientific paper at the start of the new year largely based on the power tests that are soon to start. Due to the much better than expected performance, I need to upgrade the PCB, and in particular the relays, to cope with currents up to 20A instead of the 3A originally designed for. Meanwhile, I have written various documents presenting the evidence so far and, while I am keen not to risk interfering with the evidence related to the forthcoming paper, I am happy to provide a link to one interim report (not written in scientific paper format) showing the methodology, equipment and evidence of some of the CoP values obtained so far. This might provide some inspiration to others who are embarking on this journey.

If there is one overarching finding I would state after all my work then it is this: one needs to optimize all the factors based on the unique properties of a specific build. The factors so far tested include PWM PRF and duty cycle, coil voltage (i.e. number of batteries in series), battery capacity and chemistry, charging point on the charging profile, and the battery swap interval.

With my build designed to allow for the testing of all these variables, when these are optimized, then I have now reached CoPs of more than 10 (compared to around 2-3 when not optimized) using HV pulses of a little over 1kV applied directly to the battery. When towards the end of this year I get to increase the peak HV towards 2kV (by changing some active components) the results are likely to increase significantly. These values translate to power levels of 100-200W which is a modest output but scientifically speaking highly significant.

Since the pdf file is 9MB and can't be attached to this post, here is a link to my Mega account and one document that I’m happy to share at this time. Others will follow as and when my paper is published next year.

https://mega.nz/file/8IVVCaqS#yJDmYb...YDIRczxxz9fUt8

I’m not going to distract myself with too much discussion on this forum about it as I’m rather busy but I felt prompted to present this now as we head into a difficult winter for many, not least for reasons of energy availability!

Blessings

Julian