A pathetic waste of time nonetheless.
That is actually incorrect, I also said it had one property that was very useful in some circumstances. If you build a starship coil carefully then its magnetic field is much more 'defined', what I mean by this is.
Take a normal round coil and place paper on to, sprinkle iron filings on top and energies the coil, do the same with a starship coil that has the round part in the center the same size. What you see is in the normal coil the magnetic field spreads over a larger area and its concentration is fairly uniform. With a starship coil the field is much tighter and dosnt spread out as far, also its much stronger around the circle part then suddenly drops in strength fairly quickly as it spreads out.
When I was trying tto build my spinning floating globe that was really handy, the starship coils I wound to rotate the globe gave me the ability to have coils close together without there fields overlapping.
So they are far from useless, they just do any of the magic things that get claimed for them.
Energy harvesting I am very into, I have several kits for it, and some of the 32 bit energy micro DEV kits run really well from tiny thermal electric generators, ok its not free energy in the excepted sense but it uses energy that is free (if you see what I mean). Also my aquarium lights use this to good advantage, I have 3 watt LEDS in the hood and they get really hot, too hot!
So i put a small peltier cell with the cold side against the Led back plate, then put a large P4 CPU heat sink on the other side of the cell, this has a small 12V 10mA CPU fan on it wired to a Linear technology energy harvesting chip that connects to the the peltier cell, so now as the Led get's hot it produces energy that is converted and boosted in the LT chip and it powers the fan on the heat sink! So as soon as the Led starts to get warm it powers the fan and this cools the Led, when the temperature drops right down the fan turns off.
I think thats a great way to use energy harvesting! As for mobile phone charging thats easy, I have a Dura patch Piezo flexible strip, they cost huge money but using another LT chip I can more than get enough current and voltage to charge and power a phone! I posted details in another thread, but I will over the weekend show you pics of it and the scope trace from it, the patches are so flexible you can bend upto a 21mm radius. Mount the patch on a plastic ruler and make it BOING (you know what I mean?), then with just a 4mm deflection of the patch I get around 70V for 35 mS, this is more than enough with a harvesting chip and cap storage to do a phone. I will post a vid of it so you can see it work, the down side is I got 2 patches as samples (via dad), otherwise these small patches are around £90 each!!!!!!!!!
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Free energy I love, but again my definition of free is as KISS describes. Linear Tech have so many excellent energy harvesting chips, that there are many many things its now possible to run from very tiny amounts of energy. The technology is here and I think should be used more.
Take my Fish tank, the main problem with Led lights is the heat and them burning up, use the TEG cells and a fan and heat sink and you get what I would call free energy, or energy you dont want (heat) to produce power to get rid of it lol, Weurth Elecktonika has a great energy harvesting kit, I use it alot for experiments.
Steam power is still widely used if you think about it! much of our electric today comes from steam
. I have seen a small working frenzel lense steam boiler (thats why I wanted the lense a little while back) that runs a steam turbine in the uk on a medium warm day.
So alternative energy and energy harvesting is just something I am interested in. What I HATE!!! is the muppets that claim you can get more out than in! because its turned a good phrase and description into a dirty word.
very Best
LG