@ MonomorphicDoes the "thrust" signal invert if the direction of the device is reversed, like with Woodward signal?
In the video, Prof. Woodward shows a 1-Line diagram for the setup. The On/Off relay is ahead of the power amplifier, and a step-up transformer of all things is connected directly to the D.U.T. A transformer has a very high leakage inductance and a high impedance compared to the D.U.T. I would not be surprised if the big Transients at Turn-on and Turn-off are simply the flyback energy from the leakage inductance dumping the energy into the D.U.T.EDIT: The test setup I see shows that the equipment is on a table, approximately 2 meters from the D.U.T inside the vacuum chamber. The leads to the device look like about 20 AWG wire. That's fine for 0.5 Amps, but when I examine the voltage trace, it shows the voltage collapsing at the D.U.T. during turn on, and during resonance. So when the device hits resonance and is trying to draw more power, the in-line resistance is preventing it from doing so. I really think it is likely the transients are due to the XFMR and these long, thin wires
What’s especially interesting about the thrust trace in Figure 19 is the large switching transients thatoccur when the power to the device is turned on and off. It is easy to believe that these transients arejust electrical artifacts having nothing to do with any long-range gravitational interaction. However, thisaccounting for the transients is wanting for a couple of reasons. First, the signal that drives the poweramplifier is switched at random phase of the AC signal. So the voltage at switching is just as likely to benegative as positive, and just as likely to be increasing as decreasing in magnitude. These considerationssuggest that the switching transients in individual runs, if present, should have random magnitudes andbe equally likely positive and negative. When transients of this sort are averaged over several runs, theyshould average to zero. The observed transients do NOT display this behavior. They are always in the samedirection and do not average away.. Another way to address the switching transients is to ask if they are produced when a DC voltage isswitched. In this case, one is no longer bothered by pesky random phase AC effects. But the DC voltagedoes produce a displacement of the center of mass of the device, and that should produce a displacementof the balance beam as the new center of mass moves to the equilibrium position of the old center ofmass. Since the voltage polarities produce displacements in opposite directions, one might expect any sucheffect to be polarity dependent. Actually, this test was first carried out several years ago at the behest ofevaluators from Aerospace Corp. The results are contained in Figure 20. Run averages for both positive andnegative polarities and forward and reversed device orientation were obtained. When the negative polarityaverages were subtracted from the positive polarity averages for the two orientations, and then the reversedpolarity difference was subtracted from the forward polarity difference, the resulting net thrust showed asmall transient (a few tenths of a uN) at switch-on, as is evident in the left panel of Figure 20. This is to becompared with the transients in Figures 19
Quote from: tdperk on 11/16/2017 09:59 amIt's not like a Mach Effect device trace. The baseline does not return to the same level after the drive period. I believe you are seeing stiction or play in your bearings or another part of the assembly.I've pulled out just 5 pulses and compared it to the mach effect trace. Looks very similar to me. The torsional pendulum is suspended by wire so there are no bearings. This was the very first run with the new 3W amplifier. I am pretty confident that with a little work honing in on the right frequency, I will be able to produce traces identical to the mach effect. I suppose I will have then invented a ~1uN space engine with a 3W bass shaker.
It's not like a Mach Effect device trace. The baseline does not return to the same level after the drive period. I believe you are seeing stiction or play in your bearings or another part of the assembly.
Because the hanging wire is less likely to show stiction problem than the bearing Dr. Woodward used, I'd guess your results may be caused in asymmetric stiction response of air. So it might go away in vacuum. To show that Woodward's experiment is caused by stiction, you might need to use their bearing to show the "thrust" in vacuum, or to show that their system can not show thrust in a sealed box hanging in your torsion balance. The later is a much easier experiment than the former. But you need to obtain a thruster they have. Just my two cents.
Quote from: Povel on 11/16/2017 12:51 pm@ MonomorphicDoes the "thrust" signal invert if the direction of the device is reversed, like with Woodward signal?I will have to get back to you on that once I've better isolated the best frequency and have made more test runs. The shaker can be rotated 360 degrees so it will be a simple test, though my prediction is the "thrust" will reverse.
Quote from: Monomorphic on 11/16/2017 12:58 pmQuote from: Povel on 11/16/2017 12:51 pm@ MonomorphicDoes the "thrust" signal invert if the direction of the device is reversed, like with Woodward signal?I will have to get back to you on that once I've better isolated the best frequency and have made more test runs. The shaker can be rotated 360 degrees so it will be a simple test, though my prediction is the "thrust" will reverse.Don't forget that Woodward's device has theoretical support, the effect is derived from physics and the data reasonably matches so it's highly unlikely it's all a mistake due to imagination plus Dean Drive effects. It's also been seen on multiple kinds of setups over two decades as well as by other experimenters. Are they all making the same simple mistake? What are the odds?
Quote from: Bob012345 on 11/16/2017 05:53 pmQuote from: Monomorphic on 11/16/2017 12:58 pmQuote from: Povel on 11/16/2017 12:51 pm@ MonomorphicDoes the "thrust" signal invert if the direction of the device is reversed, like with Woodward signal?I will have to get back to you on that once I've better isolated the best frequency and have made more test runs. The shaker can be rotated 360 degrees so it will be a simple test, though my prediction is the "thrust" will reverse.Don't forget that Woodward's device has theoretical support, the effect is derived from physics and the data reasonably matches so it's highly unlikely it's all a mistake due to imagination plus Dean Drive effects. It's also been seen on multiple kinds of setups over two decades as well as by other experimenters. Are they all making the same simple mistake? What are the odds?I doubt the quality of their theories. How many different theories are there so far for Em Drive? Only 0 or a few of those can be correct. I do not understand his high level theories, but I do know that he makes elementary mistakes in college level physics, such as pointed out here (By my other ID)https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40959.msg1589319#msg1589319
Thank you Monomorphic.I'd also like to point out that the mach signal you attached in the last post is the so called "chirped one", which according to Estes Park proceedings was obtained by using a specifically shaped signal to get the big transients at the beginning and at the end of a cycle to be asymmetric.At pages 153-154 of the same document you can find "regular" mach signals, which at least to me look much less asymmetric.I'm curious to know if the asymmetric shaker can reproduce signals that mimic these ones too.By the way, averaging on a whole cycle should produce no "thrust" whatsoever in the case of the shaker. Is this requisite respected? If not there might be unaccounted sources of interference. If the frequency is low there might be interactions with the torsional pendulum structure for example.Woodward's device "shakings" happen at a much higher frequency, and he seems to have done all sort of analysis on the mechanical/thermal/electrical interactions between the device and the balance structure. He might have missed something though.The problem of this sorts of tests performed with dummy devices is that they only show the quality of manifacture and the "weak spots" of the thrust balance/torsion pendulum used, since they should detect no thrust signal and if they do it means not all sources of noise have been compensated. It would be interesting to see if the thrust balance used by Woodward can be fooled by using these. It would also be interesting to do structural modeling not only of the device but also of the thrust balance itself, and run some simulation showing how it reacts to the MEGA drive shakes. That's quite a lot of work though.
Woodward appears to have changed his arguments on the "over unity" issue but I don't agree with your analysis. The power you discuss is the mechanical power the moving device has with respect to some observer and is dependent on that observer. In Woodward's paper, the power is applied wrt the instantaneous rest frame co-moving with the device. That's makes a huge difference. It's just like the rocket you describe. The rocket does a burn of the same power irregardless of its current velocity wrt some observer. Yet the rocket's mechanical power as measured by some observer may be a lot higher or lower depending on the relative speed. So, no, I don't accept your statement that Woodward makes elementary mistakes.
@ WarpTechQuoteIn the video, Prof. Woodward shows a 1-Line diagram for the setup. The On/Off relay is ahead of the power amplifier, and a step-up transformer of all things is connected directly to the D.U.T. A transformer has a very high leakage inductance and a high impedance compared to the D.U.T. I would not be surprised if the big Transients at Turn-on and Turn-off are simply the flyback energy from the leakage inductance dumping the energy into the D.U.T.EDIT: The test setup I see shows that the equipment is on a table, approximately 2 meters from the D.U.T inside the vacuum chamber. The leads to the device look like about 20 AWG wire. That's fine for 0.5 Amps, but when I examine the voltage trace, it shows the voltage collapsing at the D.U.T. during turn on, and during resonance. So when the device hits resonance and is trying to draw more power, the in-line resistance is preventing it from doing so. I really think it is likely the transients are due to the XFMR and these long, thin wiresI'd like to know your thoughts on the following passage by Woodward about these transients, always from Estes Park proceedings ( look at pages 154-155 for figures)QuoteWhat’s especially interesting about the thrust trace in Figure 19 is the large switching transients thatoccur when the power to the device is turned on and off. It is easy to believe that these transients arejust electrical artifacts having nothing to do with any long-range gravitational interaction. However, thisaccounting for the transients is wanting for a couple of reasons. First, the signal that drives the poweramplifier is switched at random phase of the AC signal. So the voltage at switching is just as likely to benegative as positive, and just as likely to be increasing as decreasing in magnitude. These considerationssuggest that the switching transients in individual runs, if present, should have random magnitudes andbe equally likely positive and negative. When transients of this sort are averaged over several runs, theyshould average to zero. The observed transients do NOT display this behavior. They are always in the samedirection and do not average away.. Another way to address the switching transients is to ask if they are produced when a DC voltage isswitched. In this case, one is no longer bothered by pesky random phase AC effects. But the DC voltagedoes produce a displacement of the center of mass of the device, and that should produce a displacementof the balance beam as the new center of mass moves to the equilibrium position of the old center ofmass. Since the voltage polarities produce displacements in opposite directions, one might expect any sucheffect to be polarity dependent. Actually, this test was first carried out several years ago at the behest ofevaluators from Aerospace Corp. The results are contained in Figure 20. Run averages for both positive andnegative polarities and forward and reversed device orientation were obtained. When the negative polarityaverages were subtracted from the positive polarity averages for the two orientations, and then the reversedpolarity difference was subtracted from the forward polarity difference, the resulting net thrust showed asmall transient (a few tenths of a uN) at switch-on, as is evident in the left panel of Figure 20. This is to becompared with the transients in Figures 19
They have done experiments where the mass on both ends was the same, and there was no thrust detected. That would appear to negate this whole argument, IMO.
Quote from: WarpTech on 11/16/2017 07:10 pmThey have done experiments where the mass on both ends was the same, and there was no thrust detected. That would appear to negate this whole argument, IMO. One would expect there to be no "thrust" if the masses on both ends are the same. What I have built is analogous to the mach effect thruster because I have a large mass on one side of the shaker - just like Woodward has a larger brass mass on one side of the PZT stack.
I doubt the quality of their theories. How many different theories are there so far for Em Drive? Only 0 or a few of those can be correct. I do not understand his high level theories, but I do know that he makes elementary mistakes in college level physics, such as pointed out here (By my other ID)https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=40959.msg1589319#msg1589319
....The appearance of momentum conservation violation in our impulse engine doesn't mean that momentum isn't conserved. It means that we can't treat the impulse engine as an isolated system. Since the effect responsible for the apparent violation of the conservation principle is inertial/gravitational, this should come as no surprise at all. As Mach's principle makes plain, anytime a process involves gravity/inertia, the only meaningful isolated system is the entire universe. Since inertial reaction forces appear instantaneous [see Woodward, 1996a and Cramer, 1997 in this connection], evidently our impulse engine is engaging in some "non-local" momentum transfer with the distant matter in the universe. With suitable choice of gauge, this momentum transfer can be envisaged as transpiring via retarded and advanced disturbances in the gravitational field that propagate with speed c.Gauge freedom muddies up discussions of inertial reaction effects [Woodward, 1996a]. Choosing a gauge where all physical influences propagate at speeds figure has the advantage that lightcones in space-time have an invariant meaning, whereas the surfaces of simultaneity that appear in other gauges (e.g., the Coulomb gauge) do not. As just mentioned, in the Lorentz [or Einstein-Hilbert] gauge the inertial reaction effect, and thus our impulse engine, consists of a retarded/advanced coupling between the engine and the distant matter in the universe that lies along the future light cone. The introduction of the force transducer in the engine allows us to extract a net momentum flux here and now from the potentially largely thermalized matter in the far future. The net momentum flux is accompanied by a net energy flux, so although our impulse engine, considered locally, appears to violate energy conservation, that need not necessarily be the case. The extraction of useful work from matter that may be completely thermalized raises interesting questions. Boosting, rather than borrowing, from the future, however, seems to be the nature of the process involved....
That "overunity" paper is a mistery to me. Woodward seems to perfectly understand the issue and he even re-derives the argument, but at some points he gets basic physics completely wrong.Even more strange, he actually acknowledged the energy production implications of his device many years ago, as is showed on this page (dated 1997!)https://physics.fullerton.edu/~jimw/nasa-pap/
Quote from: Monomorphic on 11/16/2017 12:12 pmBecause the MET trace returns to baseline, it is plainly not a Dean Drive effect. Because yours does not, it clearly is.If you dispute this interpretation, please label your traces clearly and include data showing your mechanism does return to baseline position when unpowered or when driven out of proper phase.
Quote from: Bob012345 on 11/16/2017 06:37 pmWoodward appears to have changed his arguments on the "over unity" issue but I don't agree with your analysis. The power you discuss is the mechanical power the moving device has with respect to some observer and is dependent on that observer. In Woodward's paper, the power is applied wrt the instantaneous rest frame co-moving with the device. That's makes a huge difference. It's just like the rocket you describe. The rocket does a burn of the same power irregardless of its current velocity wrt some observer. Yet the rocket's mechanical power as measured by some observer may be a lot higher or lower depending on the relative speed. So, no, I don't accept your statement that Woodward makes elementary mistakes.In a rocket, you have to account for the loss (or gain in some frames) of mechanical energy by the exhaust. The chemical energy released is the same between frames, but not the energy imparted to the rocket. (You keep using the word power, but the energy is more relevant to this discussion. Power depends on whether the burn lasts 5 seconds or 5 minutes which is irrelevant to this discussion.)Doing calculations in the "instantaneous rest frame" is one of the elementary mistakes. Since the frame is constantly changing, you are not using an inertial reference frame. There are ways to correctly do calculations in a non-inertial frame, but Woodward does not do these, and there is no point, since you can get the answer much more easily by just using an inertial frame.
Also, I am not "doing calculations" in a non-inertial constantly changing frame. I pick an inertial frame co-moving with the device at some instant and watch the evolution from that vantage point. I believe that's what Woodward did also in that paper.
Quote from: meberbs on 11/16/2017 07:14 pmQuote from: Bob012345 on 11/16/2017 06:37 pm... It's just like the rocket you describe. The rocket does a burn of the same power......I used power because that was the point about which I was responding.
Quote from: Bob012345 on 11/16/2017 06:37 pm... It's just like the rocket you describe. The rocket does a burn of the same power......
... It's just like the rocket you describe. The rocket does a burn of the same power...
I agree with your point about accounting but it's different from the point I was making which was that in Woodward's paper in question, like the rocket, the energy coming from the device only has to support acceleration wrt the co-moving inertial frame at that instant, not the mechanical power wrt each observer which was a mistake in the critique I was commenting on.
I believe Woodward's current position is that they are completely independent and the device only sets up the conditions that allow the Mach effect to work and not the energy to accelerate the device which comes from the gravitational potential of the universe. Still, I think the critique of his old paper was flawed.
Quote from: Bob012345 on 11/17/2017 04:29 pmAlso, I am not "doing calculations" in a non-inertial constantly changing frame. I pick an inertial frame co-moving with the device at some instant and watch the evolution from that vantage point. I believe that's what Woodward did also in that paper.No by definition, the "instantaneous reference frame" is constantly changing and is therefore a non-inertial reference frame. If you were just picking a single frame to work with, then you could just pick the "initial rest frame" or define some other specific frame. Without changing the reference frame it is simple to show that any constant force/power relationship results in energy generation.Quote from: Bob012345 on 11/17/2017 04:29 pmQuote from: meberbs on 11/16/2017 07:14 pmQuote from: Bob012345 on 11/16/2017 06:37 pm... It's just like the rocket you describe. The rocket does a burn of the same power......I used power because that was the point about which I was responding.No, you explicitly were referring to the other poster's paper and not Woodward's. Go read the paper again and you will see he use delta-energy (dE) not power.Quote from: Bob012345 on 11/17/2017 04:29 pmI agree with your point about accounting but it's different from the point I was making which was that in Woodward's paper in question, like the rocket, the energy coming from the device only has to support acceleration wrt the co-moving inertial frame at that instant, not the mechanical power wrt each observer which was a mistake in the critique I was commenting on.Completely false. When you say it only has to support the power in the co-moving frame, you are talking about a non-inertial reference frame. One second later, the object is moving at a different speed, so either your argument breaks down because you are no longer in a co-moving frame, you have made a mistake by changing reference frames while pretending you haven't, or you are using a non-inertial frame and leaving out all of the non-inertial effects. There is no mistake in the critique of Woodward's paper, and your attempt at claiming a mistake appears to be a complete strawman, because you are still using the term power while referring to a section of the critique that specifically calculated change in energy, not power. If you have any further complaints about that paper please reference the exact equation or statement that you have an issue with.Maybe it would help you see the problem if you tried actually calculating the instantaneous rate of change of kinetic energy of an accelerating object that is currently at rest. This minimum power obviously cannot be the actual minimum for an object accelerating for a finite amount of time.Quote from: Bob012345 on 11/17/2017 04:29 pmI believe Woodward's current position is that they are completely independent and the device only sets up the conditions that allow the Mach effect to work and not the energy to accelerate the device which comes from the gravitational potential of the universe. Still, I think the critique of his old paper was flawed.Woodward's current position is not relevant to the question of whether he (and now you) made mistakes in entry level physics.
Completely false. When you say it only has to support the power in the co-moving frame, you are talking about a non-inertial reference frame. One second later, the object is moving at a different speed, so either your argument breaks down because you are no longer in a co-moving frame, you have made a mistake by changing reference frames while pretending you haven't, or you are using a non-inertial frame and leaving out all of the non-inertial effects. There is no mistake in the critique of Woodward's paper, and your attempt at claiming a mistake appears to be a complete strawman, because you are still using the term power while referring to a section of the critique that specifically calculated change in energy, not power. If you have any further complaints about that paper please reference the exact equation or statement that you have an issue with.