Stanley Meyer's patent #4,936,961
So - who is this Stanley Meyer? If you don't know, you are among the fortunate majority. If you do, you may not yet realize how much of a scam artist he was. This would be quite unfortunate, as you may have paid money and/or invested time trying to make his invention work. If you wish, download a copy of the patent and follow along. I''l make it easy for you, here's a link - http://patimg2.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid...&SectionNum=&idkey=NONE&Input=View+first+page.
Old Stan has several patents and quite a bit of writing, much of it in the form of so-called 'memos'. These are the things to pay attention to, as claims are made that can be verified, or at least dismissed as pure hokum. His video of the infamous 'water powered dune buggy' is suspect. All one has to do is watch a movie of, say, Spiderman, to come to the understanding that literally anything can be made to happen in a video.
I am going to confine commentary to the text in the patent document. There are accompanying illustrations and even a block diagram of the 'control circuitry', but the substance there is utterly absent. A block diagram has no content without a schematic. In the one case I am aware of, Stan did publish a series of 'schematics' in a document labelled "WO 92/07861". In that case, no components were identified in any way, so it is also void of meaning.
As an abstract, Meyer's patent #4,936,961 purports to describe a method of promoting water electrolysis with close to zero expended power. The process is to place a high voltage across a confined quantity of water such that the molecules will become pulled apart by the action of the voltage. Said voltage is supposed to increase in steps, so we are supposed to imagine the molecules will virtually be shaken apart.
Why the elaboration about the voltage being applied in steps? Imagine how difficult it might be to simply place a large voltage across a container of water and observe water molecules coming apart. The increasing pulsing voltage is the necessary flim-flam to make the reader imagine there is really something going on.
He speaks of inducing a resonance in the water molecule. This is at line 43-44 of column 2 of the text. This is the first of several impossibilities in the text. Water does, indeed, exhibit resonance, but up in the near infra red. That is a frequency inconviently high for modern electronics to produce. Imagining that any circuit can excite a body of water at a resonant frequency is simply ludicrous.
Can we establish anything about the mysterious circuit? Surprisingly, yes. In column 4 starting at line 45, Meyer states that his step up transformer has a primary coil consisting of "200 turns of 24 guage copper wire", and a secondary coil of "600 turns of 36 guage wire". In column 6 at line 19, we see that he operated the circuit with a "26 volt applied pulse to the primary coil".
Transformers are fairly well-behaved devices. The turns ratio is a very accurate means of determining the step up or down of voltage. As the primary has 200 turns and the secondary has 600, we find the ratio to be 1:3, so the secondary voltage he claims to have success with must have been 26 * 3, or 78 volts.
So much for reason. Having just told us that the transformer did a 3X step up, Meyer then says, starting in column 4, line 56, that the transformer "provides a voltage step-up from the pulse generator in excess of five times". Just to cloak things with some flim-flam, he goes on to say "although the relative ampount of step-up is determined by pre-selected criteria for a particular application". This is the equivalent of saying not to blame him if it doesn't work - those "criteria" never get explained in any fashion.
Immediately following this bogus explanation is another one about the "coil", or "resonant charging choke" - his words, not mine - in the secondary circuit of the step up transformer. This device is located between a diode off the secondary and the outer cylinder of the "water capacitor".
Part of the explanatioon is okay. Column 4, line 61 says that with current through the diode, "an electromagnetic field is formed around the inductor". That is what will happen, assuming the "water capacitor" has enough capacity for enough cahrge to flow and build the field. It doesn't, but more about that later.
It gets all flim-flammy again when he goes on to say in line 63 that, when current ceases, "the field collapses and produces another pulse of the same polarity". That is simply not the way fields behave around an inductor. If a polarity of voltage impressed across the inductor drove current to build a field, the collapse of that same filed will drive current in the opposite direction, reversing the polarity of voltage across the inductor.
It is sort of amusing to observe in the Figure 1 diagram the presence of another coil in the line from the transformer bottom to the "water capacitor" inner cylinder. It is shown with an adjustable tap, but is clearly labelled "isolated circuit from secondary coil". It is impossible to say if Stan actually had a sense of humor when he did this, or if he was just that ignorant.
It is adjustable so it "tunes the circuit and accomodates contaminants in water" - column 6, line 40.
We run into to contradictory explanations now, although it is clear that Stan had no idea he was contradicting himself. First, the action of the coil between the diode cathode and the outer capacitor cylinder is said to be a sort of voltage pump. The field collapse is supposed to place ever-increasing amounts of voltage on the "water capacitor".
The trouble with this scenario is that no mechanism exists to make it happen - even ignoring the reverse of voltage taking place upon the field collapsing. The transformer can only produce so much voltage - about 78 as we have seen. What happens in the inductor when the capacitor has charged to a point where the voltage on the outer cylinder is also 78? Not much. No field can build without current, and no current flows where there is no voltage difference. His entire explanation is bogus.
There is another fun aspect to all this. Meyer makes a big production about minimum current in his cell. The water is pure, so it is non-conductive. The circuit is supposed to run at resonance (but suddenly not that of water). In his words, column 6 line 27, "In achieving resonance in any circuit, as the pulse frequency is adjusted, the flow of amps is minimized and voltage is maximized to a peak".
If it only worked that way. The circuit topology he has arranged is a series LC circuit (actually LCR, as some resistance is always going to be present). The interesting thing about series LCR circuits is that they exhibit a minimum reactance at resonance. From "University Physics, Seventh Edition", Sears, Zemansky & Young, 1987, "It is possible, with appropriate electronic circuitry, to feed energy into an L-R-C circuit at the same rate as the rate of dissipation by I2R losses. It is as though we had inserted a negative resistance into the circuit to make the total circuit resistance exactly zero." Zero resistance equals zero volts. Sorry, Stan.
Left unanswered is the question of why he chose a 1N1198 diode for the circuit. The diode is pretty heavy duty for a minimum current circuit - it's rated for 40 amps. How about those voltage peaks? Well, Stan says they should be into the "thousands", but a 1N1198 is only rated for 600 volts. Kinda got that one backwards, or so it might appear.
One of these days, I'll work out the area of the "water capacitor" and so its capacity. English to metric just isn't going smoothly right now...
So - who is this Stanley Meyer? If you don't know, you are among the fortunate majority. If you do, you may not yet realize how much of a scam artist he was. This would be quite unfortunate, as you may have paid money and/or invested time trying to make his invention work. If you wish, download a copy of the patent and follow along. I''l make it easy for you, here's a link - http://patimg2.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid...&SectionNum=&idkey=NONE&Input=View+first+page.
Old Stan has several patents and quite a bit of writing, much of it in the form of so-called 'memos'. These are the things to pay attention to, as claims are made that can be verified, or at least dismissed as pure hokum. His video of the infamous 'water powered dune buggy' is suspect. All one has to do is watch a movie of, say, Spiderman, to come to the understanding that literally anything can be made to happen in a video.
I am going to confine commentary to the text in the patent document. There are accompanying illustrations and even a block diagram of the 'control circuitry', but the substance there is utterly absent. A block diagram has no content without a schematic. In the one case I am aware of, Stan did publish a series of 'schematics' in a document labelled "WO 92/07861". In that case, no components were identified in any way, so it is also void of meaning.
As an abstract, Meyer's patent #4,936,961 purports to describe a method of promoting water electrolysis with close to zero expended power. The process is to place a high voltage across a confined quantity of water such that the molecules will become pulled apart by the action of the voltage. Said voltage is supposed to increase in steps, so we are supposed to imagine the molecules will virtually be shaken apart.
Why the elaboration about the voltage being applied in steps? Imagine how difficult it might be to simply place a large voltage across a container of water and observe water molecules coming apart. The increasing pulsing voltage is the necessary flim-flam to make the reader imagine there is really something going on.
He speaks of inducing a resonance in the water molecule. This is at line 43-44 of column 2 of the text. This is the first of several impossibilities in the text. Water does, indeed, exhibit resonance, but up in the near infra red. That is a frequency inconviently high for modern electronics to produce. Imagining that any circuit can excite a body of water at a resonant frequency is simply ludicrous.
Can we establish anything about the mysterious circuit? Surprisingly, yes. In column 4 starting at line 45, Meyer states that his step up transformer has a primary coil consisting of "200 turns of 24 guage copper wire", and a secondary coil of "600 turns of 36 guage wire". In column 6 at line 19, we see that he operated the circuit with a "26 volt applied pulse to the primary coil".
Transformers are fairly well-behaved devices. The turns ratio is a very accurate means of determining the step up or down of voltage. As the primary has 200 turns and the secondary has 600, we find the ratio to be 1:3, so the secondary voltage he claims to have success with must have been 26 * 3, or 78 volts.
So much for reason. Having just told us that the transformer did a 3X step up, Meyer then says, starting in column 4, line 56, that the transformer "provides a voltage step-up from the pulse generator in excess of five times". Just to cloak things with some flim-flam, he goes on to say "although the relative ampount of step-up is determined by pre-selected criteria for a particular application". This is the equivalent of saying not to blame him if it doesn't work - those "criteria" never get explained in any fashion.
Immediately following this bogus explanation is another one about the "coil", or "resonant charging choke" - his words, not mine - in the secondary circuit of the step up transformer. This device is located between a diode off the secondary and the outer cylinder of the "water capacitor".
Part of the explanatioon is okay. Column 4, line 61 says that with current through the diode, "an electromagnetic field is formed around the inductor". That is what will happen, assuming the "water capacitor" has enough capacity for enough cahrge to flow and build the field. It doesn't, but more about that later.
It gets all flim-flammy again when he goes on to say in line 63 that, when current ceases, "the field collapses and produces another pulse of the same polarity". That is simply not the way fields behave around an inductor. If a polarity of voltage impressed across the inductor drove current to build a field, the collapse of that same filed will drive current in the opposite direction, reversing the polarity of voltage across the inductor.
It is sort of amusing to observe in the Figure 1 diagram the presence of another coil in the line from the transformer bottom to the "water capacitor" inner cylinder. It is shown with an adjustable tap, but is clearly labelled "isolated circuit from secondary coil". It is impossible to say if Stan actually had a sense of humor when he did this, or if he was just that ignorant.
It is adjustable so it "tunes the circuit and accomodates contaminants in water" - column 6, line 40.
We run into to contradictory explanations now, although it is clear that Stan had no idea he was contradicting himself. First, the action of the coil between the diode cathode and the outer capacitor cylinder is said to be a sort of voltage pump. The field collapse is supposed to place ever-increasing amounts of voltage on the "water capacitor".
The trouble with this scenario is that no mechanism exists to make it happen - even ignoring the reverse of voltage taking place upon the field collapsing. The transformer can only produce so much voltage - about 78 as we have seen. What happens in the inductor when the capacitor has charged to a point where the voltage on the outer cylinder is also 78? Not much. No field can build without current, and no current flows where there is no voltage difference. His entire explanation is bogus.
There is another fun aspect to all this. Meyer makes a big production about minimum current in his cell. The water is pure, so it is non-conductive. The circuit is supposed to run at resonance (but suddenly not that of water). In his words, column 6 line 27, "In achieving resonance in any circuit, as the pulse frequency is adjusted, the flow of amps is minimized and voltage is maximized to a peak".
If it only worked that way. The circuit topology he has arranged is a series LC circuit (actually LCR, as some resistance is always going to be present). The interesting thing about series LCR circuits is that they exhibit a minimum reactance at resonance. From "University Physics, Seventh Edition", Sears, Zemansky & Young, 1987, "It is possible, with appropriate electronic circuitry, to feed energy into an L-R-C circuit at the same rate as the rate of dissipation by I2R losses. It is as though we had inserted a negative resistance into the circuit to make the total circuit resistance exactly zero." Zero resistance equals zero volts. Sorry, Stan.
Left unanswered is the question of why he chose a 1N1198 diode for the circuit. The diode is pretty heavy duty for a minimum current circuit - it's rated for 40 amps. How about those voltage peaks? Well, Stan says they should be into the "thousands", but a 1N1198 is only rated for 600 volts. Kinda got that one backwards, or so it might appear.
One of these days, I'll work out the area of the "water capacitor" and so its capacity. English to metric just isn't going smoothly right now...
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