Steorn Orbo Motor Replica

Reader [Hjhndr] ran across an interesting set of tests and wanted to know if they’re brilliant or just a load of bull. We’re not making the call on that, but the tests on a Steorn Orb motor replica are worth looking at.Keep in mind, people used to think the earth was flat and scientists of the time would have sworn up and down that’s the way things were.

The Steorn Orbo is a motor that generates more power than is put into it. At least according to Steorn Limited that’s what it does. An independent panel of scientists said otherwise a few years back but that didn’t stop the company from showing off the concept a few more times, most recently a showing in Dublin ended this month.

So anyway, [Jean-Louis Naudin] took what he saw from those demonstrations and built a replica. He’s made several papers about the principle as well as his testing available online. There’s a lot of math, a little bit of smoke and mirrors, and several videos. Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments.

175 thoughts on “Steorn Orbo Motor Replica

    1. The comments on this website are beyond outrageous.
      Regardless if this works or not, it is time you all got off the internet and did some real work in building and testing the best of these machines before you utter another mindless insulting dogmatic word. The thermodynamic laws are more than out of date , they are stone age.
      Patents have been granted, and machines tested thoroughly in the past, but nobody seems to be interested in replicating these fascinating machines.A few years ago you guys would have called the jet engine bullshit. you would never have gone and seen one, and just verbally attacked anyone that made one. Use the internet to do research with open thought. Take the time and money to test things for yourself before you preach the laws of physics to people that already know them and have found them lacking substantially. Do some real historical research on these things and stop behaving like the Spanish inquisition :-)
      Not everything on the internet and utube is bullshit, I can be sure of this because I have taken the time and money to test some ideas.

      1. Well no, because the jet engine works and seeing a plane take off under jet propulsion is alot different than what happens when we attempt a perpetual motion device. If it works, why don’t any military powers in the world pick it up, after all most technologies mankind has produced are either concieved in war, or harnessed to be used in war. Take your emotion out of your thought process.

  1. Perpetual motion hackaday? REALLY??

    Perpetual motion violates either the first law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics, or both. The first law of thermodynamics is essentially a statement of conservation of energy. The second law can be phrased in several different ways, the most intuitive of which is that heat flows spontaneously from hotter to colder places; the most well known statement is that entropy tends to increase, or at the least stay the same; another statement is that no heat engine (an engine which produces work while moving heat between two separate places) can be more efficient than a Carnot heat engine. As a special case of this, any machine operating in a closed cycle cannot only transform thermal energy to work in a region of constant temperature.

  2. This is about as sad as those people on youtube who think they have made some sort of perpetual motion machine but all they really made was a wheel that turns for a while and then stops. I hope no-one in the hack-a-day community buys into this shit.

  3. I would have liked to see him try to build the device, rather than abstract it to some principles and building a pointless device to test those.

    As for calling all this ‘crap’, well, yeah, you’re probably right. I’m not in favor of just writing it off though. If it’s not a closed system, it may leech energy from somewhere else.

    From the way the principle looks, I’d say that have a device on their hands that is excellent at demagnetizing permanent magnets, and converting that to mechanical energy. It may even be useful.

  4. I was just going to say, maybe it is demagnetizing the magnets to generate mechanical energy.

    It would seem like free energy until one considers that it took energy to magnetize the Neodymium magnets.

  5. If we live in a universe of 11 dimensions, of which we only occupy 4, I think its perfectly valid to suggest that over-unity is at least a *possibility*.

    Saying that however, these perpetual motion machines from Steorn, and the youtube copycats, are plagued with pseduo-science and should be treated with as much skepticism as we so easily give people wearing tinfoil hats claiming to have been abducted by visitors.

    So to echo other commenters, WTF HackaDay?!

    incidentally, Steorn is just down the road from me, and I would treat them the same as the guys from Scientology – give them a wide berth and hope the brain mold that affects them isn’t too contageous.

  6. JL Naudin…how many times has this name been posted online with the idea of some “miraculous” perpetual energy machine. Now, I’m the first to say that the only impossible thing is the impossible. However the things he associates with routinely fall into the HIGHLY improbable category. “Perpetual energy” may exist in some form, but it is probably at a subatomic level where the outside forces that prevent it at normal scales don’t exist. I will say that I’m all for trying to build a perpetual energy machine, however posting on a site like Hack-A-Day without a working model seems a bit pretentious and like an obvious attempt to lend credibility to an unlikely result. In the future, please try to post about those things which have a firm foothold in reality.

  7. Indeed, this is a sad hack-a-day.

    Nebulous: Don’t fall for this crap! The source of energy is plainly the current flowing through the toroidal coils.

    The theory of this piece of hokum is that “free” potential energy exists between a magnet and a ferrite (the core of a toroidal inductor). The lie is that you can negate the force of attraction without doing work. Changing the direction of the ferrite’s magnetic domains in the presence of a magnetic field requires work – at least as much work as is recovered “freely” as the motor spins to the next position.

  8. Wow! I’m getting two of these motores to put in my electric jalopy project. Currently I use a water-powered fuel cell. This will bee such an improovment! I’ll add an anteana to wirelessly recharge the power grid as i drive!

  9. It doesn’t work because in order to release the magnet the coil has to generate a force and do work on the magnet against the pull of the permanent magnets. Importantly, this extra work is only done _if the coil is released_, since work done is force times distance. This work presents itself as an e.m.f generated in the coil opposing the current traveling through it, due to lenz’s law.

    His last demonstration experiment is therefore invalid because he only tests it with the magnet present or not present, not with the magnet being released from the coil.

    Also note that in any case where he demonstrates supposed ‘free energy’ he measures only current, not voltage, which is where the extra power draw would manifest itself in this case.

    This can happen because, if he is driving the coils in the motor in the same way as his demonstration model, he is creating a current source, which adjusts its voltage output to keep the current running through it constant, instead of the normal situation where voltage is constant, and current varies.

    This, in fact, accounts for all the effects he notes in his experiments, although is also depends on where he is measuring the voltages he quotes on his graphs, which he doesn’t mention. If they are, as I suspect, the voltage across the power rails to his driving circuit, then the ‘free energy’ he is noting is simply being diverted from the MOSFET, which would dissipate less heat as the load on the motor increased.

  10. If there truly is no back-EMF on the coils, then he could simply remove the rotor entirely, and measure the exact same voltage and current waveforms on the coils.

    You will see him do every convoluted test *but* the simple and obvious ones that will disprove the device in an instant.

    I emailed him once about such a simple test on another project of his. Try it sometime, the incomprehensible babbling you get back is somewhat amusing.

    HAD, please, just say no to pseudoscience.

  11. Comic Sans font, selective interpretation of electromagnetic principles… awesome!

    Looking that the device, my interpretation is this: So he has a toroidal coil with a ferrite core. When not powered, the permanent magnet attracts to the ferrite core. To push away the permanent magnet, he applies an electrical current to the coil.

    Then he writes: “Don’t forget that the free mechanical power produced by the magnetic attraction of the magnets towards the ferromagnetic core has no link with the electrical power spent to release the magnets.”

    … correct me if I’m wrong, but to mechanically repel or “release” the permanent magnet from the ferrite core, you have to put electrical work into the coil to counteract the EMF inducted by the magnet. At best you can perfectly cancel the EMF, but this does not create motion. In fact, it just keeps the magnets in place at a sweet spot, where the magnet’s attraction and the opposing field balance out (kinda like the way superconductors keep magnets repelled at a certain distance). To ensure that magnets are completely physically repelled, you have to put in more power.

  12. @rcxdude, @Ken
    Right-o. Actually makes sense.

    So if I have this straight, the illusion of free power would come from the electromagnetic coil, which allows the permanent magnets to freely move away… Which looks like no effort, but in fact requires at least as much energy as that movement provides…?

    That said, I still don’t believe in instantly damning to obscurity anyone claiming to have over-unity. Although the claim should then be “We’ve got over-unity based on all inputs we know. Where’s the energy coming from?” rather than calling it free energy. I do realize Steorn has a reputation, though :)

  13. i hate those guy who claim over unity just because they use magnets in their design as if magnets were not a source of (magnetic)energy. its about as dumb as claiming an atomic power plant is a green technology just because is dosent produce co2.

    creating an open system device wich taps external energy to achieve “overunity” now thats would be a revolution…..

  14. Aw leave them alone. €12M in investments in Steorn is a work of genius, and think what a great learning experience it will be for the investors. Perhaps after losing their shirts they will crack a physics textbook.

    I happen to think it is an ideal Hackaday offering. It made me giggle, has a pretty build and oodles of schadenfreude.

  15. Kids are grown up but still floating somewhere really far from our gravitated reality. Plus, it’s quite hard to believe this to be anything serious since it uses parts of a broken PC cooler.
    That ‘company’, is just making realistic-looking videos such as these to grab some more dumb investors` money.

  16. Jean-Louis Naudin, is well know as a spammer and madman in most of the french speaking physic forums, bulletin boards, mailing list, etc.

    If you listen to him, he already realized cold fusion, water thermocracking, water motor, etc.

    All his website is priceless fun: http://jnaudin.free.fr/

    “Look i just put XXX Kw of electric power in those electrodes and this little quantity of water, bubbles ! It must be cold fusion or hydrogen after water thermo-cracking, … ”

    “No, it’s just water vapor.”

  17. unplug it and let it power itself! that is about as simple as can be of a OU test. If it keeps going and going and going, i’ll bite. on the another note – while I think steorn is truly a con, Naudin seems to truly believe its out there.

  18. The video of the rotating model with the amp-meters connected to it clearly shows, that there is no “free energy”, this is just a very inefficeint transformer, that’s all…

    Seriously, I thought this site promoted critical thinking, not this crap…

  19. Hmm judge the company by how successful they are =) The Wikipedia link states that Net income is
    € -1,794,648 (2005)[1] That’s pretty good right? With revenues in excess of 900$ !!!!

  20. You’re all missing the point here. The motor itself is a good hackaday candidate because the person made it without plans or anything. That sort of “i see this thing, i’m gonna try and make one myself” is awesome. Unless I’ve not read enough and there actually are plans and it’s just one big perpetual motion wank.

    Yes perpetual motion is a load of crap and so is most of this guy’s website, but he’s custom-made a funky-looking unusual motor. That’s pretty cool.

  21. “Hack-a-day, why?”
    Maybe because when all of you incensed deacons of thermodynamics flock to the comments to defend your holy principles, Hackaday gets more pageviews and therefore more ad revenue. :p

    Anyway, I think the devices these people come up with are interesting. Their explanations of them might be incorrect, but you don’t really have to join their cult to build their machines. Maybe if more hackadayers build the machines and ran the tests to disprove their theories their explanations would receive less attention.

  22. I’m going to stop reading Hack-a-day to 3 months, one for posting this, one for not saying it’s fiction, and one for not retracting it.

    please retract it so I can only skip 2 months.

    I might miss something interesting in those 3 months but it’s worth saving myself the frustration of reading this drivel.

  23. Did anyone read the article? He presents the data clearly and experimentally. He doesn’t just go off on how this is Gods greatest gift to science. He doesn’t even claim it as free energy he remarks how it’s interesting effect that converts potential magnetic energy into work. You give hack a day crap for posting non-sense when it’s actually an interesting scientific read. PLUS science isn’t about just dismissing things flat out because they seemingly disobey the known laws. Science is about trying to find ways to disprove what we know in order to form a greater understanding.

  24. Interesting post! Glad to see that somebody thinks outside the box; Tesla thought he could power the whole world wirelessly, and he didn’t have a huge coal plant either… Is this post really so irrational?

  25. holy christ there is so much butthurt in these comments; seems like the existing laws of science are some sort of religion to you people. if the man wants to try to disprove thermodynamics, let him; yes, it’s almost certain that he’ll fail (seeing as every other perpetual motion idea has met the same fate), but hey, he’s tinkering with something. isn’t that what hackaday is about?

  26. Exactly as has been stated prior. Maybe some folks should RTFA, and maybe appreciate the work that went in to building and analyzing. Of course it wouldn’t be the internet if we didn’t have the armchair physicists and mechanical engineers. I believe the synopsis even said there was some smoke in mirrors; of course any of us who have research similar concepts understand that perpetual motion isn’t possible as such, but who is to say that somewhere there maybe something worth while, that maybe there is a concept that can be applied to another project. But then its much easier to cry ‘Witch’ and burn anyone involved at the stake.

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