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. so for couple years HAD mostly posted projects all alike: “software” overcomplicated impractical solution written as for mainframe, run on oversimplified 8bit micro and everyone cool (who’s not are trolls), but this one stinks?
    Well it is a hobby too, and most this projects do work to some degree, for example Bedini motor does recover old batteries, and it good for time spending because that what hobby is for
    And before telling about thermodynamic principles and laws of conversion maybe you should read about them first? It might be surprise to you but they apply only to isolated systems, and we don’t live in a jar after all

  2. @Devin

    It is, among other things, a simple expression of the fact that physicists are going to point and laugh at you if you claim to have a free energy device.

    Nothing is free, and especially not energy.

  3. @Alberich

    How do you know? Do you just follow what you’ve been told by physicists? If everybody believed everything they’ve been told, we’d have no progress.

    While I doubt that this is truly “free energy” as much as you do, this sort of experimentation should never be discouraged; worst case, our previous notions of physics are confirmed, best case we have a source of infinite energy and we have to re-think the entirety of physics. In-between these results there are a myriad of possibilities as well; what if one of these “magnet motor” experimenters finds out that permanent magnets can be used as super-powerful batteries, for example.

    Even if the article is complete bullshit, at least it’s not another over-engineered hipster-built arduino-controlled blinking LED piece of trash.

  4. @all the offended people,
    Whoa. chill out. I had to go back and re read this article to see what everyone is freaking out about. I’m still not totally sure.

    I think that the steorn thing is b.s. I’m astonished he’s convinced people to give him money. I also think it’s cool that this guy has reproduced one and documented the process.

  5. JL Naudin is probably the only person in the world who is ready to test any crazy idea, make experiment, measure something and put results to the web page. He does not draw conclusions about it, he does not criticize it.

    I think that is the right method of doing science. If experiment shows BS, everyone will see that is is BS, if it shows something interesting someone will try to replicate it, and will probably find out something.

    about Steorn Orb motor replica:
    it needs 120mA @ 8V just to run without any load ? that is 1 watt of pure losses, not counting poorly driven BUZ11. does not look promising as overunity device to me.
    what? no CEMF ? maybe it has to do something with diode on the drain of BUZ11 or ferrite cores driven into saturation by powerful magnets.

    about Overunity&Co.
    if it needs battery to run it is not overunity.

  6. To all of you assholes that claim “hackaday never posts anything good anymore” why dont you shut the fuck up and hack something, then there will be something to post, and then we can call you a fag for not coming up with something ingenious… or because you use an arduino…which is another thing, wtf are you snobs complaining about the arduino for? If you hate it so much, what kind of boards are you using??? Nothing obviously, because if you would bother to learn to code then we would have an abundance of hacks and you would have nothing to complain about…. You know most of you sound like? Whiney little bitch ass twelve year olds.

  7. On a side note, those who actually read the article and put forth constructive criticisim are awesome…and probably the same people who actually do amazing things that are note worthy… Thank you

  8. Morbo Motor: E=kL^2 260mH > 160mH Delta E pushes rotor to run. But it seems to me a kinda BLDC . How about Hysteresis and cogging? One layer coil is like 1 turn in toroidals?

  9. What is really missing from all those experiments, is a torque measurement. RPM is useless without a torque measurement, much like voltage is useless (in this context) if you don’t measure the current.

    While it may be true that this motor doesn’t produce any back-EMF (not all motors do, that’s not really new), the inductance of the coil changes with the rotor position. When the magnet is near, the inductance, and thus the stored charge in the coil, assuming a constant current, decreases.

    As to why the induction decreases; the only thing I can think of right now, is saturation of the ferrite.

  10. Why People assume that free energy mean something from nothing ? In such projects free means as in a beer, you dont pay for it, who do you shouldn’t care, just as you don’t care about billions trees and living creatures that give their lives over millions years to become oil, It wasn’t you who pump raw material into Earth after all you just taking it out spending some energy on work to get much more back, just tap into already existing source. And don’t forget that just 100 years ago there wasn’t much at all, almost all science developed in pas century. Just recently we get tiny boost on viewing the world thanks to tools. And it known that even with help off all tools, we can detect such miserable percent of universe; after all we see only 3 dimensions when most modern theories require at least 9 for physics to work. So how can anyone be sure that in past 5 generations we discovered all forms of energy? Is it so hard to imagine that there is unknown sources, and it can be used just as we use all energy known to us, and can be converted to work or other energy just as electricity or heat.
    Don’t forget humans actually use only free energy (sun, potential energy created by nature(rivers, wind) , heat, and dead plans which is sort of potential energy too, even atomic sources was not created by us)around by spending some work to get it, we did not fill in any of the resources we tap into and no laws of physics is broken by this routine process

  11. just read the link, guy wrote good report on what he get and what he think this might be, yes ferrite ring saturates and bloc magnetic field of permanent magnet under it so torque produced only by permanent magnet and to saturate ring constant amount of current is used independent from load instead as in most traditional motors current directly respond to load

  12. Jeez gang, I’m sure the creators of HaD don’t buy into this crap, They’re showing us something cool, which is EXPERIMENTATION, EXPLORATION, and RESEARCH! It is obviously (to most of us anyway) BS, but just lookit that motor! I want to build one just cause it looks cool, not out of some delusion that it will create energy.

    Regarding the ad below the article, ever heard of Google Adsense? the ad is placed BY GOOGLE, based on the content of the page. HaD is nowhere near stupid enough to try to SELL this crap, for a couple pennies of click revenue. The readers would quickly see through such an attempt.

    Personally, I am glad to see this article, I like the mechanical end of things more than the software, or even the electronics. but then, I’m a machinist, so my view is probably a bit different than the average reader.

    BTW, Hack a Day, I like the site, I like the stories, and I think the only thing that has gone downhill here, are the comments, not the content. Keep up the good work!

  13. All I’ve got to say is holy shit hackaday you’re shitting me. I’ve lost the majority of the little respect I’ve had left for this blog as I’ve noticed the quality of the posts go downhill recently with some of the new bloggers.

    I’ve been keeping track of them for a while, largely because they’re basically the only company who’s actually successfully brought forward their completely wrong ideas so far for so long, and I think part of it is that really they’re being a lot less stubborn than most of the other free energy idiots out there and are being very reasonable people when it comes to proving or disproving that their system works.

    I read in one of their most recent news releases that they were finally going to release their prototype of a system with “coefficient of performance > 1.0”. For investors (most of them stupid without any science training), this sounds like breaking conservation of energy, but for anyone who knows a bit of thermo, this is a number related to heat pumps. You can have COPs of > 1.0; in fact, good heat pumps typically have COPs >> 1.0. I can’t quite figure out how it works with their contraption (as is often true with claimed perpetual energy systems–they’re complicated enough for people to believe they work without analysis), but I suspect they’re somehow demangetizing the magnets and taking energy out of that.

    So, I actually suspect that they’ve finally realized after all this work that they haven’t in fact “discovered” perpetual energy (if you learn the physics and do the math, conservation of energy is necessary, and without it, suddenly everything we use to design engines and chemical reactions suddenly isn’t supposed to work. . .but they do, so I’m pretty darn sure you’re wrong if you still think you can break conservation of energy). Now, they’re slowly and subtly trying to break this news to investors–the fact is, though, whatever heat pump they’ve designed, it sure as hell looks pretty novel and pretty neat if it’s based on magnetism. If you look at their site, too, you’ll notice that suddenly they’ve got a bunch of pages dedicated to selling magnetic bearings and magnetic measurement systems. I think they’re getting ready for an alternate game plan (or finding ways to make money once people realize they haven’t found the nonexistant “free energy”).

  14. aside from any free-energy claims, this is a rather unusual and interesting concept for an electric motor.

    Most motors use coils to attract magnets (DC motors, AC synchronous motors and permanent magnet stepper motors), some use coils on both the stator and the rotors (universal motors). The most widely used motor, the AC asynchronous motor, uses coils on the stator and shorted single-turn coils (the squirrel cage) on the rotor. Then there is the variable reluctance motor, which simply uses soft iron which is attracted by magnets.

    This motor, however, is somewhat like variable reluctance motors because it uses non-magnetized ferromagnetic material, however, because it uses permanent magnets to attract this material, instead of coils, it can’t just interrupt the current to stop the attraction. Instead, the coils are saturated to make them, more or less, magnetically disappear.

    While interesting, I don’t see any real advantages to this motor. It seems like it can only produce a large torque with some level of efficiency (however efficient or inefficient it may be). Also, I don’t see how one could build or control the motor to minimize the torque ripple; I think a huge torque ripple is inherent in this design.

  15. As previous posters have stated, just because a device appears to produce more energy than it consumes does not mean it violates the laws of thermodynamics.

    Now, its extremely unlikely that we can get to it by designing convoluted electromagnetic motors, there is likely to be an energy source that is both simple to tap, and to use, but we haven’t discovered it yet.

    Some of the most overarching scientific discoveries have been purely accidental. It seems likely that someone will find an amazingly efficient energy source while attempting to create something completely different.

    Oh, and that flat earth article was quite enlightening, very good read. I wish I could go back and slap my elementary school teachers for some of that crap about Columbus. Then again, I already knew that.

  16. Free energy does exist and Steorn’s claim does hold, and its very easy to test it on your own.

    Naudin has been kind enough to provide a circuit diagram to illustrate it. He calls the experiment “S2Gen” and more details can be found here:

    http://jnaudin.free.fr/2SGen/indexen.htm

    I just built one myself yesterday and posted some information about it on my blog:

    http://freeorbo.wordpress.com/

    As well you’ll find some articles that may help you understand the mechanism behind this effect.

    Before you write this all off, it would be smart to build a unit or find a friend who can help you make one. It’s not very difficult to do.

    The S2Gen experiment illustrates some of the key points in a very understandable way: the interaction between the toroid and the magnet, the time-variant nature of the effect, and in fact why it can be clearly shown to be free energy.

    All of the above respondents are clearly intelligent people and should be able to easily understand the results and see that there is in fact new energy in the system.

  17. Seriously this will be the first time I say thanks to Mike, good job, look for more analog projects, especially “little gems” circuits (ex: 2 transistor level shifter which can replace max232 chip, or old and forgotten bu very simple and with fair performance rf link made with super-regenerative 1-3 transistor receiver and 2transistor AM (ask/ook)transmitter that can be easily interface with uC)

  18. Strangely, I found this article interesting and somewhat amusing. As others have said novel electric motor designs are cool.

    Now, I wouldn’t vilainize HAD for posting this article but I would, however, love to ream them for continually horrible writeups. I suppose they are still training new staff or something, but honestly some of these post are so ignorant that their offensive to their content authors their linking.

  19. “No system is perfect. They all loose energy. Even the known universe will one day run out of entropy and fail.”

    No. No. The universe doesn’t run out of entropy. Entropy is something that is is equal or increasing until you reach “heat death” which is universal equilibrium (aka maximum entropy).

  20. You can’t create. Period. You can borrow energy from somewhere to use it somewhere else. Nothing is lost, nothing is gained in the grand scheme of things. You just transform said energy to something more convenient for your needs.

    I cried a bit when I read this article title, skimmed through the “content”. I rejoiced when I saw the number of comments. Thank you HAD readers, I know I can count on you to bring back people to reason. Insanity can be fun, but it’s no use in a community like this.

  21. @threepointone : Think of this post as a good intellectual exercise about applying theory in a correct way. Discussions like these show other people (with less experience) what is good and bad interpretation of electromagnetic theory.

  22. What the heck is everyone’s problem? It’s not like HaD is reporting this as real science or anything. It’s an interesting thing (definitely a hack) and something to laugh at. This is not a journal of engineering – it’s a blog that post cool electronics/hacks for entertainment.

    The people who say they’re going to stop reading HaD crack me up. Start your own blog. No one cares if you stop reading.

  23. It is interesting however improbable.The thing that pisses me off is the people that post links to wikipedia and insist that because it’s there it must be true.Give me 45 minutes and I can have over 10,000 people that I have never met verify that I did something “impossible” now here is the cool part you can choose what that thing is…and you don’t even have to tell me what you chose! wiki is the worst thing about the internet and if you choose to site it as a source than you are an absolute moron.

  24. SparkyGSX: I agree, this motor is cross between existing systems using rare-earth magnets. The motor itself is not new. Reading the site, I see basic testing with multiple tries at building the contraption. He tried and failed, but at least he tried which is worth noting on Hack-a-Day. The experiment did lack mathematical proofs and many basic experiments engineers would run. At least he got to use his and show off his expensive Fluke Meter.

  25. Well, I’m going to go ahead and say it.

    This thing works!

    I totally just built one, installed it in my car, used it to power the warp drive and force field (which I also built with parts from Jaycar) and flew to Alpha Centuari, to have tea with a Xorbakian named Fred.

    You guys can argue all you want about it, with all your “physics laws” and proven science, but the fact remains, I just used it to fly across the stars.

    How awesome was that?

    PS. I’m thinking of using it to power my Flux Capacitor so I can travel through time and see a T-rex, anyone got ideas on that?

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