Firstoff I just wanted to clarify that this a question that has plagued me for manyyears, and i do have a fairly decent grasp of physics ( My original major atuniversity was mechanical engineering before I ended up transferring tobusiness, so i never got past first year physics). I understand the laws ofconservation of energy and thermodynamics and i abandon this project many yearsago. But there are some details that haunt me to this day and i'd like to findsome closure.
Many years ago, when i was 17 I had an idea for a motor that ran off of aconfiguration of permenent magnets, having never heard of perpetual motionmachines i wasn't aware of the problems with this idea. After a lot ofexperimentation and trial and error i built a prototype from wood and largeceramic speaker magnets cut into 3 equal sized sections making six sections in totalwith one ceramic magnet positioned between them attached to a central driveshaft. The concept was akin to a magnetic rail gun curved back in on itself, usingvery particular alignments of the poles. As you can guess it didn't work!.. Bigsurprise right!... lol... I realized that the magnetic fields from each sectionwere interacting, so they were not acting as isolated sections which wasintegral to the concept. Being young and not knowing any better i tried to finda way to make each section act independently, and eventually i found a way. itseemed a ferrous iron plate placed between each section effectively (I don’tknow if it did, but it behaved as though it had) isolated and amplified the force acting on themagnet attached to the drive shaft. The effect was stark and it had asubstantial amount of torque. The next step for me was to design a system thatwould move these metal plates out of the way to allow the magnet to pass andthen return to place. This was about this time that i started at university,and it was this device that inspired me to major in engineering. However I quicklyabandon the project after learning that it essentially would violate the lawsof thermodynamics.
But to this day it haunts me. I've never found an answer that satisfactorilyexplains my observations, and explains exactly why it wouldn't work. Although idon't doubt that there is a reason that it won't, because if it did it would bea perpetual motion machine, Thereby creating energy from nothing, which isparamount to creating matter from nothing...
So I’m looking for the mechanism that explains why this won't work. Duringobservation it really looked like it did work. There was large amounts oftorque.. it easily traversed the gaps and spun freely under its own power. Themagnetic fields acted as though each section was independent. And I had foundthat I could counterbalance the iron doors so that they were very easy to slidein and out of the gaps between each section. (on a side note the doors seemedto become polarized themselves in such a way that it actually improved thepower of the unit rather than just isolating each section) Everything seemedvery promising.
The only thing i can think is that the magnets are actually demagnetizing as itruns and are therefore giving up the energy used to create them. Any insight?
I really appreciate your time in responding to this.
Maybe i can finally put this out of my mind once and for all.
Thanks a bunch
Mike