June 28, 2009

Remember Steorn - the Irish company?

Back in 2006, they claimed to have developed an over-unity electrical generator that put out more power than was used to drive it. They called this technology Orbo and said the following on their website:
What is Orbo?
Orbo is a technology that creates energy from magnetic interactions. Orbo provides free, clean and constant energy at the point of use.

Orbo is a platform technology that can be engineered to power anything from a phone, to a fridge to a car.

Orbo is controversial - science tells us that energy can not be created - yet Orbo does this. Orbo is an over unity technology - it provides more energy out than is put in.

Orbo is a result of many man years of technological development using a "Victorian Science" approach. It is a technology that has been derived phenomologically, through test, implementation and retest.

Steorn will provide Orbo to the product developers under license. These product developers will provide Orbo powered products to the public.
They staged a public demonstration but the room lighting overheated their mechanism and they were not able to show anything. They also invited a jury of scientists to analyze the technology and last week, they published their findings:
Jury Announcement
In August 2006 the Irish company Steorn published an advertisement in the Economist announcing the development of �a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy�. Qualified experts were sought to form a �jury� to validate these claims.

Twenty-two independent scientists and engineers were selected by Steorn to form this jury. It has for the past two years examined evidence presented by the company. The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.

The jury consists of scientists and engineers in relevant fields from Europe and North America, from industry, universities and government laboratories. Information about individual members can be found at http://stjury.ning.com/

R.I.MacDonald
Chairman, Steorn Jury
And another one bites the dust. The joke of the matter is that Steorn is presently marketing two sensors for measuring magnetic fields. Given their confusion over what constitutes over unity, I would not touch one of their sensors with a ten-foot pole. Most claims of over-unity stem from stunningly bad lab work or improper use of test equipment. A lot of the work done with moving magnets develop pulse waveforms and not the smooth sine curves that commercial electrical power uses. Cheaper meters assume that the AC waveform will be a sine wave and give incorrect readings when confronted with a stream of pulsed current. Swap out the measurement tools with a nice $300 Fluke or Tektronix multi-meter and your free energy suddenly evaporates... Posted by DaveH at June 28, 2009 4:09 PM