Say you had a large cylindrical magnet in a vacuum, suspended in zero-g, rotating inside a closed circuit conductor. Also assume you had a nearly frictionless system holding the magnet in place while it rotates.

Now lets say you reved up the magnet to a high rpm, would the energy output be greater than the energy impulse needed to spin the magnet to start with?

I can't accept this device could produce more energy than initially given. But you wouldn't need a lot of energy to set the magnet in rotation and it should stay in that state for quite some time. The energy input comes out as potential difference in the conductor coils but it technically has to be less than or equal to the input. This means the generator won't produce much power, but it should if it runs like a top on no energy for days.

Someone tell me why this wouldn't work, I can't stop playing with the idea.

are you trying for a perpetual motion device?? If you are, it wont work

I know the spinning magnetic shaft will eventually stop, I just need someone to prove my stupid idea of getting more energy out than in mathmatically wrong. If I put x amount of mechanical energy in to turn the magnet, the output would be less than or equal to x.

It just seems as though I would get free energy out as the magnet continues the spin for days without a driving force. That's why I'm figuring the power [energy/time] output would be very small, but do all generators produce miniscule amounts of energy?

Imagine having a constant driving force [a perpetual impulse like hydroelectric] turning a generator on Earth at 50,000rpm for 10 minutes. Now imagine this same generator spinning at 50,000rpm for 10 minutes with only that initial driving force. The generator would eventually slow down, but under said conditions this would take days...days of longlasting mechanical motion not dependent on a constant driving impulse.

There's probably some force/effect that your not thinking of that will reduce the energy output

"assume you had a nearly frictionless system holding the magnet in place while it rotates."

Here, conveniently in italics, lies the problem. As my school physics teacher often said, "the answer is always heat".

edit: I appear to have replied to the wrong thread.

Good job, me.

Do they even make cylindrical magnets with the poles split lengthwise in half? I thought about spinning a coil inside a magnet in these conditions but the brushes would destroy the idea.

The idea is all ready destroyed however, since conservation of energy makes this impossible.

Energy would also be lost as heat from the wire coils, unless they're superconductors, at which point they dont interact with magnets like we're used to.

Quite simply, when you take power out of the shaft, it slows down, losing that energy ( and more, due to losses which are inevitable in anything ) , so no, you would not be able to get more energy out than in ..
Mathematically, its pretty much 1 does not equal 2 :)

In order to produce current, the magnets field must apply force, which results in torque on the magnet.

^^exactly what i was gonna say

I may be wrong, there's plenty of chance for that, but just mechanically it would be impossible & first you need to deal with getting it going up to speed. Inertia can be a bitch. Considering it's not going at all to begin with, that issue is multiplied. And there's friction all the way during speeding it up, and operating, which is like a parasitic loss*. *Aspiring mechanical engineers will hammer me for my choice of 'terminology' there. Believe me though, I'm a 'gearhead' and know Nereth and a bunch of other people & a race car engineer - though not more than casually in that case, I know and acknowledge what real parasitic loss is!.

You may even have to deal with centrifugal forces. Maybe that's just a word-drop so I can further tie this post all up with engineering and automotive references by linking to a Clutch track while I'm on the subject and listening to them, because Clutch are bad cats. rock criminals.

Without further ado, Impetus: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4oLmMBTCKc)

Anyone who says that friction is the reason that it is impossible to create a machine that outputs more energy than it takes in is wrong. This would be impossible even without friction, as it is a result of the first law of thermodynamics. What friction does is prevent you from even getting back as much as you put in.

In order to produce current, the magnets field must apply force, which results in torque on the magnet.

If this really is true and the magnet would be torqued by the electromagnetic interaction with the coils, then it's all I needed to hear.

Anyone who says that friction is the reason that it is impossible to create a machine that outputs more energy than it takes in is wrong. This would be impossible even without friction, as it is a result of the first law of thermodynamics. What friction does is prevent you from even getting back as much as you put in.

The first law of thermodynamics is 'conservation of energy'.

I don't write this just to make you disgruntled, but that seems like a dumb thing to say. The first law of thermodynamics, paraphrased into the context of a perpetual motion machine, says that a Perpetual motion machine couldn't work because of entropy/entropic loss of energy. That contradicts what you said, considering friction is a force and an agent of decay (entropic loss here), and you said that a perpetual motion machine would be impossible because of the first law of thermodynamics, not because of the first law of thermodynamics, thus anyone saying the failure of a perpetual motion device is due to the first law of thermodynamics is wrong. What a paradox.

Whether or not perpetual motion is possible doesn't have bearing on the fact that your statement is flawed*. It's not quite irony, but it's definitely ferrous - it's actually & definitely an impossible statement, while perpetual motion is only theoretically and almost definitely impossible.

Can you see the rust? From what I think I can see it's eaten a huge hole in your arguement..
..and the remainder is beginning to bubble and flake, and maybe become terminal if this cancer that slowly spreads isn't cut out.




*[Or, at least, it seems to be. Show me that it isn't, I could quite easily be mistaken.]

^No man, he's saying even in a perfect world where my magnet would spin frictionless forever, I still could not extract more energy than initially put in. I'm really not quite sure I understood what you just said either.

^What he said. Conservation of energy (First Law) makes it impossible to get more energy out than you put in. This does not make perpetual motion impossible, because a perpetual motion device wouldn't need to output energy. What makes perpetual motion impossible is entropy (Second Law), but this topic is not about perpetual motion, it's about a machine that outputs more energy than it takes in.

edit: I appear to have replied to the wrong thread.

Good job, me.



This reply and edit brings me constant lulz.

This reply and edit brings me constant lulz.

I aim to please.