|
| |
Steorn Jury issues verdict: no excess energy
After nearly three years of review, the jury selected by Steorn to validate their claim to a free energy device has issued a verdict: Steorn's process does not produce energy.
Despite the negative results of this jury, Steorn continues to work on the
project and say they believe they will have such a product available to go into production by the end of this year.
by Sterling
D. Allan
Pure Energy Systems News
Copyright © 2009
|
|
|
The Steorn jury consisted of 22 scientists and engineers in relevant fields from Europe
and North America, from industry, universities and government laboratories. |
|
|
|
After nearly three years of review, the jury selected by Steorn to validate
their claim to a free energy device has issued a verdict: Steorn's
process does not produce energy.
Despite the negative results of this
jury, Steorn continues to work on the project and say they believe they will have such a product available to
go into production by the end of this year. Members of the private forum
who have
been given information about some of the key ingredients seems optimistic as
well.
When I interviewed Steorn CEO, Sean McCarthy just after they first made their announcement
in 2006, he revealed to me that the free energy device was an all-magnet motor.
On June 24, 2009, the Jury Chairman, R. Ian MacDonald wrote:
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/
Dr. MacDonald holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, and is a Senior Member
of IEEE, as well as a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and a Professor
(Emeritus) of Electrical Engineering at the University of Alberta. Such
credentials would have been of great benefit to the credibility of Steorn's announcement if the jury's ruling had actually ended up
being affirmative rather than contradictory to Steorn's original claim.
The negative ruling, however, has not deterred McCarthy. In a
response on Steorn's website, he pointed out that the Jury process had actually
commenced at the end of 2008, and new developments through the beginning of 2009
have "resolved the key technical problems related to the implementation of
Orbo." He said the company "is now focused on commercial launch
towards the end of this year, at which time academic and engineering validation
[will] be released concurrent with public demonstrations".
I talked to a person who has been involved in a private Steorn forum that has
been given quite a bit of information under NDA regarding the Steorn technology
for the purpose of replication and the development of instructional
materials. He said that from the beginning McCarthy had been very quiet
about all matters regarding the jury, which was a separate body, so he didn't
know what information they had been given to analyze. Regarding the
positive spin that McCarthy was putting on expectations for the near future, he
said that it was his observation that this optimistic sentiment is probably
shared by most of the private forum members, including himself, though no
successful replications have yet been achieved.
Products
While they don't have magnet motors for sale yet, Steorn has developed a couple
of products for those involved in magnet motor research and development: a
Magnetic Torque Measurement System and a USB Hall Probe. Again, while
these tools may have been involved in the Steorn Jury's determination that the
Steorn magnet motor technology did not result in energy gain, at least as a
byproduct of the process of running vigorous tests, now they have an item they
can sell to others involved in similar research. Hence, the analysis
efforts of the Steorn Jury can be propagated to other similar technologies.
According to Steorn's site, the Magnetic
Torque Measurement System "is specifically designed to measure the
'pure torque' of permanent magnetic interactions during rotary motion. 'Pure
Torque' refers to the torque that the system experiences due to magnetic
interactions only."
Steorn's USB Hall Probe
"represents a unique approach to magnetic field measurement, replacing
traditional gaussmeter / teslameter hardware with a real-time USB software
interface that integrates seamlessly with standard PC hardware. The
SteornLab USB Hall Probe uses Hall Effect sensing to measure magnetic flux
densities, while the USB software toolkit replaces traditional gaussmeter
display features by providing enhanced graph visualisation and data logging
support, all in real-time at a high display sampling rate."
A June 26 article
in Wired magazine article picked up by many news services chides the
company and product as "Snake oil salesmen hawking [a] $400 magic wand." They seem determined to not let Steorn
live down the botched
Orbo demonstration two years ago, calling the attempt a "perpetual
motion device", not allowing their imagination to consider that magnet
motors could be harnessing a principle of magnetism no more magic than the tidal
forces that cause the ocean to rise and fall.
# # #
SOURCES:
Forum
Related Stories on Steorn Jury Results
| |
|
Feed