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Robb
SFN Regular
USA
1223 Posts |
 Posted - 05/22/2007 : 06:46:12
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http://www.lutec.com.au/
This company claims free energy at 440% efficiency. This claim has alot of similarities with other bogus free energy scams such as Joseph Newman and Dennis Lee.
1. Insinuates that its many worldwide patents back up the claim that it really works. (You do not have to show test data that something works to get a patent.)
2. Has a test rig setup showing the input power less than the output power. How do we know this? It is either a deception or incorrectly measured (usually is in error because of power factor).
3. The output power is not hooked up to the input power. If truly over unity then why not let some of the output power supply the input energy. In all the scams I have investigated all do not ever demonstrate this. They all have a other power source for input power usually batteries.
4. Technical data coming soon. (yeah right) Almost all successful free energy pushers are masters of putting off tests or supplying real data.
5. Asks for investors before it is fully functional or test data published.
6. Description of technology or theory never really says where or how the free energy is produced. Only describes construction of the device.
7. Claims device will save the world from destruction.
The only things missing are claims of revelations from God and mass conspiracy to cover up their technology. I am confident they will get plenty of investors if past scams by other people are any indication.
I sent them an e-mail asking for test data or where and when I could see a test performed. I doubt they will respond.
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Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. - George Washington |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 08:31:57 [Permalink]
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| Yeah-- it sounds totally phony. Who would fork over $Aus 100,000 (just over $82,000) based on nothing?!? |
| Edited by - Cuneiformist on 05/22/2007 08:33:46 |
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Robb
SFN Regular
USA
1223 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 09:33:36 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Cuneiformist
Yeah-- it sounds totally phony. Who would fork over $Aus 100,000 (just over $82,000) based on nothing?!?
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The same people that invested in this guy without a working model.
http://www.josephnewman.com/ |
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. - George Washington |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 05/22/2007 : 12:19:58 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Robb
Originally posted by Cuneiformist
Yeah-- it sounds totally phony. Who would fork over $Aus 100,000 (just over $82,000) based on nothing?!?
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The same people that invested in this guy without a working model.
http://www.josephnewman.com/
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The same sorts of sophistcated investors  who fall for the Nigerian, and now South African 419 scams. I have little doubt that he'll get plenty of funding, if only from the ponzi aspect of it.
I'm trying to remember the name of that investement hoo-hah we discussed with it's advocates a couple of years back (who faded mysterously away). Aging minds falter sometimes, but it smells a little like that.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 12:28:46 [Permalink]
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I have a self-sustaining methane plant inside my body, I am accepting grants and donations...*
*See Kentucky Fried Movie for hilarious reference. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 13:09:02 [Permalink]
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I was hoping to put something like this into my electric scooter, to save the $.002 per mile that I now have to spend operating it, to allow me to remove its heavy lead-acid battery, and extend its range.
But sadly, the LEA is just too efficient. I would have no way to dissipate the excess energy, unless I installed an electric heater on my scooter. And a world full of electric scooters all running heaters full blast so they would not explode is probaby going to heat up as fast as one where everyone drives greenhouse gas-producing automobiles.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 13:17:01 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by filthy
I'm trying to remember the name of that investement hoo-hah we discussed with it's advocates a couple of years back (who faded mysterously away). |
PIPS/PureInvestor.
Hey, Robb, good catch on the new guys. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 13:23:37 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
Originally posted by filthy
I'm trying to remember the name of that investement hoo-hah we discussed with it's advocates a couple of years back (who faded mysterously away). |
PIPS/PureInvestor.
Hey, Robb, good catch on the new guys.
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Funny, Dave, but most, not all, of the posts in that old thread are coming up twice in a row, as though dupes posted twice. Wonder what's up with that? Isn't that itself a violation of some kind of text and energy law?
And Gorgo, whatever happened to the lady with the Ponzi "investments"?
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 05/22/2007 13:32:02 |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 13:26:12 [Permalink]
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That PIPS guy still owes me $1k. The bastard.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 13:53:44 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by HalfMooner
Funny, Dave, but most, not all, of the posts in that old thread are coming up twice in a row, as though dupes posted twice. |
You should see the threads with four duplicates of each reply. I don't know what causes that, but it happens when we archive threads. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 05/22/2007 : 14:46:13 [Permalink]
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PiPs! Yes! Thanks Dave. That one was fun, wasn't it?
Dude, I fear that you will never see your 1k, alas. We can only hope, if we are feeling generous, that the poor bastard got out of it with his shirt.
There just ain't no free lunch. 
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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ktesibios
SFN Regular
USA
505 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 15:10:21 [Permalink]
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So I'm in the middle of going over the description in their US patent and so far I've noticed two things:
1. This isn't something new- it's actually a disimprovement (plz excuse the neologism) of a technique for running a brushless DC motor that's been around for decades. Where they've disimproved it is in the use of a rotating mechanical switch- the brushless motors I've encountered use Hall-effect sensors to detect the rotor position and drive transistor switches to provide the required 3-phase coil drive. There's also a neat trick involving sampling the coil voltage during the "off" period for each coil, which allows you to measure the motor's back EMF, which is directly proportional to rotational speed, which is a handy thing for implementing a feedback speed control system.
Because there are no brushes or commutator, these motors are very rugged. Like an AC induction motor, the only wear items are the shaft bearings, and they will happily run until the bearings are utterly trashed.
Musicians: if you've ever used a Roland Space Echo or Chorus Echo, there was a brushless DC motor of exactly the type I'm thinking of driving the tape.
As for its age, I found that same circuit in Grundig dictating machines I worked on in the early '80s- machines which had been manufactured in the '70s, and the venerable Space Echo isn't much younger as a design.
In essence, these guys have reinvented a 30 year old wheel, and put corners on it to boot. This does not inspire confidence in their knowledge of motor technology, let alone their claims of over-unity efficiency.
For the curious: Wikipedia article on BLDC motors
2. The patent contains the statement "By switching the coils A to C in the above manner the rotor 11 can be induced to rotate with a lower amount of input current to the stator than would be required if current was delivered constantly to the coils A to C. "
Umm, if current was delivered constantly to the coils A to C, the motor wouldn't rotate at all. The rotor would turn to a position where the torques due to each coil were in equlibrium (most likely one with one magnet centered on a coil, as in Figure 4A of the patent), oscillate around that position a bit, and settle. Dumping a shot of DC into all the windings of an induction motor (which is essentially what a BLDC motor of this type is) is a method of stopping it quickly, and this has been exploited to provide an emergency stop function for power tools.
I'm not even done reading their patent, and they've already demonstrated a remarkable level of ignorance of basic principles. This also does not inspire confidence.
Lutec have indulged in this kind of delusion before. Their previous offering was very neatly deconstructed by Ian Bryce for the Australian Skeptics. His article can be found here. The punch line is that they thought that the IR loss in the motor windings was identical with the input power. When the efficiency calculation is done correctly, i.e. (power delivered to the load)/(power taken from the source), their claimed 2500+% turned out to be a poor 33%.
Since their new gadget apparently uses the same windings for both input and output, the opportunities for making errors in measuring input and output power are made very bountiful.
I would dearly love to get my hands on one of these gadgets. While it's near-certain that their claims are based on a combination of incompetence and wishful thinking, it would be very interesting to find out just what the central mistake is.
Since it's extremely unlikely that Lutec would allow one of their gadgets to fall into the hands of anyone who knows how to do accurate electrical measurements, Robb has got the best handle on it. For any device that's claimed to put out more power than it takes in, the proper response is "close the loop and let's see the thing run on nothing but its own output". For something that has electicity as both input and output, closing the loop should be a trivial problem- if it really is significantly over unity. That the promoters have not done this speaks volumes. |
"The Republican agenda is to turn the United States into a third-world shithole." -P.Z.Myers |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 05/22/2007 : 15:43:27 [Permalink]
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Thanks, Robb for your great thoughts (a vertible tech fraud detection toolkit), and ktesibios for your patent analysis.
Modern brushless DC motors are marvels, even though they've been around awhile. One odd fact about them is that their windings have to be wound by hand, unlike brushed DC motors.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 05/22/2007 15:44:17 |
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Another Free Energy Company
