Hi F6FLT,
Yes, if one includes short term gain as a rational consideration, then I would say your picture fits reality. In that way, the scorpion who stings the frog that is transporting him across the pond is a rational actor :-) Many inventors believe that the workability of their invention in their lab automatically translates to commercial success, and often have exaggerated ideas about what the market is willing to absorb. However, the technology may still be a very good one. For instance, just from patent scans of yesterday, some thermionic converters were made in the 70s that eliminated the space charge issue and had heat conversion efficiencies of more than 50%. However, using them for solar power would entail a new industry from scratch. These patents go into the dead file-- until someone mentions they are making a thermionic generator.
At least in established areas like PV power, these commercial and sociological considerations lead me to look for things that can be adapted to the current systems, or at least require only that new electronics be installed (giving a solar controller company an opportunity, if they choose to bite). After surveying some 2K patents in the solar field over the last couple years, I have two, maybe three such concepts that have the possibility of actually improving yields substantially without massive retrofitting. So, yes, it's true that most patents are not of sufficient interest, but given that there are zillions of patents, continuous looking steadily comes up with great technologies that are not being used. Stuff falls through the cracks.
Now on to the main focus: "the thing". The very first project I started way back in 1996 (when I had to bus to the U library to look at microfiche :-) was to examine every patent or project that someone, somewhere claimed to show excess energy, simply to see where the most reports were. I wanted to count the number of reports in each technological area to see where there might be more smoke, which might be some fire. Aside from those things that catch the unskilled popular imagination-- the aforementioned PM motors, sliding, rotating gizmos, etc,-- the most anomalies were in sparks, arcs, and plasmas--all likely related to LENR. There was also a lot of 'high strangeness' in water/steam physics. But, at the risk of looking where it was easy to look, I focused early on solid state electromagnetic devices, reasoning that our society was moving away from rotary devices whenever possible, and LENR, plasma, sonoluminescence, etc. were outside the ken of home experimenters for the most part, and not likely to be something that would ever be installed in a home or car. Within the area of solid state electromagnetic devices, two areas developed to be of special interest-- parametric transformers, oscillators and amplifiers (because the thermodynamics of these devices seemed to be exceptionally murky and involve 'noise coherence'), and transformers with two or more secondaries, whose secondaries were made to react on each other rather than on the primary. There are an unusual number of projects/patents using this pattern, starting with the Hubbard Coil, going through the Unidirectional Transformer of Raymond Jensen, to the recent patent from William Alek, and even to some projects in these forums (as well as many more obscure devices). There is also some basic physics involving positive and negative interference, with examples in acoustics and nano scale optics, that supports this line of inquiry. Since then, although I continue to survey multitudinous patents and projects, I've devoted my spare time to promoting concepts in those two areas, with moderate success. Every test involving the 'secondary mutual reaction' principle has shown an absence of load on the primary, and only excessive magnetizing current in the primary due to inadequate transformer design has prevented them from being OU. Detailed power balance shows an effect. This is a technical hurdle that I continually push against in my own inventing and theorizing. Of the parametric projects, only one involving varactor diodes seemed to show some promise, so this line of research has lain fallow for a while.
Regards, Fred
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