Thanks for the type up @lfarrand - I have come to the same conclusion, he definitely is doing the work one way or another .. I suppose I speak for everyone here in thanking you for taking the risk of a purchase, for what clarity was obtained.
No worries, I'm happy to take one for the team
I know if I didn't buy it to see for myself then I would have regretted it if the opportunity got away. I paid for it in Bitcoin which I had accumulated in the past, so it didn't really cost me anything tangible.
I think the high level summary of how the Don Smith devices work is:
1. Charge a low capacitance (10pF) to a high voltage (4,000V+) at high frequency (20kHz+)
2. Discharge this energy into a coil
3. Rectify the output into a smoothing capacitor (high capacitance at lower voltage)
4. Output DC to load or through an isolation transformer as 50/60Hz AC
I actually think you can skip step 2 (discharging into a coil) and simply just charge capacitors to high voltage and then use this to charge another capacitor or bank of capacitors to a lower voltage / higher capacitance.
Here are some examples to show how voltage is much more important when trying to increase energy using capacitors.
- 10pF 4000V is 0.00008J
- 100pF 4000V is 0.0008J (capacitance x10 = energy x10)
- 10pF 40000V is 0.08J (voltage x10 = energy x100)
The other benefit of charging a low capacitance to high voltage is that due to t=RC (capacitor time constant), if C is low then the time to charge will be low. My theory is that this requires fewer electrons, hence low current, since there will be fewer electrons excited to a high voltage rather than more electrons (higher capacitance) excited to a lower voltage. Higher capacitance means more electrons since there is more 2D space to fill.
I found this which I thought was very interesting:
https://www.fundamentaljournals.org/index.php/ijfps/article/download/160/257Here's a quote from that article:
This is the reason it has been proven and verified that the energy stored and released by the discharge of the capacitor through the resistor is equal according to the conventionally known laws of physics, which is expressed by the capacitor energy (1), which reflects only the attractive part of the stored energy.
The conversion of the repulsive potential energy into electrical current happens only when there is a discharge device in the circuit that allows the charges to travel following the repulsive electrostatic force lines through space like spark gap, cold cathode tube, and/or vacuum tubes which are the examples of the devices that allow the charges to jump out of the conductor into space so that the stored repulsive electrostatic potential energy can be materialized into kinetic energy and consequently into the electrical current of the usable form.
Therefore, there was an omission of the repulsive electrostatic potential energy in the theoretical calculation of the stored energy in the capacitors, and incomplete experimental verification by releasing the electric charge through a resistive load, thereby unintentionally blocking the repulsive potential energy from manifesting itself into kinetic energy.
These were two fundamental misconceptions that resulted in the conventional physical law of local energy conservation in charged capacitors in electrodynamics. However, two errors, both theoretical and experimental, that mutually confirm each other to be accurate, do not necessarily prove that the involved scientific principle is valid.
The earlier cases of unusual energy-producing devices reported by Nikola Tesla (Tesla, 1901), T. H. Moray (, 1944), and others have consistently used discharge circuit elements such as spark gaps, cold cathode tubes, and vacuum tubes in their devices, which confirms the space-discharge to electrical-current-gain mechanism, which contributed to the workings of their devices, whether the engineers performing the experiment recognized the anomalous excess energy creation effect or not at the time.
From these examples, we conclude that the key mechanism for utilizing the additional electrostatic potential energy stored in the capacitor is by converting the repulsive potential energy into electrical current by letting the accumulated charges in the capacitor discharge through space before allowing them to recombine and let the total energy manifest at the power load.
Certain solid-state electronic devices with multiple layers of semiconductor junctions, for example, Sidac ("SIDAC Thyristors,"), among others, were developed in the 1950s and have a negative resistance property in their I-V discharge curves, as shown in Fig. 1.
Here's a video posted by the author of that article, explaining pretty much the same thing that the article does:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhXV3ca1J6g&t=19s&ab_channel=EugeneJeongI think there might be something in this. It's interesting to note that a spark gap, vacuum tube or multilayer solid state device are required for the effect to manifest.