The reversible stack worked very well however, the power and support wires were effected by the heat generated in the piezoelectric chip (PzC). I was powering the stack for 5 s and heat would travel from the PzC to the first brass mass, then to the nickel bronze guitar string attached to that mass. The same would happen to the second brass mass later. The first string would expand faster than the second string causing a bias that would look like thrust toward the large mass. Even worse, when the stack was reversed everything would reverse and still the thrust appeared toward the large mass. The big clue was that the thrust did not release immediately when the power was cut, but slowly diminished. The problem was easy to verify. I just pinched the first string with wire cutters pliers just above the stack. Rerunning the test showed none of the original thrust. Having power and support with the same wires was a great idea that didn’t work. Their still appeared to be thrust so I went next to Build 3.0 (See Figure 7)
I wanted to reduce the dampening the the stiff guitar strings caused so I switched to 4 lb test nylon fishing line. It’s really like thread but, also being nylon conducts heat very slowly. I also increased the string length to 25 cm to reduce the gravitational force on the stack. Now called the DIY Mach Effect Device (DMED), Figure 7 shows the other significant change which was attaching 30 awg stranded copper wires directly to the top of each support screw. I also separated the strands ~ 3 cm to allow the stack to vibrate freely while simultaneously providing power.
I started running data with a very short 0.5 s, 4 watt power cycle to reduce the PzC heating. I got great results as you can see in Figure 8. When first energized the response drops to -53 mV but this is not thrust. (That was confirmed later by turning off the signal generator and driving the stack with 13 VDC causing no stack oscillation.) When the power hits the PzC it immediately expands ~0.3 um (according to Thorlabs). Since I’m measuring on the PzC end that slight expansion causes the photo detector output to drop slightly. That’s not what happened here as I later found. The lions portion was due to crosstalk in the PicoScope which is now corrected. I will redo those runs in a later blog. That problem does not minimize what happened during the period when the stack is vibrating at 616 kHz. The response went from up from -53 mV to -26 mV between 0.9 s and 1.25 s. That 27 mV toward the large mass is real thrust because the stack immediately begins oscillating. The period is easy to calculate in Figure 8 at ~.9 s.
With that result I decided to try multiple drive cycles at the natural stack period .9s. Figure 9 shows the result of 5 drive cycles where the stack is driven to 230 mV p-p. The obvious next step was to drive for 30 cycles and video the motion (The problem with the PicoScope is not a factor here since it’s not in the circuit). I placed an led in the frame so you can see when the stack is energized. It weighs about 2 g and is moving about 1 mm p-p after 20 drive cycles which means it is responding to about 2 uN force on each drive cycle. If you look carefully you can see the thrust is always toward the large mass. If confirmed by Dr. Woodward and others, the Mach Effect will be a new force in physics or maybe a new gravitational force since they are using Einstein’s field equations.
In order to eliminate false positives, I tried different orientations of the stack: reversing, changing polarity, different compass directions and using a different stack. All caused thrust toward the large mass. Later I’ll show that the force is toward the small mass when the device can operate close to the PzC resonance. I also ran another video with just the PzC and no large mass to show there was no drive thrust.
This is all suggesting that the Mach Effect is actually driving the stack or there is some other unknown something causing the stack to swing so consistently. As before let me know other error modes or suggestions that come to mind. Until next time, thanks for viewing. – Larry
Leave a Reply