Remember the perpetual motion machine called Orbo? It's back!

I've been following news about a company called Steorn for many years now. They claim to have developed a technology that generates more energy than it consumes. Every time they've had a public demonstration, it doesn't work. I'm not surprised.

I thought they'd given up, but they are back. And they have a new video, which appears to be a webinar for investors. The person who runs a blog about Steorn has a good recap:

Description of the Orbo PowerCube internals

[Steorn CEO Shaun McCarthy] showed the internal components of a PowerCube, described how the energy generating Orbo power pack works, and even demonstrated the process of manufacturing a simple device of this kind.

The Orbo battery (or power pack) is made up of three components: two dissimilar magnets and a layer of chemical gel that sits between them. The two magnets can be in "basically any physical format." Shaun compares the resulting combination of components to a galvanic cell. However, in a galvanic cell, the chemical agent would be chemically eroding the other components; but in the Orbo battery, the chemical layer is completely inert and has no chemical interactions with the magnets.

The process of producing an Orbo battery involves taking these three layers, two dissimilar magnets separated by a chemical (the formula of which is "not that simple"), heating them up to just beyond melting point, and then very slowly cooling them, which allows them to retain an electric field. The result is that permanent electric fields are "frozen" into the two magnets. These two electric fields then interact with one another to generate an electric current, in a way that is analogous to how the magnetic fields in the "classic" perpetual motion machine Orbo interacted with one another to generate force. The electric fields frozen into the magnets work in a way that parallels the frozen magnetic fields of permanent magnets. The term for a device with this sort of permanently frozen electric field is "electret", a portmanteau of "electric" and "magnet".

Shaun states that when polarized the right way, "what you end up with is something that is positive and negative." "It doesn't matter what you do to me, I will always polarize." The Orbo battery is thus an electric field version of the original magnetic Orbo. "So it is consistent, similar, and in many ways an incredibly simple piece of technology."

According to Shaun, Steorn's first battery prototypes were built approximately 2 years ago, and are still outputting power 24/7. Shaun says, "we know theoretically these materials will hold an electric field for circa 800 years."