Basic Electrostatics, Bennet Doubler: Theory of Opperation
Please read the description and consider the diagram of the Bennet Doubler presented above. Nothing I write will make any sense unless you make some effort to understand this machine.
It's not well explained, but this machine uses capacitance to accumulate electricity. This may be the reason why capacitors are called "accumulators" in very old patents.
In step 1, the ground voltage in plate b pushes out the electrons in plate a and into plate c, leaving plate a positively charged and plate c negatively charged (though the porfessor forgot to mark it). Now the connection between plate a and c is broken and the connection to ground in plate b is also broken.
In Step 2, Now the negatively charge plate b is placed beside the negatively charged plate c and the charges in the plates repel each other, plate c is grounded in this step, so the charges in plate c escape to ground, leaving plate c with a positive charge.
In Step 3, because the negatively charged plate b is beside plate a, all of the charge from both plate a and c couple with plate b and draw in more charge from ground.
It becomes clear that the factors that affect the opperation and efficiency of such a machine are clearly dependant of very different factors than electromagnetic machines.
If we refer to this page: https://www.coe.ufrj.br/~acmq/efield.html
We can see that a clear factor is the working surface area (or capacitance) of the working plates and the rate at which charge may be pulled in from the "ground", we have some friction in the components.
Now it may seem like you would have to fight to pull plate b away from plate c, but there's a trick, since plate c and a are conected, the charges are free to move between them. Electrons have basically (effectively) zero mass, physically moving them from one conductive plate to the other presents the same resistance as if you were dragging a magnet accross a table with a magnet beneath the table.
Instead of friction, you have electrical resistance and instead of a magnets that weight grams to pounds, you're dragging around electrons that weigh 9.1093837e-29 grams.
If you always provide an route for electrons to move and you have low resistance connections, it's easy to move electrons around.
Instead of moving charge with a changing magnetic field, you are moving mass with charge.
This explains another phenomena that electrostatic machines have: They are harder to spin when they are unloaded. This is because, without a load, charge accumulation resists the accumulation of more charge. Once the machine is loaded and the charge is free to escape and neutralise, the resistance to building charge is gone.
As such, you have a machine that is easier to opperate under load.
This is the polar opposite of electromagnetics. This is why these machines present and operate with a coefficent of performance. It's not that it's "overunity" is that moving electrons with magnetics is just not efficient at all in terms of moving electrons, It's fantastic at transmitting power, but not moving electrons. Moving them directly with electrostatic forces bypasses the problem of back EMF completely.
As long as you allow the charges to escape the machine, the resitance you feel to spinning them is friction, electrical resistance in wire and the force require to move the MASS of the ELECTRONS.
Once you realise that you are moving around the mass of the electrons directly with electrostatic forces, it all makes sense. Electrons have effectively zero mass.
I call this a broken energy loop:
Broken energy loops require 2 factors: a method of concentrating energy with a COP and a method of extracting energy that is more efficient than the inverse COP.
Since we now know that the smart way to move electrons around is by mass, not via electromagentics, we can now have a fairly easy broken loop to expoit as long as we condition the power and design low friction, low resistance machines with very large surface areas and then to condition the power from kilovolts and milliamps to an electromagnetically usefull level of volts and amps.
One other broken loop I know of but gave up on exploiting due to reliability and cost issues uses Nitinol wire.
Nitinol wire is an endorthermic elastic metal that uses state changes to change it's elasticity.
Because it is an endothermic chemical reaction that relies on heat and any internal frictional heating actually assists the contraction, Nitinol is as close as it's possible to be to being 100% efficient at converting heat energy to mechanical energy when it is tensioned correctly. Untensioned there is a 20 deg kelvin hysteresis between the martensite and astenite transition temperature, if strain is applied, the state transition point differential can be lowered.
Either way, you use a heat pump to heat the hot side of the wire and cool the cold side of the wire and you wrap the wire around pulleys with a bit of tension to stretch it. Once it starts spinning, it keeps spinning until the wire breaks or the heat differential is gone.
The main problem is the wire breaking and getting enough friction on the pulleys to transmit power to a generator.
It's fantasically no good. It's "overunity" but it doesn't work because the materials breakdown and are destroyed quickly.
So the plates act as a sort of battery. How does the initial charge get to/into the plates? Are the protons naturally occurring and if so would the plates have to be humongous just to spin an electric motor on a toy train? I think this in what Tesla had been looking into but he was using the electricity from the atmosphere as his source of protons.
It depends on what you do in terms of what charge is in the middle plate at the start.
If you connect it to ground, it will be negative, if you connect it to an antenna, it will be positive.
if you use arial electrodes for both (a spark gap), whatever residual charge may or may not be there will start it. Bennet doublers are "self exiting".
If there's absolutley nothing, rub your feet on the carpet and touch a plate
The bennet double is an amazing visual. It's the absolute best way to explain the theory of opperation of an electrostatic influence machine, but it is not the best design of one.
Ideally, you want a rotating design that maximises the size of the charge surfaces and allows for high speed rotation as the ammount current produced is proportional to the surface area of charge carriers passing the collection point.
I'm currently working on a barell based design that tries to maximise the effects from Lord Kelvin's Replenisher. I've decided to switch gears and do this instead because contrarotation is mechanically complex. This will be much simpler and way more reliable.
I have a 180 mm diameter barrel with 30 170 mm long 10 mm wide plates on the barrel.
I'm going to be electrically insulating my design more and elimate coronal losses in the machine so that the voltage can go higher than 15 KV.
Because of the barrel design my surface area is huge.
According to the professors equation, I should be able to provide over a milliamp of current at a rotational speed under 1000 rpm, the only question will be how much I can mitigate the coronal losses incumbent in the original design so I get the voltage to climb to where it should actually be.