Shock waves and steam heat
For more than two years debate has raged on the Internet about
an ordinary-looking metal drum sitting on the concrete floor of a factory
building in Rome, Georgia, 50 miles from Atlanta. Its inventor, the man about
whom the Internet debate is raging, is James Griggs, an industrial heating
engineer.
The invention that has brought Griggs such notoriety is a
device that he began developing in 1987, that he calls the 'Hydrosonic Pump' and
that many of his supporters believe is over-unity, in that it generates around
30 per cent more energy as heat than is put in as electricity.
To the skeptics, the Griggs Gadget is, at best, a case of
self-delusion on a grand scale, and, at worst, a case of scientific fraud. To
his supporters, the pump is the first unequivocal public demonstration of
undoubted over-unity.
Jim Griggs told me, 'the pump is based on a theory of what
takes place when a shock wave is created in a fluid. We know that when you
create a shock wave in a liquid there is a minute amount of energy released into
the fluid in the form of heat.'
'Most of the previous studies had been done in how to
eliminate that shock wave, instead of putting the heat to a useful purpose.
We've designed a system to take the shock-wave heat energy, capture it, and
produce hot water or steam.'
Griggs believes that his device works on perfectly normal
principles and violates no laws of physics. Just what
happens when the Hydrosonic pump is filled up with water and switched on is
described by over-unity investigator Jed Rothwell who conducted a detailed
engineering investigation of the device in January 1994.
'During one of the demonstrations we watched,' he says, 'over
a 20 minute period, 4.80 Kilowatt Hours of electricity was input, and 19,050
BTUs of heat evolved, which equals 5.58 Kilowatt Hours, or 117 per cent of
input. The actual input to output ratio was even better than this, when you take
into account the inefficiencies of the electric motor.'
But if there are kilowatts of excess heat available, why
doesn't Griggs simply use the steam to turn a turbine-generator and connect the
output to the input -- thus getting a perpetual motion machine?
One reason is that converting steam into electricity is an
extremely inefficient process. You would be lucky to convert 5 per cent of the
output heat energy back into electricity -- and 2 per cent might be nearer the
mark. The Hydrosonic pump would therefore have to be massively over-unity before
you could recover enough energy to make it self-sustaining, and at present the
margin is a 'modest' 30 per cent.
More importantly, the excess energy does not actually appear
at the output steam pipe for a constant input of energy. What happens is this;
the pump is started and after five or ten minutes reaches a steady state where
it is converting water at room temperature to steam. Once this steady state is
reached, the pump, according to Griggs, goes into an over-unity mode where the
output temperature is maintained, but the amount of energy needed at the input
to maintain it, drops by 30 per cent.
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Griggs has been working with a number of physicists and
engineers to try to get to the bottom of just how his device works. As well as
Jed Rothwell's consulting engineering firm in Atlanta he has worked with
Professor Keizios, dean emeritus of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at
Georgia Institute of Technology and past president of the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers. Professor Keizos supervised the design of the
instrumentation that measures the energy input and output of the Griggs Gadget.
In a second test, during which the over-unity effect was
measured, the adjusted co-efficient of power was a remarkable 168 per cent --
the machine produced 1.68 times the energy that was input. A third test did
nearly as well with a Co-efficient of power of 157 per cent.
If the only evidence for these claims were the colour brochure
printed by Griggs's company, Hydro Dynamics Corporation Inc., and reports of his
supporters, then most observers might be inclined to side with the skeptics:
Griggs's claims seem fundamentally improbable. Yet surprisingly, Griggs has not
only patented his device and started manufacturing a commercial version on a
small scale, he has also sold and installed devices to users in the Atlanta
area.
The customers include the Atlanta Police Department, a fire
station, a dry cleaning plant, and a gymnasium. Interestingly, the Hydrosonic
pump was installed in the public buildings by the county engineer after
evaluating the device. The buildings are using the device mainly for heating
purposes, and they have been running for more than a year. The customers have
bills from their local electric utility company showing a year on year decrease
in bills equivalent to 30 per cent.
What precisely causes the claimed excess heat? Griggs himself
rejects the popular idea that his pump has something to do with so-called 'cold
fusion'.
'We have kind of been lumped into the cold fusion field', he
says wryly, 'because we have experienced excess energy out of the pump. As far
as cold fusion goes, we don't believe that we're accomplishing any type of
nuclear reaction within our system. We feel that it can be explained through the
theory of cavitation or sonoluminescence.'
Griggs's gadget has been examined by a steady stream of
investigators, both friendly and skeptical. So far, they have all gone away
mystified. Unlike most 'over-unity' devices, however, you can buy and install a
hydrosonic pump in your own home.
