hoola

the next test will be with the "edge contact" method used to drive the tubes, as they do offer high isolation from the initial pulse. A properly designed electronic selective gate system could have a near complete isolation if desired, with the added benefit of having a control of relative values of the two signal strengths.

Today I worked on the original stack, replacing the copper contact pads as the wire hookup tabs were beginning to fall off due to a year of constantly soldering and unsoldering them. I replaced the pads with the .006 copper as with the new stack, in a further attempt to equalized their responses when working in tandem. Tests done after completing today's repairs showed a closer correlation in the two displays when scan order is reversed.

When you switch scan directions there is little to no correlations to the scope display simply being inverted, as one would think, as they are laid out with symmetrical spacers, washers, etc., instead they are almost entirely unrelated in appearances with occasional rare exceptions. I have yet to see a clear reason why this should be he case. Asymmetries in the torque within the stack seems responsible for some of it. These tests are done with all piezos on.

Today's testing shows that the 1/4" polycarbonate is in itself very sound deadening, and may not need to be even partially evacuated during operation. The enclosure should preclude any false thrust due to acoustic pressure from the stack, as any should be neutralized, staying within the containment.

The vacuum chamber is approx 80 cu. in. interior volume, and nearing completion. I have suspended the stack within it on a coil spring and so giving it more degrees of freedom of movement, not being fixed directly to the arm, now free to move in the vertical Y directions, due to the chamber being mounted on the arm, but also in limited amount in the X and Z directions within the chamber itself, and even to rotate if any forces should allow it to. I don't think I will need to completely evacuate the chamber, and have decided not to get helium for now and to see how a partial normal vacuum will keep the noise down to a reasonable level.

I have tentatively figured out the melted chocolate incident. I must have placed the chocolate on the generator where it melted, then moved it as I began doing the first of the 600V experiments over to a shelf against the wall. and away from the generator, although I don't remember moving it, thinking it had always been on the shelf. I have thought this as a possibility as the generator's power switch is on the secondary of the standard 60hz transformer, leaving the primary energized if the unit is plugged in, and does so to keep the temperature inside the unit warm, and therefore the top of the case where the chocolate container would have been. This is done for more stability when switched on. Sorry, I should have come to this conclusion and posted sooner.

today I set the value for the bias to -30V to give approx 35ma idle current per tube. The plate and screen grids of each tube are tied together at approx +350V, as the 5KV supply is not hooked up yet. The cathodes are all directly hooked to ground. No AC signal is as of yet been applied to the grids.

sorry, I misspelled wonderous.

An excellent lecture on perovskite materials is on youtube "The Woderous World of Perovskites - with Mike Glazer". From 2017, covering it's history and up to the current research.

the pyro electric effect of perovskite material is used to sense temperature change, and does emit a charge when stimulated, but seems very unlikely that the change in heat was sufficient to make any significant charge sufficient for arcing, and the heat was almost entirely applied to the tab itself, taking care not to heat the piezo and especially the poly washer any more than necessary, which melts easily being made from common polyethelene. I did make a few attempts to stimulate charge through heating and resoldering some of the tabs, but found no charge, and noticed one of the poly washers was getting slightly melted with the repeated heating. I planned on only having to heat them once, and did not expect to be sidetracked with this issue, so will return to it next month when I will build another stack specifically to test for excessive pyro electric charge, and proceed with getting the planned tests in order.

I failed to mention the method of my soldering, which is "ball soldering" and I leave the pencil on about a half second longer than needed and add the little extra solder, then flick the pencil away while the tip scrapes off the connection. In this way a roundish blob is pulled off the connection and then has enough heat to snap back from surface tension, leaving a smooth shiny round surface. Could the act of the quick and sliding removal trigger charge? Or the rapid drop in temperature, or a change in shape of the drop as it congeals and forms a minimum surface? Both sparks occurred exactly as I pulled off the pencil tip. Since this oddity took place twice in quick succession, it seems worthy of checking out further, as the sparks seemed substantial enough to have knocked me out of my chair, but mostly from the unexpectedness of the situation. I will go ahead and hook up a fet voltmeter to the suspected tabs and see if I can replicate the sparking by resoldering the tabs once more.

the piezos are 5.5mm thick, with a 1mm poly washer and a .016 sheet copper between them, so the arcs were a little over 1/4 long, occurring between the tabs, which are bump outs on the circular copper sheets in order to solder on the drive wires. I have not been able to reproduce the phenomena so far with any cautious physical stimuli such as tapping individual piezos or bumping the central rod. I do live in a desert area, so low humidity could have been a contributing factor by allowing charge to accumulate.

I was hooking up the original stack with my new one, wiring in parallel between them and positioning them one up, one down, each located at opposite ends of a 25" balance beam. While soldering them together to hook up to a common feed from the driver chassis I realized I had made a simple wiring error, and as I was unsoldering a drive wire from piezo #1 (which was an error, as piezo #1 and #7 are turnarounds and used as signal source for the scope, and doubling as "turnarounds" for both). I then hooked the wire onto the piezo #2tab (the first drive piezo), and as I was withdrawing my pencil from the tab, an arc occurred, accompanied with a rather loud snap. This was very surprising as the arm was on the bench, unhooked from the electronics, and away from anything I can imagine could have caused such a high induced voltage. The 15 watt soldering pencil was the only energized thing near. I did not bump, jar or hit accidently the stacks. I went ahead and continued to hook up the parallel harness, as I was only half done at that point, and when I moved the tip away from the piezo#3 tab, another arc occurred, and this time I happened to notice the arc was between the inputs of piezos #2 and #3. Upon completion of the task, the stack was installed and energized, as I wanted to see how the would interact powered in parrallel. The thrust signatures on the scope and appeared unchanged with the new arrangement, but no movement of the pan balance of course and as expected. I would not have written this but for the two arcs that occurred. I did see arcing on the piezos surfaces as I was modifying the tab hookups with nickle paint. As the paint dried with a blowdryer, tiny fuzzy multiple arcs did occur, but no sounds, that being about a year ago. I have the 5 drive tubes mounted and wired, and attendant supply done to drive the tube grids with a -90 volt bias source, a +340 supply for the screens, and of course a 6.3volt ac for the filaments. I have finished a separate 5KV, 60ma supply for the plate drives. The supply can be easily changed over to 10KV if needed later on. In either case, a variac will allow a gradual smooth increase in voltages. I have the 1/4" polycarbonate sheeting, and will begin fabbing up the low pressure helium containment (noise abatement) for the new stack today and should have other detalis worked out soon for a proper test by the weekend.

It does seem that with the circular stack idea, by simply removing one element and leaving a small gap in the circle , that would offer the same basic system as with the linear stack idea, with a starting and ending element. This arrangement would offer a more practical way of getting rotary motion without any added complications of a revised NFB circuit that I tried early on with the linear stack, which did seem to offer some thrust signatures, but not as much as with the timing delay format.

Since a problem of shock waves travelling back in the stack and mostly neutralizing any potential forward thrust is a main consideration, what if the stack was circular...?..then, a thrust bearing shock wave might impart a rotational force to the wheel assembly. Perhaps some 3D printed wedges to go between them could offer a reasonable transfer of energy between them, and to provide the overall circular shape. The bigger problem is to induce the shock wave to have a preferred direction of travel, so a sub system would have to be developed that "neutralizes on the fly" using the several piezos just aft of the element under stimulation. I am using timing intervals to attempt the neutralization of this return shock wave in the linear stacks and see some evidence of that happening. Most everything has been assembled to the next set of tests, and the tubes are on order. Hopefully in two weeks things will be underway.

if the particles have no energy levels, then what is the casimir test measuring?

the recent G-2 experiment results that show an anomaly in the levels predicted by the standard model, might indicate a variation in the natural energy levels of virtual particle pairs interacting with the muon at the times of testing, instead of being measurement errors or the standard model being incorrect. If so, this would tend to agree with the concept of the particle pairs having natural variations in the overall energy levels, in support of the dark matter/weak space idea. In a followup on a general dark matter question, would dark matter tend to collect at earth's lagrangian points? Thanks

I have read lately that superconducting material may not only exclude magnetic fields, but perhaps also gravitational waves. Could the piezos I am using show any altered effects at liquid nitrogen temps? I doubt the piezos would be superconductive even at ultra cold temps if tested. Liquid nitro is cheap and readily available so I will try it when the next arrangement is functional and waveform patterns have been established just for fun. Hopefully they won't shatter when run cold. With the new setup I should be able to pump 20 watts into each individual element. Up to now, only about a few watts have been used per piezo. The parts for the high voltage series are being assembled, and I hope to have things underway by June.

Could the intermittent results be due to the off timing of the tests? A predominance of more kinetic energy on one end of the device vs. the other may change rapidly, averaging to zero, and when the experiment is shut down at the right moment, the energy differential is near it's highest, giving it a "cherry picked" but real result over the many test cycles. This would mean it needs a precise and rapidly timed on/off sequence, giving pulses of thrust instead of a steady force.

Since gravitational lensing occurs with large things such as galaxies, could black holes serve the same function? If, near the event horizon with it's high gravitational gradient, would a sharp focus of light rays occur at certain distances from the event horizon? Too far away and the gradient decreases. Too close to the black hole and the information is lost, so a precise distance vs. gravitational gradient point might give a clear image to a distant observer from something far away from it. Any observation would almost certainly be positioned at an angle to the normal lensed image shallow angle caused by a galaxy or other large object. This angle could be quite high, and only be seen momentarily as the perspectives shifts between the imaged object, the black hole focus point, and the observer, and might explain some anomalies such as gamma ray bursters. It seems a spinning black hole with it's frame dragging would make a sweep of any deflected rays, as in the gamma ray burster idea, and a stationary hole might provide a longer view of lensed rays. Of course this would have to be a free floating black hole for the idea to work.

is not every phenomena in the universe subject to entropy...is this not a valid scientific principle?

yes, they essentially become real particles, at least as stable as any free particle subject to decay. I see the "waste" energy of the annialation phase of virtual particles as dark energy, as the physical process has inherent inefficiencies.

the longer virtual particles survive, the lower their energy? does this mean that the energy is lowered to zero as it is all converted to matter as in the case of Hawking radiation? Also, if the energy of long term survivors is less, so will the resultant minimum energy waste upon recombination, as in the source of dark energy idea, making it "weak space".

correct, but closely related via the pair mechanism behaviors in various settings.

to say the effects of the casimir test are electromagnetic in nature is not to say that they have nothing to do with gravitation. It seems to me that the "stretching of space" is accomplished within the virtual particle creation/annialation mechanism, and the duration of their brief existences has directly to do as to the "stretching" of the orbits of the pairs. The longer the pairs are kept separate mean more of an effect to the environment. The ultimate example of this is Hawking radiation, where particles are prevented from making the final step of the annialation process, therefore caused to persist as real particles.