Walter Preston Hansen, Riley Densley, Bingham
High School, South Jordan, UT
As published in "Physics Letters A" Antanasijevic et al. (2002) reported the results of their simple air-spark experiment showing more energy out than in—“overunity†energy. Our experiment replicated and extended this work to test the overunity claim.
We constructed a simple air-spark apparatus fed by a high voltage capacitor bank. During the spark discharge we carefully monitored the energy going into and out of the apparatus by measuring the voltage on each side of the spark gap and the series current. The energy out of the apparatus fed a power resistor that converted the electrical energy to heat. The electrical energies were calculated numerically. The ratio of output energy to input energy determined whether or not anomalous overunity energy was present.
We made 40 energy runs over several weeks. When calculated with the Int(VI)dt method, normal discharge loss of 2-5% was observed. When calculated using the Int(Ri2)dt method-the method used by Antanasijevic et al. (2002), the energy output depended on how the resistor value was measured.
Because of this dependence on the resistance measurement method, we expended extraordinary effort to accurately measure and analyze resistance data with high precision in order to draw valid conclusions. We concluded that a power-weighted average resistance is most accurate in measuring spark discharge events. Using this method no overunity was measured, contradicting the 2002 result. We also tested the spark gap in a magnetic field to determine if this affected the energy out/in, and found that it did not. Awards won at the 2009 ISEF First Award of $1,500 - Coalition for Plasma Science (CPS) Second Award of $1,500 - Team Projects - Presented by Science News