In August of 2009, Gabriel Ohiochoya Obadan of Pasadena, California filed a U.S. patent for a device he calls the Hydro-Electric Reactor. The patent claimed the device could create energy from ambient air whether indoors or outdoors. Using a multiple compression propulsion system, the reactor creates pressurized air which then passes through proprietary-designed micro-turbines. The turbines drive generators which produce the end product, electricity.
What the inventor claims, if true, is utterly astounding. The Hydro-Electric Reactor requires no fossil fuel input and provides net energy output greater than input by multiple factors. Cogar International Energy Corporation, the company that has built a prototype, claims it can service 20 generators using 500 kilowatts of energy input to create 2,000 kilowatts in output. The reactor once started operates continuously without further application of external energy because the energy generated is cycled back to keep the machine operating. So all you need is 75 kilowatts of external input to get it started and then it is off to the races.
On June 2, 2012, Power Engineering published an article about the technology, “Extraordinary Green Energy Breakthrough From Cogar International Energy Corporation” describing an upcoming news conference and technology demonstration.
In visiting the Cogar website I gleaned the following advantages derived from the Hydro-Electric Reactor:
- It produces electricity for less than 1 cent (U.S.) per kilowatt hour.
- Unlike other renewable energy sources like solar and wind it is continuous.
- Air goes in and only air comes out.
- It is self-sustaining after the initial kick-start.
- It is designed to operate efficiently for a century with little downtime for maintenance.
- It is easy to install anywhere whether in or outdoors and scales from as small as a power source for an automobile engine to as large as a source for power station generation.
- If used in automobiles, ships and airplanes it can provide electrical engines with unlimited mileage on a continuous charge.
The patent describes how its proprietary technology compresses ambient air in several stages to drive micro-turbines. The compressed air passes through a Jet Propulsion Corridor. It intersects with the turbines which are semi-circular bucket shaped with internal and external flanges. The turbines drive shafts attached to the generators that produce the electricity. Exhaust compressed air gets recycled back into the unit through a pressurized air conduit in a continuous feedback loop.
Mr. Obadan is described as a scientist, inventor and divinity. On the company website it states that he has broken three major laws of physics.
- He has created a machine that can run perpetually once primed without any additional external power source….a “perpetual motion machine.”
- He has demonstrated that the law of thermodynamics can be broken by showing that less energy can create more sustainable energy, in fact in multiples well beyond the initial energy input.
- He has broken Isaac Newton’s axiom that every action leads to an equal and opposite reaction because his reactor creates more of reaction than the initial action.
If all of the above is true then the June 9th, 2012 press conference and demonstration should be attended by lots of people in the energy industry, and governments from around the world because this would be extraordinary. But let me conclude this article with a few caveats.
Building a machine that puts out more energy than it receives is a very tall task. No one has succeeded to-date and many who have invested in “free energy” inventions have been burned. At least Mr. Obadan is stating the cost for the Hydro-Electric Reactor is one cent per kilowatt hour.
But the laws of thermodynamics have held up over time. If you don’t remember your high school physics here is a brief explanation.
The first law of thermodynamics deals with conservation of energy. You can transform energy from one form to another such as changing light into heat, but you cannot create or destroy energy. In other words you cannot produce something from nothing in this Universe, at least not since the Big Bang. So any device that generates more energy than the energy it receives violates this law.
The second law of thermodynamics deals with entropy. When energy is applied to a system it begins to breakdown. For example, some of the energy may be lost to friction in moving parts or to heat escaping from the system into the surrounding environment. That’s why motors fail over time, bearings give out, buildings corrode, and so on. To-date nothing in the Universe has demonstrated that it is not subject to entropy over time.
So is the Hydro-Electric Reactor pictured above flim flammery or is it for real? We’ll keep our blog readers in the loop as this story unfolds.
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Don’t bother attending or even reading the results. It’s amazing that this boondoggle has gotten this much publicity from these people
So I’m guessing you have summarily judged the Hydro Electric Reactor does not produce excess energy, and you have done that without ever personally seeing one in action. Are we to suppose that you also suppose the Rossi E-Cat consumes more energy than it produces, also without giving it a personal hands-on test?
For tens of thousands of years, early hominids could break the darkness of night only by the making of fire. Eventually a few nonconformists thought “outside the box” and invented electric light bulbs. But, they couldn’t invent the light bulb before others had previously invented chemical storage batteries, dynamo electricity, and steel metallurgy. The naysayers stood around the non-conformist inventors’ crude early efforts and smugly pronounced, “It will never work because ___________,” you fill in the blank. Well, the critics were nearly always proven correct, and the ambitious innovators were nearly always wrong. For every good workable practical invention, there were likely 10,000 nutty dreams, cunning frauds, and incompetent physical executions of the basic concept. But here is the most important thing: the one good idea out of every 10,000 bad ideas is worth more to mankind than 10,000 times the costs of pursuing the bad ideas.
So I say, more power to Gabriel Ohiochoya Obadan, and his goofy Hydro Electric Reactor dream of free energy from air and free money from the greedy, gulible, and scientifically illiterate. Chances are at least 9,999 out of ten thousand that in this case, as well as in all others, the traditional and well-settled laws of thermodynamics will overwhelmingly prevail. Gabriel feels very much alive and is happily jousting multitudes of impudent and imtimidating thermodynamic windmills. It doesn’t matter that Gabriel’s quixotic patent filing drawing shows startup air pressure must be higher at the compressor stage discharge than at the recirculate pipe discharge, and thus true air flow would initially be in reverse to his direction arrows, and thereafter all pressure downstream of the compressor would equalize and air flow would cease. The proof must be in the pudding. Either Obadan’s contraption actually produces energy or it doesn’t. True, it’s extremely likely his big anti-thermodynamic contraption doesn’t work, but it’s a free society in which Gabriel can indulge his mostly harmless fantasy dreams and feel good about himself. Some remote possibility exists that eventually some whacky character such as Gabriel Obadan, or Andreas Rossi, will invent something useful that more than repays the investments in worthless and ill-conceived concepts.
Now, some of you may have already collected several million dollars from a generous Nigerian interior minister who had extra government funds he needed to deposit in your US bank account. Well, his brother is now giving you an opportunity to clean up again with the new Nigerian Hydro Electric Reactor free energy contraption. Get in on the ground floor of this revolutionary new energy technology now before it’s too late. A good investment strategy might be to take the millions the Nigerian government official deposits into your US bank account and loan it to Cogar International Energy Corporation at a guaranteed 25% interest rate for 10-years. See: http://www.cogarinternationalenergy.com/investment-opportunities.php
For every million dollars you loan Cogar you get back $9-million. Infreekingcredible! What’s not to like?
The first real boondoggle is the fact that just about every single fellow who wields the laws of thermodynamics does not understand, never mind appreciates those laws imbedded in their context and their explicit, but always omitted limitations, trying to use their slaughtered torsos in an argument.
The second real boondoggle is the fact that Mr. Newton & co. made not one, but two cardinal mistakes deriving formula F = ma.
The third real boondoggle is the fact that very few are capable to appreciate the electro – magneto – mechanical dependencies of non-chaotic turbulence with respect to conductive substances, water in particular, and with respect to all natural motions in the universe.
Regards, Slavek.
Hi Slavek, Please explain yourself. Where are the boondoggles that you talk about regarding the laws of thermodynamics? Two cardinal mistakes? Please provide your evidence.
Slavek asserts: “The first real boondoggle is the fact that just about every single fellow who wields the laws of thermodynamics does not understand, never mind appreciates those laws imbedded in their context and their explicit, but always omitted limitations, trying to use their slaughtered torsos in an argument.”
I’m unaware that the mechanical engineering department of any major US university introduces the “slaughtered torsos” factor in its thermodynamics courses. To the contrary, the modern kinetic theory of gases passes every empirical experiment to about 8-decimal places of precision. Seems only fair that any telling refutation of an opposing faction’s arguments first provides an approximate articulation of the propositions it pretends to refute. That is to say, the ignorant person who cannot accurately paraphrase the settled principles of thermodynamics has nearly zero competency to honestly refute them.
Slavek asserts: “The second real boondoggle is the fact that Mr. Newton & co. made not one, but two cardinal mistakes deriving formula F = ma.”
Perhaps it has escaped your notice that Newton & co produced a supremely useful co-relevant definition for “force” that also logically defines time, distance, mass, and energy. These co-relevant definitions of “classical” mechanics withstand every actual test to about 8-decimal places of precision, and the definitions were constructed in a time when the world’s best measurement apparatus struggled to achieve 5-places of precision. Any defect in the F = ma formula must be found after the 8th decimal place, and is totally negligible as far as practical engineering of non-relativistic energy producing contraptions are concerned.
As an interesting aside; it’s a historical fact that prior to publication of “Principia,” Newton & co. (Newton, Flamsteed, Halley, and Ole Romer) conferred and well understood that nature’s fundamental forces communicate not instantaneously, but at some high, yet finite, speed (estimated at the time to be 220,000 kms). That speed as calculated from Romer’s astronomical data was recognized as being high enough that its relativistic effects could for most, but not all, Earthly purposes, be ignored.
Slavek asserts: “The third real boondoggle is the fact that very few are capable to appreciate the electro – magneto – mechanical dependencies of non-chaotic turbulence with respect to conductive substances, water in particular, and with respect to all natural motions in the universe.”
If your words are taken to signify meanings common to their ordinary usage, no specific intentional meaning seems to emerge from that constellation of self-contradictory ambiguity. Hence it’s impossible to conclude how few or many might appreciate whatever it is that you could have in mind. For certain, conventional definitions commonly employed in mainstream science and engineering adequately describe the knowable properties of turbulent and chaotic systems. Tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians understand those properties
Does anybody know how it turned out?
The lack of information should be a good indicator that the inventor was blowing smoke.
Hi Folks – any updates on this so called ” invention ” ?? Is it real OR just another Scam ??