Hi All,
I was wondering if anyone knows of a Richard Clem engine video that was taking when he dove his car around town?
Some interesting read: Comments to CLEM1.ASC (KeelyNet)
Richard Clem's rotational engine
Although I do not have any direct experience with Clem's device, I would like to comment on the principle of operation, which seems quite simple and straightforward to anyone who has studied the writings of Viktor Schauberger, the Austrian naturalist and inventor. Indeed Schauberger was working with vortex action in liquids (especially in water) and was finding effects that were at the time, and are still now, unexplainable with the normal principles of physics or thermodynamics.
As far as I understand, the engine made by Clem was built around a cone with spiralling channels cut into it and when a liquid, in that particular case vegetable oil, got pressed through the channels, they caused the cone to turn. At a certain point the flow of the liquid and the turning of the cone became self-sustaining, up to the point of putting out a good and heavy (350 HP for a 200 pound engine) power output.
As I said, this is not surprising if one is familiar with the work of Schauberger. In the USA, there is one person I know of who has researched Viktor Schauberger's work in depth and who is trying to disseminate the vortex technology that grew out of Schauberger's work, through a publication called Energy Unlimited and a newsletter ("Causes"). His name is Walter Baumgartner but unfortunately I do not have contact details. To return to the Clem engine, the principle of this machine is based on the fact that vortices under certain circumstances are self-accelerating and may be used to do actual work.
One example of this in nature is the tornado, which may reach very high rotational energies without apparent input from the outside.
Schauberger used this principle before the Second World War, to run a small turbine for electric energy production that is said to have had an output of approximately nine times that a conventional turbine would have had with the same amount of water and the same altitude differential. He patented his turbine and the patent is described in a separate article of mine.
It is not known for certain what this effect is based on. From my view there are two possibilities:
1) A vortex "absorbs" ambient heat and utilizes the energy contained in it to augment its own motion. As heat is in fact molecular or atomic motion (absolute zero being the absence of any motion of this kind), a vortex could conceivably be able to direct that motion into one direction, thus ending up with
a) decreased environmental temperature and
b) increased motion.
Both factors seem to hold true for vortices.
2) The second possibility is that the vortex motion, being the most congenial motion to the aether or space background, is a means of tapping the inherent energy in space, also variously called zero-point energy, space energy or gravity field energy. A vortex, especially fast-turning and especially in dense material, may be "assisted" in its motion by a vortex forming in the space background or aether, that will eventually contribute energy to the vortex in the fluid.
These two explanations are not mutually exclusive and both mechanisms may be at work. They are at this time speculative attempts to explain properties of vortices. Although the explanations are speculative, the properties of vortices as such are not. They have been observed and measured and are shown to us daily by nature.
What Schauberger (and now Clem) have done is they have found a way to harness a phenomenon that has been given little attention by the scientific community.
The implications of this for energy production are enormous as can be readily seen reading the file CLEM1.ASC (http://www.keelynet.com/energy/clem1.htm) on KeelyNet. Josef Hasslberger
Rome, Italy
17/5/1995
<blockquote> Originally posted on December 26, 1992 - CLEM1.ASC A few months back, we got a call from a friend who had heard of this incredible motor that was said to run itself and generate excess useable power. The details were unclear at the time and our friend gathered more details and we met for lunch to discuss what he had found out. This file with diagram is listed on KeelyNet as CLEM2.ZIP. As we understand it, inventor Richard Clem died of a heart attack soon after the deal was signed with the coal company. His workshop was raided by law enforcement officials and all his notes and drawings were removed. The story as I was told by our unnamed friend : A local man (Dallas) developed a closed system engine that was purported to generate 350 HP and run itself. The engine weighed about 200 pounds and ran on cooking oil at temperatures of 300 F. It consisted of a cone mounted on a horizontal axis. The shaft which supported the cone was hollow and the cone had spiralling channels cut into it. These spiralling pathways wound around the cone terminating at the cone base in the form of nozzles (rimjets). When fluid was pumped into the hollow shaft at pressures ranging from 300-500 PSI (pounds per square inch), it moved into the closed spiralling channels of the cone and exited from the nozzles. This action caused the cone to spin. As the velocity of the fluid increased, so did the rotational speed of the cone. As the speed continued to increase, the fluid heated up, requiring a heat exchange and filtering process. At a certain velocity, the rotating cone became independent of the drive system and began to operate of itself. The engine ran at speeds of 1800 to 2300 RPM. Immediately after the inventor had the heart attack and the papers were removed, the son of the inventor took the only working model of the machine to a farm near Dallas. There it was buried under 10 feet of concrete and has been running at that depth for several years. In later conversations, our contact says the engine had been tested by Bendix Corporation. The test involved attaching the engine to a dynamometer to measure the amount of horsepower generated by the engine in its self-running mode. It generated a consistent 350 HP for 9 consecutive days which astounded the engineers at Bendix. They concluded the only source of energy which could generate this much power in a CLOSED SYSTEM over an extended period must be of an atomic nature. Construction of the engine was from off the shelf components except for the hollow shaft and the custom cone with the enclosed spiral channels. Richard Clem worked with heavy machinery for the city of Dallas and had noticed that certain kinds of high pressure pumps continued to run for short periods after the power was removed. His curiosity into this phenomenon led to the development of the Clem Engine. </blockquote> (http://www.keelynet.com/energy/clem1.gif)
More:
The Clem Over-Unity Motor The following is from a newspaper clipping that has no name or date. In 1972, Richard Clem announced the invention of a way to operate automobile engines on cooking oil. He's still making that claim today, even though his first prototype motor fell apart and he had been "strung along" by at least 15 companies before he found financial backing. Clem, 48, a heavy equipment operator for the city of Dallas and part-time inventor, says if the automobile industry adopts his invention, motorists could change the eight gallons of vegetable oil only every 150,000 miles and never buy any gas. Clem said he uses vegetable oil because his motor runs at 300 degrees - a temperature where water has boiled away and conventional motor oil breaks down. Though he won't divulge many details of the engine, a 12-volt battery apparently is the only other source of power. When Clem finished his first vegetable oil engine in 1972, he mapped a 600- mile test trip to El Paso for the first engine model he had financed through his earnings. But he only made it as far as Abilene before the 'shafts and everything bent in it.' He blamed the failure on poor construction, too small a shaft and the use of chains instead of gears. Undaunted, he decided to try again, but said, 'I needed money to build this thing better.' Neither the automobile industry nor the 15 other companies he wrote - some as far away as Taiwan - were interested in financing a prototype and then manufacturing it. Then last year, he said, a large coal company offered to back him. Clem refused to disclose the name of his benefactor, but did say the coal company had signed contracts to sell the engines to power companies for use in pulling turbines. Clem said he expects to finish work on the motor by the end of this year. (1972)
Vanguard Note..
The above article was reported as being generated from Flower Mound, Texas (northwest of Dallas and slightly beyond Carrollton). I called the only Clem listed in the book as of 11/20/92 and they knew of no other Clem in that area, nor did they know of any Richard Clem or his family. Two separate visits to the patent section of the Dallas Library have not yielded any patents by a Richard Clem involving any type of engine. We are still pursuing for more details. As of 12/26/92, I drew up a .GIF file called CLEM1.GIF that is bundled with this file under the name CLEM2.ZIP. It gives a better understanding of how the machine was constructed, at least as it was described to us.
For those who study such matters, one immediately sees the tie-ins with Boundary Layer Drag principles as evinced in much of Tesla's work as well as Victor Schaubergers Impansion and Implosion discoveries. We have noted something odd about spinning masses in that at specific velocities, strange things occur. The velocities at which phenomena occur are dependent on the resonant frequencies of the mass as an aggregate, exactly as Keely said. The Clem system was said to be built with off-the-shelf components. The most complicated piece of the entire machine was the cone. And based on Boundary layer drag, it would seem that the cone was unnecessary. The question with the Clem device is 'Does the extended surface area of the cone add to the additional velocity of the cone, yielding greater pressures through centrifugal force or would flat plates as in the TESLA turbine be sufficient to generate the same effect?' We continue to look for more information on this device and appreciate your comments or supporting material.
Update as of May 1996
A company called Creative Sciences is selling plans ($60) for what they claim is a machine that generates 1500hp and runs by itself. They call this a CEACU and claim it was released by a 70 year old retired scientist.
The truth of the matter is it was designed and built by the late Richard Clem of Flower Mound, Texas as documented by this paper. It is wonderful that someone has taken this information and done something with it (or so claimed) and we will have more details later if you might like to build one. However, be aware a few years ago, some of our Roundtable group chipped in for about $150 worth of 'plans' from Creative Sciences. The plans were bogus and were not free energy unless you are simple enough to think compressed air (as used in some of Dennis Lees 'demonstrations') is free energy. In the last part of June 2001, Rick Harrison, president of Creative Sciences sent an email to KeelyNet saying he was prepared to sue if we did not stop 'bad-mouthing' his company. The website is http://www.fuellesspower.com and I told him go ahead, since I and many others would love to see them prove their overunity claims in court. Since then he has not responded back and the website is not responding, so I think they are changing their claims. We also have several emails from others who say Creative ripped them off and one from Brazil saying its been 60 days after he sent about $115.00 and received nothing. With regard to differences between the CEACU design and Clem the CEACU does not require the cone, but instead uses a thick disk with nozzles on the outer edge. A hollow shaft feeds water into this disk at a high velocity. As the water exits from the nozzles, the disk spins giving an ever higher velocity. A 3200 psi air tank is used to get the disk spinning to 1000 rpm when it is claimed to begin to run on its own. There are other ways to achieve this velocity beyond 3200 psi as you can well imagine. If you write them, please let them know that Richard Clem is the true inventor (as I will). Thanks!... Jerry W. Decker (jdecker@keelynet.com) Sysop / KeelyNet
(http://www.keelynet.com/energy/thin.jpg)
Clem Engine Index page (http://www.keelynet.com/energy/clemindex.htm) - 06/11/04 KeelyNet Loader page (http://www.keelynet.com)
What is centrifugal force?
We are all familiar with the effects of centrifugal force, we experience it for example every time we are in a car and take a bend - we feel a force pushing us to the outside of the curve. If, for example, you have placed your sunglasses on the seat next to you it would come as no surprise if, when taking a sharp bend at speed, they slide across the seat.
Centrifugal force is sometimes referred to as a 'fictitious' force, because it is present only for an accelerated object and does not exist in an inertial frame. An inertial frame is where an object moves in a straight line at a constant speed. But Einstein's general theory of relativity allows observers even in a non-inertial frame to regard themselves at rest, and the forces they feel to be real. Centrifugal force is not fictitious, it is a real force.
Centrifugal force arises due to the property of mass known as inertia - the reluctance of a body to change either its speed or direction. A body that is at rest will stay at rest until some force makes it move, and then will continue to move at the same speed and in the same direction unless and until some force changes the way it is moving. This is all neatly summed up by Isaac Newton's three laws of motion.
I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. (This is sometimes referred to as The Law of Inertia)
II. The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma.
III. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
We can illustrate 'inertial frames' by using the example of an astronaut in a space ship. Let's imagine that we have an astronaut aboard a space ship that has no windows, and we are at the controls to which our astronaut has no access to. We ask our astronaut to perform any experiment that he may wish in order to determine if the spaceship is moving or at rest. We start our experiment with the ship at rest and ask our astronaut if we are moving. He replies that he is in zero gravity floating around the ship and is unable to detect any feeling of movement, and that by carrying out various tests - such as measuring a swinging pendulum, he is still unable to detect any movement and concludes that we must be at rest. We then fire up the engine and accelerate through space, and keep accelerating, and again ask if we are moving. This time our astronaut is certain that we are accelerating, he is forced to the back of the ship, by inertia, and the more we accelerate the stronger this force becomes. If he drops an object it will 'fall' to the rear of the ship, which has now - as far as he is concerned - become the 'floor'. If we judge our speed of acceleration just right, we can create a force that is exactly equal to the force of gravity, known as 1G, and this is indistinguishable from gravity in every respect. No matter what experiment our astronaut performs, it would be impossible to tell if he is in a vehicle accelerating at 1G, or stationary on the surface of the Earth. This is the basis of Einstein's general theory of relativity, that the effects of acceleration are indistinguishable from the effects of a uniform gravitational field. This is known as the 'equivalence principle' and results from the equivalence between gravitational mass and inertial mass.
We now start to slow down our space ship, as we can see a speed camera coming up, and again ask our astronaut if we are moving. Again he replies that we are definitely moving, as the sudden slowing down caused him to be thrown forward and collide with the front bulkhead, and he mutters something to the effect that as his nose is bleeding and he is pressed flat against the bulkhead he doesn't feel it necessary to perform any experiments to confirm our movement.
We now stop decelerating and allow the ship to coast along at a uniform speed of 100,000 mph, which is now well within the legal speed limit for this part of space. We ask our astronaut once more if we are moving, and he replies that as far as he is able to tell while freely floating around in a zero gravity environment, that we are not moving.
Our little experiment has demonstrated that if the ship is travelling at a uniform speed in a uniform direction it is not possible, by any means whatsoever, to determine whether or not it is moving, It is only when the ship changes speed, either by accelerating or decelerating that the movement becomes apparent.
So what happens if we change direction instead of changing speed? Let's return to our space ship and find out. We accelerate back to 100,000 mph and maintain this speed and direction, at which point our astronaut with the sore nose is again in 'free fall' - a state of weightlessness - and unable to detect any motion. We now put our space ship into a tight turn to the right and hold the curve, and ask our astronaut if we are moving. He replies that as he is pressed hard against the left side of the ship we must be moving, and adds that as he knows that the space ship is unable to move sideways, it cannot be accelerating in the opposite direction to the force, so it must be turning to the right.
So far so good, all pretty straight forward stuff really, so what's the problem?
The problem is that we have seen that centrifugal force is a result of inertia, an object's resistance to a change in direction. When the space ship turned to the right the astronaut tried to keep going in the original direction, straight ahead, and so was forced to the left side of the ship. That makes sense, it is perfectly understandable according to Newton's first law of motion. But let's consider another movement that we can introduce using our space ship, let's rotate it about its axis.
If we now rotate our space ship about its axis, give it a spin, what happens to our astronaut? He will again be pressed against the side of the ship, providing he is in contact with it and moving with it. The question is WHY is he pressed against the side of the ship? The ship is not accelerating, nor is it changing direction, and the rate of spin can be kept constant, but centrifugal force will keep our astronaut firmly pinned against the side of the ship for as long as it continues to spin.
We can illustrate the central problem of explaining the nature of centrifugal force by examining how a spin drier removes water from clothes. We put wet clothes in, turn the machine on, and the drum spins around at high speed throwing out the water due to centrifugal force. Simple. The question is how do the clothes 'know' that they are spinning? Easy, you say, the drum is spinning in relation to the drier, and the clothes rotate with the drum. If only it were that simple!
We can imagine an arrangement whereby the drum, and hence the clothes, are kept stationary while the drier rotates rapidly about the drum, the opposite to what normally happens of course. Now if the drum rotating in relation to the drier was all that was required for centrifugal force to draw the water out, then this arrangement would work in exactly the same manner as the more conventional arrangement. You do not, however, need to be a rocket scientist to be able to tell that this arrangement would not dry the clothes! This very effectively destroys the argument that the clothes know they are rotating because of their movement in relation to the drier. The movement must be a movement in relation to something else. The next logical step is to argue that in the last example it was obvious that the drum was not really moving, only the drier was, so let's extend the area. This time we will imagine the drum remaining still, just as before, but this time we will rotate not only the drier, but the entire room, around the drum. Will that make any difference? Again we can see that this arrangement wouldn't work either, because from our vantage point from outside the room we can see that the drum isn't 'really' rotating. This does present a problem though. Imagine that we have constructed a large spin drier and we sit inside the drum and the door is closed behind us. The drum again stays still but the drier, and the entire room rotate about us. The view that we see through the door would make us feel quite dizzy, but we would know that we are not moving because we would feel no forces acting upon us, we would not be pressed against the sides of the drum.
If we now return to our astronaut in the rotating space ship, he was pressed against the sides of the ship, so what is the difference? What in 'empty' space is the space ship rotating in relation to?
Isaac Newton thought about this problem of centrifugal force and came to the conclusion that there must exist a 'preferred frame of reference' in the Universe, defined by absolute space. This is just another way of saying that there must be a special place in the Universe that all motion can be related to. If this is the case, our wet clothes would know they are rotating, and hence fling out the water, because they are rotating in relation to this special fixed point in the Universe. This would also explain why it would not be possible to 'fool' the clothes into thinking they are rotating by rotating the drier instead. It is interesting to note however, that if we kept extending outward our rotating frame about the stationary drum, eventually the water would be thrown out because the entire universe would be rotating in relation to the drum, which is the exactly the same thing as the universe remaining stationary and the drum rotating! It may be that the same effect would happen if the rotating frame was just our galaxy instead of the entire universe, we don't know.
Enter Ernst Mach, an Austrian philosopher and physicist (1838-1916) whose ideas were to later influence Albert Einstein when he was developing his ideas on the general theory of relativity. It was Einstein who gave the name 'Mach's Principle'. It was in honour of Mach's work on shock waves associated with projectiles moving through the air that the Mach numbers of speed were named after him; a speed of Mach 1 is equal to the speed of sound, Mach 2 twice the speed of sound, and so on.
Mach proposed (Mach's principle) that inertia is caused by the interaction of an object with all of the other matter in the Universe. It will be remembered that Newton believed that all motion was relative to some universal preferred frame of reference. Thirty years later, George Berkeley, argued that all motion is relative, and must be measured against something. Since 'absolute space' cannot be perceived, that would not do as a reference point, he said. He argued that if only a single globe existed in the Universe it would be meaningless to talk about any movement of that globe. Even if there were two globes, both perfectly smooth, in orbit around one another, it would not be possible to measure that motion. But 'suppose that the heaven of fixed stars was suddenly created and we shall be in a position to imagine the motions of the globes by their relative position to the different parts of the Universe'. What Berkeley is arguing, is that in effect, it is because the clothes in your spin drier know that they are rotating relative to the distant stars that causes the water to be thrown out. Berkeley also argued that it is the same for acceleration in straight lines; Berkeley's reasoning would be that the push into the back of the seat that you feel when a car accelerates is because your body knows that it is being accelerated relative to the distant stars and galaxies.
Mach did not add a great deal to the ideas put forward by Berkeley, but did put forward the suggestion that if we want to explain the equatorial bulge of the Earth as due to centrifugal forces, 'it does not matter if we think of the Earth as turning round on its axis, or at rest while the fixed stars revolve around it'. It is the relative motion that is responsible for the bulge.'
What Berkeley and Mach suggest, that it is the 'fixed stars' which provide a frame of reference, raises another question. The 'fixed stars', as we are well aware today, are not in fact 'fixed', but are actually part of a system that is itself rotating - our own Milky Way galaxy. Even before Mach was born, William Herschel and other astronomers had provided good evidence that the Milky Way is a flattened disc of stars, its shape clearly determined by rotation and centrifugal force. Mach might well have argued that there was only two ways in which the whole galaxy could be seen to be under the influence of centrifugal force. Either Newton was right, and the whole system of 'fixed stars' is rotating relative to absolute, empty space; or Berkeley and Mach were right, and there must be some distribution of matter, far across the Universe, that enables a frame of reference against which the rotation of our Galaxy is measured.
Another example of centrifugal force that is well known to us is demonstrated by objects in orbit, such as satellites or the International Space Station (ISS), or indeed the Moon. The difference here is that astronauts aboard the ISS do not experience the effects of centrifugal force as they orbit around the Earth, they are not pushed away from the direction of the Earth. Why not? To begin, let's examine how an object gets into Earth orbit and stays there, 'unsupported'.
Imagine having a large and powerful cannon, the more gunpowder packed behind the cannon ball the further it will travel. Now imagine setting up our super powerful cannon and firing it so that the cannon ball lands say 1,000 miles away. Now pack in more gunpowder and fire again, this time it will have travelled further, say 2,000 miles, before falling to the ground. Keep repeating the exercise and adding more gunpowder every time, and every time the cannon ball is fired it will travel further before it falls to the ground. Eventually, with enough power behind it, it will go all the way around the world before falling to the ground, and will have almost reached its starting point - it will land just behind you. Now, by packing in even more gun-powder, and getting just the right trajectory, it will over-shoot you and keep on going, it will not land. What the cannon ball is now doing is permanently arcing back down towards the Earth, but the curve of the Earth is falling away at the same rate, the cannon ball never 'catches up' with it. This is known as being in "free fall', the cannon ball is in orbit.
Our astronaut aboard the ISS is in free fall, just like the cannon ball. The ISS - and the astronauts - are prevented from being thrown out of orbit (like the water thrown out of the clothes in the spin drier) by the force of gravity. This balancing force is called centripetal force, and keeps the ISS in a closed orbit. Because the centrifugal force is exactly balanced by the centripetal force of gravity the astronauts aboard the ISS will not feel any sensation of centrifugal force. This is another example of the equivalence principle, which says that the effects of gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable from one another, and in this particular case they exactly cancel each other out.
If you were in a lift that was at the top of a very tall building and the cable snapped, as it hurtled towards the ground you would be in free fall just as the astronauts are aboard the ISS. You would be able to freely float about inside the lift and enjoy the sensation of being weightless, until you reached the ground. It was by employing this trick that the directors of the film 'Apollo 13' were able to film the 'astronauts' in a weightless environment. They just hired a plane, fitted out the interior to look like the the Apollo module, and after having climbed to a suitable altitude nosed the plane down and allowed it to 'fall' towards the ground. Hey presto, 'look mum, I'm floating in space!'
We can create a weightless condition while still on Earth, we just have to fall. We can duplicate the force of gravity in a gravity free environment by acceleration. We can rotate an object and create centrifugal force, but we are unable to explain how centrifugal force works. Is it Newton's preferred frame of reference of absolute space? Or Mach's and Berkeley's idea that it is the average distribution of matter across the Universe? There has to be some way that an object knows that it is rotating in relation to something.
We do not really know how it works. General relativity and Mach's Principle seem to suggest that it is connected to the average density of matter in the Universe, but is unable to explain how this could be done. Recently, a group of physicists have speculated that inertia arises from charged matter (electrons, atoms etc) moving through the physical vacuum which acts differently along the direction of motion and behind the particle so that inertia is actually a quantum mechanical effect produced locally, not by distant matter. Doesn't help much though does it?
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