US7109671: The 2006 Continuation Grant of Bedini's Back-EMF Motor-Generator Patent

US7109671B2 is the second US patent granted on John C. Bedini's back-EMF permanent electromagnetic motor generator. It shares its title and its 13 January 2000 priority date with US6392370 — Device and Method of a Back EMF Permanent Electromagnetic Motor Generator, from which it was filed as a continuation. The grant is useful to readers of this dossier for two reasons: it spells out, at greater length than the abstracts usually quoted, the theory Bedini's patents offer for how the machine is supposed to beat ordinary motors, and it gives a concrete parts list for the single-rotor prototype. It contains no test results.

Where it sits in the patent family

According to the Google Patents record, the application (US10/107,925) was filed on 26 March 2002 by Energenx Inc, published as US20020097013A1 on 25 July 2002, and granted on 19 September 2006 with John C. Bedini as inventor. The parent, US09/483,715, became US6392370B1. Related filings include the PCT application WO2001052390A1 (see WO 01/52390 A1 — Bedini PCT Application), a European application EP1264389A1 listed as withdrawn, and an Australian application listed as abandoned.

The legal-event history shows the four-year maintenance fee paid with a late surcharge on 22 March 2010, then a lapse for non-payment effective 19 September 2014. The patent therefore stopped being enforceable well before its anticipated 2022 expiry.

One detail of the record stands out. Alongside conventional codes for permanent-magnet synchronous machines and Hall-sensor commutation, the patent is classified under H02K53/00, the category reserved for alleged dynamo-electric perpetual-motion machines (perpetua mobilia). That is a classification label, not a ruling on whether the device works, but it shows how the claimed effect is filed in the patent system.

The theory the patent offers

The background section builds its case in stages.

Why an ordinary motor stays below COP 1. The patent judges motors by their coefficient of performance (COP): the energy delivered to the load divided by the energy put in. In its account the ceiling comes from a symmetry. A rotor magnet gains energy as it is pulled toward a stator pole, then gives the same amount back as it is dragged on leaving. Because the two exchanges cancel over a full pass, the magnets contribute nothing net, and whoever runs the machine must pay for every bit of energy reaching the load as well as everything lost inside it. On that reasoning, the patent says, even an ideal frictionless permanent-magnet motor can never exceed a COP of 1.0, and real ones fall short: it puts their efficiency between less than 50% and about 85%.

The proposed escape. The patent then argues that if the system becomes an "open dissipative system" that takes in extra energy from its surroundings and spends it cancelling the drag-back, it is no longer bound by equilibrium thermodynamics. It lists what such open systems may do: self-order, self-oscillate, put out more energy than the operator supplies, power themselves and their loads, and show negentropy. The key selling point, in the patent's words, is that "the operator only pays for the small amount of energy necessary to trigger the back EMF."

Where the extra energy is said to come from. The patent claims that the energy flow surrounding any circuit is about 10^13 times larger than the part the circuit actually intercepts. It says a small trigger pulse temporarily changes the coil's "reaction cross section" to this normally wasted flow, so the coil collects some of it. The coil then releases it as two back-to-back asymmetrical back-EMF events per firing. Using both poles of every rotor and stator magnet is said to double the number of these impulses per revolution. The patent insists that "No laws of physics or thermodynamics are violated in the method and device of the present invention," and says conservation of energy holds throughout.

The patent equates back EMF with Regauging, defining it as energy produced by the coils alone, not by the magnets.

The hardware described

The detailed description is much more conventional. A starter battery, which the patent compares to a spark plug, feeds a power switch and a Hall-effect pickup (part No. 3020). The pickup reads a timing wheel carrying four magnets, all with the south pole facing out. The timing wheel sits on the same shaft as a rotor with four magnets, all of the same polarity (compare Monopole Motor Configuration), and a power take-off at the far end.

The stator is two iron bars joined by a permanent magnet, each bar ending in a magnetized pole piece on either side of the rotor. Each bar carries an input coil with an output coil wound over it. The input coils feed a full-wave bridge recovery rectifier, specified as 10 Amp, 400 volts, which returns energy to the system or to the input battery. The output coils feed a single-diode second rectifier that charges a separate recovery battery. Transistors are listed as a 2N-2955 and an MPS-8599, but the part number for a third transistor is left blank. The resistor list gives 470, 2.2K, 220 and 1K ohm values, though its reference labels overlap: 31b is assigned two different values.

For scaling up, the patent allows 2 to 60 rotor magnets, 1 to 60 stators and 2 to 120 conducting bars, with one Hall switch per stator when the stators are fired in sequence rather than in parallel. The recovered energy may go to the input battery, a capacitor, a recovery battery, a lamp, a fan or shaft work.

What the document does and does not establish

The patent establishes that the US Patent Office granted claims (19 in number) on this arrangement, and it gives a partial parts list and schematic description, with no performance data. It does not establish that the machine delivers more energy than it draws.

• It gives no measurements: no input power, no output power, no battery energy before and after, and no COP figure for the device itself. Its COP discussion is purely theoretical.
• The 10^13 figure and the "reaction cross section" mechanism are stated without derivation or data.
• Two of the non-patent references it cites are textbook pages on Lenz's law (Boylestad, 1977; Chapman, 1999); the citation list says only that these pages describe Lenz's law.
• The patent cites earlier filings on harnessing back EMF, among them a 1998 European application by Rosemary Ann Ainslie and a 1977 Dimmer patent on a battery-operated motor with back-EMF charging.

Other parts of this dossier complicate the patent's account. The PCT application in the same family is quoted as giving a COP of about 0.98, which William Alek read as below unity. Bedini later said "back EMF" was simply the claim the Patent Office would accept (see Back-EMF Motor-Generator Claim and Radiant Reactive Power). The kind of whole-system energy balance that would settle the question is described in Real-Power Draw vs. Primary Discharge as a COP Test and remains absent. See Bedini Claims vs. Evidence: The Patents, the Inventor's Disclaimers and the Absence of an Energy Balance.