Hopegirl's blog entry says a little bit more about her chief engineer:
Hopegirl wrote:Before we go into details of the challenges of each of the builds, it is important to explain more about the methodology and working style of James Robitaille, the one responsible for bringing this to the world in this way.
James is not impatient. He is slow and methodical and very careful with each step he takes. He paces himself and measures twice before doing anything. For him, engineering work is like meditation.
James is a non-degreed engineer, meaning, he does not have the same conditioning that the traditional academic system imposes on the entire energy industry (see supporting video HERE [link omitted]). Because of this, he does not have to “unlearn” what many had to learn. Also because of this, he was the top engineer for a major motor manufacturing company for 26 years. They saw his gift, as all of those who have worked with him can see. This company also went through several downsizings, but even through this his worth and position was recognized and never made redundant. He left this job of his own free will, to dedicate his talent to building and offering the QEG to humanity.
Upside: if they were looking for an engineer who actually understood the design of rotating machinery, they may well have found one. 26 years in the field of motor manufacturing is a substantial credential, degreed or not. Downside: Mr. Robitaille may have royally screwed himself by jumping on the QEG circus train. There aren't many companies left that are willing to hire on non-degreed engineers, even ones that have had nothing to do with perpetual motion machines.
She goes on to link to his
test report on the machine, and, while it's not quite a model of clarity or thoroughness (there seems to be exactly one test performed, when all's said and done), it does at least give what seems to be an honest account of the thing. Namely,
The comparison is shown in Figure 9, and shows that for a consistent Power IN of around 900W, the Power OUT across the Secondary Coil did not vary by much, at around 150W in all cases. This gives a Power Efficiency of around 17% for all the capacitance values assessed.
He does point out that the voltage and current were in phase all along the way, which is good. But 17%? That's hardly going to qualify as over-unity. Hell, he could build a rotary converter (good 1910's technology, that) and get DC from AC for a lot better than 17%, no newage fluff or business about capacitors and "resonance" required.
Not that his tests pointed to any resonance at all, really, or at least nothing significant. His results seem to indicate that, if there is a resonant point in the machine, either it makes approximately nil difference in its efficiency, or it's so peaky that you have to get exactly the precise capacitor in place to take advantage of it. My money's on option #1.
I find it rather hilarious, incidentally, that one of the sorrows Hopegirl describes is their repeated destruction of the cores by failing to hook up a load before running the thing. Now, seriously, assume you have a machine that produces free energy: what do you think is going to happen if you don't burn it off?