Experimental Proof of Power Amplification Using DC-to-DC Converters

The experimental setup

Here is a real actual experiment I did to prove to myself once and for all that power can indeed be amplified. The setup is extremely simple. It consists of one 12 Volt 12 Amp Universal sealed lead acid battery bought from Radio Shack, when it was still around. A DC-to-DC Converter, a 7 Watt 12 Volt 0.648 Amp LED light and two meters.

The experiment starts off powering the 7 Watt LED light with the battery. There is a meter in between the battery and light measuring current coming out of the battery and into the light. There is another meter connected directly to the battery reading the voltage of the battery.

When the battery is connected to the light the battery voltage drops drastically by a large factor while drawing right around .525 Amps. The voltage drops from around 12.20V right down to 12.00V. Ok so far so good. This is all fine and dandy and there is nothing unusual about this. The light drains the battery, pretty plain and simple.

Next we now replace the LED light with the DC-to-DC Converter and connect the converter's output directly back to the input. On some converter's the negative output is already connected to the input's negative internally.

So in this case the negative of the output doesn't have to be connected to the negative input. So only the positive of the converter's output has to be connected to the battery's input.

Evidence of Power Amplification

Here comes the fun part. The converter draws well over the .525 Amps that the LED light drew from the battery. In fact it draws up to nearly 1 full amp at right around .800 Amps. Sometimes it will fall a bit to around .600 Amps but it's still a fairly good amount of current.

But this time the voltage of the battery barely drains. It's stays up near 12.20V and barely drops at all. The voltage of the battery doesn't come anywhere near as close as to what the LED light pulled it down to. It keeps the voltage close to where it started out at.

The important thing to take note of here is that the DC-to-DC converter pulls almost twice as much current than what the LED light pulled. Yet the voltage doesn't drop hardly at all or as drastically as the LED light did.

Here we have a load that is pulling more current without dropping the voltage down to what it should be dropping it down too. A bit of a conundrum. If we think about this a little bit further, we should realize that the converter should be pulling the voltage down well beyond what the LED light pulled it down to.

If the converter is pulling more current than the LED light then the battery voltage should have been well below the voltage the LED light pulled it down to. In that case the converter would have been powered with less voltage and more current, therefore the same amount, slightly more, or even significantly less power than the LED light.

What does this mean exactly? It means that right around 6.3 watts of power came out of the battery and into the LED light while 8.54 watts appeared to be powering the converter. There was more power flowing or more work done with the converter than the LEDs. Yet the converter didn't pull down the voltage nearly as much as what the LEDs pulled it down by.

Why is this? The answer is simple. If there was another meter measuring current coming out of the output of the DC-to-DC-Converter and back to the battery it would show nearly the same amount of current that's coming out of the battery and into the input of the converter.

The K.I.S.S. Principle (keep it simple stupid)

A meter measuring the output of the converter and going back into the battery is left out of the setup intentionally. Why? Why did we leave that meter out of the equation? I wanted to make the experiment as simple as possible with only two meters. In this way we could easily compare the power it took to power the LED light compared to the power it took to power the converter.

In reality we are recirculating the energy from the converter's output and returning it back to the battery. This allows more power to flow through the converter load as real work done with real wattage and power. Amazing isn't? We can actually get many more times the amount of power out of a battery by recycling the energy.

Is this free energy?

Sadly no, it's not free, at least on the surface it doesn't appear to be that way. Yet how are we able to get more power from the same amount of energy? Doesn't there have to be more energy in order for there to be more power?

Even though it is impossible to obtain more than 100% of the energy than what you put into it, you can reuse that energy multiple times and perform work several times. You can perform more work with the same energy.

In other words, you can take 100% potential energy and get more than 100% kinetic energy. This is a clear case of power multiplication. Perhaps we could use that power and convert it back into energy, but can it, will it ever be greater than 100%?

What do you think? You think it's possible to convert some of that amplified power back to energy without effecting the primary energy source?