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©2002 Cascadia Times

Calling Gray Davis

Port Angeles inventor finds a way to save tons of energy. Maybe the governor ought to listen.

By Carlotta Collette

Jerry Lamb, of Port Angeles, Washington, wants to have a talk with California Governor Gray Davis. He wants the governor to come up to the Olympic Peninsula for a visit. Lamb, a high school educated former logger and mill worker, figures he can help California out. He’s got simple, durable, inexpensive and really quite amazing solutions to many of the problems California is facing. The governor can see these inventions and try them out at Lamb’s workshop - a modest structure filled with shiny motors and magnets, heavily laden plywood tables that float above stud-framed tracks, the exposed innards of an old Freightliner truck and a high-speed computer that can display it all in motion in three dimensions.

Lamb, a tall, almost giddy, 42 year old, will happily give Governor Davis a tour. There’s the magnetic coupling device he designed and patented for industrial motors. In more than 50 installations across the West, it has demonstrated reductions in energy use by as much as 66 percent.

There’s the magnetic levitation device he believes will be able to move freight or people along existing train tracks (actually gliding slightly above them) at more than 300 miles per hour with no exhaust fumes and no noise. He thinks a much slower version would be especially good for moving people through, or even over, national parklands. “It would be quiet and clean and cause much less disruption than long lines of traffic in the forest,” Lamb maintains.

So far, the wooden test model in his shop can float the weight of a car with an inch and a quarter air gap under it. He can propel the whole thing with only three-quarters of a horsepower of energy. He’s in the process of applying for a patent on that technology.

Then there’s the Freightliner drive train. Some time back, Lamb installed his adjustable speed “clutch/brake” in an old 13-gear Freightliner truck. He drove the truck from Port Angeles to Portland, Oregon, Freightliner’s headquarters, and then home again after the folks there refused to even look at what he’d done. In fact, his coupling device enabled smooth, nearly unlimited shifting and easy braking, all at far greater fuel efficiency and much less engine wear and tear than is currently available. Back at the shop, Lamb pulled the whole drive mechanism out of the truck, mounted it on blocks and is still tinkering. It helps to understand that Lamb bought, repaired and sold more than 60 cars when he was just a teenager. He is a capable man around machines.

And he is having fun - a great deal of fun.

Lamb has been playing with magnets since he was 19.

“My wife and I were just married, and we lived in a mobile home in a trailer park,” he explains. “This gentleman who lived behind us had recently seen a TV program about magnets. He told me magnets were my destiny. And I thought, magnets? I didn’t even know what a magnet was. So I went to the library and started reading everything I could about magnets.”

He spent the next 10 years building magnetic motors. The real breakthrough came with an accidental discovery he made at 3 a.m.

“I was mounting these electro-magnetic coils on aluminum holders,” he recalls. “I was using aluminum because it is not magnetic. At one point, I reached out for a cup of coffee, and my sleeve caught a rotor and turned it. Underneath it was this piece of aluminum, and it fell over. I thought I’d bumped it so I set it back up. It fell over again. I realized the magnet was moving it, but I knew that couldn’t be, aluminum is not magnetic. I thought I’d been ripped off. That this wasn’t aluminum, but it was. And I knew I’d discovered an incredible phenomenon. Magnets and conductors create a special force. And I thought, oh my god, these things are really weird.”

Lamb demonstrates this force by spinning one of his magnets in the air as it hovers above a sheet of copper. The magnet coasts down gently in apparent defiance of gravity. This is the secret behind all of Lamb’s inventions.

Take, for example, the adjustable speed coupling device he invented for industrial motors.

There are several in use at the Daishowa America paper and pulp mill just down the road from Lamb’s workshop. If you use a phone book in the United States, chances are good that the paper came from here. Daishowa America sells more than 160,000 tons of phone book paper a year and has contracts with nearly every big phone company in the country.

Lamb points out two 100-horsepower motors; each is about four feet tall and as big around as a small garbage can. Together these motors run pumps that move between 6 million and 7 million gallons of fluids every day from the milling plant to water treatment facilities.

There is a third motor in the array, but it isn’t running. It doesn’t need to. When Daishowa put Lamb’s magnetic coupling device, called MagnaDrive, on the first two pumps, the third pump became extraneous. They keep it for emergency backup, but otherwise it doesn’t run.

This sidelined motor is typical of motors in use all around the world. The motor is aligned along a shaft that connects to a pump. To start the pump, the motor had to come on full bore, drawing as much as four or five times more energy than it actually needs to run the pump once it’s started. In the case of the motors at Daishowa, that’s a force of about 1,200 rpm instantly turning a pump at the same speed.

“You can imagine all that steel moving all of a sudden at 1,200 rpm,” says Daishowa engineer, Terry Dotson. “That takes a lot of energy and causes a lot of wear.”

With the MagnaDrive coupling, the motor shaft and the drive shaft don’t touch. A copper plate is mounted on the motor side of the shaft, and across an adjustable air gap there’s another plate, this one studded with super-powerful magnets that have only been available since the 1980s. This second plate is mounted on the pump’s shaft. The motor doesn’t have to be oversized to turn the pump, because the pump isn’t connected to it. The spinning copper conductor compels the magnet-studded disc to spin. To adjust the speed, the two plates are moved closer or further apart.

“I can start the motors and then bring the pumps up to speed slowly,” says Dotson. This is what’s known as a “soft start.”

“With my technology,” Lamb explains, “a 100 horse motor doesn’t even draw 10 horse to start the motor, and then you slowly ramp the load up.” So smaller motors can be used in virtually all installations.

Since utilities must be capable of generating electricity sufficient to meet the starting load of all the motors they serve, Lamb’s soft start coupler and the consequent smaller motors will cut the peak generating capacity utilities must buy or build.

Lamb explains that this is especially important to California’s industries.

“In California they are cutting rebate checks for every kilowatt an industry can take off its starting motors,” he says. At Daishowa, the company figures they’re using 80 kilowatts less energy to start their motors. That, and the efficient operating of the coupling devices, saves Daishowa more than $32,000 every year. If they were in California, Lamb explains, “The utility would actually be cutting them a big check for the savings.”

What is equally important to Dotson, however, is the reduction in maintenance costs. “With all pumps, there are alignment problems that are difficult to fix and cause a lot of vibration. Misalignment of the motor shaft and the drive shaft is the number one cause of rotating equipment failure in industry. With MagnaDrive,” he explains, “there’s no physical connection, so there’s no alignment issue and no vibration.” In the past, Dotson would rebuild his pumps maybe five times a year at a cost of about $10,000 per pump. Since installing the MagnaDrive couplings, “we haven’t had to rebuild one yet. I haven’t had to work on them at all for ages,” he adds.

Even greater savings were demonstrated when MagnaDrive couplers were installed on two previously troublesome pumps at the 55-story Washington Mutual Tower in Seattle. The pumps are part of the building’s heating and air conditioning system. The constant starting and stopping of the pumps was wasting energy and causing significant pipe and equipment damage. Electronically controlled variable speed drives were installed, but they proved to be too complex and brought their own problems.

Engineers at the building reported “continuous noise and vibration problems that we were having trouble isolating.” They weren’t sure whether the MagnaDrive couplings would solve the problems, but since they put them in, “the problems are gone.” Maintenance costs also are down. “All I need to do is keep them greased,” said one facility engineer.

Energy costs are down as well. On one pump, the coupler cut energy use by 66 percent. On the other, the savings were 31 percent. As a result, Washington Mutual is replacing all the electronic variable speed drives in the building with Lamb’s MagnaDrives.

Think of this from a national, or even international perspective. About 25 percent of total U.S. electricity use goes for industrial motors that run pumps, fans, blowers and other equipment just like these examples. If you add in the pumps used for water treatment and supply, including both municipal and agricultural pumping, that figure jumps to about 40 percent. In developing nations, it’s 50 percent or better. Lamb is certain his coupling device could cut that by a huge amount in every installation.

“Everyone is saying ‘build more oil, more gas, more coal plants.’ I’m saying, we’ve got plenty of energy. We shouldn’t even be thinking of making more until we’ve used what we have more efficiently.”

The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance views things similarly. The Alliance is a unique consortium that includes nearly all electric utilities in the Northwest; state governments of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington; public interest and environmental groups in the region; and efficiency industry representatives. They help identify, test and deploy innovations that can make significant cuts in regional electricity use.

“We provide what you might call ‘pre-venture capital’ - the money to do the initial demonstrations that can give credibility to very innovative, but still young technologies,” says Margie Gardner, executive director of the Alliance. “We can cross utility service territory lines, work with one skilled, focused staff, and target areas that we see as generating the biggest savings for the investment.”

Lamb and Ron Woodard, former president of Boeing’s Commercial Airplane Group and current president of MagnaDrive, the company he, Lamb and a third partner formed, approached the Alliance for help when they were getting started in 1999. They needed credibility, technical and marketing support, and money. It was just the sort of project the Alliance was looking for. MagnaDrive had a product with tremendous potential if it could be proven.

An initial investment of $1 million was offered to help demonstrate the technology in a variety of industrial, commercial and agricultural (for irrigation pumping) applications. The following year, another $1.1 million was provided to continue the demonstrations, compile and distribute the results and help with marketing.

“The Alliance was a wonderful source of technical support,” says Woodard. “They understood the energy needs and savings potential. They helped us see how to market this. They had a wonderful group of consultants who really helped us out. And of course, at that stage, we really needed the financial support.”

The results of this partnership have been overwhelmingly positive. In every one of the 50 current installations, the MagnaDrive coupling device is performing at or better than anticipated. Energy savings range from 20 to 66 percent. Maintenance and equipment replacement costs have been reduced substantially. In Idaho, where it was tested for irrigation pumping, the Department of Water Resources called it “bullet proof.”

Daishowa’s Terry Dotson is so happy with his results he thinks MagnaDrive couplings should be “designed right in on every new application. It’s an absolutely fantastic idea from a mechanical point of view,” he says. “It solves a lot of headaches. You’re going to see longer equipment life. You’ll see better running equipment, smoother, requiring a lot less energy. That’s what we’re looking for in American industry today. That’s what this coupling does.”

So Jerry Lamb thinks maybe his coupling device should be mandated for every industrial motor in use. He’s already talked to Washington’s Governor Gary Locke about the idea.

“I told Governor Locke flat out: ‘I want a mandate. I want my device on every motor shaft.’ Of course, if I want a mandate, I’ve got to be sensitive to not hurt anybody. You know, you can change a light bulb, and that’s not going to hurt anybody. Or add a windowpane that’s more efficient, and that won’t hurt. Changing speed control devices - well you’ve got to be very careful. Some controls are very complicated, very expensive and not very reliable. But mine has no detrimental effects. This is the best technology. It enhances the entire system. It makes the motor cycling very flexible, maintenance goes down, and reliability goes up. You can put these on and start saving energy a lot faster than you can build a power plant.”

Lamb has this vision. “Twenty years from now, we’ll look down at earth and everything will be run by magnets. We’ll wonder, since this is so much cleaner, so much more efficient, so simple and sturdy, why did we ever use anything else? Why did we ever do things any other way?”

Which leads to Governor Davis. “I’ve got to get Governor Davis here because he’s got these big problems,” Lamb explains. “He’s trying to solve transportation and energy problems with technologies nobody is going to be using in a few years. I could really help him.”

So Governor Davis, if you’re reading this consider yourself invited. Jerry Lamb has a special attraction up in Washington that he’d like to show you. It just might make your job a lot easier.

Carlotta Collette writes from Portland.