Tesla and the AC Induction Motor

Not many people know our current Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush, John Snow, used to be CEO of CSX-T. CSX-T is an intermodal container shipping business that made its way into the Fortune 500 under the tutalage of Mr. Snow. Prior to the decade of the 90's, the rail industry in the U.S. was in decline. Truckers hauling freight on our interstate highways posed a sizeable threat in shipping by being more flexible and expedient in delivering goods. Mr. Snow, with prior experience in government, law, economics, and railroading, helped oversee the merging of the Chessie System with Seaboard/Atlantic Coastline into what is now the largest railroad in the eastern half of the United States. How did he do this? With rail all ready in place in the United States, the very backbone of the Iron Horse that literally built this nation, how could a CEO tranform an ailing industry into a Fortune 500 company? I guess that is why President Bush appointed him Secretary of the Treasury. I'm not sure if we have seen the results in the private sector he achieved with CSX-T, or in the federal government. Time will tell. A major factor in the success of a railroad is the reliability of its locomotives. Traditionally locomotives began as steam and near the middle of the 20th century became diesel/electric. Not many people know that the actual diesel engine does not pull the train. DC traction motors attached to each axle turn the wheels and pull the great load. DC motors have "brushes" like the alternator of your car. Under the stress of small grades, common to appalachia (2-3%), traction motors are likely to burn out. They overload and seize causing major repair work. General Electric, Siemens, General Motors, and others were pioneering the use of the AC motor, a brushless motor turned by a rotating electromagnetic field. The rotor, or the axle of the motor,is pulled along by a magnetic field created in the stator that rotates through its winding. The speed of the motor is controlled in a somewhat drastically different method than with its DC counterpart. Instead of increasing the amperage to the motor to control the speed, the AC motor needs a complex electrical system utilizing a PC (personal computer) and a fairly newly developed electrical component, the IGBT or Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor. The GTO was also used. To make a long story short, the diesel prime mover now turns an alternator that produces AC (alternating current) power rather than DC power. This is rectified and sent to the PC, which with some sophisticated software varies the frequency of the power which in turn really becomes the speed of the motor. That means the lower the frequency of the AC power, the slower the motor turns. Power in your home is transmitted at a steady, unchanging frequency, 60 cycles per second, or 60 Hz. This was rather pioneering in the field of traction. This new "drive" and drive control created a much finer degree of control over the tractive effort of the locomotive. There is less wheel slip and smoother acceleration and deceleration. Likewise locomotives were begun to be built with dynamic braking that uses the slowing and coasting of the locomotive to turn the traction motors into miniature generators that themselves produce electrical power. This energy is dispensed on a "grid" that is cooled by large fans, and on the newer line of GE conceived locomotives is stored in large batteries for future use. What could be the shortcomings of the AC traction motor? Think back for a moment to circa l980. Pink and green Polo shirts, preppies, Ronald Reagan, a happy decade for the most part. No Viet Nam no Korea, just a mostly pleasant decade in which to grow up as typified by the song, "Remember the 80's." Well, the railroad industry was almost bankrupt. They were not running nearly the amount of trains that operate daily today. AC traction was yet to be implemented. It was tested in the rough logging territory of the Pacific NorthWest by the Union Pacific. They were so impressed with the operation of the new locomotives they ordered many of new ones. The Union Pacific mainline is very close to Littleton, Colorado as are two Molybdenum mines that use AC drives underneath the ground. Taos, New Mexico was the first U.S. city that began to complain of a humming sound that was new. The governement did a study and attributed the sound to mining equipment nearby, and they were correct. GE had built a 15 mile long conveyor belt under the ground to haul the ore from the same type of mine to the refinery. The new AC drives were perfect for the application because they turn very slowly controlled by the same device found on locomotives. The hum sound began to appear in a variety of places including overseas. England, China, and all the countries that began to utilize AC traction in their railroads became plagued with humming sounds. In my mind, and this is only opinion, the decade of the 90's became the decade of new, unexplained psychological disorders that to this day aren't understood. ADD, Panic/Anxiety Disorder, SIDS all seemed to come out of nowhere. Likewise global warming began to heat up! Reflect for a moment and put the two together. New diseases that seem to have no physiological cause, that is no biological cause in the human body. Mysterious illnesses that just happen. Add Acid/Reflux to the list, that annoying little disease that wakes you up at 3:00 a.m. pushing stomach acid up burning your throat. Could there be a correlation between the advent and use of primitive AC traction and all these new diseases? Think for yourself how this may occur. How could rotating electromagnetic fields controlled by a thrysister, IGBT, or GTO cause mental illness? Simply put, brain activity is electrical. Alpha, beta, and theta waves in the brain are electrical signals functioning in the low frequency range of about 8-14 Hz. Before the advent of AC traction, other than the Navy's low frequency radio communications, there were few electrical signals being broadcast in this range. (Quantum physics is the study of electromagnetic waves, and these waves increase in danger the higher the frequency of the waves.) Gamma energy or nuclear radiation has the highest frequency and is the most dangerous as can be seen by the effects of the bomb on human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Take the other end of the spectrum, and you are operating in the range of the human brain and nervous system. Studies have shown when the brain of a human being is subjected to a source of external electricity in the air for an extended period of time, the brain eventually "gives up" and changes to or latches onto the offended frequency. This, in other words, can change your thought process or your mood. Given that thousands of AC traction locomotives are in operation everyday, could it be possible they are the source of these diseases? How can a locomotive, when it is so far away, possibly effect my brain activity? How can the polar ice caps be melting at an alarming rate? Another misunderstood phenomenon could be contributing to the problem. How can electromagnetic energy travel so far? Consider radio, TV, and cell phones. They travel thousands of miles. How would low frequency electricity be any different? Actually low frequency energy travels more efficiently because the wavelengths are dramatically longer. That is why the Navy uses this low frequency energy to communicate with our submarines all around the globe. The transmission tower for the energy is about 150 miles long! There can be no doubt this new energy source is in the air, and likewise there seems to be another component to the problem. Problems focusing, concentrating, staying alert, blurred vision. These are factors NASA has studied in our space program caused by infrasound or low frequency sound waves. They needed to know exactly how G forces and tremendous volumes of low frequency sound would effect pilots and astronauts. The effects are well documented, but how is this related to the rail industry? Diesel engines, because of their firing rate, produce an infrasound wave that tends to stay in the 2-4 Hz range the entire time the engine is running. As the engine rev's (although diesel prime movers are built to spin at a fairly constant rate) the frequency changes subtly. The engines are built this way because their sole responsibility is to spin a large generator or alternator, as in the case with AC traction. That means every operating locomotive in existance, whether with DC or AC traction motors, is producing a low frequency, inaudible wave that can best be described as a "pressure wave" in the air. Because of the nature of low frequency energy, they travel great distances. Radio traditionally refers to "carrier waves," different frequency waves that carry audio material that are cancelled out at the destination. Infrasound waves can be considered huge carrier waves that have the potential for carrying complex sound vibration. The simplest way to see this is to look at the surface of the ocean. See if you can see any rhyme or reason to the patterns on the surface? Do they look like ocean currents? That's because likely they are not. The surface of the ocean could be a direct spectrograph of the sound and vibration that is in the air above it. There is a second easy way to see the infrasound wave produced by diesel engines. If you ever take a cruise, turn on the stern cams on the ship's television. This allows you to watch the "wake" of the propellers in the ocean behind the ship. Watch for at least five minutes. What you will begin to see is the wake forming a gentle 1,100 foot long, wave in the water behind the ship as the ship is slowly and discretely pushed back and forth by the large and powerful infrasound waves. The wake, like the surface of the ocean, is a perfect pepresentation of the waves in the air. Likewise the majority of turbulance you feel in a cruise ship is caused by infrasonic energy pushing on the sides of the ship above water, not by the ocean's currents. Getting back to the railroads, how could AC traction be creating these new diseases, other than the altering of your brainwaves? (like that isn't enough!) Processing the vast amount of electricity traction motors need to pull tons of cargo is bound to cause some type of residual effect. What could that be? Resistance causes electrical vibration. When you produce a great amount of energy, then hold it back in a structure of some kind, it is bound to produce vibration. Send that vibration through the air with a diesel-produced infrasound wave, and you have what could be the cause for many of these illnesses that seem to be unique to the decade of the 90's. When your eyes, ears, skin, brain, and nerves are assaulted with invisible vibration, could this not be the cause of lack of concentration? Infrasound by nature is produced by drastic weather and the looming prospect of the dinosaur. It illicits feelings of dread, panic, and being afraid. Could not AC traction be the root of these things that continue to plague life in the good old U.S. of A? It's worth a thought.