Nikolaos Simos
Nikolaos Simos | |
|---|---|
| Residence | New York, United States |
| Known for | Classical electromagnetic analysis of Nikola Tesla's wireless energy transmission; earth-ionosphere cavity resonance |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mechanical engineering, structural and materials engineering, electromagnetics |
| Institutions | Brookhaven National Laboratory |
Nikolaos Simos (also published as Nick Simos) is an American engineer and scientist, a senior scientist emeritus of Brookhaven National Laboratory, who is known within the independent-energy research community for a classical analysis of Nikola Tesla's scheme for the wireless transmission of electrical power. Working from Maxwell's equations and the resonant modes of the earth-ionosphere cavity, Simos has argued that Tesla's far-reaching claims for global wireless power were not violations of established physics but consequences of it, and that they deserve serious quantitative re-examination. He presented this work at the 2015 ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference organised by Tesla Tech in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Biography
Simos earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from City College of the City University of New York, and completed post-doctoral study at the Earthquake Research Center of the same institution.
He joined Brookhaven National Laboratory's Nuclear Energy Department in February 1989, working on the safety of nuclear reactors. He was promoted to associate scientist in 1990, to scientist in 1993, and to mechanical engineer in 1994, and was named senior mechanical engineer in 2011. Over the course of his career his research moved from reactor safety toward the structural analysis of accelerator-based systems, the behaviour of materials under intense proton irradiation, and the design of high-power target systems for particle physics experiments. He contributed to the design of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, in particular to its ground-vibration stability studies, and to target material studies for the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment and the Spallation Neutron Source.
In 2011 he received a Brookhaven Engineering Award, described by the laboratory as one of its highest accolades, cited by Laboratory Director Doon Gibbs for his "research and leadership in radiation damage studies of novel materials by intense proton beams." He is the author or co-author of more than one hundred publications. After twenty-eight years of service he was granted senior scientist emeritus status on 7 June 2017, as a member of the Collider-Accelerator Department.
Scientific contributions
A classical approach to Tesla's wireless energy
Simos's Tesla work sets out to test, rather than assume, the physical viability of the worldwide wireless power system that Tesla pursued at Colorado Springs and at the Wardenclyffe Tower. His stated conclusion is that a number of Tesla's most far-reaching assertions and reported experimental observations fall within fundamental physical law: that they comply with Maxwell's equations and violate no classical principle of physics or mathematics. This is a notably different line of argument from both the dismissal of Tesla's wireless power as impossible and the appeal to wholly new physics — Simos's claim is that the orthodox equations themselves, properly applied to the planet as a resonant system, already permit what Tesla described.
The physical core of the analysis is the earth-ionosphere cavity: the shell of weakly conducting atmosphere bounded below by the conducting surface of the earth and above by the ionosphere, which behaves as a resonant cavity supporting extremely low frequency electromagnetic modes, conventionally known as the Schumann resonances. Simos develops the coupling between the ionosphere and the earth in terms of these cavity modes, treating the mechanism as a longitudinal wave coupling rather than as ordinary radiative transmission from an antenna. In this picture Tesla's transmitter is not a radiator throwing energy outward to be lost in space, but an oscillator driving a bounded resonant system, so that the usual inverse-square attenuation argument against long-distance wireless power does not straightforwardly apply.
From this treatment Simos derives a resonant transmission frequency of approximately 11.78 Hz, a result he obtained independently of the earlier derivation by James Corum. The convergence of two independent analyses on a harmonic near 11.7–11.8 Hz has been taken within this research community as significant support for the cavity-resonance interpretation of Tesla's system.
Simos has framed the practical motivation in terms of energy access and infrastructure: the possibility of delivering electrical power without the expense of conventional transmission infrastructure, and with far lower delivery losses than those incurred by conventional generation and distribution networks. He has expressed interest in the prospect of a transatlantic wireless power transmission along Tesla's design, distinguishing it from the short-range magnetic-resonance "WiTricity" approach developed at MIT, which he regards as a much more limited technology than what Tesla actually proposed.
Conference presentations
- "A Classical Approach to Tesla's Wireless Energy", ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference (Tesla Tech) and Seventh Conference on Future Energy (COFE7), Albuquerque, New Mexico, 29 July – 1 August 2015.
Works
On Tesla and wireless energy
- Nikola Tesla Unplugged, report BNL-113155-2016-CP, Nuclear Science and Technology Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 25 October 2016; submitted to the Seventh Conference on Future Energy, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 29 July – 1 August 2015. PDF
- "Wireless Energy Transmission: Nikola Tesla Unplugged", Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Future Energy (COFE7), Integrity Research Institute, 2016.
- "Tesla Unplugged", chapter in Thomas Valone (ed.), Nikola Tesla's Electricity Unplugged: Wireless Transmission of Power as the Master of Lightning Intended, Adventures Unlimited Press, 2016.
Selected mainstream work
- Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) Target Material Radiation Damage from Energetic Protons of the Brookhaven Linear Isotope Production (BLIP) Facility, Brookhaven National Laboratory, February 2016.
- With H. Amick, A. Soueid and M. Fallier, "NSLS-II Ground Vibration Stability Studies and Design Implementation", Synchrotron Radiation News, vol. 32, no. 5, 2019.
External links
- "Nikolaos Simos Named Senior Scientist Emeritus", Brookhaven National Laboratory Newsroom
- Nick Simos on ResearchGate
- Nikola Tesla Unplugged (BNL-113155-2016-CP)