Yea, we changed the name of the project and this video is extremely rough. Please Paramount don't get mad, we dropped the whole Star Trek thing and you won't be seeing it in the future. The pattern in the Ferrofluid just looked so much like the Star Trek insignia that we temporarily named the project the Star Trek Magnetic Motor Project. It is now named after the inventor instead.
We know that the view of the project here is unfinished, and that it isn't yet running. Only a few of the magnets, one V's worth, were installed at this point. We also know that at the point the project was in this video, it was "finger powered" rather than magnetically powered.
Unfortunately once the project was complete, we discovered the flaw. While the V-Gate design does indeed work, it is more of an illusion than a reality. When we have a series of V-Gates in a series, we can start the rotator out not yet in-line with the fist magnets, this causes a fairly strong attraction force that causes momentum to exist before the rotor meets the first V-Gate. The acceleration of each V-Gate has exactly equal acceleration and deceleration characteristics, so it flies past the breaking point (open side of each gate) as long as there is excess momentum to burn off. As soon as that momentum is used up, the rotor stops at the next wide point.
When we completed the track, there was no point where we could start the rotor that it didn't stop in 1 to 3 gates, because there was nowhere to start it to gain that initial momentum. Give it a push start and it can go for awhile, but only for as long as it takes to use up the momentum added during startup.
Also, friction is a factor. In the model we used a computer can which spins pretty freely and fortunately had a magnet dead center to hold the rotor in place easily, but even with that low friction and the bit of wind resistance on the rotor, we could not get the motor to run very long without stopping, no matter how much energy we inserted at startup.
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