I have yet to see any signs of this system failing to provide power. I'll keep watching it, but it looks stable.
Let me ask one thing though Fossaman, was this with an ocean with waves and all or was it with a reservoir?
Artificial reservoir, actually. Not a real lake. (although it doesn't really matter, water is water)You'll notice that there are a bunch of fours and fives in the first picture? That's as the very bottom-most level of it was draining so I could do some work on the plumbing. By 'waves' I just mean the oscillations of the uneven water surface.
I need to see a blueprint of exactly what you did there. It looks like you stacked a couple perpetual generators on top of each other, with an over-flowing well backwashing into the system.
Nope. That's not what I did. It was originally designed as a perpetual motion system using only one pump. The bottom z-level of the reservoir (the second picture) would be pressurized, so there's a diagonal jog there. Water would flow through, depressurized, then get sucked up by the pump, turning the wheels as it goes. The diagonal square also has a floodgate on it, allowing me to shut off the system as I like (although now its only function is to prevent the system from flooding up to an even 7/7, which would stop it). What you see in the pictures is the extent of the system; there's another lobe of it rotated 180 off to the right, but it's exactly the same.
So, let me see... you filled up a resevior to 7/7, then blocked it off, then channeled a section attached to it so the water level dropped, causing waves. Wouldn't the water start to even out after a while? And if it doesn't, and if the power is coming from a wave that doesn't stop, is it possible to create several waves going across the surface of the water, thus keeping the wheels powered all the time?
Sort of. I just controlled filling using floodgates. All of the channeling and such was done pre-flooding. And it's not really waves, it's squares of water that are less or more full than all the others. With this exact design I can tell you that both two squares and four squares that are different will effectively run all the waterwheels at once. This will never 'even out' as you say, because there's nowhere for it to even out to.
I'm starting to suspect that the shape of the channels has something to do with the success or failure of a brownian power-plant. Has anybody tried with exactly the shape seen here? With it rotated ninety degrees? Something about the patterns fluids 'slosh' in might make certain shapes viable while others are not.