• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

A new energy source; maybe/maybe not?

james dixon

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
SEAPOWERx.jpg


I am bringing this drawing back into the discussion just to ask one last question.

In the drawing there are twelve (12) buckets on the right side. Just for discussion each bucket has a lifting force of 100-foot pounds. 12 buckets times 100 = 1200-foot pounds of lifting force.

1200-foot pounds of lifting force can produce more energy at any one moment in time than 100-foot pounds;

Once all the buckets are full and this machine is running, the process continues to produce 1200-foot pounds of force if you continue to fill one (1) bucket at the bottom in sequence with the rest.

YES or NO?
 

Shiranui117

Pronounced Shee-ra-noo-ee
Premium Member
View attachment 32343

I am bringing this drawing back into the discussion just to ask one last question.

In the drawing there are twelve (12) buckets on the right side. Just for discussion each bucket has a lifting force of 100-foot pounds. 12 buckets times 100 = 1200-foot pounds of lifting force.

1200-foot pounds of lifting force can produce more energy at any one moment in time than 100-foot pounds;

Once all the buckets are full and this machine is running, the process continues to produce 1200-foot pounds of force if you continue to fill one (1) bucket at the bottom in sequence with the rest.

YES or NO?
No. The fact that kinetic energy is inevitably lost via friction, drag, etc. means that this machine will inevitably grind to a halt. There has to be something externally applying continual force to the system to keep it moving and thus generating power, turning a turbine, etc.
 

james dixon

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
There has to be something externally applying continual force to the system to keep it moving and thus generating power, turning a turbine, etc.

There is. When each bucket reaches the bottom air is pumped into it which maintains the cycle..
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
View attachment 32343

I am bringing this drawing back into the discussion just to ask one last question.

In the drawing there are twelve (12) buckets on the right side. Just for discussion each bucket has a lifting force of 100-foot pounds. 12 buckets times 100 = 1200-foot pounds of lifting force.

1200-foot pounds of lifting force can produce more energy at any one moment in time than 100-foot pounds;

Once all the buckets are full and this machine is running, the process continues to produce 1200-foot pounds of force if you continue to fill one (1) bucket at the bottom in sequence with the rest.

YES or NO?
It will certainly produce a force, due to the buoyancy of the buckets on the right, as these, you say (I had to find and read your posts from April to understand this), are filled with air pumped down from the surface.

However, the work done in pumping the necessary volume of air down, against the pressure of the seawater at 600ft, will be far more than the energy generated due to the buoyancy of the buckets.

Consider what you do: you pump down enough volume of air to exactly fill one bucket, at 600ft depth. This requires a volume of air on the surface 17x the volume of the bucket, because the pressure at 600ft is about 17atm. You fill your bucket at that depth and it rises. As it does so, the air expands and exceeds the volume of the bucket, so the surplus bubbles out and is wasted. This process continues throughout the ascent.

So your machine is a pointless waste of energy.

You would do a bit better with flexible balloons that did not spill air as they rose, but even then the best you could do is recover all the energy expended in compressing the air, leaving aside losses due to friction, compression heating and so on.

Back to the (crank) drawing board, I think. :D
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
View attachment 32343

I am bringing this drawing back into the discussion just to ask one last question.

In the drawing there are twelve (12) buckets on the right side. Just for discussion each bucket has a lifting force of 100-foot pounds. 12 buckets times 100 = 1200-foot pounds of lifting force.

1200-foot pounds of lifting force can produce more energy at any one moment in time than 100-foot pounds;

Once all the buckets are full and this machine is running, the process continues to produce 1200-foot pounds of force if you continue to fill one (1) bucket at the bottom in sequence with the rest.

YES or NO?
I don't see how it works.
Also, "foot pounds" are the units for either torque or energy, not force.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
Yes his units are all over the place. He measures quantities of water in square feet! He seems one of the less serious of the perpetual motion cranks I have come across.
It's important to get the terms right.
I'd also recommend making the buckets out of prefamulated amulite.
This prevents depleneration of the laminar wainshafting.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
By the way, having an idle few moments, I looked up the energy needed to compress air to the pressure 600ft down in the ocean. It is about 330J/litre.

You can get it from the 2nd graph at this site:
Horsepower required to Compress Air.
Where you can read off ~5.5W compressor power to compress to 17bar (which is the pressure at 600ft depth), at a rate of 1litre free air/minute. So for a rate of 1litre/sec you need 60x as much i.e. 330 Joules/second to compress 1litre/second to that pressure. So you need 330J for each litre of free air compressed.

However to produce a litre of air at 17bar, you need 17x as much free air, so you need 330x17 = 5,100J per litre of 17bar air, delivered at 600ft down in the sea.

Now, turning to these "buckets" on the conveyor, each litre of air introduced at the bottom displaces a litre of water, weighing ~10N, and so that is the buoyancy force it creates. As the conveyor rises, this does F x d work. Taking 600ft as 180metres, the work done will be 10 x 180 =1800J, again per litre of 17bar compressed air.

In summary, for every litre of compressed air you expend 5,100J to compress it and you only get back 1800J, 35% of the energy input. So, as a supposed source of "free energy", this device is spectacularly crap.

As most of us knew anyway, but still it's good to do the analysis.
 

columbus

yawn <ignore> yawn
In summary, for every litre of compressed air you expend 5,100J to compress it and you only get back 1800J, 35% of the energy input. So, as a supposed source of "free energy", this device is spectacularly crap.
Then there's the energy required to push the buckets through the water, 1200+ feet, per cycle. That's moving a lot of water.
Then there's the energy required to create the device in the first place.
Tom
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
Then there's the energy required to push the buckets through the water, 1200+ feet, per cycle. That's moving a lot of water.
Tom
That too, indeed. I just thought I would do the analysis to show that, even setting aside all such real world effects in a practical device, it cannot work, even in principle. He's just forgotten to think about how energy-intensive it is to compress air.

It is always like this with free energy cranks. They set up a scenario sufficiently complicated that they cannot analyse it correctly, and hey presto, they conclude the laws of thermodynamics must be wrong.
 
Top