I recently discovered a book on mechanics and engineering from 1824, which has some theories about perpetual motion. I have been having some thoughts about certain types of machines similar to 'ying yang' and 'mirror magnet' machines, and also plasma accelerators, lightening and water powered machines. I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on this topic.

I was taught (many moons ago) that perpetual motion machines were an impossibility because all types of machines tend to use more energy than they can return back. As far as engines go, I recall that diesel engines were considered to be the most efficient as far as energy put in and what you get back, (perhaps I should say as far as energy being converted into a more usable form), but even diesels are only 44% efficient. Electric motors have a higher efficiency, but with all conversions of energy there is still resistance, heat loss, etc., which of course results in inefficiency/less efficiency. For a device to be completely perpetual or over unity, it should be able to run off of its own output/input continuously without any loss from resistance, etc., and ideally still have some workable energy to spare. This type of closed loop system with an efficiency of 100% to my understanding is impossible.

Perpetual Motion if obtainable could only work inside a vacuum chainber.

As air particals etc.. would create friction.
And then combustion would be impossible for the lack of oxygen.
I think it would have to be done in space anyway. zero G would help tremendosly

And even with 100% efficientcy it would be usless because it creates only enough energy to power itself.

[This message has been edited by Krusher (edited April 19, 2000).]

I developed a theory on how to get energy from no where.

Is the anyway radiowaves could be converted to electricity because there is always radiowaves all around us from the universe and stuff.

It would seem to me this would be a very good source of energy, even if its not to powerful.

Like solar power that can work at night

Overunity or free energy devices do they work?

Over the last two years I have attempted to build various machines that either work on the over balanced load, magnetic repulsion, or electrical devices that supposedly draw energy from an anonymous source like magnetic waves or ether energy.

I found the closest I came was with an overbalanced load device. Since this was my most successful attempt I have persevered with it and incorporated magnetic repulsion as a driver. The new device is called the magnetic cam gravity wheel. I found that to use the opposing magnetic forces you need to build in a cam effect otherwise the machine will seize up due to magnetic lock. So far I have only built a model out of cheap parts like straws, pop sticks, bluetac, erasers, cardboard etc with the most expensive parts being the nyobium magnets. It again came close to continuous operation but slowly wound down in speed due to the magnetic cam not being correctly aligned. Since then I have not had the time to return to the idea and pursue it further.........later maybe?

Many people in main stream science and engineering frown upon the idea of perpetual motion and toying with it, also there are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there making extraordinary claims of success. Personally I have found it a very gratifying exercise to play with the concept as it clearly shows some of the fundamental theories of physics and helps to gain an understanding of the laws of thermodynamics.

Exercises in futility or just some good fun for inquiring minds? Investigate and try yourself and make sure you have some fun along the way.

Allcare

Tony H2o

Perpetual motion...not likley (unless we have a seriously flawed understanding of our universe, well seriously limited anyway). However efficency is the answer. e=mc^2, 1kg of caol = 3x10^16 jouls of energy. We could power this planet on a bag full of caol for a year IF we achieved 100% efficency. BTW 44% efficency on a diesel engine, I find that hard to believe. We might be talking about different measurements of efficency though.

Magnatism is certainly the best way to try and achive perpetual motion I believe.

A research (Biologist) by the name of Bruce DePalma describes an experiment that while utilizing an electricly sheilded rotating mass, he had observed that the higher the velocity it rotated, the more ability it gained to have an influence to oscilate changes in the forces that govern radio frquencey picups on a standard FM Band Radio!
Translation, meaning that the influence that this spinning orb, or disk altered the forces around the radio, and he was able to pick up stations that would not otherwise existed prior.
I will conduct some more research on this phenonema, and return with my results to follow-up more details as I come across them, and post them below.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Here's the details........

The Home of Primordial Energy - THE Place for information from BRUCE DePALMA
Free Energy research information and data. The papers of Bruce DePalma and Paramahamsa Tewari.Physics, Space Power, Space Energy, Free Energy, Electro-Magnetism,Electricity, Anti-Gravity, Magnetism, Inertia, Rotation, Philosophy. http://www.depalma.pair.com

Bruce DePalma -- Free Engery Device
( Article by Richard Walters,
For the People Magazine ) http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/depalma.html

Bibliography of DePalma Institute
Bibliography of Papers
Relevance: 74% Date: 16 Aug 1997, Size 14.9K, http://www.depalma.pair.com/biblio.html

Contacting DePalma Manufacturing Services. There Are Serveral Ways To Get In Contact With DePalma Manufacturing Services. Surface Mail (Snail Mail)... http://www.depalmamfg.com/info.html

Re: Passing of Dr. Bruce DePalma
A public link page providing a variety of resources on this topic. http://www.ufomind.com

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://noosphere.princeton.edu/shnoll.html

Cosmophysical Influences, Shnoll, et al.

Simon Shnoll and colleagues have been gathering evidence for the past 40 years on apparent "cosmophysical influences" that produce concentrations of identifiable similarity of regions in time series that should have no similarity beyond chance occurence. They create histograms to represent segments of time series, and examine all the histograms in pairs which have randomly assigned identifiers. Blind judges select pairs which appear similar (algorithmic methods are still being developed), and the frequency is computed for pairs separated by differing time intervals. The finding is that synchronous or adjacent pairs, and pairs at intervals of 24 hours, 27 days, or 365 days show similarity more frequently than they should by chance. Data from a variety of different physical systems have been assessed, for example, counts of radioactive decay for plutonium and cesium sources separated by 200 Kilometers. A recent paper which discusses the procedures and responds to various questions and criticisms is available here, as a pdf document. A selection of comments is available, drawn from the extensive email discussion among researchers interested in automating the comparison process.
Most recently Shnoll and his team have examined data from the GCP -- and they have found the same pattern of similarity between synchronous or adjacent segments of data displayed as histograms, implying that the source of the structure is informational. The following email correspondence and the figures tell the story.


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://psiland.free.fr/conf.html#BEMSSE


October 20-22, 2000 : 5th Biennial European Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration.


p)'i4q4

Hi all,

Perpetual motion... yes... I remember I once saw a thermodynamical proof saying it could not be possible. This involved proving that no device could ever deliver work to e.g. a rotating axis, without giving of heat in some way (this would violate the entropy postulates in themodynamics).

I think that's also pretty much the reason why every perpetuum mobile fails: friction. These don't necessary have to be air molecules, but you also have to consider collisions between moving parts in your machine and these always generates heat. Heat equals a loss of energy and hence no perpetuum movemement.

Krusher mentioned using electromagnetic radiation for energy retrievals (as in solar power). Well yes, if you (ab)use the photoelectric effect in some way, you might be able to free some electrons for an electric current, but then you're a bit limited in wavelengths (since this does not work for all kinds of radiation).

For other methods in general, you have to wonder: whatever you do, you always need energy to do it. Whereever you get this energy, if even the slighest bit is lost somewhere your perpetuum mobile is a goner. Magnetic fields also pose problems since accelerated electrons (which you can find if you have some piece of metal in an electric field) tend to give off radiation, once again losing energy in doing so.

However, I was thinking more in the line of Krusher's idea: a metal/superconductor rotating in a magnetic field with some trick could perhaps be a perpettuum mobile, but then no physical contacts between parts are allowed (since this would give of heat) and that kinda makes the idea of perpetuum motion irrelevant...

But then again, a load of physical laws are still to be written, so who knows what we might come up with next week :).

Bye!

Crisp


------------------
"The best thing you can become in life is yourself" -- M. Eyskens.

I know these facts. In 1908 the first over unity device was created and functioned. It was patented and drew the attention of many wealthy Oilmen of that time. It was purchased, lock, stock, key and patent from the Inventor who was suddenly VERY wealthy for the time. The 'Oilmen' took the device to every major University of the day and especially those which relied on the contributions of the 'Oilmen, in other words, MOST of them.' After displaying the new technology to the professors fo the time, they stated very mater of factly, "You shall never teach such technology for there is no major profit. You will, instead, teach all there is to know about the consumption of oil. There is profit in oil, the Oilmen, of this country, will profit from oil and you will profit from our good fortune." Of course they agreed and the PHDs of today have never heard of Overunity as anything more than a joke. That day, that decision, in 1908, is about to be revoked. California is the state that will be the first to prove overunity. The equation will be CoP>I. Our device will start with 12 volts DC and output over 200 HP. That is everything I can tell you, safely.

Nice story, MagAirMan, but it's a myth. Overunity devices are impossible. They violate one of the most fundamental laws of physics - conservation of energy.

Exactly. Also, the idea that a large number of scientists were bullied into silence is ridiculous. Some might be, but most would risk anything to publish such a staggering scientific break-through. The idea is like claiming that a bunch of reporters could be shown info of Michelle Obamas lover and be kept silent about it.

Magnetic devices are often seen as promising because fewer people really understand the mechanics of magnetism. Unlike most purely mechanic devices, the functioning of a magnetic device cannot be resolved into a row of steady states, but many people try to do just that, and are led to believe that a given device will work, because they fail to realize the effect of induction.

Hans

I know these facts. In 1908 the first over unity device was created and functioned. It was patented and drew the attention of many wealthy Oilmen of that time.
So what is the patent number? Give us the patent number, and then we can all look it up the plans and find out exactly how this amazing machine works.

Go ahead, I'll wait...

Exactly. Also, the idea that a large number of scientists were bullied into silence is ridiculous. Some might be, but most would risk anything to publish such a staggering scientific break-through. The idea is like claiming that a bunch of reporters could be shown info of Michelle Obamas lover and be kept silent about it.
That's the main thing that most people with nutty conspiracies theories about science fail to understand. Pretty much every scientist wants to be the guy who publishes something new that turns science on its head, because that's what gets you fame and fortune (in the science world, anyway). The idea that a scientist who worked for a university would refuse to publish something amazing simply because it would piss off a company is laughable.

the idea of a catalyst in chemistry seems to suggest at least a unity conversion.
maybe the idea doesn't apply here.

the idea of a catalyst in chemistry seems to suggest at least a unity conversion.
maybe the idea doesn't apply here.
Catalysts only lower activation energy, they don't change the overall energy released or absorbed in a reaction.

Our device will start with 12 volts DC and output over 200 HP.Big deal. This is not at all remarkable.

There are a million ways to generate 200HP using less than 12 volts. Here are just a few spurious ones:
- a giant weight, suspended by a cable, attached to a generator
- a stick of dynamite with appropriate energy conversion devices
- a battery with appropriate energy conversion devices
- a magnet with appropriate energy conversion devices

See, these are all systems that, with a small initial input, can do a lot of work. But they all have some method for storing the energy and all eventually reach equilibirum, after which they will do no further work without being reset. They cannot continuously output energy.

Yours will be far less obvious in its potential energy storage. But it will be there.

I will bet a dollar - No FIVE dollars - that your device starts with some form of potential energy and outputs its 200HP, but cannot do it continually. It will need to be reset somehow.

Is the anyway radiowaves could be converted to electricity because there is always radiowaves all around us from the universe and stuff?

I believe the device you are interested in is called a rectenna...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectenna

Although rectennas are mostly of interest in microwave reception, crystal radios have long been a simple device that can receive radio and even replicate the sound made on AM radio frequencies through an earpiece, all with no external power other then the radio wave itself! Unfortunately, you need to be very, very close to the AM broadcast tower of your choice to really have one of these things make audible sound in a earpiece, since with the omnidirectional broadcast of a radio signal from a radio station, it gets weak very quickly as you move away from the station. This kinda highlights how ineffective energy transmission via radio is.

HOWEVER, if instead of omnidirectional you were to use a directional radio source, you could send a good bit of power, made even more effective if you use microwave instead, which is really just the shorter-wavelength cousin of radio waves. This is why microwave transmission is often mentioned in ideas about putting solar arrays in space, microwave transmission would let these arrays beam power to earth with about 80% efficiency.

Rectennas are designed as a grid-like structure, where the grid spacing is determined by the wavelength of the radio wave in question. Microwave is convenient because wavelengths of 10 cm can be collected by a hand-manufactured rectenna, composed of just wires, metal poles, and some properly-placed diodes. If you wanted to make things interesting, you could theoretically produce a rectenna with nanotechnology that could collect nano-meter-scale wavelengths, which would include the wavelengths belonging to visible light! By this method (which we're not really ready to do yet with current nanotech from what I understand), you could make a light-collecting solar panel that gets, who knows, 80% efficiency? This compared to the current 15% or so (right?) and you have the god of all solar panels! Actually, the wiki article mentions this, cool...

If nobody mind's i'm gonna be an asshole and not look up all the references I did a few years back to learn all this, but if you want, just ask, I can probably find something again.:D

It is possible to have micro-fluctuations in entropy due to the random nature of the quantum world. The probability that this happens is defined by Fluctuation Theorem, as developed by Dr. Denis Evans of Australia. He's got experiments proving that this happens. However, in the long run entropy does seem to always increase.

The earth is essentially a giant mass of potential heat energy. In another 50 billion years the liquid core will have cooled and the moon too far away to influence the tides. Our only source of energy will be the sun, and it will have blown up in a supernova before this.

The reason the earth's heat is potential is because of black body radiation. It is the only mode of radiation that can transfer energy through vacuum, and it is constantly draining the earth's internal energy.

However, the internal energy is very rarely mentioned and utilized. We are very concerned with solar power because it seems more immediate, and because the sun was the giver of life since the dawn of mankind.

It is important to remember that the principle behind the sun's radiation is the same one behind earth's radiation - planck's black body laws. The earth is glowing just like a star.

However, the earth seems not to glow so much with its own energy as it does by re-radiating the sun's energy. Without the sun the earth's outer temperatures would drop drastically. Just how much, we do not know. But it is true that even by converting the earth's thermal radiation we would be actually indirectly harnessing sunlight.

Every 24 hour cycle, the earth's surface gets saturated with 'thermal potential' energy. During the night it radiates back into space. Because the earth is in thermal equilibrium with the sun, it actually radiates just as much energy as it receives.

The atmosphere acts as a giant battery for thermal energy, and by taking energy from the atmosphere one can get nearly limitless amounts of work. Any inefficiency is simply expelled as heat, which can then be re used, over and over and over again.

I like the idea of using the earths own thermal radiation as an energy source, but how would you actually do that? Have you ever taken thermodynamics classes? Well I won't tell you all the specifics of why it is unconceivable to do such a thing, but look up "power cycles" or "rankine cycle" on google it might help.

The idea is to establish a macroscopic temperature difference, so the rankine cycle is still applicable. One would take all the microscopic temperature differences and pool them to create a macroscopic one.

Here is a thought- can one concentrate sunlight to a temperature hotter than the sun? This would mean that energy is flowing from cold to hot.

The answer is yes. We produce temperatures hotter than the sun in fusion experiments (much, much hotter than the surface of the sun). We could power these experiments with solar panels. So, we can draw energy from a colder source (the sun) and put it in a warmer source (the fusion experiment).

DRZion, you seem obsessed with the energy equivalent of the "free lunch" - in two other threads I explained why you cannot get energy from the Earth's thermal radiation, in mechanistic detail, as I knew you would not accept that conclusion from the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (James R had already tried that way and you rejected it.)

Here is the best conceptual attempt to do what you are trying to do in this thread with exploitation of the micro fluxations. I mentioned it, Maxwell's Demon, to you before. Unlike your feeble, ill-informed efforts, it is hard to destroy Maxwell's Demon, but has been done several times. (That is as should be as Maxwell knew a lot about thermodynamics.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Maxwell%27s_demon.svg/310px-Maxwell%27s_demon.svg.png

Read more at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

Contents [hide]
1 Maxwell's thought experiment
2 Criticism and development
3 Applications
4 Experimental work based on Maxwell's Demon
5 Adams and the demon as historical metaphor
6 Maxwell's demon in popular culture
7 See also
8 Notes
9 References
10 Further reading

Perhaps you will stop with your nonsense when you understand many much better informed than you more than 100 years ago realized it is not possible to get energy from a thermal source at temperature T unless you have a secondary place at temperature t such the T > t. Even then, you can only get, in theory, {1- (t/T)} of the energy converted in higher quality energy and at least (t/T) fraction of the thermal energy taken remains thermal at the colder temperature t. (Is less useful).


... by taking energy from the atmosphere one can get nearly limitless amounts of work. Any inefficiency is simply expelled as heat, which can then be re used, over and over and over again.It is really time for you to stop posting this nonsense. Do not again start a new thread of it.

There have been recent developments in thermodynamics that suggest that entropy is reversible for short periods of time. Maxwell did not know about these.

I am not trying to get free lunch, and if I am, I plan to face the consequences. I am not saying the heat death of the universe can be prevented. The second law holds. Entropy is created.

What about my example above? Energy is traveling from cold to hot.

Your example above is utter rubbish. We have two venues for posting such nonsense: here (http://www.sciforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=27) and here (http://www.sciforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=92). Please stop posting it in the science forums.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV7CO8No-CE

If this is a fake, its a damn good one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV7CO8No-CE

If this is a fake, its a damn good one.
It can't be anything other than a fake. That rattling noise you hear? Thats energy being dissipated from the mechanisms. That energyhas to come from somewhere, and its not coming from the magnets forcing the central wheel round and round in a perpetual motion machine. Note the non-existent lighting, and the opaque central wheel, and indeed as someone suggested in the comments, the motor is probably under the table.

I've seen the magnetic-shielding motor before. Supposedly it has been proven not to work, but it took advanced calculus to prove why it doesn't work. :\
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm

At least mine doesn't try to break the 1st law and create energy out of nothing.

I heard an excellent idea for a perpetual motion machine the other day. You know how a piece of toast with jam on it always lands on the carpet honey-side-down, while cats, when dropped, always land on their feet? Tie a piece of honeyed toast to a cat's back, honey-side-up, and drop the cat. The cat and the toast start spinning in midair, and there you are--perpetual motion...:D

I heard an excellent idea for a perpetual motion machine the other day. You know how a piece of toast with jam on it always lands on the carpet honey-side-down, while cats, when dropped, always land on their feet? Tie a piece of honeyed toast to a cat's back, honey-side-up, and drop the cat. The cat and the toast start spinning in midair, and there you are--perpetual motion...:DBetter idea than some posted here. :D However, the combo will still hit the floor, so you need to modify plan: Throw combo out of the shuttle so it can be in free fall nearly forever.

NASA is interested in orientation devices - they can see if the cat's orientation ability depends on the cat being alive. (I think cat will die, but may not explode in the vacuum. Lets keep the plan secret - I don't think the SPCA likes cat experiments.)

Well, I for one do not believe the cat will spin for ever. Sooner or later the cat will be burnt, much like the toast on it's back, by an expanding sun. In a real universe, friction is your ally.

Well, I for one do not believe the cat will spin for ever. Sooner or later the cat will be burnt, much like the toast on it's back, by an expanding sun. In a real universe, friction is your ally.

But wouldn't the cat move away from the sun as the sun loses mass? It might only get singed instead of burned up completely...:cool:

But wouldn't the cat move away from the sun as the sun loses mass? It might only get singed instead of burned up completely...:cool:Good point and don't forget cats have 9 lives. (Even in this one universe. If we use Schrödinger’s cat - - think of the non dead quantum cats in all those other universes!)

I always knew quantum physics would come in useful some day...:D

ha a cat and honey sounds uhmmm nice...
to create an over unity machine one must first create an under unity machine so that the over unity machine doesn't violate conservation laws.

Gotta create the head of the dog as well as the tail so to speak other wise you aint got no dog chasing it's tail.
Maybe we should use a cat and honey as an example instead!:cool:

Dear All...

I think myself that "Perpetual Motion" devices or "Over-unity" devices does exist.The basic question is : only WE inventors ... or the Physicist Community wants to solve the technical issues as well. Our World and Life is rely on the Theories decades or 100 years old already. It makes not sense that nothing has been changed since that time.

As I know myself we basically have a PM or OU system in use already... It´s known as Nuclear Power...there X amount of energy needed to enable Chemical reaction (fusion) which release few X more energy than the energy was needed to pursue the Reaction...the process is not self sustaining (fuel and energy is needed)...but anyway the final result is the same...

"more energy OUT than we need to put IN..."

Therefore I think myself the success of new and innovative technologies basically rely on the Scientific community and their willing to support the development of the same...

Maybe I have an IDEA as well how to ... and IT looks that IT shall be classified as Renewable based tech. ...

I think myself that "Perpetual Motion" devices or "Over-unity" devices does exist
They don't.


As I know myself we basically have a PM or OU system in use already... It´s known as Nuclear Power...there X amount of energy needed to enable Chemical reaction (fusion) which release few X more energy than the energy was needed to pursue the Reaction...the process is not self sustaining (fuel and energy is needed)...but anyway the final result is the same...
No they aren't.
They don't use chemical reactions and there's definitely not more out than in.
And since nuclear powerplants don't run forever on the same source (they need "topping up") they also aren't perpetual motion.

Dear All...

I think myself that "Perpetual Motion" devices or "Over-unity" devices does exist.The basic question is : only WE inventors ... or the Physicist Community wants to solve the technical issues as well. Our World and Life is rely on the Theories decades or 100 years old already. It makes not sense that nothing has been changed since that time.

As I know myself we basically have a PM or OU system in use already... It´s known as Nuclear Power...there X amount of energy needed to enable Chemical reaction (fusion) which release few X more energy than the energy was needed to pursue the Reaction...the process is not self sustaining (fuel and energy is needed)...but anyway the final result is the same...

"more energy OUT than we need to put IN..."

Therefore I think myself the success of new and innovative technologies basically rely on the Scientific community and their willing to support the development of the same...

Maybe I have an IDEA as well how to ... and IT looks that IT shall be classified as Renewable based tech. ...

I have an idea as well, but my idea does not entail creating energy. This would be a true perpetual motion machine, one that can run forever. Mine merely relies on a pool of heat, from which a temperature difference can be created. Of course, the universe is expanding, and the energy remains constant (as far as we know). So, energy is becoming very dissipated, and at some point even my perpetual motion machine will not be able to utilize it.

I agree however that we too often rely on laws created 100 years ago. These laws are ingrained into our thoughts and are easily recalled by those who oppose revolutionary ideas..

For a good puzzle (as why it is NOT and PM or OU device) see blue text at:

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2326306&postcount=32

... at some point even my perpetual motion machine will not be able to utilize it. ...You will not need to wait long if your only resource is "a pool of heat" as it will not even start to work.*

If you have two "pools of heat" the hotter with temperture T and the colder with temperture t, then you can transfer all the thermal energy, E, in the hot pool to the cold pool and not get more work than W output where:

W = E {(T-t)/T}

and even that requires that the temperature of the "colder pool" does not increase. I.e. it is an infinite mass.

-----------------
*I think I have already told you to read about "Maxwell's Demond" - if not do so.

For a good puzzle (as why it is NOT and PM or OU device) see blue text at:

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2326306&postcount=32

Ha! Fountain of eternity. I like it.

This is a very good idea.. I've thought about something sort of similar to this and I still haven't figured out where the energy comes from.

In a different, but perhaps related idea, I've thought about a tall chamber with liquid at the bottom which would evaporate and condense at the top. Towards the top of the chamber, you have static hydrophilic condensers [and the physics is tricky here, but for sure, water should at least settle onto the condensers, even if it does not drip down]. So, there is perpetual motion [or at least potential energy is created]. Where does this potential energy come from? Assume there is no sunlight.

Going back to your idea-
It certainly doesn't harness heat. It seems that it drives purely on gravitational energy.. but that would mean you are creating energy. :confused:

IF it does work, I cannot see how energy is not being outright created. I will have to give it some thought overnight.


About magnetic bearings, you cannot make a static magnetic bearing [trust me :o]. This is Earnshaw's Theorem, and it states that you cannot levitate any collection of point charges using a static magnetic field. There are pseudo-magnetic bearings that use mechanical means to confine the magnets, but the lift is provided using magnetic force.

ha a cat and honey sounds uhmmm nice...
to create an over unity machine one must first create an under unity machine so that the over unity machine doesn't violate conservation laws.

Gotta create the head of the dog as well as the tail so to speak other wise you aint got no dog chasing it's tail.
Maybe we should use a cat and honey as an example instead!:cool:

all machines are under unity

For a good puzzle (as why it is NOT and PM or OU device) see blue text at:

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2326306&postcount=32

Okay, I got it. The volume of the water never changes, and the extra gravitational potential of the water in the tube is perfectly canceled out by a very slightly lowering sea level. No energy is created.

However, this is a perpetual motion machine, one that will last until the ocean freezes or boils. Or, until we filter all the salt from the oceans.


You will not need to wait long if your only resource is "a pool of heat" as it will not even start to work.*

If you have two "pools of heat" the hotter with temperture T and the colder with temperture t, then you can transfer all the thermal energy, E, in the hot pool to the cold pool and not get more work than W output where:

W = E {(T-t)/T}



This is only one of the equations for work. There are others that rely on pressure, sunlight, wind, etc to turn a motor.


all machines are under unity

What about a perfect carnot engine? 100% efficient and 100% reversible.

Okay, I got it. The volume of the water never changes, and the extra gravitational potential of the water in the tube is perfectly canceled out by a very slightly lowering sea level. No energy is created.

What about a perfect carnot engine? 100% efficient and 100% reversible.No, neither of these is correct.

Consider the steady state with water flowing over the top of the floating tube, making power via the turbine. In this steady state the level of the sea is not falling, but is steady / constant also. Thus, you are getting energy output with no decrease in the gravitational potential of the sea.

The carnott engine is reversible but not 100% efficient. The efficiency is (T-t)/T where T is the absolute temperature of the heat source and t is that of the colder heat sink.

...About magnetic bearings, you cannot make a static magnetic bearing [trust me :o]. This is Earnshaw's Theorem, and it states that you cannot levitate any collection of point charges using a static magnetic field. There are pseudo-magnetic bearings that use mechanical means to confine the magnets, but the lift is provided using magnetic force.
“… It is possible to levitate a rotating object with fixed magnets. The levitron is a commercial toy which exploits the effect. The spinning top can levitate delicately above a base with a careful arrangement of magnets so long as its rotation speed and height remains within certain limits. This solution is particularly clever because it only uses permanent magnets. Ceramic materials are used to prevent induced currents which would dissipate the rotational energy. …”
From: http://www.hfml.ru.nl/levitation-possible.html
The toy Levitron = http://www.hfml.ru.nl/pics/levitron.jpg is not a violation of Earnshaw's Theorem as the magnets are spinning, not static.
When the magnetically levitated storage system has zero energy and to get it strated spinning, some conventional ball (or roller) bearing must be used.

Two common examples of dynamic stabalization against gravity of statically unstable conditions are an inverted broom on your finger tip or a Chinese lady with a spinning plate on top of a stick.

http://media.economist.com/images/20090718/2909AS1.jpg

Each lady has 10 spinning plates in the air and there are at least seven ladies (only see some of the plates of the right and left most ladies). That is at least 70 plates simultaneously spinning on top of long sticks! The Chinese are amazing people with a long (more than ten times longer than the US) high level culture

“… It is possible to levitate a rotating object with fixed magnets. The levitron is a commercial toy which exploits the effect. The spinning top can levitate delicately above a base with a careful arrangement of magnets so long as its rotation speed and height remains within certain limits. This solution is particularly clever because it only uses permanent magnets. Ceramic materials are used to prevent induced currents which would dissipate the rotational energy. …”
From: http://www.hfml.ru.nl/levitation-possible.html
The toy Levitron = is not a violation of Earnshaw's Theorem as the magnets are spinning, not static.
When the magnetically levitated storage system has zero energy and to get it strated spinning, some conventional ball (or roller) bearing must be used.

Yes, a very good point. Using the proper engineering, it may be possible to make a bearing on this principle.

There is a so called 'saddle point' in the force between two magnets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_point
The levitron spins the saddle point and thus creates a permenant local minimum.


No, neither of these is correct.

Consider the steady state with water flowing over the top of the floating tube, making power via the turbine. In this steady state the level of the sea is not falling, but is steady / constant also. Thus, you are getting energy output with no decrease in the gravitational potential of the sea.

Yes, this machine is driven by gravitation at the expense of heat. This machine harnesses pure heat without the need for temperature differences. It seems someone has beaten me to my perpetual motion machine.

Gravitation is not the source of energy, it is merely the driving force. There is no need for any temperature difference.


The carnott engine is reversible but not 100% efficient. The efficiency is (T-t)/T where T is the absolute temperature of the heat source and t is that of the colder heat sink.

In the above example, is there a temperature difference? No. Is gravitational potential constant? Yes. Is this 100% efficient? I would say so.

Epic.


As a disclaimer, I will admit that it is only the illusion of perpetual motion. Sooner or later, the system will either freeze due to heat death of the universe, or boil due to an expanding sun.

... This machine harnesses pure heat without the need for temperature differences. It seems someone has beaten me to my perpetual motion machine.

Gravitation is not the source of energy, it is merely the driving force. There is no need for any temperature difference.No that is not the correct answer either. If it were, it would work in a lake too. (that is hint.)

... In the above example, {the fresh water fountant in the sea, I assume you speak of} is there a temperature difference? No. Is gravitational potential constant? Yes. Is this 100% efficient? I would say so. Epic. Fountain can work in isothermal water, but probably is not as the deep ocean water is cold ~4 C. Thus if you want after this cold drinking water has turned the turbine generator it can be the heat sink for a low efficiency Ocean Thermal Power system too! (They are all low efficiency as the available temperature difference bwteen surface and deep water is small, 30C at best. So if surface were 300K the efficiency would be (300 - 270)/300 = 0.1 or 10% in but is nowhere on Earth's oceans is it that high.

I have not thought much about the efficiency - but it is extremely low as you will see when you understand why it works.

BTW look at post 44 again - I have added an amazing second photo why you were posting.

No that is not the correct answer either. If it were, it would work in a lake too. (that is hint.)
Fountain can work in isothermal water, but probably is not as the deep ocean water is cold ~4 C. Thus if you want after this cold drinking water has turned the turbine generator it can be the heat sink for a low efficiency Ocean Thermal Power system too! (They are all low efficiency as the available temperature difference bwteen surface and deep water is small, 30C at best. So if surface were 300K the efficiency would be (300 - 270)/300 = 0.1 or 10% in but is nowhere on Earth's oceans is it that high.

I have not thought much about the efficiency - but it is extremely low as you will see when you understand why it works.

Are you sure this would work? It seems that there must be a considerable pressure difference to drive reverse osmosis. Because fresh water is lighter than salt water, the pressure at the bottom of the osmotic tube is lowered. This lowered pressure continues the osmotic process, while freshwater escapes out the top of the tube, where it can drive a turbine. Is this correct???

The same would happen in living cells, but they are closed. So, instead of letting water out they burst. In this situation, the fresh water escapes out the top. This is the basic principle behind the fresh/saltwater fountain. However, the thermodynamics and energetics of it are still tricking me..

The point is- potential energy never changes for the ocean water. You said this yourself, and I can confirm it. BUT, work is still done? This would mean energy is created.
As work is being done, the ocean would have to cool to offset the energy consumed through work. Potential energy never changes, but work goes on forever? This can't be right. Perhaps the physics of this fountain are more subtle than you first thought.

Are you sure this would work? It seems that there must be a considerable pressure difference to drive reverse osmosis....yes it will work if the tube is long enough (assuming the ocean is deep enough). This observation of yours can be your second hint - think long and hard about that and how it must change.

For late comers who also want to try to solve a good puzzle (as why sea water fountain is NOT and PM or OU device) see blue text at:

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2326306&postcount=32

It does seem like it should. However if it does, it is definitely PM


As a disclaimer, I will admit that it is only the illusion of perpetual motion. Sooner or later, the system will either freeze due to heat death of the universe, or boil due to an expanding sun.

and maybe OU. . . but that's ridiculous.

The water will keep rising in the tube until pressure at the membrane is at equilibrium from both sides. Since fresh water is less dense, the fresh water column will have to be taller than the salt water column at equilibrium. If the tube is cut so that equilibrium cannot be achieved, water will overflow and continue flowing towards the unreachable equilibrium.

For this to not be OU the ocean water has to somehow get cooled. But, I have no idea how or where. This cooling must somehow be related to pressure (or height in other words).

You can probably make this machine much more efficient using something other than seawater. . .

Can we talk about the thermodynamics of it now????

...The water will keep rising in the tube until pressure at the membrane is at equilibrium from both sides. Since fresh water is less dense, the fresh water column will have to be taller than the salt water column at equilibrium. If the tube is cut so that equilibrium cannot be achieved, water will overflow and continue flowing towards the unreachable equilibrium.That is a nice concise explanation of how it works. (Better than mine!)


...For this to not be OU the ocean water has to somehow get cooled. But, I have no idea how or where.No, the entire ocean can stay with exactly the temperature and distribution of temperature it has at the start. - Let's assume the tube walls are a good thermal conductor and with the very slow osmotic flow the water inside the tube at any depth is at the same temperature as the water outside. Or assume the entire ocean is at 70F and always remains at 70F. (Not true but if it were the fresh water still overflows the top, driving the turbine as falls back to sea level.)


...Can we talk about the thermodynamics of it now????Lets give some time for others to figure out why it is neither PM nor OU. (The answer is not that sun dies and oceans freeze - it is more fundamental than that.) Think some more about my second hint especially.

That is a nice concise explanation of how it works. (Better than mine!)

Thank you.


No, the entire ocean can stay with exactly the temperature and distribution of temperature it has at the start. - Let's assume the tube walls are a good thermal conductor and with the very slow osmotic flow the water inside the tube at any depth is at the same temperature as the water outside. Or assume the entire ocean is at 70F and always remains at 70F. (Not true but if it were the fresh water still overflows the top, driving the turbine as falls back to sea level.)


Then what you are proposing either is OU, or it does not work. Follow the logic.

1. Temperature remains the same (you say). This means that thermal energy is constant.
2. You are driving a turbine and thus doing work. This creates heat energy.
3. This heat is over unity. It comes from no where.

Surely, this isn't what you mean.


So, the water has to cool if this isn't to break any laws of thermodynamics. Where does this water cool? And, better yet, how is the heat transformed into gravitational potential energy?

The only idea I have is this -
When you open a scuba diving pressure tank, gas escapes. When this gas escapes it expands, and for some reason it is cold even though the tank is at room temperature. I think this is due to the ideal gas law.

So, I think that as the water passes through the membrane it expands (it must, that is how density is lowered). Due to this expansion it cools just like the gas escaping from the scuba tank. This colder water of course quickly equalizes with the surroundings. Nevertheless the ocean is cooled in proportion to the change in pressure, and it is the change in pressure that elevates the water column. The pressure is related to height of the tube, and overall it is the isentropic expansion of fresh water that produces the potential energy. The potential energy is then released as the water falls back into the ocean. The kinetic energy of the falling water is dissipated as heat back in the ocean, or is used to drive a turbine to produce work.

Remember, if there is no pressure difference at the membrane the system is at equilibrium. In this case no work can be done and there is no cooling.



PS I realize it is kind of silly to think that a liquid will cool upon expansion. Or is it?? Not at all. If energy remains constant and a liquid expands, it must cool down.

It gets slowed to a stop by the turbine (didn't really pay much attention to the question to be honest).

It gets slowed to a stop by the turbine (didn't really pay much attention to the question to be honest).

The water gets slowed down by the turbine only because it is doing work. This doesn't change sea levels and the machine can continue running.
The membrane is doing work too. The two cancel out. It works. If there would be no turbine, all the energy would be put back into the ocean as kinetic energy. With the turbine, some of the heat is lost as work and that is how the ocean cools.


To be concise and rational-

A pipe filled with freshwater, submerged into the sea, will have a growing pressure differential with its outsides.
At one point this pressure will exceed the pressure required for reverse osmosis.
Below this depth, an osmotic membrane should continuosly suck in water and pour it out the top.

Its really hard to beat.


As the water goes through the membrane, it will expand. And I do think it will in fact expand, and not just
lose density.

"Changes in hydrogen bond strength for water are interpreted in terms of electron delocalization involving
cations, anions, and water. A perturbation molecular orbital (PMO) model gives a good account of the
limiting slope of apparent water density. Model values for solution densities at low concentrations compare
favorably with experimental results. Changes in the structural equilibrium for liquid water caused by the
presence of ions will be reflected in changes in the free energy of solution for even the lowest concentration
of ions."
This is from a paper about salt water.

The energetics work out I assume. Energy is not created, it is only transformed. This is something I refer to
as 'Ambient Heat Conversion'. It seems to violate the second law, but I can assure you it does not. I have
done A LOT of thinking about it over the past 2 years. It is essentially a perfect carnot engine. Reversible,
100% efficient. No entropy done in the cycle (however, plenty of potential for entropy outside the cycle).
No entropy done in the cycle means it will work in a closed system without violating any laws.

To DRZion:

I have tried to get you thinking more productively with a couple of hints. Your on the wrong track with thermodyanic thermal considerations although it is probably true that the H20 from great depth does expand and thus does work and thus does cool as it moves to the surface. However the total heat content of the ocean does not change as when it falls on top of all the other water in the ocean that water is compressed and heated in exact compensation. Let me try to prove this to you or at least make it very plausible:

Image a square vertical tube with 1 cm^2 cross section a little more than 2.6m tall filled with 260 gm of water. I conceptually (only) divide it into 2600 thin horizontal layers, each 1mm tall, with names, A1 thru A100, B1 thru B100 …Z1 thru Z100, which is the bottom layer. There is also a top layer of air / water vapor called A0, which has the same mass as all the other layers. (The top of the tube is rigidly closed so that the actual air pressure does enter into our discussion.) Thus on top of layer z100, there are 2600 layers with total weight of 260 gm.

Now tiny valves exist at bottom of layer Z100 and at the top of layer A0 which allow me to first take “one layer’s worth” or 0.1gm of water from Z100 and then add it back into the air layer A0 via a syringe. When I take water, I let the 260gm/ cm^2 pressure on top of layer Z100 push the plunger of the syringe – I.e. that water, like the water passing thru the osmotic membrane, does work, expands and cools as still within the syringe, it comes to the zero pressure at the top of layer A0.

Until that “syringe water” has been injected to become the new layer A1, the air layer, A0 essentially doubles it volume and also cools. “Essentially” as the bottom layer has only 2599.9gm/cm^2 pressure on it and also ever so slightly expands also. Note also that each of the layers remaining in the tube falls essentially 1mm So the total work done (falling water column and push on the syringe) is just what is needed to lift the syringe water back to the top and inject it. I.e. as should be obvious when the original conditions are restored, so is the gravitational potential. New layer A1 is cooler as you noted but you failed to note (in the ocean case) that all the other layers have been compressed (For example, the new A2 was the old A1.) – are under 0.1gm/cm^2 more pressure than they had before 0.1gm of “syringe water" was removed. This compression both heats them and the colder new A1 is slightly more dense than the original A1 so it has fallen in the gravity field just enough to compensate for the “essentially” I mentioned earlier. When thermal conduction within the tube has restored all layers to the same temperature it is the originally temperature and everything is exactly as it was.

Summary:
No net work has been done and no temperature change has occurred. The conditions are exactly restored. The ocean case however does do net work and everything is not just as it was. (That change you need to think about - what is different? It was your hint 2 or 3, recall?)

In the ocean case, the wind and ocean currents due to the non-uniform solar heating (gulf stream etc.) and some surprisingly due to fish and jelly fish swimming do this restoration of prior thermal conditions. They partially (or totally?) undo the the change the system is making.

Now for your new (third?) hint: This work producing system is NOT some thermal engine. Stop trying to understand it that way. It is much more like a system getting energy from coal to do work. Where did the coal get its energy from? This system is using the same type of stored energy as the coal energy system is. It would eventually stop as it is making that energy less available to itself*, much like burning coal is making stored energy less available. It would eventually stop, except for the sun, the wind and the swimming fish. I.e. it is not a PM machine. Perhaps with this hint you will understand to that it is very far from an OU device also. – It has terrible efficiency as the sun, wind and swimming fish do exist!

-------------------
*But ironically it is making the energy MORE available to longer tubes and other systems which can tap into this same stored energy, if it were not for those swimming fish and wind.

Summary:
No net work has been done and no temperature change has occurred. The conditions are exactly restored. The ocean case however does do net work and everything is not just as it was. (That change you need to think about - what is different?

Yup, in the ocean the water is injected above the A0 layer. This potential energy has to come from somewhere. It could either be chemical, mechanical, or gravitational potential energy. I think it is in fact the stored mechanical energy.


In the ocean case, the wind and ocean currents due to the non-uniform solar heating (gulf stream etc.) and some surprisingly due to fish and jelly fish swimming do this restoration of prior thermal conditions. They partially (or totally?) undo the the change the system is making.

Not totally, because work has been extracted from the system.


It is much more like a system getting energy from coal to do work. Where did the coal get its energy from? This system is using the same type of stored energy as the coal energy system is. It would eventually stop as it is making that energy less available to itself*, much like burning coal is making stored energy less available. It would eventually stop, except for the sun, the wind and the swimming fish. I.e. it is not a PM machine.

Coal got some of its energy from the sun, but it also got some of it's energy from the earth. Its kind of a composite material. What kind of stored energy do you mean? Its certainly not chemical, like coal.



I did some extra investigating-

http://true-random.com/homepage/projects/diffusion_machine/
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/osmosis.htm

... Coal got some of its energy from the sun, but it also got some of it's energy from the earth. Its kind of a composite material. What kind of stored energy do you mean? Its certainly not chemical, like coal.
I did some extra investigating-
http://true-random.com/homepage/projects/diffusion_machine/
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/osmosis.htmYour first ref may be correct but it is not a clear presentation and I only skimmed it. The second is wrong badly wrong as he ignored the density difference between sea and fresh water (after many had pointed that out he said it was only 2.5% (not very important) It will work, but requires a tube much longer than he even dreamed of. He also says 20 atmosphere differential to drive reverse osmosis, Perhaps that is correct so I will use it and fact that column ~30 feet deep of fresh water has one atmosphere at the bottom.

If the top of the tube is tiny amount above the sea surface and filled with fresh water then 30 feet down it out side in the sea the pressure is 1.025Atm. for a pressure difference of 0.025Atm. According to him we need to had a differential of 20Atm. So 30(20/ 0.025) = 24,000 foot tube is required to develop the 20Atm pressure differential needed for reverse osmosis. Roughly 4.5 miles long I don't know if the deepest ocean trenches are that deep or not, but the system is so far from economical it really does not matter.

---------------
I will not have internet access tomorrow and no one else is actively interested so will tell part of the answer now. There is a huge amount of energy stored in strong brine. I.e. it took the sunshine millions of years on the entire ocean to evaporate the volume of the ocean many times over making million os year of rain, which fell on the rocks and carried the various dissolvable minerals to the sea, making it more salty as time past.

As an aside, long before man knew about fusion energy they knew the sun was releasing a lot every year. Where it came from was a problem. One way to estimate how long it had been shining was to measure the salt content of major rivers and their flow to estimate how long rain had been falling to make the current salinity of the oceans. (Much more than the 6000 year of the Bible was the not very popular answer.)

a salt flat (no water now) is a huge store of solar energy - Mankind has yet to lean how to economically use it. Oil is sometimes found in salt domes not full of salt anymore due to ground water flows, I think, If they were filled with salt, instead of oil the stored energy would be greater! It is sort of like nuclear energy - for long time man did not know how to get access to this stored energy. That is the current state of the chemically stored energy in concentrated brine or a salt flat.

If we ignore the continuing action of the sun, especially its indirect action called wind, then as the sea fountain runs the top layers of the ocean become fresh and the bottom more salty (assume no wind or fish mixing.) that is the center of gravity of the ocean is being lowered even thought the level of the ocean is not changing (much). This is where most of the energy would come from, I think, in the no wind or fish case. Likewise in this no mixing case, any given length tube will cease to function as the salt concentration at the bottom increases. The more concentrated is the brine the more the higher the pressure difference required is to get reverse osmosis flow.

In reverse osmosis you are not using the energy stored in the brine, but adding to it. To tap that energy you need to dilute (undo the suns concentration) the brine. I'll quite now but just mention that with string fresh water pan and strong brine pan you can make a salt powered motor. A huge fortunate awaits anyone who can discover how to make a practical, economical salt powered motor. The energy stored in salt of the earth is I am nearly sure at least an order of magnitude than stored in oil, possibly several orders of magnitude greater! We just to not know how to economically tap into it.

Your first ref may be correct but it is not a clear presentation and I only skimmed it. The second is wrong badly wrong as he ignored the density difference between sea and fresh water (after many had pointed that out he said it was only 2.5% (not very important) It will work, but requires a tube much longer than he even dreamed of. He also says 20 atmosphere differential to drive reverse osmosis, Perhaps that is correct so I will use it and fact that column ~30 feet deep of fresh water has one atmosphere at the bottom.

If the top of the tube is tiny amount above the sea surface and filled with fresh water then 30 feet down it out side in the sea the pressure is 1.025Atm. for a pressure difference of 0.025Atm. According to him we need to had a differential of 20Atm. So 30(20/ 0.025) = 24,000 foot tube is required to develop the 20Atm pressure differential needed for reverse osmosis. Roughly 4.5 miles long I don't know if the deepest ocean trenches are that deep or not, but the system is so far from economical it really does not matter.

---------------
I will not have internet access tomorrow and no one else is actively interested so will tell part of the answer now. There is a huge amount of energy stored in strong brine. I.e. it took the sunshine millions of years on the entire ocean to evaporate the volume of the ocean many times over making million os year of rain, which fell on the rocks and carried the various dissolvable minerals to the sea, making it more salty as time past.

As an aside, long before man knew about fusion energy they knew the sun was releasing a lot every year. Where it came from was a problem. One way to estimate how long it had been shining was to measure the salt content of major rivers and their flow to estimate how long rain had been falling to make the current salinity of the oceans. (Much more than the 6000 year of the Bible was the not very popular answer.)

a salt flat (no water now) is a huge store of solar energy - Mankind has yet to lean how to economically use it. Oil is sometimes found in salt domes not full of salt anymore due to ground water flows, I think, If they were filled with salt, instead of oil the stored energy would be greater! It is sort of like nuclear energy - for long time man did not know how to get access to this stored energy. That is the current state of the chemically stored energy in concentrated brine or a salt flat.

If we ignore the continuing action of the sun, especially its indirect action called wind, then as the sea fountain runs the top layers of the ocean become fresh and the bottom more salty (assume no wind or fish mixing.) that is the center of gravity of the ocean is being lowered even thought the level of the ocean is not changing (much). This is where most of the energy would come from, I think, in the no wind or fish case. Likewise in this no mixing case, any given length tube will cease to function as the salt concentration at the bottom increases. The more concentrated is the brine the more the higher the pressure difference required is to get reverse osmosis flow.

In reverse osmosis you are not using the energy stored in the brine, but adding to it. To tap that energy you need to dilute (undo the suns concentration) the brine. I'll quite now but just mention that with string fresh water pan and strong brine pan you can make a salt powered motor. A huge fortunate awaits anyone who can discover how to make a practical, economical salt powered motor. The energy stored in salt of the earth is I am nearly sure at least an order of magnitude than stored in oil, possibly several orders of magnitude greater! We just to not know how to economically tap into it.

:bugeye:

Wow. That is quite the extended and far-reaching analysis. It is true, in a closed system the fresh water would form a layer on top of the salt water, until the salt water was too concentrated to undergo osmosis.
[edit]: not necessarily however, because brine is hygroscopic. Adding water molecules to the system won't necessarily create a layer, rather the water molecules will get drawn into the brine. I still think that such a system might possibly work when it is closed off with no external energy.


The diffusion machine at the bottom of the first link seems to avoid this problem of water layering... It also takes into account the density differences of the gas produced by gravity.
http://true-random.com/homepage/proj...usion_machine/
I have actually tried building a perpetual motion machine something like it this summer :)



For some reason, most people don't like the idea that Kinetic energy can be constant over long periods of time. In our everyday life, we observe that kinetic energy halts to a stop. That is why people oppose perpetual motion machines.
A system with constant energy, what difference is it whether the energy is kinetic, thermal, electric, chemical? Its still energy!
If you look in the sky, there is some kind of perpetual motion out there! The planets keep orbiting the sun, so much kinetic energy that it is hard to imagine.

Yes: "brine is hygroscopic. Adding water molecules to the system won't necessarily create a layer, rather the water molecules will get drawn into the brine." But "drawn into" is not the best way to look at this - tends to be misleading.

In the sea with a fresh water layer on top, there is a difusion gradient. Not many Na+ or Cl- ions going donward as they are far fewer there than in the sea water below. Eventually, if not for the reverse osmotic fountain, diffusion will mix and to make the concetraions NEARLY equal, but the action of gravity will keep the bottom always slightly more salty. BTW, Einstein got his Nobel Prize for something very much like this AND the photo electric effect.

He modeled the vertical distribution of uniform size Brownian motion spheres. After a few years of hard work, some French scientists comnfimed that distribution - Einstein's model assumed that atoms were real - at least half of scientistis had strong doubts that was true but almost all accepted atoms as facts after Einstein's "atoms dependent" model was confirmed.
It was sort of a "tipping point" for the atomic theory.

As H2O has both H are on the same side of the O (105 degree angle between) it is intrinsically an electric dipole. (This makes them hook up so cold water especially is really a mix of nH20 chains and other 3D structures, which are thermally breaking up and reforming. ( n is a temperature dependent set of small integers) When you add an ion these H20 diploes tend to cluster around it so the effective mass of the typically nH2O can be slightly increased. Thus to throw such a cluster, perhaps often only ClHHO- (note I put both HH quasi protons, next to the Cl-) up thru the water /air interface, is harder to do. Hence salt water has an higher boiling point.

Thus once the Cl- is in with lots of nH2O s the idea of "holding" is OK, but there is not much if any "drawing down" of either ion.

In the sea with a fresh water layer on top, there is a difusion gradient. Not many Na+ or Cl- ions going donward as they are far fewer there than in the sea water below. Eventually, if not for the reverse osmotic fountain, diffusion will mix and to make the concetraions NEARLY equal, but the action of gravity will keep the bottom always slightly more salty. BTW, Einstein got his Nobel Prize for something very much like this AND the photo electric effect.

I realized this is necessary in order to keep conservation of energy intact in this scenario that I have mentioned earlier in this thread.


In a different, but perhaps related idea, I've thought about a tall chamber with liquid at the bottom which would evaporate and condense at the top. Towards the top of the chamber, you have static hydrophilic condensers [and the physics is tricky here, but for sure, water should at least settle onto the condensers, even if it does not drip down]. So, there is perpetual motion [or at least potential energy is created]. Where does this potential energy come from? Assume there is no sunlight.


EDIT: It seems that the water would still drip down if you used the setup from the bottom of the second link (http://true-random.com/homepage/projects/diffusion_machine/). Drip drip drip goes the water for ever (...in a closed system).

If the whole chamber is of uniform temperature and pressure, then any water condensing at the top will have gained gravitational potential energy. There is absolutely no source for this energy, and so it seems like it has been created.

However if you assume that there is a pressure difference, the difference in energy can be explained through condensation/evaporation. At lower pressures, less energy is released due to condensation/evaporation. So, a little bit more energy is picked up at the bottom of the chamber than is deposited at the top; this energy difference cancels out the gravitational potential. Energy is not created, it only changes forms.

In a closed system, a box three feet cubed, thermal energy will be constant for ever. No one doubts that. However, kinetic energy cannot be constant? What makes thermal energy different and special?

... If the whole chamber is of uniform temperature and pressure, then any water condensing at the top will have gained gravitational potential energy. There is absolutely no source for this energy, and so it seems like it has been created.No. There are several sources of the energy when there is net flow from the bottom to the top of H2O molecules. One source, which gets the process started, is the energy stored in the salt when the sun evaporated the water from it to make salt crystals. (I am not sure, but suspect that as the salt disolves it too will cool so part of the energy driving the process is the heat of binding being removed from the salt.)

You need to clearly distinguish between the initial conditions when this chemical stored energy is being used and the final steady state conditions when the vertical flow of H2O molecules is zero. Initially the hydroscopic properties of the salt will remove H2O from the moist water vapor at the top. Then the water in the tank at the bottom will evaporate more H2O molecules and cool, so in addition to the chemical binding energy of the salt crystal, thermal energy is being removed at the bottom.

Eventually the colder bottom water will have the rate of H2O molecules leaving it equal to the rate water vapor molecules are entering the water in the bottom tank - I.e. the level of the water in the bottom tank will cease to drop. That was a gravitational energy loss, which also helps drive the system. Likewise, the rate at which H2O molecules are escaping the "grasp" of the salt solution in the tray at the top will equal the rate at which the H2O molecules in the slight less dense (due to gravity) vapor (moist air) at the top are being captured by the salt water solution in the top tray. I.e. eventually at every station from the water surface at bottom to the surface of the salt water in the tray at the top, the net flow of H2O molecules is zero.

All the mass of H2O that was lifted against gravity is a gain of mgh in its potential energy, but the thermal energy in the water (and even the moist air above it) is reduced to achieve part of this gravitational gain. The remaining part comes from the solar energy stored in the dry salt crystal you initially charged the system with.

If after equilibrium is established you were to open the well insulated system and restore the initial conditions for a second run to the steady state, you will need to heat the salt solution with more energy than the gravitation energy it produced in the first cycle to get the dry salt crystals back again. You will also need o re-warm the bottom water etc.

As you should expect - this system requires net input of thermal energy to close the cycle as you are converting thermal energy into gain of gravitational energy, not very efficiently at that.

It is really not differ than burning some wood in a boiler to produce work. The sun supplied the energy to grow the tree. In this case, if you get your salt from a salt deposit, the sun was the source of the energy for the first cycle. You will burn natural gas, or nuclear fuel, to reproduce the starting conditions for the second and subsequent cycles.

Unfortunately, there is no free (energy) lunch. Most of it, including nuclear, came from some sun or gravitational collapse and mankind is helping nature degrade it into heat.

No. There are several sources of the energy when there is net flow from the bottom to the top of H2O molecules. One source, which gets the process started, is the energy stored in the salt when the sun evaporated the water from it to make salt crystals.

Yes, one is the pressure difference that I mentioned. The salt will add some energy to the system, but this is not the point.


Initially the hydroscopic properties of the salt will remove H2O from the moist water vapor at the top. Then the water in the tank at the bottom will evaporate more H2O molecules and cool, so in addition to the chemical binding energy of the salt crystal, thermal energy is being removed at the bottom.

As the salt removes H2O, more water will drip at the bottom. Thermal energy is being removed via evaporation and deposited via condensation. Evaporation/condensation are the same phenomenon but performed backwards.


Eventually the colder bottom water will have the rate of H2O molecules leaving it equal to the rate water vapor molecules are entering the water in the bottom tank - I.e. the level of the water in the bottom tank will cease to drop.

Colder bottom water? A temperature difference? Another perpetual motion machine? :D
Indeed, there will only be a slight drop in the water level before it is replenished at equilibrium.


That was a gravitational energy loss, which also helps drive the system.

There was a net gain in gravitational potential energy of water due to evaporation. Evaporation is caused by heat.


Likewise, the rate at which H2O molecules are escaping the "grasp" of the salt solution in the tray at the top will equal the rate at which the H2O molecules in the slight less dense (due to gravity) vapor (moist air) at the top are being captured by the salt water solution in the top tray. I.e. eventually at every station from the water surface at bottom to the surface of the salt water in the tray at the top, the net flow of H2O molecules is zero.

Yes, there will be equilibrium. However, a part of this equilibrium will be dripping water, IE kinetic energy. Initially, there is only thermal energy; as the system progresses towards equilibrium gravitational potential and kinetic energy increase at the cost of thermal energy.


All the mass of H2O that was lifted against gravity is a gain of mgh in its potential energy, but the thermal energy in the water (and even the moist air above it) is reduced to achieve part of this gravitational gain. The remaining part comes from the solar energy stored in the dry salt crystal you initially charged the system with.

Yes, thermal energy is converted to a different kind of energy, namely gravitational potential.
The salt acts as a catalyst, and I'm not sure if it's energy is in any way transformed.


If after equilibrium is established you were to open the well insulated system and restore the initial conditions for a second run to the steady state, you will need to heat the salt solution with more energy than the gravitation energy it produced in the first cycle to get the dry salt crystals back again. You will also need o re-warm the bottom water etc.

If you open the system, there will still be some kinetic energy stored in the form of dripping water. If you added extra thermal energy and close the system, it may have a higher amount of energy that it did initially.


As you should expect - this system requires net input of thermal energy to close the cycle as you are converting thermal energy into gain of gravitational energy, not very efficiently at that.

No, you do not need to add any thermal energy. There is already thermal energy inside of the system at the beginning. A part of this energy is then converted to gravitational potential and then kinetic energy.


It is really not differ than burning some wood in a boiler to produce work. The sun supplied the energy to grow the tree. In this case, if you get your salt from a salt deposit, the sun was the source of the energy for the first cycle. You will burn natural gas, or nuclear fuel, to reproduce the starting conditions for the second and subsequent cycles.

Incorrect. No energy is required, as no energy is created. Thermal energy is transformed to gravitational potential which is then released in the form of kinetic energy, which then causes friction/waves as the water droplets fall back into the bottom tank, this releases all energy as thermal once again. Due to the cyclic nature of the system, a proportion of the energy will always be kinetic, thus, perpetual motion


Unfortunately, there is no free (energy) lunch. Most of it, including nuclear, came from some sun or gravitational collapse and mankind is helping nature degrade it into heat.

Once again, heat is not any any different than other forms of energy; in the right circumstances heat is converted to kinetic energy, just like in the right circumstances kinetic energy is converted into heat.

Sorry, but I am incredibly zealous about the topic. I have basically spent the last 2 years thinking and researching this stuff, so I know if I'm right.

I am still not sure about the thermodynamics here, but I think that it could be modeled after a perfect carnot cycle. Although the turbine, evaporation and condensation are not 100% efficient, the byproduct is heat. So, you start with heat and you end up with 10% kinetic energy 90% heat, but even then, I reckon that the heat cancels out since it can be re-used.

In a perfect carnot cycle work is reversible and entropy is not created. This would agree with this kind of engine. Any time you turn the engine on you create kinetic energy. After the engine is turned off, the kinetic energy turns back into heat due to friction. So, all in all it is a perfectly reversible process. [and i suppose that no, it is not perfectly reversible, because a spontaneous temperature difference dissipates energy much more quickly than the natural equilibrium state; hence, energy is in some form used up, or at least made un-usable]

I know that in the actual work cycle no entropy is created, however, the work that is being done outside of the cycle could still increase entropy.. but I suppose it could also be used to decrease entropy.

Yes, one is the pressure difference that I mentioned. The salt will add some energy to the system, but this is not the point. Yes it is part of the point. Added energy must be counted to see if there is any net energy produced.

As the salt removes H2O, more water will drip at the bottom. …No, water will not leave the salt, drip out of it. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Either the salt will be attracting water or it will be releasing water, but not both.

Colder bottom water? A temperature difference? Another perpetual motion machine? Indeed, there will only be a slight drop in the water level before it is replenished at equilibrium.Every gram of water evaporated will require 540 calories, If memory serves me correctly. The container is assumed perfectly insulated. Thus the heat of evaporation is taken from the water. In the SW of the US many homes were once cooled by “evaporative coolers.” Once you could even buy a window mounting unit for your car – cheap early version of car air-conditioning.

There was a net gain in gravitational potential energy of water due to evaporation. Yes, initially until the stead states is reached. The energy that caused this was the solar energy stored in the dry salt. As it becomes a salt solution, you are “undoing” some of the stored solar energy – returning the salt to a form before the sun had stored the maximum possible energy in it. I.e. you are decreasing the energy stored in the salt below the max which the sun had stored in it.
Yes, there will be equilibrium. However, a part of this equilibrium will be dripping water, IE kinetic energy. Initially, there is only thermal energy; as the system progresses towards equilibrium gravitational potential and kinetic energy increase at the cost of thermal energy.This so mixed up and wrong I hardly know where to start! Let start with the completely general fact that if any system has “dripping water” it is NOT in equilibrium.

Yes initially there was thermal energy as system was not at absolute zero. – But, unless there is a colder heat sink to dump waste to, none that energy is available to do ANY work or increase high quality energy like lift something in a gravitational field as that increase in gravitational energy could do work at 100% efficiency in principle. We have assumed the system is perfectly insulated so there is no such colder heat sink, but even if there were such a heat sink, we could only convert at most the Carnot fraction of the heat into work or stored gravitational energy in a gravity field.

Initially, there will be an increase in the gravitational energy stored in the H2O molecules absorbed by the salt in the tray at the top. As this system is less efficient than a Carnot cycle, the chemical energy decrease in the salt as it becomes salt solution will be GREATER than the potential energy gained by the water molecules. Also as 540 calories /gram are being supplied to the water part of them need to be added to the water. Water does not without external help just spontaneously cool itself to evaporate. In this case, the “external help” is the salt, which is reducing the density of H2O molecules immediately over the water surface. This reduces the rate at which these vapor molecules are entering and becoming part of the liquid water. It does not change the rate at which H2O molecules are escaping form the liquid water surface, but these “lucky” molecules are the faster than average ones, so the average speed of H2O molecules is dropping – we call that cooling.
Yes, thermal energy is converted to a different kind of energy, namely gravitational potential. The salt acts as a catalyst, and I'm not sure if it's energy is in any way transformed.If you understood any thermo, you would think otherwise, be concerned. The salt is the source of the energy initially driving the system – Do you think it would work without the salt??? Just on the “thermal energy” alone????? Again I tell you that without any colder heat sink you cannot even one erg out of a billion BTU of thermal energy! (I forget but an erg is very small - about what a flea needs to jump, I think.)

It is hard to believe you could concentrate so much bad thermo into so few words! (Perhaps there is a prize for that? :shrug:) The rest of this post of yours is just more of the same nonsense about dripping water and work from heat with no colder heat sink, :eek: so I move to your other post:

Sorry, but I am incredibly zealous about the topic. I have basically spent the last 2 years thinking and researching this stuff, so I know if I'm right.... In a perfect Carnot cycle work is reversible and entropy is not created....You have as discussed above many false ideas and need a teacher to correct them. Here you have all wrong ideas about a Carnot cycle. It is neither "perfect" and is not failing to generate entropy as it runs.

Although the Carnot cycle is not "prefect" it is more efficient than all other cycles. (Not hard to prove this but will not bother. Basic way to prove that is to divide the other cycle into a large number of Carnot cycles with the two adiabats of each tiny Carnot cycle almost touching. I.e. completely fill the other cycle’s VT (or PT) curve with multitude of tiny, narrow, Carnot cycles.)

The efficiency of the Carnot cycle is E = (T -t)/T where t is the absolute temp of the heat sink where the "waste heat", h, is dumped. T is the temp of the heat source. Q = W + h. (Conservation of energy.)

W = Q(T-t)/T and h = Q(t/T)

My thermo is rusty as 40+ years have passed, but as I recal the entropy is related to H/T where H is the quantity of heat and T the absolute temperature that heat is at. Thus the original entropy was Q/T and the final entropy is W/T +Q(t/T) as assuming no friction, the work W, a fraction of the origianl Q, is neither an increase not a decrease in the entropy of that part of the energy. I.e.

The final entropy is just this not changed entropy fraction W/T + h/t = Q{(T-t)/T}/T + Q(t/T)/t = (Q/T){(T-t)/T + 1} =(Q/T){(T - t + T)/T} = (Q/T){(2T - t)/T}
Now the first factor (Q/T) is just the original entropy. Thus, the second factor, {(2T - t)/T}, tells if the entropy has increased of decreased.

As t < T then (2T -t) must be GREATER than T. Then when something great than T is divided by T, the result is greater than unity. Thus the second factor is greater than unity.
I.e. contrary to your assertion, the operation of a Carnot engine INCREASES entropy.

I have shown this mathematically but the idea is simple: Some of the high quality heat available at T has been converted into lower quality heat at t.

As I said earlier, you really need a teacher. You have wasted two years to only become “arrogantly ignorant” about thermodynamics.
I have wasted too much time and effort trying to help you.
I only hope some others have read and learned something from my posts – you surely have not.
You already knew it all – as you have studied for two years! :rolleyes:

You can go back to make energy out of room heat radiation falling on a photo cell - I am thru correcting you.

I sincerely do hope I didn't misunderstand any wikipedia articles.... anyhow, my inventions will prove otherwise. Thank you, BillyT, because you have brought this perpetual motion machine to my mind first. It really is a good model and a good exercise for my concepts.



Feel free to dispute, I can only hope for experimental proof.


No, water will not leave the salt, drip out of it. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Either the salt will be attracting water or it will be releasing water, but not both.

It is not the same salt at the top and bottom, there is a pressure gradient going downwards.


none that energy is available to do ANY work

Yeah, thats what carnot had to say about 200 years ago.


As this system is less efficient than a Carnot cycle, the chemical energy decrease in the salt as it becomes salt solution will be GREATER than the potential energy gained by the water molecules.

And how exactly is this chemical energy lost?? At equilibrium the salt concentration is constant. . .
so I suppose anything above the equilibrium constant is potential energy.
Nevertheless, at equilibrium the salt solution will be hygroscopic. Salt concentration does not decrease at equilibrium because there is dripping/kinetic energy leaving the bottom of the top tank.


Let start with the completely general fact that if any system has “dripping water” it is NOT in equilibrium.

And why not?? If the proportion of kinetic energy to all other energy is constant, I would say this is equilibrium.
How does this not make sense? :shrug:


lower quality heat

THER IS NO QUALITY, ONLY ENERGY!!1! ;)