Electricity from ambient heat

What if we could use another hidden energy "trick" in a engine to make it more efficient.

Consider this paper:

The Infuence of the Equilibrium Dissociation of a Diatomic Gas on Brayton-Cycle Performance
16 January 1962
Prepared by T.A. Jacobs, Aerospace Corporation
and J.R. Lloyd, University of Texas

 

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What makes topics like this confusing to so many people is that they simply do NOT understand the basic principles involved. And by not knowing them, they mistakenly think they've developed something completely new - despite the fact that people have been trying to find a "loophole" in thermodynamics for HUNDREDS of years - and have ALWAYS failed!

 

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Extracting energy from ambient heat is not impossible. You just need to wait until, by chance, all of the molecules end up extremely localized for capture at high pressure. The trick is to be patient enough.

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LOL....I agree.

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This is preposterous! Entropy of a closed system can be reduced through proper engineering and even natural phenomena. A nobel prize winner illustrated this in a book nearly 100 years ago!

 

Nope. Your claims - and people continuing to beat their heads against a wall - are what ARE preposterous.

 

Maxwell's demon?
I think you spend more energy in watching and waiting than you recover.

Neither consistently nor persistently.
Cite your references.

If we could make any heat engine, heat pump, or refrigerator more efficient than the Carnot efficiency, then we could use it to make perfectly efficient heat pumps, refrigerators, and engines, and have free energy forever.

What if we could use a hidden navigation trick to get uphill by going downhill?

What's it say? I don't understand thermodynamics enough to talk intelligently about Brayton cycles.
Is it talking about improving practical efficiency (ie engineering), or theoretical efficiency (science), or both?
How much improvement?
How does a Brayton cycle compare with a Carnot cycle?

 

Well, I forgot the sarcasm tags as this scenario would take longer than the estimated age of the universe for a gas chamber of even moderately small size. I'm not sure you need to expend energy to wait, though. Couldn't you have half of the chamber rigged with a pressure sensor that closed a seal once it reached a threshold?
Edit: I did have a point though, which is I'm not sure we can say that this process is itself "impossible" in the strictest sense of the word. "Ungodly impractical" might be more appropriate. But if pulling energy out of ambient heat is simply a matter of TIMING (regardless of average expected wait times), then an extremely "lucky" person should be able to do it.

Why do you think muscle cars have small front wheels? It's so they ALWAYS drive downhill!

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(<--- does this suffice for a sarcasm tag?)

 

There are solutions for a more efficient engine.
Unfortunately people do not like simple solutions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrbDU_n1jqM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXZuRB4P-x8&feature=related

 

That's Maxwell's demon. How does your pressure sensor work? Does it change the pressure it senses? Can it misfire due to random fluctuations in its own internal state?

Not really "do it" so much as "chance upon it by accident".

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How efficient? Not more efficient than the theoretical limit we're talking about in this thread.

Please generally love simple solutions that work effectively.

 

Improving physical phenomenon can not.
It can improve engine performance that captures this energy.
Currently, the wheel of a car reaches less than 30% of this energy.

Then please read carefully all the thread I indicated.
(the patent)

 

INdeed - I'm not so much aghast about it being impossible, as I was at their reactions :shrug:

 

Don't know, I reckon any regular macro-level PSI sensor would work, wouldn't it? This is really just stream-of-thought here, but it differs from Maxwell's Demon in that the demon uses (divine?) knowledge to continually allow or disallow molecules beyond a barrier, greatly speeding up the process of heat separation. My suggestion is to simply have one or more gas chambers with a PSI sensor in one half of the chamber that trips a spring loaded door once the sensor reaches, say, the pressure associated with 90% of the total gas volume occupying that half. We cannot claim that the system would produce less than the setup requirement because the energy required to set the trap door, the size of the entire gas chamber, and the target pressure may all be arbitrarily set. Also, a macro-level sensor should be basically protected from quantum flux...UNLESS the numbers bear out that quantum flux will cause it to misfire before the gas collects itself to the point of being usable. :huh:

Call it pedantic, but "chance upon it by accident" is still "possible". I could also make the claim that ALL heat engines have an element of chance to them working...it just so happens that the odds are much more in favor of the 2nd law of thermodynamics behaving in the usual, expected manner. At what point of "luck" do we call it an accident if it was the intention?

 

When Maxwell's demon is required to use non-supernatural senses to detect the state of the molecules, it turns out that it can't work. I'm thinking that the same idea will apply to this scenario - sensing the pressure will change the pressure in a not-completely-predictable way.

I was thinking of thermal vibration more than quantum fluctuations, but either way, I'm not able to crunch the numbers to figure it out.

When it can't be consistently repeated.
The same logic we apply to testing any other suggested causation.

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I think few serious-minded people dispute that you can't "force the chub" when it comes to pulling energy from ambient heat. What I'm proposing is something different, though. It's a completely passive process that relies on the rules of the game. The trivial proof would of course be to capture a combustion engine in action, and then play the video in reverse...where heat happens to converge into the pistons such that the bonds are made to create vapors that condense into gasoline...completely allowed according to Physical laws, just extraordinarily unlikely to happen.

Let me guess...you define the squishy term "consistent" to coincide roughly with the tendency of the 2nd law of thermodynamics to behave as we expect it to?

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What if a process only produced work 25% of the time? Does that disqualify it from being "consistently repeatable"? How good is your lighter? Wanna make a bet? (Bonus points to anyone that can name the reference

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Sure, just look here-
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=100447

my challenge to anyone is to find a statement by a nobel laureate against perpetual motion

 

Yes, it could happen. But not consistently or persistently, just like the joke in my previous post.
And the Maxwell's Demon thought experiment indicates that waiting for the "could happens" can't give a long term payoff.

Statistical analysis is the way to go if it's not obvious (and sometimes even it is seemingly obvious).

Roald Dahl short story collection... Henry Sugar?

Edit - no, Tales of the Unexpected (had to look it up

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That's essentially what RJBeery and I are discussing.
I maintain that you can't use thermal fluctuations (such as Brownian motion) to consistently and persistently extract useful work from ambient heat.

An odd challenge. There's nothing unscientific about perpetual motion.
The argument is about extracting useful work from ambient heat.

 

Extracting useful work from ambient heat and perpetual motion are one and the same thing, at least according to the wiki. But can we really trust the wikipedia when it comes to matters of perpetual motion?

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