perpetual motion free energy by siphoning

We all know that you can siphon off liquid from a container by sucking it up a tube until the liquid is travelling of its own volition. I don't know what the scientific principle behind it is called, but anyway, we all know about it.

Well, if a gigantic tube (or multiple tubes) were placed in the ocean and made to suck out the water by this process (initially you'd use powerful pumps to start the process, but then, the water would siphon out of its own accord), the energy of the water coming out of the tube and dropping from a height, could be used to power generators sited on platforms underneath it, to produce very cheap electricity. The best thing about this, is that you wouldn't need to use any energy to pump out the water, except for the start up phase and it would never stop!

Am I wrong in this assumption? If I'm not; why hasn't it been attempted?

 

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Siphoning will not continue for a very long time.

 

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Why not? The water in an ocean won't diminish.

 

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Just because it won't... that's not how siphoniung works

 

Draw a picture of what you think you mean.

 

New York's water supply is siphoned along tubes, 1200 feet underground, from the Catskill Mountains.

All that is needed to create this process is to create a vacuum in the tube by initially sucking out the air in it and from there it is unstoppable unless air gets back in the tube.

I can't draw a picture of it, it's the principle that matters.

 

But air/water will always fill the tube, and then motion will stop.

 

I understand that as long as there is more water inthe part of the tube outside the source container than the part which is in it, then the flow will carry on. Water won't stop the process; only air. The tube size/bend/angle etc. could be configured for maximum efficiency in this respect.

 

So what you need is a high level of water somewhere and a lower point in which the water from the tubes will collect?

I think Israel will be a bit pissed off when you fill the dead sea up again.

 

We have free energy.
Wind, Solar, Hydro.

The powers don't utilize these. why do you think a dubious siphon technology would get play?

 

I think that's what he's missing. Water will only flow uphill for a short time. Continuous siphoning ends up at a lower level. We call these dams.

 

The siphoning proposed here is NOT a source of energy, but there is IN PRINCIPLE a related one that is:

If an osmotic membrane is placed across the bottom of a very long vertical tube in the ocean and this tube is filled with fresh water to the ocean surface level, then the pressure at the bottom of the fresh water column is less than the ocean pressure on the opposite side of the membrane and “reverse osmosis” will occur. That is, pure water is extracted from the ocean and enters the tube at the bottom. The top of the fresh water column will rise above the surface of the ocean (assuming the tube extends up into the air). Thus, a fresh water fountain is created in the ocean . Not only is it nice to get fresh water there for no noticeable expenditure of effort, but as this fresh water falls back into the sea, you can get energy from it also!

My post tend to be too long, so I let someone else explain why this is a little known solar energy system that only looks like a perpetual energy system.

 

the destination of a siphon has to be lower than the source, you cant siphen from the ocean, then drop it above.

in order for the motion to continue gravity must have more effect ot the destination end. it takes more force to pull it down again than to lift it up if the destination is too high

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in the correct one, it takes less force(gravity) to make it move in the right direction, than to sit idle.
it is the opposite in the wrong one. what you are proposing would require the source to be lower than the destination and therefore would not work.

if you made a big bucket that was weighted so that it remained below sea level(with the rim above of course) then you would have a large area wher you could pump the water to with a siphen, only problem is: the amount of energy used to lift this bucket to the surface and empty it.

besides, unless you took your bucket to the bottom of the ocean, the amount of force required to move the turbines would be so great it would stop the siphen

 

Yeah, you're right. I never realised that the source has to be higher than the destination... another brilliant idea dashed.

 

if you could design someway of dopping it into some form of bucket like i mentioned, then you would just have to make sure that the energy required to empty the bucket was less than that produced

 

No, it was always a stupid idea.

Go ask Stryder, he posted an 'idea' for making water flow uphill using a cunning arrangemnt of pipes, and allegedly tried to make it. Best he managed was a static system, no doubt due to an airlock.

Maybe he took pictures. that would be funny, I'd love to see them if he did.

 

Summing up: In a syphon, the column of water outside the container must be taller than the column inside. And of course, as somebody noted, this means that the outlet must be below the water surface.

The bucket of water needs not only to be emptied, it also needs to be forced down into the water, so no joy here.

The reverse osmosis:

Reverse osmosis only occurs if there is sufficient pressure across the membrane, so the column of fresh water will only rise till that pressure falls below what is needed for reverse osmosis to occur. Since there needs to be more pressure outside the membrane than inside, the column will be lower inside the tube than outside, thus it will not reach the surface, much less rise above it.

Hans

 

I've seen a book where many of brilliant inventors and dreamers attempted to utilized many different syphon systems (involving anything from tubes, to buckets, to plungers, to water wheels, almost anything) to get a perpetual motion machine working. You wouldn't believe how many times this idea has been tried!!! But of course, all these systems failed, because the ever-tricky law of conservation of energy. You can't get energy out of nothing, simple as that. Free energy needs to tap off a near-perpetual energy source. For us, that ultimately comes from the sun, or the earth's core. Simple mechanical tricks can't do what these furnaces do.

 

Hmm... just thinking, but, if you could build a lock in the ocean and somehow raise the water level in it so that it was substantially higher than the surroundng sea level, then, I guess, in theory the siphoning concept just might work.

 

'somehow raise', right, this is where you put the energy in, to be removed later.

To get the water in for free, you could wait for lower level water to evaporate, and then precipitate into your 'lock' and then let it fall back down through some kind of generator arrangement

Except this isn't a new idea, it's HEP, and we've been doing it for ages. It's not perpetual either, as it requires an input, ie, the Sun.