Perpetual Motion

I thought i'd better start the thread with a silly idea - as im known for it! (NO im not claiming to have invented the impossible!) I've been a bit busy lately after telling the boss to go shove it, and having to find a new employer a bit quick. Ive looked in often, but I think this year I might give it a miss, as theres only so much of Mc HillaryObamaCain I can stand, but its good to see the resident AI axis of evil have totally lost the plot as republican doom awaits. I grin when I think how much they will froth at the mouth when they see this non-fossil fuel device!

I apologize in advance for the size of this image, but I had an idea whilst in the bath, so to speak for 'saving the world™' as it were, Eureka! - and have been working on this over the weekend. I think its pretty self explanitary as marked up, obviously this is just a pictorial schematic and doesn't represent what a working model would look like,(for instance I know the radiator and the cool side of the stirling engine should be seperated) but I present it here for public consumption, and gleely await hardeeharhar's rampant demolishing of the principle. . And no, I cant do the calculations!

The point of this device is how to store solar energy during the day without using a battery so that power can still be generated during night time. I have converted the solar energy into potential energy - raising water as steam (rises naturally so needs no pump) into a reservoir so that the potential energy can be released during the night. Nothing here is particulary complicated at all, which means that practically anyone could build one and it will be dirt cheap relatively speaking. Will be great for third world countries, abundant sun-shine and simplicity of manufacture. Because of the immense weight of water - a square metre of it weighs one ton - you can really step up the gearing on this - so the generator will fly for very little movement of the ballast. A bit like Hassan pedalling his bike with a 72 tooth chainring on to a 9. It isn't supposed to be a quick cycle on this thing - I envisage the total downstroke of the ballast should be about 6 hours! so it only cycles twice a day. I've drawn it with a 1 metre cubed ballast, but there is no reason why the ballast couldn't be a mile long if scaled up! running hundreds of generators and quarter of a mile in the sky - All you need to do is scale up the rest of the components and the steam generator.

I know there is nothing new here, its just the combination of already existing devices arranged in a certain manner. Have fun!

thats what happens when you watch too much pr0n!

Really, i do know it isn't perpetual motion. I was having a laugh!

actually im not wasting anything! If you dont know what a stirling engine is, look here. The design calls for the steam to be converted back into water so it can flow back into the battery tank. Normally you would use a heat exchanger with pumps, radiators and fans to cool the steam and release the heat into the atmosphere.

Why waste that heat?

In my design the steam flows through the stirling engine, the heat energy is captured to power the piston of the stirling engine - not only does this help cool the steam, it provides power - mechanically from the flywheel is directly connected to a fan which blows over a radiator to fully convert the steam back to water. It is possible that if you make the stirling engine big enough, you can do away with the need for a radiator an fan completely, and use the stirling engine to generate power as electricity for any contol systems I might need.

Thats the cool thing. Not only have I created steam from solar energy, because of the fluke of nature that steam rises naturally, it not only creates potential energy, but in order for it to become usable potential energy, you have to remove and harness energy from it! This is clearly buy one get one free!

As it is with dropping the weight. Gravity does the work, nothing else. Gravity is free energy if you can harness it. You're then removing the energy from the potential energy to generate power for free!

But you're not removing the heat energy from the water - just using its mass - so when the water reaches the reservoir its still very hot - you need to add relatively little energy to it with the solar mirrors to make it zip right back up to the top. This freak of nature anti-gravity behavior is free energy creation as well!

The valves are purely mechanical and operate when the ballast exerts force on them when moving.

I dont know about you, but if anyone can find a better way to utilize all the sources of free energy (solar, gravity, antigravity, stirling engine) available to man in one device, i'll eat my blueprints!

Holy Crap! I've just had another idea that makes this one look complicated and lame!

hopefully we will have the next level of physics, I hope that the ITER experiment is successful, but sadly, while we can (barely) afford it, most people cannot, and they need a clean efficient renewable system that plays to their advantages, solar and gravity could be their blessing.

That is a great invention,

what I dont understand with inventors of things like this though, is why they stop where they do. Look at that chimney, I bet a really usable amount of energy goes up there to waste as heat. I'd stick a stirling engine on it! - but if you wanted something cheap and cheerful, why not have a metal barrel surrounding it with a tap and fill it with a few gallons of water - instant water heater from a waste product.

On topic, during the interlude I have designed the one mechanism I thought would have to be electric powered (what I called control logic) to be totally mechanical and operate under the weight of the falling ballast (when its at its rest point so really efficient)- its really neat stay tuned!

sigh! yes i know, my first design was for that - but......um....I thought that would be too boring and not much of an engineering challenge

then I progressed to a pendulum.....one in which the arm carrying the ballast extended under gravity to provide mechanical advantage over the weightless one - which contracted to the fulcrum - so offered little resistance to being lifted.

Then I thought of this, the great advantage of this is that it can be very compact, and can be built tall with little footprint. Rotary things take up a lot of space and footprint. With this, you can make the ballast any shape, it could be a quarter meter wide and deep by 5 metres tall. Incidently for real, im designing them as back to back semi circular to make a complete circle falling down a central core. Once you have a completed module, say it was 5 metres square (or diameter - more surface area for the collectors) , you simply line them up in a straight line - as many as you want. These things need to be aligned in straight lines to point in the direction of the sun as it travells across the sky to maximise efficiency.

This is just a schematic of how it works, my envisiged design doesn't look much like what i've shown at the top, Its more of a cylindrical tower, where the sides are solar collectors which transfer heat via a heat pipes* to the water in the reservoir to heat it and the parabolic mirror is actually at the top of the tower like a satellite dish and beams focussed light via mirrors through the core to the base to create the steam.

Its just a bit of fun, and I wanted it to be an engineering challenge at the same time. Just to be really geeky im trying to find a way of incorperating a 'magnetic wankel' engine somewhere in it. Im toying with the idea of making the ballast spin as it falls to provide the rotation for the 'missing' magnet which needs to oscillate at a certain point to keep the magnet spinning!

Since that though, ive thought of a fourth idea, where the entire thing is built inside the heatsink of the stirling engine! - heatpipes would actually run through the falling ballast, superheat it during its descent - water stays liquid under pressure - and upon release at the bottom - would depressurize into steam and automatically rise to the top where it would be cooled back into water to repeat the cycle and the heat exchange power the stirling!...so many ideas so little time!

*been researching these - if you encase them in a vacuum - they can reach up to 3000 degrees centigrade!

that wont work though, hot water doesn't defy gravity even though it does rise. The hot water would simply move up the return pipe to the equilibrium level of the water in the reservoir tank - The water in that tank cannot be at a higher level of the water draining out of the ballast, else it will fill it!

It has to be converted to steam!

That might be true - but due to the conservation of energy, converting the steam back to water will release the 2.26MJ - hopefully this will occur at the heatblock of the stirling engine, which I reckon to have an efficiency of about 20% according to the carnot formula - which is better or about equal to using a PV cell to generate power - And then we have created a source of potential energy - however small- that can run a generator during the night when sunlight is not available to power the stirling engine.

a cool useful mechanical machine!

http://www.dailytech.com/Hightech+Wi...ticle10936.htm

and for total PC coolness - Im getting one of these for certain

http://www.dailytech.com/MSI+Showcas...ticle10918.htm

I did. It proves you can generate from natural sources using natural tricks - phase changes and gravity etc.

When you look over the net, you find a good range of clever systems that really make the most of renewable natural sources, and this has to be the way forward until we master fusion. Like everything, these systems are new ideas in their infancy, and just as the combustion engine has developed from a 0.5HP chugger to todays F1 units over 100 years, if we get on with it, im sure 30 years from now we could produce realistic Gigawatt designs.

I just want to make something I can sit in my backyard - just because I can. Im sure its pretty shit really, but if I got it to work that would be cool - even if it only ever powered my torch.

I looked up the heat of evaporation of some stuff after I read Berlepsch's critique. Seems water, though plentiful in supply and easy to handle is just about the worst you can get!

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fl...eat-d_147.html

I have to stick to what I can make and get hold of easily - I dont have a licence for toxic chemicals and cant make high pressure steam vessels!

You should check the price of copper - I enquired about it for the heat exchangers and solar panel heaters (i want to roll my own - wheres the fun in buying prefab? £6500 per ton (or $12000 for you). Damn crazy!