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[Philip Hardcastle]

Mr. Hardcastle, in order to violate Lord Kelvin's expression of the Second Law of Energy, you need to do work by removing heat from a single reservoir.  More specifically, you must perform work with every calorie that you remove from that single reservoir.

The Kelvin statement of the Second Law of Energy is:
Your apparatus has much more than just a single heat reservoir.  It has at least two reservoirs and an input power source.

It, the device under test, does not operate between two reservoirs, it does not operate with a temperature difference across its thickness, end of argument.


It, the single reservoir, receives ac input power only because we lose heat through the oven walls to ambiebt, if the DUT was in a natural 550C reservoir we would not be having this stupid conversation about input power to an oven.


MarkE, if you insist on saying the DUT is in two reservoirs then I have to believe you are being deliberately obtuse.


I will not respond to further silly statements on this thread, if you have something sensible to say you can email me.


The plot was done by a Canadian physicist from the university of Montreal, he carefully measured in upward and downward paused steps, the curves are identical in both directions.


Result have been obtained in a few other labs with near identical results.


There have been 2 experiments where the voltage was produced but with little current, these are simply the result of using old tubes with cathode work function higher than the spec due to them being 30 year old devices.


BTW if you look at the construction of a pentode the cathode is completely surrounded by the anode, so when the tube is being heated it is 100% certain that the cathode is not hotter than the anode.


All my experiments showed summed currents with DUT's in parallel, added voltages when done in series, and all done with extreme temperature control. Also done was the DUT shorted out which gives zero outputs.


Apart from the Chief Scientist of a major technology company there was also a gentleman here that modified his toaster oven which managed to get the temperature to 500C plus, he did apparently get smoking wires that made him ill, and he did get an output the same as many others, was it a proof? no of course not, but it was a genuine attempt to try to replicate rather than to do nothing, which is what all skeptics do, absolutely nothing constructive.


I again suggest you use the pentode, once you understand the single reservoir and thermocouple theory issues, and use your access to equipment and an hour of your time to do the simple experiment, then when you get the 850mV output and see a current of 5uA you can go about showing us how you can account for it with the status quo.

[sarkeizen]

zero incompatibility means we can use a college textbook to predict this repeatable cycle.

Yawn.

Well, a couple of things:

i) You haven't presented any formal argument demonstrating that there's zero incompatibility.  You just assumed it.  Assuming something isn't the same as proving it.  This should be obvious to even a stupid person.

ii) Even if you could demonstrate something like there is "no contradiction" between the two position.   The fact that there exists no contradiction between two principles (A & B) i.e. A does not imply !B and B does not imply !A.  That is actually NOT the same as saying A implies B.  Again something you would know if you had more than a 5th grade education.

[sarkeizen]

was it a proof? no of course not, but it was a genuine attempt to try to replicate rather than to do nothing, which is what all skeptics do, absolutely nothing constructive.

So much double-speak so little time.  I truly don't understand this kind of talk at all.  So "doing nothing" is bad.  However attempting to replicate an effect in an environment so error prone that you can't really tell if he did it or not is "doing something".

I really have to ask..."In what sense".  While he was doing that I was probably playing X-Box.  While we could both be considered "doing something" in a broad sense.  I'm not sure either of us could be considered "usefully attempting to replicate the alleged sebby effect".

[MarkE]

Mr. Hardcastle, there are thermal leaks all over your experiment.  That seems to make it impossible for your experiment to test whether heat taken from a reservoir can be completely converted to work contrary to the Kelvin statement.

[Philip Hardcastle]

Mr. Hardcastle, there are thermal leaks all over your experiment.  That seems to make it impossible for your experiment to test whether heat taken from a reservoir can be completely converted to work contrary to the Kelvin statement.

I am at a loss as to how you think, but anyway.


Of course it is going to be very difficult to show heat taken in by the DUT to electrical output unless we build around the DUT sensitive thermal flux sensors, and if we did it would not be a $10 experiment, but even a first year student can appreciate the first law of energy, and by simple application of logic that the Kelvin statement can be restated as "you cannot produce power from a device wholly immersed in a single thermal reservoir". So if you know the DUT is immersed in a single reservoir, which is in practical terms known to be so by making sure it has as close as possible to zero temp gradient (I can guarantee less than 1mK), then if it outputs electrical energy it must follow that it does so with 100% efficiency.


To prove satisfactory compliance to the issue of my oven being an isothermal reservoir I deliberately applied thermal gradients of 1deg K to the DUT, the output variance was less than 0.01%. I was therefore 100% sure that my results were valid and not simply a case of me heating a DUT with a temperature gradient.


Taking the view that I can reasonably estimate both the thermal flux through vacuum and the temperature depression of the DUT active elements (cathode and anode) against the electrical output, you get a value of less than 0.00001 Kelvin cathode to anode (do the calcs yourself), but lets increase it to 0.001K, then apply that to the carnot equation and you simply cannot get 4uW output, in fact if you care to do some calculations based on a DT of 1mK the result would not allow a Carnot limit output of any more than 4 pW, so I am very sure of what I say.


predicted carnot limit = 4 uW thermal input flux x .001/1000 = 4pW (this is 1,000,000 times smaller than the measure output)


So something exceeding the Carnot efficiency limit by such a massive factor should ring some positive bells in your head.


MarkE, let's agree that no matter what I say you will not agree, and you will not pursue it by doing your own experiment, and that accordingly this conversation has no point.


FWIIW I in fact posted the diagram that started this conversation for the benefit of profitis, I really did not want a debate with entrenched skeptics.


Have a nice day.


Bye all.


Phil