Friction heater running in my house

[DreamThinkBuild]

Hi Bruce,

One idea that I haven't tried but always wanted to.
Take a large ring magnet, secure a metal bolt through the center. Seal the top and bottom half with silicone but leave an exposed ring along the edge of the magnet(bloch wall). Place a larger aluminum ring washer so that it covers the edge of the magnet but touches the exposed part. Place two more aluminum washers one on top and bottom so they contact the center ring and bolt through middle.

Congratulations you've just built a shorted out homopolar generator. Now the question is will it heat up when spun at high speed in water? The one problem is heating the magnet if it works.

Edit: Oops, Actually this would require a fixed outer bearing in the center to act as brush but same principle.

[MileHigh]

Bruce:

Let's discuss the concept of efficiency here.

If you increase the friction, what happens?   There is more of a mechanical load on the motor, therefore it draws more power from the mains.   So you are not increasing the efficiency, all that you are doing is increasing the power consumption from the mains and also generating correspondingly more heat through friction.

In a setup with an electrical motor driving some sort of a friction device you have two sources of heat.   The electrical motor produces heat and the friction device produces heat.

A very good motor will be very efficient and produce very little heat.  But in the end it doesn't matter, the input electrical power will be turned into heat by the motor and by the friction device.  Therefore by definition any combination of motor and friction device will be 100% efficient.  No matter what you do the system will be 100% efficient in producing heat.  In that sense using the term "efficient" does not really apply for this type of setup since it is always 100% efficient.

MileHigh

[Doug1]

MileHigh
  from a purely scientific numerical stand point I dont pay anything for my electric heat. I keep it turned off and use fire wood heater. I get the wood for free and use discarded left over news papers from a local store to start the fire and sometimes I even burn up paper trash to reduce my volume of trash going to the dump then use the ash around the yard for the soil. my wood heater is far too big for the space it heats so I filled half the burn chamber with fire brick which was originally just to reduce the size of the fire chamber. In the end it actually helped to serve as a heat resivour which continues to provide heat for 4 to 5 hours after the fire has died out. If your looking for the most extream of cheapness there ya go.
  I cant really provide a cost sheet since there isnt a financial cost with the wood heat. The electric used to add 200 to 300 a month depending what temp the electric heat was set to. It never felt very warm anyway. Now I like to keep it around 75 sometimes it goes higher if Im not mindfull of the damper setting. I also cut down on some use of the electric stove because the wood heater keeps my coffee pot hot and sometimes I warm up left overs to have for lunch but that would be very hard to calculate. The abillity to come inside on a cold damp or wet rainy day and plant my ass against a hot wood stove, well thats just priceless.

[Doug1]

There is a point in the exceleration of a disk dynomo where the polarity reverses direction if the a certain speed is exceeded. There would aslo then be a speed at which it is niether forward or reverse polarity while rotating which may be helpful to know. Speed can be used to regulate the heat caused by the breaking action. Teslas improvements state a method on the unipolar whereby he uses a thrid brush to accumulate in a additive sense a higher output or greater efiecincy. Found in his unipolar notes. There are loads of additional possibilities which could improve the function of friction heat. Cavitation, increasing surface area by texture, magnetic breaking, material combinations to produce curent by the peltire effect. Consider how many failed lightbulbs or bulbs that were not up to expectation to be commercially viable it toke to make the final product. Only to have commerce come in and later retard the efforts so more money could be had on shorter life bulbs. Give the poor heater a chance,there will be plenty of time to screw it up later after it reaches a point of working.

[Paul-R]

There is simply no rational reason to assume that a friction heater will outperform
an electric heating element, notwithstanding your anecdotal claims.

It is a source of wonder and amazement, MileHigh, that you can spend so much
time in the presence of exotic and profound thinkers, and yet pick up nothing.