$25,000 National Geographic Contest - Compressed Air (Ambient Heat) Energy

[Tom Booth]

My girlfriend sent me a link to this National Geographic Magazine contest. I thought about it for a while but I didn't feel I had enough time to apply, then the deadline passed, then I took another look at it a few weeks later and saw the deadline had been extended. I racked my brains trying to figure out how to explain my idea in a 60 second video.

Anyway I got something in just before the deadline. I would genuinely appreciate anyone logging in and posting questions or comments as that would give me a chance to cover some areas that I couldn't include in the video.

Here is the link if anyone here is interested. It could mean $25,000 going towards building a prototype engine and demonstrating an untapped energy source.

"The Air Juicer" - An Untapped Renewable Energy Resource - http://www.natgeochasinggenius.com/video/2668

[Tom Booth]

I've previously discussed this idea at some length in this forum:

http://overunity.com/13159/teslas-ambient-heat-engine-theory-right-or-wrong

[antijon]

Have you checked out Tripler/Wainwright? Interesting reading. It may be difficult, but I don't see why an ambient heat engine can't be made. According to Wainwright, we should be able to make an engine that compresses and cools air to use as a fuel. Essentially the same as Tesla's mechanical oscillator.

[Tom Booth]

Do you mean Tripler of Liquid Air fame? https://books.google.com/books/about/Liquid_Air.html?id=t65FAQAAMAAJ

Not sure about Wainwright. Can you provide a specific reference? Book Title?

I'm certainly familiar with Tesla. His article "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" from Century Magazine 1900 in particular: http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1900-06-00.htm

But actually I hit upon the idea while designing a solar Stirling Engine for a government contractor friend years ago. Those big Solar Stirling engines with the parabolic dish. He wanted to go into business for himself manufacturing small ones for homeowners. Those big engines they had out in the desert had some kind of cooling. Air conditioning to keep them from overheating under no-load conditions.

Anyway he told me that they found that those experimental engines with the air conditioning kept running at night. Without any sun. I thought that wasa what he told me but I couldn't understand what he meant and just puzzled over it.

Anyway so I figured incorporating a cooling system of some sort on the design would be a good idea but wasn't exactly sure why.

BTW I think that they took all those experimental engines that kept running without sunshine at night down. Wonder why?

Anyway I heard about Air-Cycle heat pumps / cold air machines. One of the earliest kinds of air conditioning using compressed air. No Freon. No CFC's, just plain old air - compressed and cooled and then expanded. Turns out that this works so well, it is TOO cold for domestic freezers. You need food refrigerated or frozen not cryogenicly preserved LOL. But I thought this would be the perfect cooling system for a Stirling Engine where the big temperature differential can be utilized. The colder the better. Why no -250 more or less?

So I started working on combining Stirling hot air engines with air cycle refrigeration.

I've been working on machinery all my life and was rather good at designing and running engines in visualization. In my mind, in great detail.

Well while working on this I had a combo Stirling/Air-Cycle generator running in my mind, on this parabolic dish. It always seemed like the dish was concentrating TOO MUCH heat. So I kept reducing it in size.

Suddenly one day I was running one of these machines in my mind and came to the shocking realization that it had gotten late and the sun had gone down but the engine was still going.

See, I was aiming for efficiency, and I saw a lot of heat boiling off the focal point. so I had the air cycle system drawing in hot air from the focal point, compressing that, delivering it to the Stirling, Then cooling the pipes with fans to get rid of the excess heat, (There always seemed to be excess heat!) then expanded the air through a turbine on the same driveshaft as the engine and generator. Then sent the cryo-cold turbo-expanded air back to the engine. The cold side was always way below ambient temperature with this arangement, so why wouldn't it keep running all night.

I told my contractor friend about my discovery. He contacted me a few days later, said that he talked to some people and that my idea was impossible and he scraped the whole project. I was like WHAT ARE YOU CRAZY!?!?!?!

Now I couldn't get it out of my head. So I started researching the actual feasibility of this idea. That's when I came across Tesla's article and Tripler's "Surplusage" and lots of other information. I was certainly not the first to stumble across this. Tesla was working on it over 100 years ago.

I really think it was supposed to be the energy SOURCE for his famous towers. That was only a wireless DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM for his "Self Acting" generator that ran on heat from compressed air.

[antijon]

That book is a great find, thanks for sharing. Yeah, I was referring to Charles Tripler, but only knew him by the patents list on Rex, http://www.rexresearch.com/tripler/tripler.htm

The writings of Wainwright show a different process than Tripler. Apparently Wainwright realized that a gas could be used as a fuel in a simple manner. To quote him,

And it will be observed that; such cycle absorbs heat from an external source, at a constant temperature; converts all of this heat into available dynamic energy; and does not discharge any heat to an external source.

His books about the fallacy of the second law of thermodynamics are interesting, but I get lost on the fluid jargon.