Banned yet again!

[Tom Booth]

I've made all the way through the locked thread and think it could have looked a bit better if you'd posted the Tesla's article. Can I ask you to post this one here ? Thx in advance.

Of course,

If anyone there on that forum was not already familiar with it, all they needed to do is ask. (As you have) My assumption is, they already knew of the article or simply didn't want to know, didn't care or had no curiosity, or perhaps thought I was just making it up, I don't know.

Anyway, the name of the article is "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" by Nikola Tesla.

It can be found online here:

http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1900-06-00.htm

Or here:

http://www.pbs.org/tesla/res/res_art09.html

The part relevant to this discussion more or less starts at the heading  :

"ENERGY FROM THE MEDIUM--THE WINDMILL AND THE SOLAR ENGINE,--MOTIVE POWER FROM TERRESTRIAL HEAT--ELECTRICITY FROM NATURAL SOURCES."

That is just a general discussion, It gets more specific in the next section:

"A DEPARTURE FROM KNOWN METHODS--POSSIBILITY OF A "SELF-ACTING" ENGINE OR MACHINE, INANIMATE, YET CAPABLE, LIKE A LIVING BEING, OF DERIVING ENERGY FROM THE MEDIUM--THE IDEAL WAY OF OBTAINING MOTIVE POWER."

His basic idea is that because a heat engine transmutes heat into other forms of energy, if a heat engine were operating on ambient heat, it would take little energy to maintain an artificial sink. In fact he suggests that the energy of the heat that does reach the sink could be "lifted up" by its own energy.

Essentially, it does not take any energy to maintain cold.

I think that this basic principle or idea has been demonstrated to be true recently.

http://www.theimagingsource.biz/en/technology/ambientheatelectricity/

That little chip may not be a mechanical heat engine but as far as I'm concerned, what is true in principle is true just the same.

"This technology proves that cooling does not require the input of external energy."

Which is, I think, exactly what Tesla was driving at.

This is true even in a heat pump. All the energy used to drive a heat pump is used to compress the gas or fluid to reach a high temperature. If the heat is then used, or used up, or simply thrown away, as in a refrigerator, that is basically the extent of the energy input requirement.

The cold produced is a consequence. When the gas is released, it is now cold due to the heat having been used or removed, but the production of this cold does not require any additional energy input. In fact, if the gas or refrigerant, or air or whatever that was compressed is released from pressure through an expansion piston or turbine, some of the energy used in compression can be reclaimed. The result is ADDITIONAL COOLING along with a production of useable energy output from the turbine.

Cooling is the inevitable consequence of utilizing heat, that is, converting the heat into another form of energy. The result is useable energy like electricity. The cooling is consequential and does not require energy input.

The second law of thermodynamics was developed in the era of the steam engine. If it has been superseded than I see no point in intelligent adults baring discussion of that reality and hiding their heads in the sand.

[Tom Booth]

It does somewhat seem reasonable those explanations I got from them, but after thinking twice, those explanations is not about the actual concept. Probably because they haven't been able to imagine the design, and how it is suppose to work.


However, please let me try to explain this design using a simpler model.


Say you have a gerotor design. As the rotor rotates, air pockets at one side expands and the other side compress. By itself this is sufficient to make a heat engine by heating one side and cooling the other side.


Now take this design, and put a motor on it so the compression side heats up, and the expansion side cools down. This is now a heat pump. Place both pump and engine side by side so heat from the pump is transferred from the compression side of the engine into the expanding side of the heat engine. Let the other side be both in open air.


What happens then?
In a lossless design, both pump and engine share the same temperature at the hot side. However, the cold sides are not having the same temperatures, but slightly hotter on the compression side of the engine, and slightly cooler on the expanding side of the pump. Thus it will be harder to run the pump than the energy output from the heat engine can deliver - because the temperature difference in the pump is greater than the temperature difference in the engine. We need the opposite scenario, and how can that be accomplished?


Attached there is an image of the heat engine. The opposite of the pump which is hot on the right and cool at the left.


Vidar

The problem there is that you are trying to use the HEAT from the heat pump to run the engine. This is a loosing battle and not what Tesla was suggesting at all.

Ambient heat is freely available, there is no real need to augment it, just use it directly.

To run a conventional mechanical heat engine you need a temperature difference, that is COLD or a heat sink.

If you first create an ARTIFICIAL heat sink or "cold hole" as Tesla described it, then you can run your engine. The engine however does not simply transfer heat INTO the heat sink. The heat is converted or transmuted into some other form of energy. Only some fraction of the heat utilized then, actually reaches the sink, the rest is converted.

The HOT side of your heat engine is AMBIENT HEAT. The cold side is the ARTIFICIAL HEAT SINK or COLD HOLE.

All the heat pump has to do then is pump the "waste heat" out of the "COLD HOLE".

That heat removed from the sink could be used to pre-heat cold water going to a hot water tank. So the heat pump doesn't necessarily have to dump the heat back to ambient or back to the engine. That probably would not work in the long run, as you are again trying to drive the "waste" heat too far back uphill. It is too much work for the heat pump to drive heat back uphill to the engine. Better to just dump the waste heat into some cold water. You don't need it to run the engine anyway. It would be better to use it for something else like heating cold water, then the heat pump would work much more efficiently.

As Tesla stated "Thus the virtue of the principle I have discovered resides wholly in the conversion of the energy on the downward flow."

Downward from Ambient that is. You don't need the heat pump to make heat to run the engine by increasing ambient temperature. It runs on Ambient heat as-is. The heat pump is just used to get rid of or remove the "waste heat" that may get into the artificial heat sink or "cold hole".

The heat pump is not used to MAKE heat, it just has to get rid of whatever percentage of heat is not converted by the engine. Move it out.

So the HOT side of the heat pump is not attached to hot side of the heat engine. The cold side of the heat pump, rather, is attached to the heat sink for engine. The hot side of the heat pump is "Waste heat" that can be dumped wherever.

Theoretically, you could send the waste heat back to the hot (or ambient) side of the engine, but I don't think that that would be very practical. It is less work on the heat pump if the heat is just dumped somewhere, like into cold water. Pumping "waste heat" back up and into what is already an unlimited reservoir of heat would just be mostly a waste of time and energy and would make the heat pump have to work much harder than necessary.

The heat pump should only have a relatively small amount of waste heat to remove anyway, if the heat engine is efficient. The engine doesn't really need the "waste heat". It has plenty of heat taken directly from the ambient. It's running directly on ambient heat. Putting a small amount of waste heat back on the hot side of the engine COULD be done, and that might work but it would not be as efficient as just dumping the waste heat into some cold water if it was available.

[Low-Q]

Thanks for the explanation. I think I see more clear what you suggest, and will look more into this.


I started reading the article, but it was SO MUCH text about practically "bla-bla-bla". I will focus on the headings you suggested, and read more closely.


Vidar

[Tom Booth]

Thinking about this a little more, I may have been wrong about dumping the "waste heat" into cold water.

The alternative of raising it back up to run the engine might work just as well.

Here is the situation, hypothetically.

First create an artificial "cold hole", basically an insulated freezer compartment, perhaps enclosing a cold block of steel.

You could now run a heat engine between the temperature difference between ambient heat and the "cold hole". But here is what is important to keep in mind. The engine uses the temperature difference to convert heat into electricity or "work", or mechanical motion. The heat is converted, so in the process of running, the engine does not transfer heat from ambient to the cold hole so much as CREATE COLD by transmuting the heat into another form.

So in other words, if you use a heat pump to keep the cold hole cold and remove whatever "waste heat" gets into it, the heat pump should only have to run intermittently. That is, as the engine runs, the "waste heat" will gradually accumulate in the "cold hole" and the temperature of the "cold hole" will gradually rise. When the temperature rises enough the heat pump will kick in for a few moments to remove the accumulated waste heat and then kick off again.

Now if the engine is primarily running on ambient heat, when the heat pump kicks in, if the hot side is attached to the ambient side of the engine, the "waste heat" will raise the temperature of the ambient side. The engine will get a temporary boost of energy from the heat pump as the waste heat is being removed.

So in other words, the waste heat is literally removed, as Tesla suggested, by being lifted up by its own energy.

Once the waste heat is removed, the heat pump kicks off and the heat engine returns to normal operation. Running directly on ambient heat.

[Tom Booth]

Let me try to explain the problem in another way:

Lets say that after 10 hours of operation excess waste heat accumulates in the sink or "cold hole" and must be removed. The heat pump kicks in and removes the heat in 20 minutes.

If you have the heat engine and heat pump coupled together and are trying to run the heat pump ALL THE TIME to supply heat to the engine, what happens after the heat pump runs for twenty minutes and all the waste heat has been removed ?

For the next 9 hours and ten minutes the heat pump is just struggling to remove heat from a heat sink where there is no heat. It would just be spinning its wheels and accomplishing nothing.

Simply strapping a heat pump to a heat engine would not work for that reason if both are running continuously or if the heat engine DEPENDS UPON the continual delivery of heat from the heat pump.

The heat engine is continually converting heat to some other form of energy by turning an electric generator for instance. Little heat is getting into the sink, so to run the heat pump continuously to remove heat that isn't there just wastes energy and you end up in a situation like the guys on the other forum said. You would be using all the energy from the engine just to run the heat pump with nothing left over.

The heat pump would only have to run briefly. Continuing to run it after it has removed the waste heat would accomplish nothing.

This is more or less just like a household freezer. It doesn't have to run 24/7, just a few hours a day. If the heat engine were not converting the heat but just transferring it  to the sink, then yes, the heat pump would have to run all the time, but as Tesla pointed out HEAT is NOT a fluid, like water going over a water wheel. It is energy that a heat engine converts into something else.

A heat pump can't remove heat that isn't there. So it only needs to run occasionally so that a sufficient amount of waste heat can accumulate so that there is something for it to do.