generator using two large towers and heavy yet buoyant balls....

[r0ck3t3r]

Here is the best I can do to show you what I dreamed about... Hell if I know it works or not. I am not the scientist type. Tell me what you think.



so basically what happens is you have two large tubes.. one filled with water and the other has tunnels going down. While going down it creates energy by turning a generator or how ever else you can thing of harnessing it. When it reaches the bottom a minimal amount of energy will be used to shoot the ball into the fluid. Because the ball is buoyant, it will easily rise back to the top to be picked up by something and moved back into the tunnel. The trick is coming up with a system to shoot the ball and at the top move it back to the tunnel without using too much electricity. This would be easy if the whole system were tall enough.

[shruggedatlas]

When it reaches the bottom a minimal amount of energy will be used to shoot the ball into the fluid.

While you are dreaming, you could double your energy output by using a turbine on the way up as well! 

However, it takes more than a minimal amount of energy to get the bouyant ball into the fluid.  In fact, it takes so much energy, that the system will not be able to sustain itself.

[r0ck3t3r]

well i think that depends on how tall it is and how resourceful you are with ways to harness its power on the way down. This would have to be done on a large scale to be of any use. I think it could work.

[shruggedatlas]

well i think that depends on how tall it is and how resourceful you are with ways to harness its power on the way down. This would have to be done on a large scale to be of any use. I think it could work.

Impossible.  Scale does not matter.  The taller it is, the more water pressure at the bottom, and the harder it will be to squeeze those balls in. 

With no load on the moving balls, with even the tiniest losses to friction, the device will not be able to sustain itself.  With any load at all, it will not budge on its own no matter what you do.

By the way, this is not a new idea.  If you do a google search for flotation/submersion based perpetual motion machines, you will see many examples similar to what you have here.  None ever worked.

[zerotensor]

While you are dreaming, you could double your energy output by using a turbine on the way up as well! 

And don't forget about:
"And get rid of the ramps and install a spinny thing to catch the balls and harness the kinetic energy and make the balls out of magnets and install coils and put electrodes in the water and produce HHO gas and pump high voltage through it while the whole thing spins, producing a vortex implosion in the plasma within a copper pyramid fitted with superconducting fiber-optics and a pulsed ultraviolet laser...."

Sorry,

The only thing perpetual about this buoyancy gravity scheme is the idea itself.  It rises up, gets shot-down, then somehow percolates again to the surface.

I once had a roommate who dreamed up the same thing, and insisted that it would work.  When I explained to her that she was wrong, and why, she took it very personally.  She said that I was trashing her dreams.  Well, sorry, r0ck3t3r, the idea won't work, for the exact reason given by shruggedatlas.  (Don't take it personally).

If you had a constant source of water at altitude, you could make the balls circulate, but in that case a paddle-wheel or turbine would harness more energy.