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Author Topic: $25,000 National Geographic Contest - Compressed Air (Ambient Heat) Energy  (Read 17860 times)

Tom Booth

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,
Quote
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.

Tom Booth

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I was not at all aware of the Wainwright material. I'm just downloading and beginning to read the first PDF. Incredible!

You might be interested also in this material, if you haven't already come across it elsewhere. It is an old Stock offering from the Standard Power Company, from around that same time period early 1900's.

As far as I know this copy someone sent to me is the last copy in existence. At least I've been unable to locate any other reference to any such booklet or the Standard Power Company.

http://peoplesresearchcenter.com/james_place/standard_power_company.html

The booklet is titled: "Perpetual Motion The Standard Power Co." and contains a section or additional booklet titled "Continuous Power The Natural Result of Converting Heat Into Work in an Insulated Expansion Engine at Temperatures Below the Normal of the Atmosphere by J.F. Place"

It carries the date of 1903. It is very fragile. I find no mention of or reference to Wainwright therein though.

This time period seems like it was bursting at the seams with this kind of documentation (at the time), though the traces have practically vanished away today. (If not for the internet).

Tesla mentioned in a letter to the publisher that his 1900 article in century magazine caused both him and the publisher a world of trouble: "...my article which has given great trouble to you and infinitely more to me."

What trouble I wonder did the publication of his article cause?





Tom Booth

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I wanted to mention that the National Geographic Website hosting my Idea submission has been dysfunctional for the past few days. Almost from the first moment the idea went live, so posting comments was not possible. Seems though that it has just gotten back up and running again:

http://www.natgeochasinggenius.com/video/2668

antijon

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Thanks for the link, I'll have to get it later as I'm on an iPhone now. As far as Nat. Geo. goes, good luck. I don't want to say it, but you'll probably not get into the top 4. I'm biased when it comes to mainstream organizations, so I don't put any faith into their public selecting process. You'll probably lose to something ridiculous and politically motivated, like reducing global warming or offsetting carbon footprints.  ::) People aren't interested in real technology, they're interested in feel good technology. You'd probably have better luck if you said you'd make ice and deliver it the North Pole to save the polar bears.

Tom Booth

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From what I've seen on there, there are actually quite a few very good ideas on there that I think are quite worthy of support. I originally joined because I've always had a great deal of respect and admiration for National Geographic in the past. I learned recently however that it is no longer a Non-Profit organization but a for profit merged with FOX. (Rupert Murdock). Reading these articles (while browsing, trying to find some way to let them know their website was not working), caused me to wonder why National Geographic is drift-netting for intellectual property.

Going back and reading the rules and terms of service I'm now wondering what I've gotten myself into.

https://actions.sumofus.org/a/murdoch-national-geographic

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/14/how-fox-ate-national-geographic

In particular, under "Your Proprietary Rights in and License to Your User Content" sounds like by simply entering the contest one has... well read it for yourself:
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Additionally, National Geographic is free to use any ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques contained within such User Content for any purpose including, but not limited to, developing, manufacturing, marketing and providing commercial products and services, including NG Services. National Geographic’s use of such User Content shall not require any further notice or attribution to you and such use shall be without the requirement of any permission from or any payment to you or any other person or entity. You hereby appoint National Geographic as your agent with full authority to execute any document or take any action, National Geographic may consider appropriate in order to confirm the rights granted by you to National Geographic in this Agreement.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/community/terms/



Tom Booth

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This idea however is at least 100 years old. I've been posting about it for at lest a decade myself. I don't think that any entity can get exclusive rights to this particular concept or proposal as it has been in the air since at least 1900 with the publication of Tesla's article.

lancaIV

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I am really sad to read this : "National"

cause I would deliver an "Inter+National" solution like to read
here as "Antwort #5" :
       
                     www.overunity.de

by entering the thread : "Lineare Drehbewegung ..." .

Have a fine day
                       greetings
                                     OCWL


Thaelin

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About normal, lets just lead everyone down a path that will never lead to anything and waste time.  It really saddens me that this kind of crap goes on but its all over the place. And if you even get close to something that will have merit, you get the  ringer for it. Why do we still fall for this? How about we all just move in the direction of things that have a chance instead of a brick wall. Watching how nature does things will lead to many great things and then will be simple in concept.

Tom Booth

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About normal, lets just lead everyone down a path that will never lead to anything and waste time.  It really saddens me that this kind of crap goes on but its all over the place. And if you even get close to something that will have merit, you get the  ringer for it. Why do we still fall for this? How about we all just move in the direction of things that have a chance instead of a brick wall. Watching how nature does things will lead to many great things and then will be simple in concept.

Not sure where you are coming from. What do you think is a waste of time?

That a heat engine can run on ambient heat is, I think, a demonstrated fact. Unfortunately it seems no one has developed any kind of working machine much beyond the toy "drinking duck". There is abundant heat energy in the air. The concept is quite simple. Get rid of some of that heat by some cooling process and the rest of all that heat becomes available.

That heat engine, the "drinking duck" can run forever and produce some small amount of usable energy on nothing more than ambient heat and a tiny drop of evaporating water for cooling.

The problem is mainly getting rid of excess heat. That really is not a big problem there is just something counter intuitive about running a heat engine by throwing off heat, but that is what is necessary.

The drinking duck uses a minuscule amount of evaporating water for cooling yet, rather impressively, IMO, can run indefinitely, producing an equally minuscule amount of "free energy" from ambient heat. The Earth's surface is 71% water. We have oceans full of evaporatively cooled water which is near ice cold just a few meters below the surface. But cold water is just one way to cool a heat engine.

An Air-cycle heat pump produces much colder temperatures than evaporative cooling while also producing high grade heat, but the focus needs to be on dumping EXCESS heat as Ambient Heat is really OVER ABUNDANT!

Instead of a drop of water evaporating to cool a tiny bit of felt on a toy duck's beak, why not a cooling pond to cool a much larger ambient heat engine.

It certainly would not be necessary to use good drinking water. Any kind of cool water would do. Salty, brackish, river water, well water, ocean water, a fish pond, even sewage water for that mater.

memoryman

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Tom, you have the 'right' idea. To go even further, it is not necessary to have a cold sink; just convert the heat directly into electricity.

Tom Booth

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Tom, you have the 'right' idea. To go even further, it is not necessary to have a cold sink; just convert the heat directly into electricity.

I've been following the nantenna stuff since someone in here mentioned it a few years ago on another thread, if that's what you mean. Quite interesting I must say. That someday might amount to something. Last I heard, with some five million $$$$, Red Wave might come up with a prototype, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyway it isn't something I could build in my workshop in the basement.

Personally I think I might just knock something together out of tin cans and a soldering iron that can outperform what nantennas have actually been able to produce in USEABLE energy. The ultra-high frequency AC currently(?) produced(as of 2016 ? I think) isn't rectifiable. (rectifiable <- is that a real word?)

Anyway, not to be dismissive, I appreciate the input, but at this point nano-antennas seem to be a bit of a red herring. A diversion from a more straightforward and IMO promising and readily doable, by any back yard tinkerer, approach.

Not that building a combination Stirling Engine / Air Cycle System is a piece of cake or anything but I think it is at least DOABLE with my mini-metal lathe and drill press and maybe an old coffee can or two, some gasket cement and a blow torch. Maybe some duct tape, a few balloons and a rubber band. $25 grand should do it for a prototype.