Fraudster - Over unity- free energy - seeks investment

There's gravity induced heat in my lunchbox, and it didn't cost me a cent
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This post is for someone named SuperVeg, and involves a challenge I made to invent the impossible a few days ago. Due to using all my money on better things, but mostly due to not really being into bets I cant win, the bet is for bragging rights only, and is open to all. The reality is, after I issued the challenge...


I'm going to run "over unity" through the invention engine and see what it comes up with.

As it's ultimate and final test, I bet (bragging rights only ) that it can come up with a device that you cant fault 

 



I thought it might actually prove to be useful as a test of a fail condition.

For some years now I've been working on a formalised problem solving technique. It involves instructions, and processes to attempt to find a solution to a given problem. I call it "The Invention Engine". So far it's largely responsible for most of the inventions in this blog. You can see the difference between the ideas I have and the problems I pose and run through the invention engine. The invention engine ones seem to work.

But it wont this time.

The Invention Engine works like a flow chart or computer program. I put a problem in one end, and a solution falls out the other. So far the process is all in my head, but at some stage I'll publish it. Much of the invention engine itself was created by posing problems and running them through the unfinished engine. That's my favourite bit about the entire endeavour.

One problem with a system designed to find solutions to problems, is that there is no way of arriving at a position where the engine should report that something simply cant be done. I understand this will be an impossible hurdle to overcome, but thought I should put the question through the engine itself anyway.

How can I create a system that can test for "must fail" conditions?

The results of that inquiry required me to put a few different ideas through a test to see how they faired. The best test I could come up with was one that I knew would fail.

I ran a few known impossibilities like tuning water into beer and perpetual motion. I also ran free energy through the engine. Free energy and perpetual motion tend to go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing.

Perpetual motion is impossible because someone named Newton made a law against it. All the good things are illegal. There is an aspect to the universe that tends toward refusing a free lunch. But there are some ways to dodge around the system.

For instance, a hydro electric power plant uses the potential energy of a stack of water sitting high up in some mountains to generate electricity. If you had to pump the water back up the mountain after you generated some electricity from it, you would end up with an electricity bill. Electricity generating companies hate it when they get a bill at the end of the month because it makes them look incompetent. Luckily there is a convenient natural system to get all that water back up the hill for free so you can do it all again. It's kind of free energy, and its also kind of perpetual motion. If you stuck the entire system in a glass dome, it would keep working. But it uses the sun to power it. It's the sun that sticks all that water back up into the tops of the mountains. Evaporation looks free, but it comes at great expense. If I had to pay the power bill for the sun, it would really put a dent in my lifestyle.

Dents aren't free. And sometimes you just don't have a handy river sitting high up in a mountain.

So this entire free lunch electricity generating thing looks like a winner in the "things that are bound to fail if I run them through the engine" competition. I can ask the question and test the system in a hope that the methods I have identified really will let me know when something simply cant be done. I haven't actually identified a method of identifying that a given thing is impossible, but I have to start somewhere.

What I do have is some half baked ideas to test.

So I ran "I want some genuinely free renewable energy that doesn't require the sun to be there at all". That should at least give me a proven "no can do" to test my ideas against.

But...

I got this instead.

please stay with me on this if you are someone who can string together a thought that can hold up to scientific scrutiny. I'm happy to have this fall over, but cant see where it does.

All good perpetual motion engines need a decent name so I'll call this one Bob. Or Bob 3000.

Find a 200 metre high hill.
Build a cable car system on it.
Stick five liquid refrigerant filled gas tankers on the down cable at regular intervals, and five empty gas tankers on the up cable.
Attach a few generators from the turnstile at the top of the system.
Run a gas line from the bottom of the hill to the top.
Plug a compressor into the gas line at the top of the hill.

Generally speaking, the plan is to generate electricity from the potential energy stored because some liquefied gas is sitting at the top of a hill. In this respect, Bob 3000 is a lot like a hydro electric power plant. The generators are placed on either the top or bottom pulley that carry the cable, or both as is convenient.

To get the gas back to the top of the hill, we release it into a large diameter gas line at the bottom that is already filled with gas. When it turns from a liquid into a gas, it fills the gas line. The gas line is a sealed system that allows the liquefied refrigerant barely enough freedom to only just turn gaseous. ie it remains under a great deal of pressure even when in the pipe.

As the full gas tanker moves down the hill it weighs say 100 tons.
The empty ones weigh, for the sake of mathematical ease, 20 tones.
So we have 500 tons coming down the hill and 100 going up.
Now lets call 400 tones falling from 200 metres approximately one shi?load of energy (where one shi?load is a unit of measurement known only to me)

Compressors use a stack of energy to compress gas, and tend to be not very efficient. But the plan here is to start with gas that's already almost a liquid, so we have a bit of a head start.

But there's no such thing as a free lunch, so lets say it takes two shi?loads of energy to compress the gas back into a liquid at the top of the hill to make the system keep moving, and it produces only one shi?load of power.

1S - 2S = (grumpy shareholders)

But here's the bit that the invention engine spat out on the third pass...

Just triple the height of the hill.

Normally if you were, say, pumping water back up hill to use for hydroelectricity, if you double the height of the hill, you double the energy costs to the system, but in this system the additional costs almost amount to not very much at all. A bit of friction at each end of the cables, and some in the pipes is about all. The gas in the pipes almost finds its own way to the top of the hill. The compressor still uses almost the same amount of energy. The only real difference is the weight of the cable. And the additional weight on the upside is counteracted by the additional weight on the downside. The result is thrice the power generated, but with only a tiny additional energy cost.

Our shareholders now see 3S - 2S = (happy shareholders + that Nobel prize I've always wanted, and some serious karmic credit for giving away a multi-trillion dollar invention and saving the world)

Now as I said, I'm happy for this impossible invention to be knocked over, and fully expect it to be. To this end I have invited a few people to do so. But I personally cant figure out where the problem is. I'm actually really keen to learn where it lies.

Even the invention engine cant find a problem.

It will be the invention engine's first failure, but as stated the final solution was supposed to be impossible, so please, I invite everyone to find where it falls over. Even if all you have is a vague feeling, drop in  comment or send me an email so I can explore it a bit.

You'll have to guess my gmail account as your first test.



120 things in 20 years - taking fraud into the realm of honesty with "Fraudster - Over unity- free energy - seeks investment" posts.

Wind energy - Blades

It turns out, there is a stack of energy in the wind. In fact the more I research, the more I see it that way. I'm starting to get some kind of grip on this energy stuff. I'll try to explain what I've understood so far.

Water pumping windmill

Just looking at the traditional windmill for now, (traditional to me) the one that looks like a fan, we see there are a stack of different blade shapes, and some seem to have more blades than others. Some seem to be always used for pumping water, and others seem to be always used for generating electricity. In keeping with 120 things in 20 years tradition, I'll start an explanation of wind energy by talking about cogs.

Connect two different sized gears together. Choose two cogs so that when the small one rotates 100 times, the large one rotates only once. Now give the gears some power by turning them. The same amount of power exists in the big and small gears, but in the small gear, its spread out over 100 turns. This means that you can slow it down by resting a feather on it. It has no grunt. Try the same feather trick with the large gear, and your large gear wont care a bit. 

If you put a set of wheels on the axle of the small gear you will zoom along until you get to a steep hill, or a feather.

If you put a set of wheels on the axle of the large gear, you will drive slowly through a pillow factory with ease.

Having just described this, for the first time in my life I suspect I might be leaning toward some vague understanding of "torque" that I didn't have when I started this post. I think torque might be rotational grunt, where power is what the engine has. If this is true, you can express an engine's power as more grunt or more speed while keeping the same power (the engine). That must be it. Or not. But for now, I'm sticking to "grunt", so now might be a good time to edit your dictionaries and engineering manuals.

A windmill's power comes from the wind. If the wind is fast we get more power. Now, picture a string of air 100 metres long. That's called a string of air. Now move it at 100 kph. That's called wind.

If we slice that 100 metre string of wind 100 times we get 1% of it's power in each slice.
If we slice that 100 metre string of wind 10 times we get 10% of its power in each slice.
That's simple enough.
If we have a 10 blade windmill, it makes 10 slices every time it does one revolution. That means it will make 10 revolutions as that 100 metre string of wind blows past.
If we have a 100 blade windmill, it will make 100 slices for each revolution. That means it will make one revolution as that 100 metre string of wind blows past.

The same amount of power is in that 100 metre string of wind, but we can harvest it in such a way that suits any combination of grunt and speed that we might need for our application.

The 10 blade windmill spins 10 times with stacks of speed, and the 100 blade windmill turns only once, but with more grunt.

It turns out that lifting water from a well requires lots of force, so we use windmills that have a lot of blades, and generating electricity requires a lot of speed, so we tend to use windmills with fewer blades in power generation.

A 100 metre string of air doesn't really get you 100 slices. Actually for all I know it might. But it probably doesn't. I made those numbers up to make the calculations easy to see, but it all works pretty much the way I described.

So anyway, that's the story of where babies come from.

Wind energy

There's a lot of wind about of late. It's got me thinking.

Quite a few years ago, I was talking to my two year old friend Sarah, when the subject turned to wind. I asked her where it came from. She looked at me as if I was a bit of an idiot, but then, to my delight, she patiently explained it to me.

It turns out trees make it by waving from side to side.

Obvious really.

Other than a bit of sailing experience, and a decent understanding of where the stuff comes from thanks to Sarah, I don't know much else about wind. I'm about to rectify that. I'm going to learn how to make a windmill. And then, once it's made, I'm going to do something with all that wind energy I collect. There are a few things that spring to mind that I might do with some wind power.

• Grinding flour is one, but I tend to get someone else to pre-grind my flour. 
• Pumping water. I do a lot of that at the moment in aquaponics, so that could be useful. 
• Or even generating electricity. I really need to learn about the stuff, so windmills might be a good introduction to electricity. 

Whatever I end up doing with my windmill, it should be an interesting learning experience.

The weather has been too rainy and windy to put much of a dent in all the things I need to do on the new aquaponics system, so I'm reading everything I can find that has anything to do with wind energy.

Aquaponics - Inverter based electrical backup system

We get a lot of blackouts.

Fish hate blackouts.

I'm going to blackout proof my planned, larger, aquaponics system by building an electrical backup. I also need to build my planned, larger, aquaponics system.

Here's what I've done so far...

Attractive isn't it.

I happen to own a one hundred amp hour deep cycle battery. That's it in the bottom right corner of the picture.

I also own a multi-meter, a battery charger, a powerhead, and a bucket of water. 

As of today I also, also own a 200 watt inverter. It's a device that turns 12 volt battery power, into mains power. I had to buy it. A small inverter doesn't cost much and you can pick one up online, or in camping sections of department stores.

A power head is essentially a fish tank stirrer. It aids in supplying the water with oxygen, and will also create a bit of a whirlpool to concentrate fish waste solids into the center of the planned, larger, fish tank. This will allow the solids to be extracted from the fish tank, and moved to the planned grow bed where they belong. 

The powerhead is a critical component, because I'll be relying on it to supply oxygen to my fish in case of a power outage or pump failure. That's the powerhead in the blue bucket. It's basically just a small motor with a propeller on it. According to the box it came in, it moves 5000 litres of water per hour. The best part is, it moves all that water with only a 12 watt motor. My pump also moves about 5000 litres of water, but it has a 150 watt motor. 

The pump's main purpose in life is to supply the grow bed with nutrient rich water, but the bacteria will be fine for a couple of days if it fails. A system full of fish on the other hand, will start to suffer within an hour or so if the water isn't moved around.

I'll run the pump on a timer, so that it runs for around 10 minutes of every hour. I'll run the power head all the time.

The plan is to run the powerhead from the large battery, via the inverter, and to run a battery charger to keep the battery topped up at all times. Based on the tests I'm currently running, and on my rough calculations, in the event of a blackout, I estimate the battery should last approximately forever. 

So far I've been running the powerhead for 4 hours using the battery alone (ie without the charger), and the batteries capacity has actually increased. Which is odd. I'm guessing it has something to do with the day warming up, which might be changing the battery's abilities. 

This electricity stuff is really the kind of thing I should know something about. Perhaps I'll look into it.