Self-Running Ambient Heat Engine

[Vortex]

Heat pipe

Heat pipe
Requires no moving parts..
A heat pipe would greatly increase heat transfer between
the much cooler exhaust air and ambient air.

The three basic components of a heat pipe are:

1. the container
2. the working fluid
3. the wick or capillary structure
Wick or capillary structure can be replaced with gravity return of working fluid.

What is a Heat Pipe?

Similar to a Heat Pipe is the Jacob Perkins tube (Hermetic tube) type heat exchanger used for over 100 years.
Single phase heat transfer system. List of Perkins patents here. Included: Jacob Perkins, Angier March Perkins, Loftus Perkins and
Loftus Patton Perkins
Very interesting, scroll down to see systems and photos.

House_N Research Template

Ref link.

Looped Heat Pipe Heat-transporting device - Google Patents

[sykavy]

converting a weed trimmer to compressed air motor

I thought this was a simple example to get started working with an air motor. Free energy isn't involved but I think that we should be acquainted with at least some basics and then work from there.

Video
YouTube - GREENPOWERSCIENCE's Channel

[oldHermit]

sykavy:

Went down to the small engine repair, picked up a couple of dead weed whackers and tried it out. Works great with air! Now if someone would tell me how to get the voltage from the magneto into usable electricity, I'd be much happier. I want to try it with the Loyd Tanner Heater that rickoff posted <http://www.energeticforum.com/renewable-energy/2835-friction-steam-boiler-14.html>.

Sorry if this is off topic

[sykavy]

sykavy:

Went down to the small engine repair, picked up a couple of dead weed whackers and tried it out. Works great with air! Now if someone would tell me how to get the voltage from the magneto into usable electricity, I'd be much happier. I want to try it with the Loyd Tanner Heater that rickoff posted <http://www.energeticforum.com/renewable-energy/2835-friction-steam-boiler-14.html>.

Sorry if this is off topic

Wow that's great. To generate electricity you would need to connect it to a small generator. I don't think the magneto on the weed whacker will produce much electricity. The point was first to understand how to make an air motor, then figure out how to run it cheap or for free. That is the tricky and some times dangerous part.

For example to have a wind mill compress air. That air could be stored and used later to run a generator. This idea came up before. It also can be stored for periods of time (excluding leakage) without immediate loss like storing energy in a battery.

Germany has had a system like this on a massive scale since the 1970's, so it works in practice already, which I don't think is practical since smaller systems could be developed by each home owner or groups of homes. This would cut losses in line transmission and other costs like maintenance and would be "free" energy
Compressed-air energy storage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Alana]

Magneticaircar

Hi everybody,

a long time ago we have had a discussion about the concept of MAGNETIC AIR MOTORS. It is very sad that nobody has a any further information about their dea. So I did some researches and have found some very interesting things.
Over "http://cleantechnica.com/2008/09/29/magnetic-air-car-could-be-ready-by-2010/comment-page-4/#comments" I have found a very remarkable discussion which I could not verify (if persons behind the discussion are real).
When it is true what (you can everybody there) than the real inventors are Elijah and Elisha Dumas. Here is the number of the patent file: US 2009/0032130 A1. The patent file discribes a fluid flow amplifiere based on the principle of Bernoulli and Coanda.
Here a very little (not very expressive) video: YouTube - llmbs's Channel.

Hope this helps
AlanA

[oldHermit]

Hi everybody,

a long time ago we have had a discussion about the concept of MAGNETIC AIR MOTORS. It is very sad that nobody has a any further information about their dea.

The problem we're facing isn't the engine (in the case of air or steam) or the motor (in the case of electric), it's the ability to keep enough power on call to run them. The Dumas brothers are/were going in the right direction. Unless you've got a magnetic motor, which has it's own problems, we need to come up with some way to get power to run whatever engine on demand. I firmly believe that until then we'll continue to run gas engines for our transportation needs.

Here's a link to an interesting set of calculations, the ninth post down:
The Compressed air engine: Is it a scam? - Naked Scientists Discussion Forum

Enjoy, keep trying.

oldHermit

[Naboo]

Hey sorry, I didn't mean to bother you all by waking up this old tread, but I noticed this when I just tested one of the links: Untitled Document

It says: DUE TO SECURITY THIS PROJECT WILL REMAIN CLASSIFIED
Can this be for real? Isn't that a bit too easy for people to understand, or is it some weird publicity stunt?

hmmm....

[Aaron]

Air Turbine Engine

Personally, I don't think that a product that has become
classified will announce itself in such a manner. Probably
hype and that is a separate issue of whether or not what
they had worked or not.

In any case, here is the old archived site:
Internet Archive Wayback Machine

[FRC]

Great thread

Would like to see this thread getting active again. Came across this concept in 2007 along with a lot of the other things in this forum. So went out and bought
an air compressor with 12 gallon tank and power tool attachments on sale for a
little over $200.00 (also have small 3 gallon one that will run off a 700 watt inverter). Still have not taken it out of the box. Would be nice to finally start
doing something with it.

FRC

[ewizard]

Personally, I don't think that a product that has become
classified will announce itself in such a manner. Probably
hype and that is a separate issue of whether or not what
they had worked or not.

In any case, here is the old archived site:
Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Thanks Aaron but now it gets even more interesting unless this is just a temporary problem. I get this when clicking your link: Data Retrieval Failure.
Edit: Nevermind - just a server hickup at the wayback machine.

[Lutherman]

take it out of the box

Speaking of outside of the box, the conventional wisdom in the 1930s among inventors was that an air car without a compressor was stupid. This has only fairly recently occurred to me.

In 1987 I built a go kart with an old riding lawnmower chassis, an old air drill, and a scuba tank. I filled the tank to 125 psi and it went 25 feet on a level sidewalk. Or I could point it up a hill, sit on it, and it would start up so fast I could hardly steer it. Massive torque.

If I were doing it now I would find a way to put a compressor on it, at least for regenerative braking if nothing else. Because of regenerative braking, the air car is the only form of transportation that is more efficient for in-town driving than constant cruising. Because every time you touch the brakes, the tank heats up. In cruising, the tank gets colder and colder.

Luther

[Lutherman]

Air Car Hall of Fame

I've discovered dozens of inventors in the past year of research who were convinced that compressed air as an energy carrier could revolutionize the industrial world. My latest project has been to answer to the kneejerk skeptic who automatically says, without evidence, that such inventors are always delusional crackpots, or scammers with no conscience. My response is to add flesh to the bones of these inventors. I am now presenting the compressed air inventors as human beings with jobs, families, etc.

For those who are only interested in the technical side, just skip the family history and the politics. This new volume is full of technical hints and clues not available before.

Volume one of what is to be an encyclopedia of lost pneumatic science: Air Car Hall of Fame. Ready for download at my website.

Do you know who William A Rohr was? If not you should! He proved in the nineteenth century what Peter Lindemann stated earlier in this thread. Something about putting your compressor IN the air tank.

More power to us all.

Luther
Pneumatic Options Research Library: Air Car Hall of Fame

[bugler]

This new volume is full of technical hints and clues not available before.

Hi. Some days ago I took a look at your book (the technical one). I had the problem that everything was in american units (psi, inches, ...).
It would be nice to have the detail in both formats. Thanks.

[Lutherman]

American units

There are reasons for doing it first in American units but no reason to not eventually do it in both. It will take some time and I might get it done for the 5th edition if I live long enough. I want to get the 4th edition done this year and won't take the time to change anything except for mistakes and omissions. The only change I plan to make in the 4th edition is to add the math for the equalization engine which I finally figured out, and to redo the pdf in color, high quality resolution so the pictures look good.

The sources I used are all in American units so if people want to check my work they can compare it against the source side by side.

I think the American auto industry still uses American units while engineers are switching over to SI units.

But you're right, eventually I want to offer it in either format.

Luther

[Tom Booth]

Ambient Heat Engine Design

Hi, I have been reading through this thread for the past few days with much interest, and learned quite a lot.

I was especially interested in the Article by Tesla about the rationale for believing that this "Ambient Heat Engine" can work. Thank you for posting that.

Several years ago I was asked to design a Stirling Engine to be used on a relatively small parabolic dish - (About the size of an old type satellite dish, maybe 6 foot diameter or so). The idea being to keep the dish as small as possible but have enough output from the engine to power a typical single family home.

So I started playing around with different designs trying various ways to maximize efficiency; began studying air conditioning methodologies to keep the cool side of the engine from overheating.

I would run the various designs in my head, see the flaws and make improvements, I'm fairly good at visualization.

So this "mental tinkering" went on for some time - several months I think in all and then one day I had a machine running in my head and I noticed that it was overheating and so reduced the size of the dish more but it still kept overheating so I reduced the size of the dish even more - eventually I took the concentrating solar parabolic reflector off the thing entirely and it still kept running -day and night (but was no longer overheating at least).

How this happened was that I had noticed that a lot of heat was escaping from the focal point. Hot air was boiling off. I solved this by using some vacuum tubing to surround the focal point to draw the hot air into some coils that went to the hot end of the Stirling engine.

To make a long story short, what started happening, after fooling around with different variations of this system is that the engine was running off the warm ambient air that was being drawn in and the simple "Air-Cycle" cooling system was expelling the same air after the heat had been removed back to atmosphere.

This machine running in my head was running off the heat in the very large "solar collector" called Earth's Atmosphere, extracting the heat and converting it into electricity, the end result of which was that the "spent" cold air was sent back to the "solar collector" - back to atmosphere. No dish was needed. The heat engine was so efficient it didn't need a dish.

This came as a shock. I kept going over it and over it running the engine in my head, - but it just kept running. I could not believe this but I sent the plan off in an email to California and the guy who owned the company told me in response that he reviewed the idea with his "experts" and they told him it was impossible and so he was no longer interested in hearing any more of what I had to say about it.

I got a little miffed over that and just went ahead and started posting the idea along with sketches and animated drawings of this machine on various science forums and such asking if anyone could figure out why this shouldn't work.

I didn't really believe it could work but I had had the thing running quite well in my head for quite some time.

I did not call it an "Ambient Heat Engine" I called it a "Stirling Turbine" as it is essentially a Stirling Engine that uses a turbine instead of a piston but it runs on the same basic principle as a Stirling Engine but with some added check valves so that the expanding and contracting air or a typical Stirling "displacer chamber" instead of pushing and pulling a piston; acts like a diaphragm pump or compressor, like a "pulse pump" to draw in ambient air as well as acting like a compressor to compress air to extract heat from the air like a heat pump and use the same compressed air to drive a turbine which not only produces the power output but also, by extracting energy from the air - further cools the air expanding through it - which cold air is utilized to help maintain the temperature differential in the Stirling engine.

By combining functions, eliminating extraneous moving parts, using plain old air as both a source of heat/energy as well as a refrigerant the thing started just drawing in warm ambient air, extracting the energy and expelling cold air. - all in my head of course. of course.

Though, currently, I found a friend who is letting me use a workshop to try and build the thing. I was hoping that by now someone else with better facilities and more experience and such would have gone ahead and built the thing, but apparently nobody is bothering just because they don't think it could possibly work even though they can't give any good reason why it shouldn't other than "It violates the second law of thermodynamics" or some such - but cannot specify exactly where in the system there would be a breakdown. Where is the flaw ? Why wouldn't this work ?

In a couple years that I have had these plans and drawings on the internet nobody can really tell me beyond flippant responses such as "Do the math and you will find out blah blah blah"

Anyway, there are some here in this forum, I see, who have access to very well equipped workshops and such and have been studying this sort of thing a lot longer than I have.

I just stumbled upon it more or less by "accident" while running different scenarios in my head.

There are some unusual components in this thing. To understand how it works and to understand the drawings and such it is helpful to know about Stirling Engines, Kinetic Theory of Gases, Air-Cycle refrigeration, (The first kind of refrigeration ever invented actually), The action of "Expansion Turbines" or "Turbo Expanders" in refrigeration, General theory of refrigeration, heat pumps, air conditioning, pneumatics and so forth - but after reading this forum it seems you guys are mostly way ahead of me in most of these areas.

At any rate I would be happy to have anyone here look over this thing and give an opinion about it.

It seems to me that it meets all the criteria for what is being discussed here and what Tesla was talking about - A "Self-Acting" Ambient Heat Engine.

If one simply Googles my username along with "Stirling Turbine" the other forums I've posted this information on can be found along with the various discussions, debates about thermodynamics and so forth.

Here is one forum I posted to most recently again since I began reading this thread here and made some comment regarding the article by Tesla I found here seemingly confirming the validity of the theory which makes this design run, In Tesla's estimation, in theory at least.

I may not know what I'm talking about but Tesla at least was a certified Genius which has given me some additional motivation to go ahead and build some sort of prototype ASAP.

The thing is actually quite low tech IMO. I would think that anyone with some basic brazing and possibly some machining skills should be able to build it in their garage or workshop.

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/46143-stirling-turbine/

Some links to some of the drawings and an animation can be found there.