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Technology has been kept largely immobile in its basic design for over a century. For all our talk about progress, real innovation is discouraged as it would tend to unsettle financial interests. We urgently need some disruptive new energy technologies.
While energy needs are set to grow inexorably for the next decades, production of hydrocarbon fuels is being throttled down to a trickle. The resulting shortage finds us - the consumers of energy - at a distinct disadvantage. We are paying the price for not paying attention.
The Peak Oil scenario was first announced in 1956 by a petroleum geologist - M. King Hubbert - who was at the time working for the Shell Oil company. Hubbert's prediction was that oil production would peak in the US between 1965 and 1970 and that internationally, the peak of production would be reached around the year 2000. Hubbert's peak, as the inexorable winding down of oil production has also been named, is universally recognized as a threatening reality, but is the theory based on actual physical principles?
North Sea oil rig - Image Minerals UK
There certainly is a shortage of production and transformation, enough to have driven prices above the $100-a-barrel level for crude oil. Those oil price increases have elevated the profits of oil companies to undreamed-of heights. Shell's profit for 2007 is a record 31 billion Dollars, Exxon Mobil "shattered its own record as the world's most profitable publicly traded corporation" with a yearly profit for last year of 40.6 billion Dollars and Shevron, the second largest US oil company saw its yearly profit increase to 18.7 billion Dollars. (LA Times, 2 Feb. 2008)
The German Energy Watch Group tells us in a report released in October 2007, that Peak Oil is here now, that "world oil production has peaked in 2006". Official industry and government data on oil reserves do not support that conclusion, but Energy Watch has made its own estimates to support a result that it has been actively looking for.
Not everyone agrees that we are running out of oil. Peter Jackson, who conducted a study of world oil supplies for Cambridge Energy Research Associates says oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.
Peak Oil artificial?
My argument is that there is no actual physical shortage of hydrocarbons. There is indeed a drop in oil extraction, but it seems that this is more a forced reduction of output, rather than a consequence of having exhausted liquid hydrocarbons as a resource.
Continue reading "The Peak Oil Deception: Squeezing Energy for Profit" »
While waves normally come in a succession of oscillations, a soliton is a self-reinforcing solitary wave, a single oscillation that maintains its form and energy along its path of propagation. Such a solitary wave can, for instance, travel along a canal and remain essentially unchanged for a long stretch.
John Scott Russell, a Scottish engineer living in the 19th century, was the first to observe and describe such a solitary wave in a channel of water:
"I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped - not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation''.
John Scott Russell's Soliton Wave Re-created in 1995 by scientists at - Heriot-Watt University.
The Coanda effect, named after its discoverer, the Romanian Henri Coanda, is the tendency of a flow of liquid or gas to adhere to and follow a curved surface. Sails and airplane wings make use of this effect to efficiently convert air flow (wind) into forward motion of the boat or lift for the airplane.
Historically, Viktor Schauberger had observed how trouts are able to stand still almost without any effort in fast-flowing mountain streams and he noted how they would, at the first sign of danger, accelerate like an arrow shot from a bow, not downstream, but against it. They do this by passing water through their gills and expelling it along the sleek body. Schauberger called itt "the secret of trout propulsion" and modeled technical propulsion systems after it. One of his implementations of the principle was called a repulsine and this page shows some designs and early implementations. Unfortunately, most of Schauberger's hardware and unpublished notes were lost in the 1950s.
How a soliton in air or water and an application of the coanda effect may combine into a useful propulsion force is also the subject of a very interesting article Mike Emery recently forwarded. Tom at montalk.net describes in this article how toroidal solitons - we know them as smoke rings - and the adhesive qualities of fluids could be put to good use in aeronautic and marine engineering applications.
Continue reading "Schauberger, Solitons and the Coanda Effect" »
The idea of entropy, of the constant and irreversible winding down of the universe, was introduced with the second law of thermodynamics. This law is based on an observation of James Watt's steam machine, which was the only technological utilization of thermal energy available at the time. According to the current views of thermodynamics, there is no antidote to entropy. Once expended, energy is said to be lost forever in that giant heat sink, which we imagine the vast reaches of the universe to be.
One of the great minds of this century, an outsider to established science, has recognized the folly of this view and coined a term for the antidote. He calls it syntropy. In his book Cosmography, R. Buckminster Fuller writes: "The reader will discover that the inexorable course of the gradual running down of the energy of the universe - that is, entropy - is only part of the picture. Entropy has a complementary phase, which we designated syntropy".
I wrote these words and quoted Fuller in 1993, in an article titled A New Beginning For Thermodynamics. At the time, I had my share of opposition, together with some appreciative comments. But few physicists seemed ready to question the unconditional validity of the second law of thermodynamics at the time. It was and perhaps still is one of the untouchable principles - almost a holy cow of physics.
Now, a decade and a half later, it seems that some researchers have hit upon a way to circumvent the law, to reverse that inexorable tendency of heat to disperse from a warm place to a cooler one.
Ammonia Butane Ambient Heat Motor - David Matos de Matos.
Heat pumps have been available for quite some time. They are used in refrigerators, air conditioners and environmental heating applications. They can extract between three and four times more heat from an environmental source than the equivalent of electricity needed to produce heat in a resistance heater. Their coefficient of performance is therefore said to be about three to four. Even though they are more efficient than electricity in heating, so far no one has been able to close the cycle and use the heat thus generated to again produce the driving force for the heat pump with some power left over to do other work.
But this seems destined to change. David Matos de Matos from Angola has designed a system that can do work with compression only. He proposes to do away with the expansion valve found in fridges and air conditioners to more efficiently utilize the cycle and run a motor or turbine with the continuously pressurized working fluid. His description of a proposed two-cycle ammonia and butane compression-only motor with expansionless phase change and heat recovery is available in this blog post: Compression only heat engines - Plus phase change
Matos says the efficiency of this engine could be much increased by incorporating the Hydristor, a variable vane hydraulic pump and motor developed by Tom Kasmer, into his design. The Hydristor operates by converting shaft rotation and power into hydraulic pressure and flow, and/or the reverse. It can seamlessly merge several flows of hydraulic power with a shaft rotation.
Kasmer proposes to use the Hydristor to replace the transmission in conventional vehicles. It could be retrofitted in cars, trucks and motorcycles without much trouble and would increase the efficiency of transmission tremendously as well as use breaking energy regeneratively.
But another use Kasmer has in mind is incorporation of the hydristor in a heat pump cycle, where he says it could increase efficiency to the point of allowing the closing of the circle. One could use the accumulated heat in a stirling engine which in turn could drive a generator and produce sufficient electricity to run the heat pump with power to spare:
Continue reading "Thermoenergetics: Can Hydraulics Reverse Entropy?" »
Great controversy marks the history of attempts to harness the force of gravity. Somewhat condescendingly termed perpetual motion, such gravity-harnessing designs have received little more than smug comments about the state of sanity of their inventors, and in the absence of any technological implementation actually in use, their feasibility was easily denied by the denizens of scientific orthodoxy. Detractors say such a self-running device would be in violation of the law of conservation of energy. Many disagree, as gravity is a real force that can be tapped if only we have the right technology.
The history of overbalancing wheels is spotty, to say the least, with most barely able to turn and unable to overcome the restraining forces of friction. But there was at least one notable exceptions, the Bessler Wheel which not only could overcome the friction and do continuous work. One of Bessler's wheels was verified by such a public figure as the Landgraf of Hessen/Kassel, who was shown the normally concealed mechanism by Johannes Bessler, the inventer. Apparently the mechanism was very simple and effective, but the discovery was lost because the inventor could not find a buyer and the Landgraf kept his vow of secrecy.
Although there are good sites about Bessler's invention on the net, none of the researchers have so far been able to replicate the technology.
But things seem to be changing now. There are two modern-day implementations of the overbalancing wheel tech that seem to work just fine, and we can see them on video.
Continue reading "Overbalancing Gravity Motor - Johannes Bessler Rehabilitated?" »
In a fairly radical departure from the principles that normally govern hydroelectric power generation, Austrian engineer Franz Zotlöterer has constructed a low-head power plant that makes use of the kinetic energy inherent in an artificially induced vortex. The water's vortex energy is collected by a slow moving, large-surface water wheel, making the power station transparent to fish - there are no large pressure differences built up, as happens in normal turbines.
Special turbine collecting vortex energy - Image: gravitationswirbel.
The aspect of the power plant reminds a bit of an upside-down snail - through a large, straight inlet the water enters tangentially into a round basin, forming a powerful vortex, which finds its outlet at the center bottom of the shallow basin. The turbine does not work on pressure differential but on the dynamic force of the vortex. Not only does this power plant produce a useful output of electricity, it also aerates the water in a gentle way. Indeed, the inventor was looking for an efficient way to aerate the water of a small stream as he hit upon this smart idea of a plant that not only gives air to the medium but also takes from it some of the kinetic energy that is always inherent in a stream.
Of course the use of water vortices has been pioneered by another Austrian - Viktor Schauberger, who was also known as the "water wizard". He floated hard-to transport heavy logs from remote regions of the Austrian forests, not accessible at the time by streets, to where they would be milled and processed. The feat was accomplished by carefully regulating the water's temperature and by inducing a rolling, longitudinal vortex motion in the water.
At one point, Schauberger took out a patent on a turbine he invented, that made use of vortex dynamics. An article about that turbine of Schauberger's which I wrote way back in the 90s can be found here. The turbine wheel was designed in the form of a cone with a cork screw pattern, and it was fast running. Quite different from the turbine of Zotlöterer which is optimized for aerating the water, rather than for production of power.
Still, Zotlöterer's results are quite respectable. The cost of construction for his plant was half that of a conventional hydroelectric installation of similar yield and the environmental impact is positive, instead of negative.
Continue reading "Water Vortex Drives Power Plant" »
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