ah... "over unity".... >1.... more than 100% efficient....

(synonym: perpetual motion machine.)

please, i beg you... don't invest in it. or, if you've got lots of money you don't need, send it to me and i promise to use it to research and try to develop just that kind of "over unity" machine.

no guarantees, please, and small, unmarked bills, ok?

ROTFLOL.

 

Over-unity is not perpetual motion. The one I describe is quite easy to understand, the energy needed to operate it comes from the ambient heat in the environment, collected by the heat pump... Is that perpetual motion? Of course not! It is considered over-unity though and perfectly sound science.

Check this out: http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/...s/heatpump.htm

 

I like using the "air conditioner in reverse" analogy. Because that's sort of what a heat pump is. And for the amount of electrical energy is consumes, it puts out way more heat energy. Most hotels/motels use them for each room heat/cool systems and some townhouse condos use them for heat as well. Here in the NE, they are not efficient enough for a 4000 sq ft house though. If you were to try and capture some of the heat output and turn it back into electrical energy, yes there is some loss but at least you are recovering some of the excess heat that is not used.

 

sorry that most of the references on that page come up 404....

but, and this may be hard to swallow... nothing puts out more energy than it consumes unless you either burn something in it and define it that way, or fudge the data.

even if some mechanism can take in X btu's of energy and move 2-3X btu's, those "moved" btu's, as maybe in a heat pump, can not be turned back into the original form of energy to move more btu's. on the face of it, that's what the claims are, and they're false or misleading at best.

for example: ...

from http://www.cwlp.com/Energy_services/...tings.htm#SEER


cold fusion has a better chance of heating or cooling your house than these devices, no matter how clever the backyard/basement/garage mechanics think they are.

if their stuff worked at all, don't you think that at least ONE serious HVAC [heating/ventilating/air conditioning] company would be working its butt off to bring it to market and blow their overly inefficient competition off the face of the earth???

no conspiracy theory in the world would prevent it. no amount of money could buy off enough inventors to keep that off the market.

the over-unity sites i looked at didn't seem to be talking about a better HVAC unit; they were trying to get more watts out than they were putting in.


but some laws of thermodynamics can do it.

there REALLY ain't no such thing as a free lunch!

but it's a nice goal and idea to play with. just don't buy the stock, unless it's to short it...

 

Sorry, you're in violation of the first law of Thermodynamics: "The first law of thermodynamics, a generalized expression of the law of the conservation of energy, states: the increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added to the system by heating, minus the amount lost in the form of work done to the system on its surroundings." From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_l...thermodynamics


This analysis fails to account for the energy consumed by the pump-motor that is integral in the design of heat pumps. Two obvious sources of loss are the I^2*R (resistive heating) losses, if an electric motor pump is used, and mechanical frictional losses of the machine.

For a larger scope discussion of this notion see "Entropy": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

Aside from that, were does the energy come from to run the heat-pump motor? A coal fired electric plant? A steam engine that directly drives the motor? ...these too must be considered in the calculations for a proper and complete analysis, and they too have losses...

I surveyed "over-unity systems" by doing a google search, my quick survey revealed that most analysis did not rely on, or rigorously apply, a solid thermodynamic analysis.

The laws of Thermodynamic are not just a good idea, they are, well, ummm, The Law! :-) (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics)

When analyzing matters like this keep Albert Einstein's qoute in mind: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

 

thank you!

 

After taking a closer look at the heat pump system that I saw several years ago, it seems that it's claiming to be really efficient, and even at -20 will output twice as much heat as electrical input, but in more normal temperatures is around 6 times the energy in. I was mistaken about the nature of it as well, it was a setup that used an efficient heat engine to just pump and heat water as well as operate the compressor. Basically the system is solar powered because the refrigerant runs through large panels outside where it picks up lots of solar and ambient heat because the gas is so much colder than the environment. The compressor draws the gas in and it condenses it into a liquid with a very high temperature, several hundred degrees, and one of the problems with designing such a system is making a compressor that can withstand that much heat for any long duration. I still don't see how it could have broken any laws of physics, there are even solar power facilities that use similar concepts (heat engines) to generate electricity, this system is just maximizing the use of lower temperature heat energy by moving and concentrating it. It's an open system with a quite well-understood source of energy, but I guess the term over-unity gets batted around so much for so many different kinds of things that it doesn't really apply to, and this is likely one of them.

Great discoveries and incredible inventions have taken place where it was once believed to be absolutely impossible, such as powered flight. These kinds of paradigm shifts don't happen often, but when they do it changes our understanding of everything. The quantum-flux, or so-called zero point vacuum energy... That's a whole other can-o-worms that needs to be investigated, and is, but again it's the 'lunatic fringe' of scientists working with the most recent groudbreaking quantum mechanics. I've read some of the open papers and seen presentations, very interesting stuff, but somewhat difficult to understand.

 

Agreed, Schwa, and your points are well-taken.

what i was objecting to was the thought/concept that the "over unity" seemed to imply a "better than 100%" efficiency. some of the electrical toys that you get when you google "over unity" sure look like their builders are trying to get more electricity out than they're putting in, and that just ain't gonna happen.

a good heat pump, under good conditions, can move more BTUs in or out of your house than you're buying as BTU-equivalents in electric power, but you're still paying for the power, and if you're on the grid, it ain't free.

if the heat pump is being driven off an electric solar panel, there are some other potential "fictions" in there, too: while every watt may go into spinning a motor to run the heat pump, compress gas, etc., and the design does sound excellent (really!), it is getting all of its energy input from the sun. there are inefficiencies in conversion from solar to electric, from electric to kinetic (to turn the motor/generator/compressor), etc.

i think we clarified one thing, though... one of the original comments, "A heat pump is over-unity because you get more (heat) energy out than electric energy put in, somewhere in the range of 300-400%... Generate electric power from that heat, and you've got yourself a closed loop system. " is what set me off, and the choice of words, too, which is obviously one of my hot buttons ... it's better to think of heat pumps as "moving more BTUs than the number of BTUs-equivalents of electricity they consume in the process." it's like a lever. i push ten pounds on this end, and 50 pounds of pressure are exerted by the other end of the lever.

but if you try to generate electric power from the heat that was moved, the conversion will net you less electricity than went in the first time. it's like hooking another lever to the other end of the one i just pushed on. sure, i can get the second lever to push with its 50# of force, but i can't ever get the same WORK out of the second lever (force times distance) because of frictional losses. (end of flame)

the system you described IS really neat, because it used the sun as multiple sources of energy for several parts of the overal cycle of the whole system, if i understood you correctly, and that's a GREAT way to do things.

about 30 years ago it occured to me that, if i put a small generator in my house to run it during a winter power outage, why couldn't i make it water-cooled and run the cooling water under my driveway and melt the snow and ice off it at the same time?

lots of problems to be solved to make that happen, and none are insurmountable, and would have been lots of fun (AND WORK) to implement. i still think of things like that...

i want to put an electric hot water heater upstream from my gas hot water heater, here in Raleigh. why? the cost of gas is very high here, and electricity is relatively cheap. if the elecric H2O heater is solar powered, after the cost of installation, it's "sort of" free power, and might provide all of the domestic hot water we need. AND if it's cloudy, the gas heater is there as a backup.

 

I think the author has it wrong in that OPEC can be scared into lowering oil prices. They never will, to any significant degree anyway. What they're more likely to do is say, "Oh, you need 20% less oil from us? How about 50% less oil." That will create a shortage and drive up prices even farther.

I've said it before on threads like this: Drug addicts cannot dictate to drug dealers how much drug to produce and how much to charge for it. Anyone dependent on something is at the mercy of those that provide it.

 

but Tim, economics don't really work that way... OPEC, if anything, is "addicted" to the money they get from the countries they sell the oil to, and their basic goal (if they have a collective IQ in the triple-digits) is to maximize the number of dollars they can squeeze out of the rest of the world before their own wells become much more expensive to extract oil from. without their oil sales, what can they do? there's only so much of a world market for sand, and i don't think theirs is all that high quality, at that.

take this quote, for example:...

supply and demand drive most of the thing. i was driving before the FIRST "oil shortage" of 1973. prices skyrocketed. why? because a bunch of Saudi princes had just graduated from Stanford and took their newly-minted MBAs home and said to dad, "y'know, dad, we've been getting screwed by the big oil companies. they've been telling us that we should sell oil for a nice low price. well, if you look at my analysis, i think we can get LOTS more per barrel, and the only thing we have to do is raise prices."

they did, everyone panicked, and within about five years, the dust settled at a much higher cost per barrel, and life went on. the '83 crunch was politically motivated; that's pretty clear. the whole Israeli thing helped them decide to cut production, raising prices [supply and demand, again...].

what they forgot is that they really didn't have any tight control over their own members of OPEC, and second, other countries around the world were discovering oil and figuring out that the high prices meant quite a bit of wealth to THEM, so the added their supplies to the market.

result: higher supplies and lower prices.

one thing i'm having trouble with is the whole concept of "addicted to oil."

sure, without it, there would be lots of pain for lots of people. but the implication is that we should do without it, isn't it? that's crazy!

conservation IS a great idea. it's one reason i drive a Prius. i use about 1/2 the gasoline to do all the things i used to do with my old 20-mpg-Taurus, and some of the things i did with my 12-mpg Corvette [though a little slower... ], but i still do them. i'm still addicted, but i can get by on a lower dose in my "fix" and i'm very happy to keep shooting up.

finally, one of the basic things in Schwartz' article in Fortune that REALLY bugs me is this one: talk about violating several laws of physics or thermodynamics, let alone reason and logic?!? conservation frees up supplies which might have been squandered somewhere else with lower efficiency. but it in no way increases the total supply itself. if he'd said, "the only way we're ever going to be able to keep a lid on energy costs..." i'd have given him my vote immediately, but the wording was very sloppy, imnsho...