Some Knowledge

I read about a machine yesterday called the Perendev motor.  This motor is said to run on permanent magnets, and is supposed to produce torque and rotation without any input of energy.  The inventors of this motor supposedly improved the design to use electromagnets and offer motor-generator sets for sale.  It seems this motor produces up to 300 kw of power out of nothing but repulsive magnetic fields.  It also seems this is an elaborate hoax to defraud people out of money.

I am just not surprised anymore by what I find posted on the net.  There seems to be a sect that lives in Switzerland that has a machine that produces electricity from a static electric machine for nothing.  They claim the machine runs and produces power with no input.  They claim the device can not be produced by a factory because the manufacturer would not understand the spiritual principles of the machine’s operation.  These people call themselves Methernitha and the device that produces this free energy is called a Thestatika.  I find this information humorous.  People with a ridiculous philosophy and a ridiculous generator living in the cheese district of Switzerland.

All these devices prey upon the same human fault: greed.  There are a lot of people who want something for nothing.  In a way, the entire economic system is based on greed.  Still, if you build a flashy looking electrical machine full of motion and sparks and claim it produces free energy, you will no doubt find some suckers to give you some money.  It seems the Perendev motor people have been taking orders for their free energy generator sets and are just pocketing the cash in return for a lot of excuses for why they have never delivered a device, working or not.  On their website they show a doctored picture of a John Deere generator as if it is a photo of their own product.  How can people run such an obvious scam in public on the net and not get busted?

The only thing close to a perpetual motion machine is the entire universe, and even that might not last forever.  You can not get energy from nothing.  Energy is neither created nor destroyed.  Energy changes form from potential to kinetic and back again.  The laws of nature do not allow you to get something for nothing.  The only reason that there are so many perpetual motion proposals is because somebody wants to get money from people for nothing.  I can’t believe that in the modern age when anyone can get almost any information they want, people still fall for these hucksters selling free energy devices.

Here is a Youtube video that shows a completely logical perpetual motion device.  As can be clearly seen in high-resolution cartoon format, the rules of logic are applied impeccably to devise a mechanism for not only providing unlimited free energy, but also a means for overcoming the force of gravity.  It is breakthroughs like this that have propelled mankind from a life in the caves to an existence in the sky.

With the price of fossil fuel and the continued expansion of technological culture, every source of energy available to man should be exploited.  There may be some people who contend that this application of the laws of probability constitutes cruelty to animals, however, who’s to say how the creatures feel about doing their part to further the cause of society.  There is already a surplus of unwanted pets.  Perhaps it is better to put these creatures to work providing power and transportation for humanity than to have them end their days in the animal shelters of the planet.  And as for jelly, there’s nothing to hold us back from just making more.

It’s time the human race looked to science for an answer to annoying social issues like the supply of energy.  With such minds researching the problems of the modern world and deriving answers based on logic and the rules of nature, there is nothing to stop us from arriving at a world of plenty for all and a surplus of power to run the machinery of our planet.

The Japanese company Genepax claims to have invented a car that runs on nothing but water. They installed what they are calling a “Water Energy System” box in the back of an electric Reva and claim that this device is all that is needed to power the car. The WES is claimed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen with a membrane. The hydrogen is then sent to a fuel cell where it combines with oxygen from the air and produces electricity to charge the car’s batteries.

The problem with this thing is that it’s a perpetual motion device. Genepax is supposedly applying for a patent on this device to power its cars, and is looking into manufacturing the device on a commercial scale. I would have to say that I’ve seen bogus claims like this a hundred times before. Every time the price of energy goes up somebody comes along and claims to have some device that extracts energy from water. The only way you can get power out of water is to either burn it in a fusion reactor like the sun, or let it fall a distance and extract power from it with a Pelton wheel and a generator.

I’m pretty sure that this company is just looking for investors to develop its impossible technology. Fortunately for them there are a lot of people in the world who never took high school chemistry and have no idea what the conservation of energy is all about. There are many different companies making perpetual motion devices these days. Google will find millions of websites offering opportunities in the lucrative water to energy business. The thing these companies have in common is that they are all scams. The companies make some kind of black box that is supposed to make energy out of nothing, and all it really does is convince people to give the makers of the black box their money. Where are the government regulators when this kind of ripoff is going on? They are probably laughing at how stupid people can be to give away their money for somebody to develop some kind of impossible machine.

I’ve been reading about ultracapacitors this morning.  These are capacitors that have a huge area and small seperation between charges.  They are generally called double layer devices.  In an ultracapacitor, the electrodes are formed from a substance like activated carbon or carbon nanotubes.  The high surface area of these substances provides one electrode.  There is a solution of an electrolyte that connects this surface to the other electrode, which is formed from more of the activated carbon.  There is a porous seperator keeping the two layers of the ultracapacitor apart.

Ultracapacitors have many properties that make them ideal for energy storage.  They are highly efficient and can store and discharge electric current with efficiencies of 99%.  Ultracapacitors are not affected by cold and can not be over-discharged.  They have low effective resistance and can be charged and discharged at a rate that is only limited by heating in the electrical conductors leading into them.  They have a high energy density per kilogram, and a power density that is approximately two orders of magnitude greater than chemical batteries.

All of these electrical properties make ultracapacitors ideal for use in electric vehicles.  Improvements in ultracapacitor design are making devices with higher voltage ratings and higher power densities.  There is much promise in this device for future use in energy storage applications.  Already there are vehicles which use ultracapacitors to provide surge current for starting and regenerative braking.  Ultracapacitors are currently available in sizes which are over 5000 Farads.  This technology holds much promise for the future and will possibly change the way power is stored.

I was reading the first part of Nicola Tesla’s autobiography yesterday and came across an interesting passage.  Tesla describes his system for wireless power transmission and along with power, he envisions a system of interconnected communications devices.  He describes pictures, telegraph, stock ticker, telephone, and even print media being transmitted on his towers from one device to another.  As I read the short description I knew what he was talking about.  It was the internet.

The only parts of the net that Tesla didn’t have were the actual devices that make such a network possible.  He does not mention computers or network equipment and says nothing about packet communications.  In an earlier passage he describes an idea he had as a child to build an autonomous thinking robot, so he did have ideas about thinking machines.

Tesla became obsessed in his later years with his scheme for wireless transmission of power.  It’s not surprising that he got nowhere with this idea.  There is no profit in power if the power company can’t meter and charge for the power a person uses.  Still, the general idea was that all devices that used electricity would be connected together on a common medium where they could all communicate with each other.  That is pretty much what we have today with the net.  When reading about Tesla I am struck by the fact that one man had so many useful ideas.  It would be hard to find another person who has had such an effect on society as this one person.

Using the UPenn Digital Library I found an interesting biography of Nicola Tesla.  The biography is located here.  Apparently, a small book was discovered in a used book store and was without copyright information.  The authors of this website decided to copy the book to the Internet so that anyone who is interested in reading about this great inventor can have the chance.

Tesla has always interested me.  His electrical inventions ushered in the modern age.  Without the system of AC power he developed, electricity would have remained a curiosity for the rich.  I became interested in him today when I was reading some websites about the Tesla Turbine, which is a steam turbine that uses thin, closely spaced plates instead of vaned wheels to extract power from steam.  Apparently, materials science was not advanced enough at the time of this invention to produce a workable device.  Still, it is an interesting design.

Anyone who is interested in the history of electricity or of power in general might be interested in reading about this man.  I don’t know if Tesla ever imagined the Internet, but he was a pioneer in radio communications and did invent the technology that made this net possible.  It is important to learn about the past, and the turn of the twentieth century is one of the most important times in all of human history.  Perhaps there is even something to learn from the thoughts of this man who lived a hundred years ago.  Knowledge feeds and builds on other knowledge, and information and ideas grow on one another.

In chemistry, two atoms of hydrogen combine with one atom of oxygen to form one molecule of water and release some small amount of heat.  Hydrogen and oxygen can be burned this way in an internal combustion engine to generate mechanical power.  In this case, the heat released by the reaction is used to expand a gas against a moving piston.

In a hydrogen fuel cell, electrons are first stripped off the hydrogen atom and are picked up by an electrode made of a conducting metal.  The protons generated by this partial reaction migrate across an insulating membrane in the cell to another electrode, where they combine with oxygen and the returning electron to form water and release a small quantity of heat.  In the fuel cell, the electron stripped off the hydrogen travels through an external circuit and does an amount of work that is equivalent to a portion of the chemical energy released in the hydrogen-oxygen reaction.

Fuel cells can have efficiencies approaching 80%.  Overall efficiency for a fuel cell vehicle varies between 45% and 35% because of losses in the electrical circuit and electrical motors which propel the vehicle.  This compares well with the 22% overall efficiency of a diesel powered vehicle.  However, there are other problems with fuel cells which keep them from being employed in more cars.

Hydrogen is not available in an uncombined state on earth.  Hydrogen can be derived from water by electrolysis, or by reacting water with burning carbon from coal.  It can also be extracted from natural gas.  Hydrogen is a carrier of chemical energy, not a source.  All practical fuel cells use hydrogen as a fuel.  This means a system for producing and distributing hydrogen will need to be implemented before fuel cells can be used in large quantities.

Fuel cells are very expensive.  This is largely because they need expensive precious metals as catalysts.  Platinum is one of the catalysts commonly used in a fuel cell.  At present, there may be $1000 worth of platinum in each kilowatt of fuel cell capacity.  Fuel cells are also subject to freezing in cold weather, as they produce water in the reaction that powers them.  It is possible to solve some of these problems with engineering, but the overall efficiency of the system will decrease.

Fuel cells have been used to power buses in Iceland, to power boats, and in submarines.  The use of these cells has been largely experimental to see how they will adapt to a transportation application.  If fuel cells are to become a more common source of power for people, they will have to become less expensive and more reliable.  Also, a system for distributing hydrogen will have to be put into operation.  In the end, it is possible that the inefficiencies in the production and storage of hydrogen will doom the fuel cell vehicle to become nothing more than a curiosity.

Before the transistor, there were vacuum tubes.  There are still vacuum tubes used in some applications, like good guitar amps.  Aside from that, the transistor rules electronics.

Vacuum tubes were big, made out of glass or metal, and sucked lots of power to heat the filament.  Tiny chips of germanium and later, silicon changed all this.  In a transistor, a small current is used to control a larger current.  Thus, the transistor is an amplifier.  Many useful circuits can be made from transistors.  Transistors are small and efficient.

In the late 1950s it was discovered how to build entire circuits on a chip.  The integrated circuit is made out of transistors, resistors, and capacitors, all built on the same material structure.  The integrated circuit can perform a complex circuit function with a minimum of interconnections.  The integrated circuit is for the most part made out of individual transistors.

None of our common modern electronic devices would be possible without the transistor.  Computers would fill whole buildings and would take a powerplant to do simple things like calculations.  The old tube circuits were notoriously unreliable and required high voltages and power to operate.  With transistors and integrated circuits, a radio transceiver  with the power of a computer can fit into a tiny pocket and serve as a cell phone.  Transistors are perhaps the most important invention man has ever devised.  Almost every electronic device contains thousands of individual transistors.  There are billions of transistors in the average computer.

What would our world be like without affordable computers, phones, entertainment devices and medical equipment?  It would indeed be a different place.  There would be no Internet without the simple transistor.  We would have no useful satellites.  People would not have the access to easy communication that they have today.  The transistor has changed the world, and offers more interesting possibilities for the future.

Triumph International Japan Ltd showed a camisole bra with a flexible solar panel on the belly portion of the undergarment.  The bra included a display panel and symmetrically arranged cup holders.  It was of course done up in green material.

I don’t think they thought out this idea very well, and the bra is not on the market.  Solar panels require direct sunlight and most people wear clothing over their underwear.  Perhaps if they made a solar panel on a shirt that could charge your Ipod it would be a little more practical.  As it is, this ridiculous piece of lingerie is not for sale and remains an item of curiosity.

I’m sure this is just a ploy to garner publicity for this company.  I’m not sure how they intend to make money if they design products they can not sell.  The world needs new sources of energy, but this?  A solar bra is nothing but a bad joke.  They ought to make wide-brimmed solar hats that are waterproof and charge your implantable mp3 players.  Perhaps this electric underwear can be used to make the idea of renewable energy more popular, but as far as practical use, it is pointless.

If you want to see how impractical this thing is, check out this link.

Analog Devices manufactures a wide array of analog and digital integrated circuits.  If you are designing a new gadget that needs a radiation-hardened fast A/D converter, this is the place to look.  Analog Devices produces many different kinds of amplifiers and signal processors.  If you are looking for what’s new in the field of integrated circuitry, check out this place.

I found this site while looking for analog computer tracking circuits for guided missiles.  Apparently, the military still uses analog computers in some of its applications.  Tracking circuits are a natural for analog computers, as the sensors tend to have an analog output, and the parallel and almost instantaneous response of a fast analog circuit can be quite handy when you need real time control signals for steering a missile.

I haven’t had much time yet to explore this chip supplier website, but it seems more interesting to me than the consumer product websites I looked at this morning.  It always amazes me how there can be so much high tech stuff in the world that never gets used in everyday life.  Then again, even a simple CD player has some pretty high tech stuff inside it.  I really must try to get back into the cutting edge of technology.