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Bladeless wind turbine.
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Previously:
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...816#post190625
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...804#post179037
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...741#post174839
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...942#post171643
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...538#post166666
This has gone around many times, and is just so much more internet hype.
Can electricity be generated by vibrations alone? sure it can. could even a 1000 if these non-decorated totems ever produce even a fraction of the energy of a single nat, gas or coal fired plant or an aging hydroelectric turbine? Highly unlikely. Why not simply strap generators to the billions of trees that grow naturally? Here's an idea just shove an anode deep into the ground then create a huge screen cathode and suspend it it the air then draw energy from the earth's natural battery effect. Oh, that's been tried as well but the technology died with Nicola Tesla.
so we are stuck with generating energy from the sidewalks
https://youtu.be/AmK-jM5D7uk
I'm with Frank on this one. These all generally turn out to be flashy PR campaigns to vacuum up investor money. Technically we can harvest goldfish farts and utilize them as an energy source. But the practicality of these ideas is all extremely limited.
The standard idea of centralized generation is here. But a distributed model of generating electricity is also possible. And easier to work out on the existing electrical grid. I'm sure you know that the further from the generators you go the less the current capacity of the wiring available. That's one thing skipped over on the internet ideas.Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank S
Biggest problem is that companies make a lot of money doing this and the people owning them want to keep it that way. De-centralising the whole shooting match takes away all the bucks.
What could be done if profit was not the sole reason to do something.
Maybe smaller profits. But it'll never happen. A distributed grid of production is cheaper than a centralised system. Requires maintenance, and can be much more resilient to outages. Pretty much why it will be such a battle to ever do it.
Even here in Ontario Canada. American love to paint socialist on most things Canadian. The main producer of electricity ion the province of 18 million is partially owned by the province. There is a "delivery" charge for the electricity. Still waiting for the delivery truck to show up.... The fee is to refinance the nuclear reactors and their super expensive maintenance that pretty much finishe din the late 60's. Still paying for the reactors that make near 40% of the electricity here. The rest is natural gas and hydroelectric. Ontario has fully tapped out it's hydroelectric potential. Quebec, Manitoba and Labrabor are the areas where there are enormous untapped potentials. Manitoba being the toughest one as there needs to be near 900 mile million volt transmission line to get to the U.S. border. Yeah Canada is big. Texas is a small fry compared to the larger Canadian provinces. Texas is 40% smaller than Ontario, And just a week bit larger than each of the provinces to the west. Hey, geography killed no one!
I don't agree with this part. There's currently a massive push toward distributed generation. More and more solar is being installed on houses everyday, and when you drive through places like Ontario it seems that every farmer has installed a massive solar array. It's a dead project now, but MicroFIT resulted in huge small-scale residential and commercial adoption. Medium scale wind projects are popping up everywhere as well. It's happening, just in parallel to centralized "old guard" generation methods, which is actually a good thing. We need both. Where I live in the East Coast we're at 30% renewable, which has been largely led by medium scale distributed projects. They're trying to get to 80% by 2030, but that has a snowball's chance in hell of happening.Quote:
Originally Posted by mwmkravchenko
Quote Frank's "Oh, that's been tried as well but the technology died with Nicola Tesla. "
Actually it's more sinister than that. At the time of Nicola Tesla, there was another guy called Stublefield, (I've actually seen a photo of him WITH tesla).
He managed to get arc lamps to light from the ground, then later got the ground to "glow" like daylight. And they said that two weeks after that he died of malnutrition, Yeh, I believe that. Like tesla, there was nowhere to place a meter.
I live near Ottawa and yes there are many more Solar arrays then even ten years ago. Trouble is that there is not the true infrastructure to keep it working out to the full possibilities. Utility style batteries are only beginning to be available at realistic prices and capacities. A few in Canada mind you, in Ontario and Alberta. Wind and solar applications. What we could really use is a truly engineered distributed grid. A few full container sized battery packs per so much generation. Possibly it will happen. I certainly hope so.Quote:
Originally Posted by nova_robotics
There are a few things that are interesting about Teslas ideas. Some of them are still not reproducible. His inductive power transmission within his machine shop is one of them. But sending electricity through the ground would not work without there being repercussions for the environment. Similarly the idea of long distance electricity transmission. If anything alive were in this path of transmission you have the same effect as being in front of a powerful microwave array ( RADAR ) array. Things die. Happily a few of his ideas were to far ahead of his time. Take his remote controlled torpedo as an example. The navy brass didn't know what to do with it. They thought it was a toy. Late 1880's and a radio controlled torpedo. Happily that took a little longer to come about.Quote:
Originally Posted by old kodger
There are a few people that if they were allowed to pursue their ideas could have changed the way the world worked.
There is no big conspiracy. The science behind this is well known. I learned about it in my first year of university. But it is insanely impractical and expensive. You can achieve far more power generation by putting up a tiny solar panel. ...which is the downfall of all of the crazy fringe theories. Yes you can power your house with AA batteries, but it will cost hundreds of dollars per kWh versus $0.15/kWh from the power company. Yes you can power your home with 10,000 hamsters running in wheels, but it's completely impractical to do this when compared to numerous other alternatives. But no one will murder you with malnutrition if you try.Quote:
Originally Posted by old kodger
We use ground return transmission all the time for power transmission. It's not that interesting actually. No worse than having electrified 3rd rails for trains.Quote:
Originally Posted by mwmkravchenko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-wire_earth_return
I am aware of this. I do not know the entire system dynamics as in the voltage through the ground and the return path in Amperes. I should look this up. Fill in a few holes in my understanding. What I was specifically referring to was the Colorado Springs experiments where Tesla was trying to use the earth as a part of a resonant system that made a lot of people and animals rather uncomfortable due to the millions of volts he was trying to pump into the ground. And yes I understand the basics of how a power generation ground grid is installed at a generator and the return path is indeed the ground. Every house has ground rods or ground plates. I have wired up quite a few homes and understand that end of the system a little more.Quote:
Originally Posted by nova_robotics
The second through the air system was at Wardencliff funded by J.P. Morgan until he found out that Tesla was trying to make electricity free. That's the one that would never really work on the scale that Tesla was hoping for.
Nicola Tesla had his brilliant side for engineering problems. But life in general and concept of profit making was not one of his strong points.
There are enormous qualities of electricity generated high up in the atmosphere by the solar wind magnetosphere interaction. Just not so easy to get it to plug into and be useful. Also some of Teslas presumptions of how the atmosphere would work proved to be totally wrong for large scale through the air transmission of electricity. The ionosphere was unknown for example.
Quote "There is no big conspiracy. The science behind this is well known. I learned about it in my first year of university. But it is insanely impractical and expensive. You can achieve far more power generation by putting up a tiny solar panel. ...which is the downfall of all of the crazy fringe theories. Yes you can power your house with AA batteries, but it will cost hundreds of dollars per kWh versus $0.15/kWh from the power company. Yes you can power your home with 10,000 hamsters running in wheels, but it's completely impractical to do this when compared to numerous other alternatives. But no one will murder you with malnutrition if you try." end quote.
There are ALWAYS naysayers, It is my comprehension that Stublefield was not trying to distribute it. Why would you need to if everybody could generate their own power locally? And if they did, J.P. Morgan would be obsolete, he was in it for money not electricity.
Earth has a bloody great magnetic iron core that rotates, does that not sound kinda like a generator? the problem for us is not how to generate electrical power, but how to capture and utilize the abundant power all around us.
Do not forget to add "and not get fried doing it." Saw a lighting strike out on the flightline at Nellis AFB, NV, when I was stationed at the photo lab there in the late 70's and early 80's. It hit about 4-500 feet in front of me. Tore up and threw several hundred pound chunks of steel reinforced concrete dozens of yards. Anyone on that spot would have been incinerated.Quote:
Originally Posted by old kodger
Bill
And there will always be people who don't understand science who fall prey to conspiratorial nonsense. We live in the age of conspiracies as a form of mainstream entertainment. Go look at all the people still waiting in Dallas for JFK Jr. to come back because of something Q said. I get it. It's fun to believe that powerful people have colluded and are hiding the truth, and that you're the only one who put together the puzzle pieces and figured it out. They're not and you didn't.Quote:
Originally Posted by old kodger
Yes there is tremendous energy all around us. A tiny gram of matter contains enough to energy to power your home for many lifetimes over (e=mc^2). The heat energy alone in the ocean could easily supply all of humanity's needs. But you can't extract it. To extract useful work you need a gradient. That's the trap free energy people always fall for.
All energy generation, all biological processes, and in fact every single event that happens in the universe depends on a gradient. Energy flows from high to low. Mass rolls down a hill, it doesn't roll up. High pressure fluid flows to low pressure. Hot flows to cool. High chemical concentrations flow to low concentrations. Everything. Literally no action in this universe can happen without gradients. You can't even make the tiniest twitch of your baby finger without them. The flaw in all of these free energy schemes is nobody understands gradients. Yes there is a big magnetic field around us, but it's largely homogeneous. There is no gradient that you can access. Motors work because their magnetic field changes rapidly on the scale of a motor. Motors do not spontaneously spin because of the magnetic field of the Earth because they cannot access a gradient. Ask ham radio operators low large their antennas have to be to access a gradient across a 2 MHz wave, while your cell phone can easily access a gradient at 2.4 GHz wifi with a 2 cm antenna. Every single process in the universe runs on gradients. This is the flaw in all of these free energy scams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_quality
Nathan Stubblefield's designs are from 100 years ago. It was impressive then, but now it's trivial to reproduce in any home shop. His designs are readily available online. Go make one for yourself. Just make sure you don't get murdered by JP Morgan. And watch out for zombie JFK Jr.
If everybody had your mindset, nothing would ever get invented, because invention requires you to work OUTSIDE of convention.
Oh sorry I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about ground conduction.Quote:
Originally Posted by mwmkravchenko
I worked with a man from India years ago and I think he explained it perfectly. He explained that his ideas are like his children, and that he wants to see all of them succeed. At the time he was advocating for some really unwise design changes, but recognized that he had to pull back and stop promoting his idea even though he wanted to see it succeed. You can see that same thing happen all the time. People have an idea, and it may even be a very good one, but they immediately over-apply it as a solution to all of the world's problems because they want to see it succeed. Tesla's genius was induction and resonant systems. Induction is one of the most important developments in human history. It is a tool for a great many jobs, but it is not the tool for every job. Can't transmit power practically with it. Like all fields it drops off exponentially with distance. It's why wireless cell phone chargers only work over a distance of a cm or so, and end up leaking half of their energy to the environment. And Tesla's ground vibrator idea for power transmission was just idiotic. You can't shake the ground then pick up those vibrations with what is essentially a shake flashlight as a means of transferring power. That's insane. Yes it's an extension of Tesla's understanding of resonant systems, no it is not a practical idea that deserves to succeed. Tesla was a genius, but everyone is wrong some of the time. Shaking the ground is one of those times.
I totally agree. Energy storage is the biggest problem we're facing right now. All the other puzzle pieces are falling into place. Storage is the main thing holding us back. I worked with a few companies that are pitching solutions to this, but it's all snake oil. They have nothing. Just more investor scams. But unfortunately if you say the right combination of buzzwords investors will shower you with money. I'm about 50% sure these were bad faith companies at the start, but I am 100% sure they are bad faith companies now.Quote:
Originally Posted by mwmkravchenko
I think high voltage DC interconnects will alleviate a huge part of the storage problem. If you connect your grid to a different grid a few timezones over, you can import solar energy when you don't have it, and export it when the other grid doesn't have it. We're starting to see this, but a few grids (cough, Texas Interconnection, cough) are holdouts for purely political reasons.
My life is literally spent inventing. That is literally my job. The difference is I understand the science behind what I'm inventing. Not all ideas are good ones.Quote:
Originally Posted by old kodger
Interesting to see this scaled up, we have a 19" rack cab with multiple miniature flappy plate versions driven by a small fans airflow as a display piece in the atrium at work, after 2 years around 20% have failed, it will be interesting to see how long the full size version endures.
Nothing is different in audio. I consulted for one job for a company in Montreal claiming to be making graphene loudspeaker cones. It was totally smoke an mirrors. The process took hours. Real life it takes seconds. They were an I.P shell game that had 20 patents one of the Phd's I had to explain things to every few hours Only one of the guys a Russian young man with multiple Phd's was truly intelligent and could make things. The rest were with their heads in the clouds and working the system to create patents and make millions on the IPO.Quote:
Originally Posted by nova_robotics