Perpetual energy idea i had as a child.

[Ghrimm]

Im 37, and when i was really young (6 or 7) i had a couple ideas. Some of those ideas are real things now, but the idea for perpetual energy i had has not, or so i think. I tried to find anything similar on the web, but could not, so i'm here asking questions. I know because of friction, this isnt actually perpetual motion, but i wanna share my idea and see if anybody has tried this before, or heard of anything like it.

My idea used a mostly closed system and im going to try and explain it as well as i can. Think of the way a turbo works in a car, a small fan, is connected to a bigger fan and the air current it squeezed and amplified making the small one spin faster, making the big one spin faster.

My idea was, if i had a circular pipe, with 2 different sets of 4 fans. 1 set would be the "collector" and one would be the "producer". The collector fans would be mostly normal and would generate energy just like a windmill, using the rotation. The producer set is the part thats a bit complicated for me to understand if its even possible, but after seeing the military create a railgun, i think it might work in some form. The producer set would free float using electro magnets, 0 friction, and would use electro magnetic pulses, timed perfectly to keep the fan spinning. The closed system would make it so the air current wouldnt be disturbed by outside forces and the producer fans shouldn't need as much energy, almost like gears on a car.


Is this even a possibility to be created?  - A free floating fan using an array of electro magnets....
Would it be possible to get more energy out of it, than is required to power it?  -  How much energy would be needed to keep something going after it already started?

And now there's bladeless fans and bladeless wind turbines (Vortex Bladeless).  Can that tech be brought to my idea to make it work?

[exchemist]

9 minutes ago, Ghrimm said:

Im 37, and when i was really young (6 or 7) i had a couple ideas. Some of those ideas are real things now, but the idea for perpetual energy i had has not, or so i think. I tried to find anything similar on the web, but could not, so i'm here asking questions. I know because of friction, this isnt actually perpetual motion, but i wanna share my idea and see if anybody has tried this before, or heard of anything like it.

My idea used a mostly closed system and im going to try and explain it as well as i can. Think of the way a turbo works in a car, a small fan, is connected to a bigger fan and the air current it squeezed and amplified making the small one spin faster, making the big one spin faster.

My idea was, if i had a circular pipe, with 2 different sets of 4 fans. 1 set would be the "collector" and one would be the "producer". The collector fans would be mostly normal and would generate energy just like a windmill, using the rotation. The producer set is the part thats a bit complicated for me to understand if its even possible, but after seeing the military create a railgun, i think it might work in some form. The producer set would free float using electro magnets, 0 friction, and would use electro magnetic pulses, timed perfectly to keep the fan spinning. The closed system would make it so the air current wouldnt be disturbed by outside forces and the producer fans shouldn't need as much energy, almost like gears on a car.


Is this even a possibility to be created?  - A free floating fan using an array of electro magnets....
Would it be possible to get more energy out of it, than is required to power it?  -  How much energy would be needed to keep something going after it already started?

And now there's bladeless fans and bladeless wind turbines (Vortex Bladeless).  Can that tech be brought to my idea to make it work?

You can never get more energy out of a device than it consumes. Most attempts at doing so involve misunderstandings about...... things like gears on a car.  In a gearbox, you can choose what combination of torque and rotational speed you want. If you double the speed you halve the torque. But power is torque x speed, so the power output stays  unchanged. The same is true of any system that uses a lower speed element to drive a higher speed one. Nothing will multiply the energy for you, I'm afraid.

In your proposed device, you seem to have an electrical power input from these magnets. The output you get will be no greater than the electrical power input, regardless of how you arrange fans of different sizes etc.    

Energy is conserved, i.e. it cannot be created or destroyed. This seems to be a fundamental principle of the universe. (Back at the beginning of the last century a very clever woman called Emmy Noether proved this must be, so if the laws of physics don't change with time. Or so I understand - I'm not a mathematician.)

 

 

[MigL]

As exchemist explains, there is a fundamental reason for such types of machines not to work.
But, on a practical level, how do you extract power from the free-floating fans ?
You have removed the bearing that drives them, but you still need a physical connection,such as bearing/shaft, to extract power.
Even using airflow generated by free-floating fans generates friction/heat in the airflow, so you are no further ahead.

In any system with a continuous symmetry there is a corresponding conserved quantity ( Noether's theorem ).
If the Lagrangian does not change over time, total energy is conserved.

Edited May 24, 2021 by MigL

[joigus]

As I don't disagree in the least with what @exchemist and @MigL have said, I will just add a lateral argument. Patent offices do not accept claims for perpetual motion machines. And I suggest you google for this question and learn why.

This is an excerpt from an article on The Guardian from 2006:

Quote

The UK Patent Office notes that you cannot get a patent on "articles or processes alleged to operate in a manner clearly contrary to well-established physical laws" as they are "regarded as not having industrial application". Any machine that generates more energy than it consumes is either a nuclear reactor or breaches the second law of thermodynamics.

By the way, nuclear reactors are no exception to the law of conservation of energy; it's just that the energy is the potential energy stored in mass, so it's "hidden".

The ultimate reason why the neutrino was discovered as early as it was is that people knew some particle must be there "stealing" the energy missing from the reaction. Even though that particle didn't interact with anything known at the time. And sure enough, there it was.

That's how sure we are energy is conserved.

Edited May 24, 2021 by joigus

[J.C.MacSwell]

50 minutes ago, joigus said:

As I don't disagree in the least with what @exchemist and @MigL have said, I will just add a lateral argument. Patent offices do not accept claims for perpetual motion machines. And I suggest you google for this question and learn why.

This is an excerpt from an article on The Guardian from 2006:

By the way, nuclear reactors are no exception to the law of conservation of energy; it's just that the energy is the potential energy stored in mass, so it's "hidden".

The ultimate reason why the neutrino was discovered as early as it was is that people knew some particle must be there "stealing" the energy missing from the reaction. Even though that particle didn't interact with anything known at the time. And sure enough, there it was.

That's how sure we are energy is conserved.

In practice they do, short of you claiming that's what it is, or it being obvious. They'll accept your money and give you a less than worthless patent. The nice thing about your patent will be that it will cost you very little to defend it. No one will successfully take advantage of it.

[joigus]

25 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

In practice they do, short of you claiming that's what it is, or it being obvious. They'll accept your money and give you a less than worthless patent. The nice thing about your patent will be that it will cost you very little to defend it. No one will successfully take advantage of it.

Interesting...

I know there are practised workarounds, or attempts at them. Here's the article that I found in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/aug/31/guardianweeklytechnologysection2

This is about an Irish company that claimed, back in 2006, to have a magnet-driven machine that would generate more energy than is put into it. They said they would get around the restriction on patenting their invention by splitting it into components and patenting those.

How successful they were I don't know. At patenting it; at making it work, I'm sure they weren't.