Solar system upgrades

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DCFusor

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Well, things are looking up for fusor farm these days. I've invested in more solar gear to go from "enough" to "no question there's way more than I need". All I have to do now is get all those panels up into the sky, though they are lashed up electrically in the garden now, and today I found that I could not only charge up the house before noon - I could charge the car, go vote and pay a phone bill, come back, charge the car again while trading, and then go out again...and here I sit on a full charge for house batteries, with some needed for the car - but tomorrow is another day. More here:

http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=563&p=3577#p3577

This is it, I'm done with this once this job is over - and being as low maintenance as all this is, while I can't say it's free power, it more or less IS free from now on. This stuff will outlive me in almost any scenario.

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I'm sure you got a lot more sunny days in Virginia than we do over here in Switzerland.
I have a small cabin in the Alps as a holiday retreat and it's pretty difficult to produce electricity with solar panels there (you can't put them on a roof because of pressure from snow during winter). Therefore, I've also installed a small water weel in a creek on the property which is doing well in summer. In Winter it's obviously not working. I also have had some problems making it smelting water proof.
I'm also considering sharing power from a biogas plant which shall be built on the neighboring property of a rancher. I would finance 20% of the plant and get free energy plus funds for the energy I don't use. We have to do some calculations before investing, though.
 
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I get, on yearly average, 4.5 hours of equivalent full sun a day. Worse in winter, better in summer. I guess I should get out my globe, but here I have little trouble with *big* snow buildups if the panels are tilted enough - which I guess they would be there? Of course, for really big snow, there has to be room between them and the ground for the snow to land on too. I've had 9" or a foot of snow on mine, no troubles from that so far. You might get lots more where you are.

Water power has been problematic here, due to famine or flood kinds of conditions - during the floods it tends to be full of little branches, leaves and what not, to the point where cleaning out the turbine all the time became too much for me for the power I was getting. And yes, we get freezes too. Putting a filter or grate upstream just means that jams up when we get a wash off - it only moves the problem.

Strangely the water freezing wasn't usually the big problem if the intake was done right - it continues to flow under the ice just fine.

From what I've seen of biogas (I'm assuming manure based?) around here, the main impediment once you get your system down is that you really do have to mind it every day to keep it working. Most who went whole hog on the first go failed, and it seems to have been better (again, around here, a lotta hippies) to get a small prototype going, learn the tricks, then build bigger. But the real trick is not the physical plant and capex - it's the guy who shovels it all in and out...like keeping a culture of yeast or something - you can't take a long vacation from it.
 
The solar panels rock! Why don't you get a couple dozen sticks of Dexion and make a nice rack for those lovely panels?
 
From what I've seen of biogas (I'm assuming manure based?) around here, the main impediment once you get your system down is that you really do have to mind it every day to keep it working. Most who went whole hog on the first go failed, and it seems to have been better (again, around here, a lotta hippies) to get a small prototype going, learn the tricks, then build bigger. But the real trick is not the physical plant and capex - it's the guy who shovels it all in and out...like keeping a culture of yeast or something - you can't take a long vacation from it.
Yes, it would be cattle manure based. I wouldn't have to do any maintenance, the rancher's employees would be in charge of that. They have 300 milk cows on the property, both summer and winter.
 
You had me there for a second, I didn't know what dexion was and had to go find out. Neat stuff. In this system, you have to use either aluminum or stainless, as otherwise you set up a cathode/anode corrosion system and it fails fast - even galvanized bolts just disappear in a few months (and I'm far from the ocean).

Since those materials are pretty expensive to buy and ship, what I plan to do is buy a bunch of 2x8 treated wood, SS screw-in studs, and make racks from that. I'll fab a bunch of aluminum angle brackets from 3x3 6061 to hold things to the roof.

The plan is to remove the inter-rack space up there, so they'll fit 6 across, push the ones up there so the lower edges are above the place where the roof gets steep, and add the additional panels on racks going down that steep part (but levered outward at the base some for a better sun angle). I'll then have dual angles - flat on top, more tilted on the front, but all up in the sky out of shadows from the nice oak trees from the south.

I made a little vid, not one of my best, but educational, of the rest of the new stuff in operation charging the car, and youtube says it's only going to take another hour and a half to finish uploading a 5 min video from here (hd), and I'll edit and put it in here when it's ready to roll.
 
how do you plan for violent weather? Like hail or big wind gusts?
 
And here's the rather boring but somewhat informative video on some of the rest of the system. Here I'm showing it charging my Volt, with some adaptiveness to prevent the huge drain from the car running down my house batteries when the sun goes behind a cloud, or it's just too early in the day for full output from things.

I plan to do a full video/pictorial on all this and put it up on my site later, I'll link it here - there are a lot of other parts of the overall system as it "just grew" over the years.

[ame]http://youtu.be/mAmdiBoB_Es[/ame]

Hail just hasn't been a problem - our top size so far has been about the size of a quarter, and everything solar survived without incident. Wind is another issue, and in fact the one missing panel there was a wind accident. I'd let the bolts get loose (it's not a fun place to work when the weather is nice, or not nice - when it ain't rainin, the roof don't leak, oops), so there was lost motion, and finally only two holding the panel to the rack. A huge microburst during a hurricane "zippered" it right off the roof - I was alerted by the sound of it banging on the side of the house, hanging by the wires (which held, telling you the rack really was the issue and it wasn't that bad). I got to go out in the rain and wind and cut the thing down - it wound up as an aux power supply on a dodge passenger van I've since sold. The dodge electrics were so nasty-inefficient that adding the panel to the roof gave it 2 more mpg!

While I'm planning on adding some more phys shiny here if we get a decent dip (looks like it) - this time in more conventional form, like coins, this points out that there are some other things that hold, or even increase in value pretty darn well - this is electricity for the rest of my life, which has value now and later - as in "you can eat this". When the panels were $7-8 a watt, and the payoff around 30 years, the investment was a bit questionable (electricity from the power co was also cheaper then). But now panels are under $1.50 a watt, and power co power is only going up from here. I'm still glad I did it as finding out that the old stuff still lives helped me get the confidence to spend the additional $10k or so shown here for all this new stuff. And, hey, it's been 30 years anyway, so by any measure, the old stuff did pay off (including time-value of money). In my case, the lack of need for code, thus a building permit, thus the lower tax rate on the "barns" I live in - paid for the original in more like a couple of years...the boonies have some hidden advantages. Don't go and tell everyone, though...
 
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Wanted to add something. That little "I've got extra power" setup is going to have more uses than just charging the car when the sun is marginal (today it hit full charge right around 2 pm, with 3 more hours of really good sun left to go).

My partner in fusion crime, Bill Fain, brings me stuff he finds - a human ferret, that guy (this is a compliment Bill - join up here!) - a scrounger extrordinaire (and a PM Bug). One of the things he found and brought was a very nice quartz water distillation rig that draws too much power to normally consider on solar, or that's how it used to be. It needs some circulating water in the condenser, but in testing I've found a way to rig it with a small fountain pump from Lowes, and a 5 gal bucket of scummy water that both does that and provides feed water to the boiler (recirculating a little so it doesn't crud up in there).

Bingo - now I have a source of distilled water. When it comes to power, quantity has a quality all its own. I point this out for you guys who are in the south, perhaps near a lot of otherwise briny and unusable water, but who probably have great solar input.

Not as efficient as one of those sit on the ground passive thingies - but this is real lab-grade distilled water too - certainly enough per day to handle a family's actual needs for drinking and cooking ( I don't use the good stuff for flushing and washing here as is). I'm going to rig a wall rack for it above the wood rack and plug it into the "diversion load" outlet I'm about to wire in, and see how we do with it.

And what's cool is that it's a power input averaging device. When you cut power, it keeps working as long as the boiler is hot...
 
thats a really neat use for a dump load DCF and as you say theres often less water where theres more good sunlight
.
although we will have to agree to differ on how good it is for you to drink distilled water,
certainly in the long term ...............
 
DCF,
Are you aware that there has been an X-Class flare from the sun which is arriving tonight and tomorrow? Depending upon just how far north you are, you may wish to check out a site called Space Weather.com.

I'm just saying......

In addition, what do you think would happen to a pile of solar panels I have in my shed, 19 of them to be exact, which are not connected to anything. Would they get fried? I am thinking about getting the rest of the pieces I need for an emergency electrical system in a grid-down situation or a SHTF scenario. This will include an inverter and charge controller. The batteries I will buy empty and the acid I will buy piecemeal as cash allows. I have three five gallon glass water cooler bottles I intend to store it in and a ten pound block of beeswax for a set of stoppers. Can I store the acid indefinitely? If not, what is the lifetime of it?
 
Yeah, the solar weather has been fun. I have a few interesting toys around here to play with that. One is a 3 axis compass, which currently isn't pointing in the normal direction - these CME's tend to warp earth's field when they hit. Another is a very low frequency "antenna" (actually a high inductance (5H!) air wound coil) to listen to events in the ionosphere, fun sometimes. Most of that stuff never makes it to the ground - the individual particles from the sun aren't that high in energy, it's just that there are a lot of them. You can tell it's happening mainly by the effects on the magnetic field - making the earth's field "shake" makes every piece of wire act like the winding of a generator - which is why power lines sometimes get hurt - they are a huge antenna.

Your panels are safe.

I don't know about having all the parts for a system and then not going ahead and building and using it, but certainly you can. I'd be using the power for things now, myself. You can probably think of something like my water distiller that can run "whenever there's extra" and be useful even if not possible 24/7. Emergency lighting with CCFL or LED lamps is another..

Acid is dirt cheap. Go to any NAPA store and order it in 5 gal chunks. It comes in a bag in a box with a dispenser hose and valve. Keeps forever just like that, unless your cats scratch through the box and bag inside (this has happened here!). Same idea as wine in a box - but a larger box.

I found out how cheap it was (to my surprise) when I needed a crapload to set up an anodizing line. It's only a few bucks/gallon.

Good batteries aren't cheap, though. The Rolls I use cost a pretty penny, but then I got a lot of 'em. I paid about $6k for 24kwh worth...you might not need or want that many. They last 20 years flooded, so no need to keep them dry if you wanted to just go ahead and use your system - just being in a system keeps them at reasonable state of charge and so on, so they don't sulfate and go bad from being wet.

Most people start off with the Dekas on the left in this link. Then they start figuring out what their total cost of ownership is - and the hassle of replacing the shorter lived stuff isn't minor. Then they wind up with Rolls/Surrette on the right. This isn't the only good place that sells this stuff, but it's a handy source of all the data on it online.
http://www.affordable-solar.com/store/solar-batteries

In a pinch, a trick is to get trolling motor (deep cycle) batteries at walmart, they're not too expensive. They can do more peak power per size than the real solar ones,
(more plates, but thinner) and don't live as long (by far), but the price is right. I sometimes hook a few into my system since their peak capacity "stiffness" means they take all the pounding, so the expensive ones don't have to - they are a kind of sacrificial "bypass capacitor" in that use, easy to lift and replace when they go bad.

Do not bother with regular "maintenance proof" car batteries. They are not designed to cycle. Running them flat just one time eats 30-40% of their capacity permanently - they are just dead in 10 full cycles. The calcium alloy they use in the plates, to prevent bubbling while charging goes into solution when you run them down, and that's that.

We in the solar biz are all drooling over the battery tech in the Volt system. We're hoping that will come down in price due to the volume the car guys generate and we'll be able to use them in our systems. GM's the only one using these LiFeP types that have fantastic round trip efficiency and life - the Japanese are still using glorified laptop batteries...
 
I don't sweat the lack of a couple hundred ppm of calcium carbonate mineral content in distilled water (or rain water for that matter). I also eat food, which makes up for it fine. The biologic threat in unclean water is lots more serious, even if filtered. (and taste and smell are obvious issues). FWIW, soft water does wash the clothes cleaner and fresher - I use collected rainwater for that always. You can see the trash can I use to collect it off the roof in the lower left of the picture above. It goes though a plastic screen on the way in, and there's an overflow hole near the top that lets any floaters get washed away. I actually get more water than I need, averaged over a year, but don't have quite enough storage to handle the dry part of the year - yet. There are about two months where you can't use the water for much - pollen.

When I was stuck with a water source with high TOC (total organic carbon) we tried using various vendor's filtering systems, and boy was that ever an epic fail. Even the carbon/silver filters gunked up with "life" very quickly (despite prefiltering and everything else we tried) and made things worse than unfiltered water by far - and the cost of changing the filters every few days was totally not worth it. It was better to just boil it.

Something huge and sand based that could be backflushed might have helped there - there weren't chunks of stuff in it or anything though - just creek water from a spring 100 yards away (not on my property at that point in time). And of course, the dissolved organic junk wouldn't be taken out either, allowing things to "grow" in any storage after the filter. This junk was basically compost-water from stuff falling into the creek.

I think the distilled vs well water thing is pretty overblown. Calcium's not hard to get in a diet in far larger quantities anyway. The beer alone...;)

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Looking on my multivitamin jar, it appears the 250 milligrams of Calcium (as calcium carbonate, also known as lime) these have represent 25% of the RDV - so that number is a gram. At 100 ppm or so calcium in most water, how much would you have to drink to get a significant part of that? That's 100 micrograms per gram (cc) of water, so...10,000 cc's of water - 10 liters! And the water doesn't have the vitamin D you need to absorb the calcium.
 
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Batteries and more info here: http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/download/file.php?id=205&mode=view

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Original inverters in the same "energy shed" as the batteries. These are all still in service, the new stuff is primarily for charging the car and a couple things around here the like 240v from a real stiff source, like the 50kv power supply for my Fusor, welders. lathes and suchlike. Those inverters really have some peak handling ability, and if you can't run a house on one, something else is wrong.
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Wow, I imagined there would be a lot more batteries. That's amazing that you can power a house on so little. Obviously, I'm no electrician.
 
How about those expensive nickle iron batteries? I read they can be deeply discharged more than thirty thousand cycles, which makes them the ideal choice for a remote location and for those who wish to go hard core self reliant, as they need no more than electrolyte changes twice a decade or so, and the electrolyte is significantly less dangerous than battery acid, and little or no hydrogen is produced.

I could well have my anecdotal facts wrong, but I read about this stuff a lot, because I have a slew of panels for when the lights go out, and am amassing what I need to get it up in just a few days. I have loads of salvaged Dexion, rolls of bond-breaker tape, rolls of dielectric tape, stainless bolts and I actually have about a hundred bronze bolts, salvaged from the abandoned maintenance shack at the SAEF II, which I demolished at NASA in '08, and took possession of in October of that year. Some of the salvage stuff I have is absolutely nuts! When these facilities are mothballed and kept under air for years at a time, the folks who worked there quickly forget the old mission and move on to the new, which means abandoning anything not certified for flight.

Anyhow, I am bidding a job with not one, but two UPS units. One is 285KvA and the other is 225 Kva. They currently are loaded with top-of-the-line Japan built [Mitsubishi] Nuke grade gel-cell batteries with an expected life of 10 - 15 years. I hope that it is still there when we go to demo the structure.

I would actually like to have a side-bar with DCF on this, as I am quite sure he can use some of the stuff we sell for salvage value, like huge air breakers, 3 phase breakers at 20, 30, 50 and 100A.

PM me DC
 
It might not be obvious that that is more batteries than you can put in a pickup truck, they're real big and heavy. (they fit, but the springs won't take it) I wouldn't mind having more, though. The house is very efficient as these things go. Nothing is heated electrically. There is one freezer, and it's in an unheated space. There's a window AC unit that gets maybe 10 hours a year.

All that is changing with the new panels, but in general the trick is use it while it's coming in - the batteries are just to keep lights and maybe a computer or TV on at night -- all other drain stops with sundown. If you do that, you don't need so much.

Most people would have some adaptation issues with my lifestyle, but if you began having nothing for a long time, it's not so bad...I find it good enough, but I'm not the kind of guy who needs a couple heated showers a day either. It's amazing how little a machine shop uses as well. Yeah, the machines and welders can really pull the power, but they get the jobs done FAST - so in kilowatt hours, it's not that much.

I tried a bunch of nickel-cad batteries (from locomotives). The trouble with them is that they swing very wide in voltage between charged/charging and discharged/discharging such that everything else in the system gets bent about it.
The ones I got were used and failed pretty quick. I hear there are better ones, but..as you say, really expensive. These Rolls ones have a 15 yr guarantee, and I'll probably get more than that out of them, as I treat them really nicely (I learned on cheaper deka l16's and wronked a couple sets learning)

The NiFe (or Cd) electrolyte is potassium and lithium hydroxide and its FAR nastier than regular battery acid - peels the skin right off you, instantly. You run it under oil, else it goes bad in days (absorbs CO2 and becomes carbonate), and it's kind of a trick doing that and keeping oil off the plates, which ruins the battery more or less. So I gave up on them.

Use the stainless bolts ancona, you can use them against the aluminum no problems. Bronze (any copper alloy) isn't going to make you happy in this use.

Big UPS units can use those gel batteries or AGM no problem - because they are designed to almost never cycle. Those types also don't boil out the electrolyte on charging (if you're careful, and they are in these systems) so they're good for something that has to sit for years, work once, then be replaced. They absolutely suck for home use. Till I can get a Volt battery system, the old flooded deep cycle lead acid are still the king.

Actually, there's one other possibility. Vanadium redox batteries - they are basically fuel cells, but you can reuse the fuel in essence, by putting current into the battery, which returns the anolyte and catholyte back to their oxidation states. You basically have 4 fuel tanks - 2 for fresh of each type, and 2 for used of each type. When charging you run the pumps the other way. Pretty simple - carbon plates. Just one catch - the membrane you need has to be made of Nafion, the most expensive plastic ever (DuPont patent, but the stuff is genuinely hard to make). This magic stuff allows protons - but not electrons - through it. That's a heck of a trick, electrochemically speaking. Then all you need is 4 big tanks, the Japanese use huge rubber bladders stuffed under parking garages to do UPS for whole skyscrapers, HVAC and all.
 
it is quite amazing, DCF - I was about to borrow your brains, and ask you about Vanadium redox batteries :)

Basically, do you have anything to say about their longevity - I know that energy density is not their strongest point, but it is a non-issue for powering a house (and it seems they are getting around the problem for EVs in the lab setup, these clever "ze Germans" here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091012135506.htm

...and suitability, in any hi-tech-collapse scenario? How long these membranes last, and would it be feasible to manufacture them, in a serious SHTF scenario?

SwissAustrian, for your water wheel, you might take a look at:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Zotloterer_Gravitational_Vortex_Power_Plant
...patented & tested in Austria, you might be actually better positioned to read about it, since a lot of info is in german. Seems to be having usable output from very little water "head" required, also is harmless to fish & critters and allows them to pass through it, no problem.

It always struck me, that there is so much more kinetic energy in naturally flowing water, than a potential energy created by water "head" in dams, why we do not focus on increasing water speed, and harvest the energy that way? It truly seems to be, that given any problem, human mind latches & fixes on the first most obvious solution that get's things done - even if it is CLEARLY sub-optimal one. And once thing gets grip in the mainstream/marketplace - that's it, it is very hard to get slightly better ideas going - windows of opportunity are everything...

There is an example of such principle somewhere in Austria, on a Danube river - where series of "inlets" are built to increase velocity of the river, and they water speeded up that way hits the turbine blades - and there are studies showing, that this kind of hydroelectric is CUPLE OF TIMES more efficient, given the amount of water flowing, and the water "head" on the river part in question, than brute-force dam approach -and it also have negligible river ecosystem impact (quite unlike dams :)). From what I remember, that particular Danube hydroelectric was built long long ago, and never catched mainstream - despite being superior in many ways. Sorry I could not remember many more details.
 
Well, press-release science has been telling us about flying cars etc and super-capacitors that will run cars for what, 2 decades at least? And zero ever really hit the market. You have to have a bit of a jaundiced eye to articles like that which are completely free of detail - actual power density, improved, but compared to what?, and so on - much as I'd like that to be true, I'll be skeptical till I can buy one.

Redox batteries really do look good for larger installations, but require quite a bit of control. The big test sites in Japan are getting us some data on how well they will work out in practice. They're doing whole skyscrapers there, with tanks that are huge bladders shoved under the parking garages. They do have some shortcomings.

For example, when you first put fresh electrolyte into the cell, the voltage is high. As the chemical energy is consumed, both voltage and current capacity drop.
So, at what point do you pulse the pumps to put in fresh? Once the not-fresh stuff is in the receiving tanks, it's mixed with whatever else was in there and assumes some average "state of charge" - it's not practical to extract most of it in a pass - it's not lost, it makes recharging easier next time instead. If you want max energy per pass, you have to let the current batch "run down" which does complicate using the resulting energy effectively, and it gets complex quick - you don't want to run out of the "Fresh" stuff in the tanks too soon just to keep the voltage up, but you don't want to have almost gone stuff in the cells if there's going to be a sudden peak demand either. Gets messy for a small install at present, though a programmer like me could probably handle all that with some decent automation. But you have this irreducible minimum amount of tanks, pumps, and control stuff to make even a small one, so small ones don't work out well economically. A large house might be about the minimum practical size for an installation. At present, commercial systems aren't made that small.

The membranes that work best are Nafion, which is hard to make and expensive. I doubt even my pretty decent lab could make it now, much less in bad conditions. It's a variant of Teflon - fluoridated plastic, nasty stuff to handle the precursors for.
It does seem to last "forever" though, as do the battery plates which don't take part in chemistry at all - usually they are graphite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nafion
As you can see, that's not a trivial synthesis.

Other membranes work, just not as well and aren't as long-lived in the sulfuric/hydrochloric acid + vanadium oxides electrolytes. Even filter paper works somewhat. I'm getting ready to do some testing here, but the Nafion is really expensive stuff...
http://www.nafionstore.com/NAFION_Products_s/6.htm

Like with most things, the time to be ready is before you need it. For now, the old lead-acid batteries (top quality though) are doing it fine.

There really isn't more kinetic energy in a flow than potential energy in a head, sorry, but that's how the numbers really roll out. Of course, quantity rules if you've got it.

And with quantity, you can make your turbine or wheel such that things like fish can pass through unharmed - bigger flows imply larger spaces between blades and bigger size generally. But it takes a surprising amount of mechanical energy to make much electricity. Remember, a HP is only ~750 watts, and it's a lot of foot-pounds/second - 550. So assuming 100% capture, that's 550 pounds of water falling one foot per second...a lot. Obviously, two feet doubles that for a given flow of water. Wheras once you get to velocity, frictional losses with the channel start to kick in hard.

If anyone is interested, I have a design published awhile back that lets you design a turbine for a particular flow/drop that is in the 80's percent efficient (this is good), and it's makeable by most welders or machinists out of sections of pipe slit lengthwise used as blades. Here, the issue with that is how much junk is in the water, it clogs everything up, and even a decent creek might only give 10-50 watts - not worth the wire to run to it. And at that level, the turbine is less than 1/2" wide and 3" in diameter, begging to be clogged by a single leaf. At any rate, whether you use a dam or not - you are somehow changing the potential energy into kinetic to run the turbine - there is actually no difference, unless you've got a special case where nature has already done that, as with underwater tidal turbines where you're only getting a little of what was theoretically there (to get it all, you have to eat the entire flow, after all, which is usually impractical).

With weirs, you're just changing head to flow (potential to kinetic) - there is no "twice as efficient" there compared to a proper head situation, as riverbeds aren't as smooth and loss-free as good quality pipe. You might be able to capture more that way in a particular situation - perhaps because you couldn't handle the flow variation dumping a whole river through a turbine, but that is another set of issues.

A lot of alt energy water stuff skips the dam anyway - if you've got a source high that becomes a creek going down a steep hill, you just tap off into a smooth pipe at the top and run that through your turbine at the bottom, which skips most of the frictional losses in the creekbed. If you're willing to eat a variable flow, the dam is moot - it's just a storage device unless you're using it to create more head than you'd have otherwise, but if you really look at the situation - that head was there anyway if you went far enough upstream to pick up the stuff. You might be thinking that the kinetic energy of the original flow into the dam basin is wasted - you'd be right, but in practical situations, you're going to lose some even in very slick and large pipe anyway if you need to go some distance. It all washes out, in other words.

In alt energy you really have to watch for the starry-eyed, sad but true. Despite many attempts, you really can't cheat the realities on the ground.

More on the slowly progressing upgrade here:
http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=563#p3634
Weather and availability of help when the weather is nice are making this slow, but it'll get done.

Looks like I get a day off from that - torrential rain.
 
...(the dam) it's just a storage device unless you're using it to create more head than you'd have otherwise, but if you really look at the situation - that head was there anyway, if you went far enough upstream to pick up the stuff. You might be thinking that the kinetic energy of the original flow into the dam basin is wasted - you'd be right

...that is quite my point (bold highlight). There might be practical considerations/scaling the thing up is probably much easier at the dam, rather than fine-tuning your river flow across several miles long stretches, and putting smaller turbines here & there, but isn't it the kinetic energy in the flow, that increases with square of the speed? And all that speed is stopped, in the traditional dam hydros - to be converted into potential energy. I do not want to argue with you DCF, I do not feel mentally fit enough ;), but isn't it the PRESSURE of the water head, that drives the traditional turbines, and thus we need to create the head at all? So I kind of doubt about converting the potential energy into the kinetic one back at the turbine outlet, I mean I still believe that there is much more kinetic energy wasted along the stretch of the river, that became artificial lake, than we can get back at the outlet. It is unfortunate that I cannot link to these studies (nothing starry-eyes, just test conveyed by some hydro- engineers), which compare that output of that velocity-focused hydro electric plant on the Danube river, versus what could be achieved from traditional dam/water head approach, if done on the same stretch of the river. They were comparing it to the "very mainstream" (again, nothing starry-eyes) tables of possible electric output, from the given flow/head on the river stretch in question, and it was clearly couple of times higher than possible with the traditional approach. And it was in Austria, which is damn good at their hydroelectrics (Alps probably help here a bit ;)), so there is a good chance they knew what they were talking about.

I am very curious about that gravitational vortex turbine design, that I've linked to - you'll find it properly tested and examined, if you look at the links in the article I've linked to, and it seems to be providing quite usable amounts of energy from water heads as little as 1.5m - which I'd say would be suitable to be put along many rivers in many places, thus scaling that way, without using dams, and impacting the river ecosystems/flooding fertile valleys.

The other quite efficient "turbine" design, for low water heads, and apparently very safe for river life is archimedes' screw (but used as a turbine, not a pump) - I remember watching another documentary about it being tested in the UK, on one of the hundreds of weirs, they had on their rivers (industrial revolution began there, and waterways were one of the very first to receive "regulatory" treatments, to make them suitable for transport)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes'_screw

Thanks for clarifications about the Redox flow batt.s - I remember reading about some company in Australia, trying to commercialize them as grid-capable batteries to assist renewables (solar & wind) couple of years ago, but they went out of business since. They'd even had ideas like retrofitting tankers, to ship that stuff from say Iceland (where it would be charged up using geothermal) to UK (where terminal would be built to accept charged solution and feed it to grid, and dispose of discharged one, to be shipped back to Iceland for charging).
 
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No, it's already kinetic energy when it hits the turbine. The pressure drop is what converts the potential into the kinetic there.

The point is, other than any loss you have from the energy in the flow being lost going into a dam lake, there's X energy there in the first place, and there's no cheating that one. You can in fact change a flow back into a head - block it, and when the moving water hits the wall, it goes up. OR consider a squirt from a garden hose. It's all fungible. The thing is, there is a tremendous amount of energy in a big river, especially if things are steep (like in the Alps) and of course, you can't get it all, ever - if you could you'd have to figure out what to do with an infinite amount of stopped water at the turbine outlet. Different approaches might work better in different situations, to be sure.

But just sticking a fan into a flow also causes a pressure drop across the fan - if you don't take energy out of the flow somehow, you can't get any energy...the water backs up some behind the fan, and comes out slower and lower - it's the same thing no matter about the detail about where the drop occurs, there's still no free.

I live near what's called "the little river". It's about 60 feet wide and a few feet deep in the mountains, so it runs pretty fast. We estimated if we blew it through a weir and put a turbine in it, you could get a couple kilowatts. This of course would also create some head behind the weir, and some past it due to the water level past it being lower. It's really all the same thing! But that's an amazing amount of water going by for just a few kw, that wouldn't even run most couple of homes. When someone really wanted energy, they put in a dam to get 10 feet of head, which worked. But in the mountains there is so much flash flooding and debris in the water sometimes it becomes a real high maintenance operation, so they shut that down.

That's one advantage of the dam. The crap settles before getting to the turbine outlet, and flash floods are better handled via spill ways.

No wonder they went out of business if they were going to ship redox electrolyte.
(using what, oil? Or the stuff itself, so when you get there it's used-up worthless?)

Someone can't do simple algebra if they thought you could make money at that one. Energy density is far too low to take advantage of that. But as usual these days, the real thing that makes this stuff take so long is the patent wars around it.

What's funny is that the company down under was one of those university spin-offs, you'd think at least one of the academics involved could do simple math. Until that is, you've worked with a few academics who shout "but it's intellectually trivial" to the engineers who know better.

You're exempt to make one for your own use, of course, but it's a bit out of range for most people.
 
Bushi is also a Schauberger fan then ? (-:

I want to build the device developed by Zotlotterer, an Austrian engineer who sees the additional potential in the vortex -

http://www.watervortex.net/?Filme_/_Dokumente

and heres a simple minature version that i would build tomorrow, if i wasnt working closely with the Environment Agency on a restoration project for some contaminated land -

 
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ok, ive perked your interest a bit then, PMB.

I was long puzzled by a device we often fit to drainage schemes, called a hydrobrake.
Its task is to release water at a constant rate, regardless of back pressure.

All it does is vortex the water within its chamber and release it. No moving parts.
Then i learned from Viktor Schauberger that you get a temperature drop when water vortexes and realised that the 'surplus energy' in the hydrobrake was being used to raise the temperature of the water.

And vice versa, the energy in the vortex is added too, by the temperature reduction as it spins, which is how Zotlotterer is able to get such good results.

I asked a fella with a waterwheel to check the temp in his flow before and after his wheel ( think he was seeing 1cubic m per sec at the time) and he recorded a 1deg c rise,
which indicated that he was loosing 1kw to heat across his wheel.

Schauberger worked this out and a whole lot of other stuff that no one can replicate today and went on to get pressganged into weapons developments for the 3rd Reich
( the equivalent of skunkworks today )
Lots of reliable witnesses to him getting far more electricity out of power stations on the Danube, yet no replication at any useful scale, currently.

Enigmatic character and just up my, somewhat dreamy, street.
 
Bushi is also a Schauberger fan then ? (-:

I want to build the device developed by Zotlotterer, an Austrian engineer who sees the additional potential in the vortex -

http://www.watervortex.net/?Filme_/_Dokumente

and heres a simple minature version that i would build tomorrow, if i wasnt working closely with the Environment Agency on a restoration project for some contaminated land -

vortex with turbine - YouTube

I would like to see the output on one of those installed under a race on a creek. I'll bet it's pretty good.
 
Bushi is also a Schauberger fan then ? (-:

...I admit, it is very interesting to read about him, unfortunately most of details that you can get is in German, and I am not proficient enough to understand it, I guess it would be hard enough to a native speaker (cause it is contrary to a lot of our conventional knowledge taught at school, and hard to get it related to what you already know), and most of what is available in English about him, I'd need to categorize as a "starry eyes" lecture, to quote DCFusor :)

Still, it is quite interesting persona. Like you said, a lot of well documented "magic" stuff, that he was able to do with water - like for example transporting heavy logs using water - ones that had specific weight heavier than water (should sink as a stone, but they werent, thanks to his clever dynamics).

Well now I need to make a confession, one that might downgrade me in the eyes of DCFusor ;) - but with all my respect to science and it's achievements, I still believe, that we are somehow sidetracked with our current scientific understanding of energy/matter/creation, and I do believe that creating energy/matter out of "nothing" is possible. I know that Big Bang theory is well established in mathematic models and all, but I do have problem with one thing: how Science might be comfortable with a theory of the Universe, which at the very beginning/its core, assumes UNSCIENTIFIC event (the Big Bang itself)? How about black holes (singularities, conveniently being shuffled under the carpet, because our "known laws of physics" (read: ones that we can currently describe using math) do not apply there? How about matter creation at the event horizon - because of quantum field fluctuation, and spomntaneous creation of pairs matter-antimatter, with one of them being next swallowed by a black hole, thus cannot recombine? Is it matter (thus energy), created out of "nothing", or not? How about the calculation of "zero point energy", again, related to quantum field, showing that a cubic centimetre of "empty" space, contains more energy, than the entire Universe mass?

I mean, this is all bonkers, with such an approach, we might give up straight away, forget about all that crap, and explain everything straight away as magic, and powered by trolls, ferries and lepprechauns. Would save us a lot of troubles in school ;). To summarize, I think that our current mainstream view on the matter and Universe creation (thus energy creation as well, thanks to our good old patent office officer's E=mc^2), is an oxymoron - yes, we can model everything very rigorously and scientifically back to the very beginning, but we will conveniently skip the beginning from our theories, because it doesn't fit.

That's not good enough for me, I think that we are missing something really big, and possibly really simple :)

...but that's just me, and I have very little to back me up :)
 
he he

I love reading DCF's attempts to educate us on the cutting edges of science, because he is singlehandedly keeping me from going 'off with the faeries'

I also ponder stuff that shouldnt happen / cant happen yet apparently does and know i am too dumb to really understand it ..........

science seems to be more about the verification of ideas and not the source of the ideas themselves.

I enjoy reading attempts by others to explain the physical world in ways that dont need a bunch of complex formulae with random constants to make em 'fit the observable facts'

However i dont think this is the place to bat this kind of stuff about
 
Well, if we want to bat it about elsewhere, there's always my own boards, which anybody here is welcome to join (you have to get in touch with me to get signed up).
We have a place there just to talk trash.

Actually, bushi, you might be really surprised what "science" thinks about what you bring up above, and there's not a problem here at all. There's a couple of places you're misinformed, but once that is corrected, I think there would be no issues.
Because actually, science either does say just what you are, but you didn't know that, or what it says makes a lotta sense in the context of the whole and you just don't know about the other observations yet.

Black holes are far from swept under the rug! Gee, there's even a tour making money selling all sorts of takes on what they imply (Steven Hawking and Wheeler) - and they are very clearly implied themselves all the way back to Einstein - in fact, his theory was called on to explain the later discovered phenomena. Nothing in current theory denies singularities at all, in fact they are an object of major study.

The universe itself - if you buy into the big bang (and I think inflation is important here for reasons you'll have to ask me to explain or this gets long) - sprang into existence from "nothing" - that's what science really says! By creating a not-that-odd math framework, it all balances out, the universe is net zero, weird as that sounds.

The one big problem, kind of solved by assuming the universe space-time is itself finite so far, is how that initial singularity managed to go bang at all - if "everything" was all crammed into a point, that's a black hole...oops, still working on that one - how can a black hole go "bang"?

Might depend on which side of the event horizon we're on at the time...or the fact that allowing 4 dimensions to expand rapidly allowed the other N to shrink - and that's where it all came from. Let it blow out here in return for squeezing in there, net mass/energy == 0.

Fun huh? Gimme a pizza and a coupla beers and I can be a cosmologist too.

And yes, it's quite likely we are missing various things both big and simple. We're just trying to get what we think we know organized, at least the honest scientists among us. The more motivated among us are looking for things we've missed.

Nope, science in general isn't the source of ideas at all, though once you've got the knack it really does help to have the benefit of everyones ideas to date, and a knowledge of what is that has plenty of unexplained stuff and relationships to ponder.

Ideas seem uniquely human. Humans just are. Science is one of the many things we do. We have ideas around all of what we do. Sometimes there is cross-fertilization. That's cool, and also almost uniquely human. I don't think any discipline sources ideas reliably. I get a few when I pick up my axe, or my lawnmower, or a test tube. It seems to be my engagement, conscious or otherwise, that makes them bubble up.

Science doesn't (or at least shouldn't) ever get into "why". Just "what". Maybe "how". Many forget that one, no matter where they are coming from, and it's a mistake. Look how stupid people in the religion vs science thing look when they step outside their very different set of expertise! They don't even fight about the same question, if either is honest about what they "know". Just dumb.

Work I'm doing right now involves the same quantum phenomena that generate "zero point energy". Fascinating stuff, but nope, at the risk of being another Rutherford, "anyone talking serious power outa that is talking moonshine". Planck's constant is really really small, and I mean really small. It kind of defines the "resolution" of the universe at very small scales and we're pretty hi-rez.
6.62606957(29)×10−34.
Almost no longer matters what the units are, eh? It's fine...in this case it's J-S.
In other words, Heisenberg's uncertainty was really tiny.

On the other hand, science seems perfectly happy with a net mass/energy of the universe being zero. So any finite non-zero number is in fact larger than the energy sum of the universe. But don't forget negative numbers - you can have a lot of either sign that still sum to zero. I think accountants came up with that one.

Here's a link to some discussion on my board about my belief that you can in fact get "energy from nothing" at least in some eyes, though I contend it's not "nothing" at all.
http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=577

See? We don't disagree at all about the possibility, just where it might be found and how it might be explained.:banana:
 
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Black holes are far from swept under the rug! Gee, there's even a tour making money selling all sorts of takes on what they imply (Steven Hawking and Wheeler) - and they are very clearly implied themselves all the way back to Einstein - in fact, his theory was called on to explain the later discovered phenomena. Nothing in current theory denies singularities at all, in fact they are an object of major study.
...I think I wasn't clear - as usual, got carried away with my writing ;). I know that black holes are totally mainstream, rooted in math/Einstein relativity and universally accepted, and no one scientist denies them - my point rather was, that once we have identified "singularity" here & there, than whatever happens behind the event horizon - well, our scientific view of the whole cosmology doesn't apply there, so we conveniently apply the logic, "well, if it is behind the event horizon, it means it cannot impact the "outside" universe in any way, it means that even if our theories collapse there, it doesn't matter, and we might just skip that part". Same, more or less, applies to Big Bang event (to my knowledge), also couple of things that somehow "had" to be there, like inflationary period, dark matter - just to held our current theories together, from falling apart. I just don't buy it, it is too many assumptions that seem to be contradictory to others, accepted broadly "laws of physics". Although I don't have anything other to offer! I wonder if there is some another, elegant, self-contained explanation to all that stuff - like, for example, some kind of magical aether (quantum field???), that vibrates on it's own, and makes all things "pop" into existence, spontaneously? Without the need of all these (quite bold :)) assumptions, that seem to be in a total contradiction to universally accepted ones?

As for scientific theories vs scientific method, that is interesting, philosophically. If we assume that every single theory, that is non self-contradictory, and consistent with experiments results, and can predict other results, is scientifically valid (and we SHOULD assume that, regardless that so many people, scientists or not, would reject anything, if it is contradict to mainstream) - then mathematically speaking, there is most likely infinite number of theories, that could describe/"explain" observed facts. And that one (few at the moment, I think), that get's mainstream traction - well, they just were in tune with many people, especially the influential ones. But at the very core of any theory, there is THESIS, which is a purely human, and totally SUBJECTIVE figure of thought, there's nothing OBJECTIVE to it.

Which, in turn, puts the whole concept of "objective" science in question - how it is "objective", if we could most probably pick infinite number of other concepts - it is only a matter of our mathematical creativity, indeed? I think that is what you were referring to, saying:
(...)Science doesn't (or at least shouldn't) ever get into "why". Just "what". Maybe "how". Many forget that one, (...)

...which, at the end of my morning rant, brings us nicely to the quote, unfortunately I cannot remember the author to give him a proper credit:
Science substitutes the answers to important questions, that it cannot answer, with unimportant ones, that it can
:)

And just to note again - I am fascinated by the science (or shall I say, the ideas, not science?) and admire what people/scientists were able to achieve, I think it is fantastic, in general. Call me dual, duopoly (or just plainly confused and messed up person :rotflmbo:)

BTW, nice solar system, DCF! And sorry for totally hijacking your thread! Guilty again... In short, is it safe to say that from your experience, solar system w/inverters and batteries is the most reliable/cost effective solution at the moment, taking into account low maintenance costs (even with batteries that have to be replaced from time to time) and all? Do you think it is possible to scale it up globally (taking into account energy needs of the human race - do we have enough stuff to make all these batteries? What about the whole lifecycle of batt.s - are they not very toxic to recycle? Are solar panels net energy positive (I mean, don't we need more fossil fuels energy to be put into production of the panel, than we could ever extract from the panel, through it's lifetime?).

Somehow, I was always skeptic about PV, (price was way to high for my likings), but price is coming down now, and I'd love to hear from the "veteran" in the field.

cheers,

PS. I've read your thing on Maxwell's demon using magnets in solution. The only thing is - wouldn't they (the magnets) also average-out? or do you plan just one of these, suspended in fluid, that it gathers energy from?

Other than that, I think that the comments by chrismb are something that I am having most problem with: "it cannot work, because it violates whatever law of physics". ....OK, but other than that? Where's the flaw in the thought experiment? I find that attitude amusing. And kind of Keynesian-ish.
 
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another outstanding post DCF

thank you

and exciting to learn that you are chasing that elusive 'zero point' energy.

It was Nick Cooks book 'The hunt for zero point' that first got me studying Schauberger.

Nick Cook was Aviation Editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, the international defence journal. He is currently the magazine’s Aerospace Consultant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Cook

And Bushi

also a great post. You are at least as confused as me but also seem to enjoy the intellectual challenge of trying to piece it all together.
 
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quote -

" if we are to believe these self-same-self-appointed authorities, the universe could not exist or have come into being as they claim from a big bang...but here we find ourselves, somehow.
Entropy seems to be tied into the direction of time. Funny thing that physics, standard model, says everything works either direction and the sign bit of time can't be determined any other way, eh? "

heh, nice one DCF. Its the anomalous behaviours that mess up the heads of the 'scientific community' yet would seem to be fundamental to our being

and that avatar picture of Doug Coulter ........ Merlin the Magician comes to mind (-:
 
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We aren't hijacking "my" thread, this is PMBug's house, so that's up to him. I do have my own boards to talk this trash on if we want to go there.

On the solar:

For anyone living in their own home, for nearly all the country, yes, solar is workable, works great. The net standard of living might not be quite up to the current levels of waste, but it's surely good enough. Some places you're not going to run air conditioning day and night, to be sure, off this, but pretty much everything else is either no change, or switch to a more efficient way and there's plenty.

The trouble arises with high-density sardine-can living, where there's not much roof per family. I have a lot of reasons I don't like that one, not just the sustainability of it. Another whole discussion about importing the goodies from the world and exporting their trash and pollution - including votes and laws that suit them, but not us.

That old saw about PV not being net energy positive wasn't even true back in the day we were using super high purity silicon castoffs from the semiconductor business, which were and are a lot more energy intensive to make.

What have you got here - a big piece of glass, and a bunch of very thin polycrystalline silicon, with minor amounts of dopant, and some silver and plastic.
It's basically all sand with value added. Work out the energy required to melt that much sand, it's only a few days worth of output from a panel, tops, and they last decades. I can weld all day every day off my system, actually it will run 4 at a time!

In fact, it's making enough energy to throw my 4000 pound car uphill for over 40 miles a day...that alone equates to the energy in about 11,000 gallons of gasoline.

Batteries are getting better over time, and with care a set lasts perhaps 10-20 years.
They don't have to be that big, mine would fit in a short pickup bed (but would break the springs). Yes, they are toxic, which is why you don't throw them away, you recycle them (and get paid to do it, as they are full of lead which isn't free). Recycling them results in a lot less environmental damage than digging up lead ore and smelting it.

A lot of people have grid-tie systems, which basically uses the power company for batteries. Some places this is a great deal (out in the southwest) - but you still have that deal with the devils - they can change terms at their whim, not yours. But it's a cheap way to get going. Here the power co pays a lot less for power in than they charge for power out, and it's a bad deal. The thing with a grid tie system is you get no independence - when the power company goes down, you do too.

For larger installations, battery types that aren't practical for us little guys are workable. There's a huge, and I mean huge, test going on in TX of a sodium sulfur type (runs at high temperature) that is the size of a large warehouse for example.
There is talk of using used electric car batteries for this too, once they're not good enough for cars anymore. The Japanese are doing that vanadium redox thing. Good things are afoot if you don't have to sweat energy/pound much.

For bigger scaleups, there's the deserts to put panels into, but of course there will be people who object to doing that one. At really large scale, solar-dynamic looks pretty good as an alternative. Here you just use mirror concentrators to make a ton of heat, then run a boiler from that. NASA is working with this for space stuff, as when it gets to a certain size, it weighs less for the power and is more rugged in launch.

On the cosmology, it's going to take awhile to frame good answers, but I will.

Quickly though - who says we aren't inside a black hole now? Maybe they are white holes looking from the inside? It would explain quite a bit. The idea that there might be places we can't get to or see confounds a lot of people, but that's just a human limitation some have. People intuit that space must be infinite, but it need not be, and no, there needn't be a wall when you get to the end, it can easily wrap, just like some old video games, and actually, some think it does. Since we know we don't know it all, the possibility exists that we might at some point be able to get to those places we can't penetrate now anyway.

Science has no problem with multiple universes. Or the fact that our own might just be a quantum fluctuation in some other space (DeSitter) - it all rolls out neatly with the math we have. From our point of view, a common quantum fluctuation might not last very long at all (that Planck number up there - it's tiny), or have much energy, but what about from its own point of view? Since the speed of light gets involved, it's point of view is time-dilated as hell - so it thinks it's lasting forever! Since it will annihilate at some point, the net energy is zero - just like we predict our own universe to be!

In other words, it's possible we are a quantum fluctuation in a higher order space, and god might be a retarded 8 year old playing with daddy's particle accelerator.
Not saying that's the case...but there's nothing to disprove it, either. Or there might be the Judea-Christain god who said "let there be a place where Maxwell's equations are true" (let there be light). That particular "Creation myth" happens to be the only one that jives well with current scientific understanding - even evolution happens in the right order. Too bad neither side of that debate seems able to realize that. All it takes is an open mind.

And the first time God speaks to anybody in the bible "I am, that Iam". If you are lucky to know someone who speaks the original language, he's using all the forms of the verb "to be" at once, non specifically. In other words, god is saying he's a trans-time being who doesn't experience time as a succession of "right nows" like we do (mostly) but "all at once" like I can see the entire computer screen at once. A few little insights like that really change what that book appears to be telling us, IMO, in a good way. But it's hard to get most theologians to understand that one.

Most people can't visualize time anyway. Takes practice and some work, which puts most people right off.

Here's the trouble with your thesis that an infinite number of internally consistent theories are possible. Well, first look up Godel's incompleteness theorem. But that's only interesting, not definitive. The real trouble is that the more we observe, the more we eliminate the possible theories that are internally self-consistent, and the number is getting "small" compared to what it was not too many years back. Thus it's becoming easier and easier to debunk junk science, actually, as most people who propose alternate theories forget that if you're going to start with some different assumption about things, it would imply different behavior of the universe than we've already observed is the case, and pretty solidly. The wiggle room is getting smaller all the time, even if you allow for the fact of certain things taken as gospel by some scientists are actually circularly defined and should be regarded as such (Hubble "constant" might be in that bag). It is almost always trivial for me to spot those, and frankly, it pisses people off if you're too direct in showing them the (obvious in hindsight) flaws sometimes. Not that there aren't still a lot of possibilities - just that they are becoming fewer all the time. It is the glory of science to progress. Which often results in us having to tell you we were wrong before - kind of the opposite of most religious views which posit no change possible.

Greene's "The elegant Universe" is a good one on this topic. (his other books not as good) It appears that some variation on string or M theory is certainly "it", and some of the properties of the implied topology are already nailed down pretty tight, to a symmetry group called Calibu-Yao [sic?] space. Within that "group" (this is some fairly weird math, group theory), there are a ton of possibilities, too many right now to try them all brute-force on today's computers - but the number is known and finite. What's cool about this, once you understand it, is that once the topology of this space (basically, where the holes and knots are) is defined, everything else pops right out - the speed of light, and all the other constants we have to put into the "standard model" as "assumptions" to make that work. It's becoming more and more obvious the standard model is like Newtonian physics - when the real truth is bigger, more like what Einstein did to it - Newton wasn't wrong, just incomplete.
Except this is a whole 'nother level of that. In most versions of string/M theory (Look up Ed Witten, maybe the smartest scientist/theorist to ever live) there are more physical dimensions than we directly observe - so far. They seem to be rolled up small, and sort of knotted, that shape being the determining factor for things like speed of light, gravitational constant and a bunch of other "magic numbers". Look at the implications of that - no one else is, but to me that means that in all but 4 (xyz and time) dimensions we're already everywhere - the Buddhists were in some sense correct - and it's only in the 4 we can't go faster than light and so on. We might indeed simply be a projection from the higher order space onto 4-space, and all we'd need to do is re-aim the projector to be somewhere else....like changing the local oscillator in a superhetrodyne radio. It might not even take any much energy. "Beam me up" might be possible!


I'm not chasing zero point energy, just working in a domain where it figures in, at present - fusion can't happen in my reactor without quantum tunneling, for example. I'm still going for fusion, but there are things going on at that level I have to work with and take into account.

My brownian diode concept is not zero point energy, it's a trick of thermodynamics.
(far larger scale, here - whole atoms and stuff, zero point is 10e20 times smaller than atoms or more)

The truth is, no matter what pseudo science thinks, is that ZP energy is there - but it took many decades after theory predicted it for it to even be measured - it's very tiny. The thermo dynamic energy extractor yes, uses just one tiny magnet per tiny cell - you'd have to adapt current semiconductor tech to make enough cells to add up to any energy you could measure or use. You might if lucky be talking about a watt/cubic inch as maximum density. The way the numbers work out that little magnet is pretty tiny for best capture - about a few hundred atoms worth, so the cells can also be really small. If you try to make one big one, the laws of probability don't let it work as well. It's a lot less rare to get say 7 out of ten heads in ten tosses than it is to get 70 out of 100 tosses. Sadly, my one connection with a semiconductor fab can't get them to make me one, and the cost is past my means to just order it done.

I don't care too much what the "scientific community" thinks about this or that. Like most professions, at most 10% of them are "real". You guys just happened on one of the real ones - me - I might know about 10 more out of a few thousand. Most of them are more interested in tenure, pay raises, job security, corner office and perks, like any other field.

Most humans have what I call "lazy brain" - always looking for some super oversimplification, so they can not have to actually think. Just want to be told what to think, and rely on authority, rather than learn HOW to think, which after all, is a lot more work, and there's no "done" to that job. The reason this place is nice is that there are a higher than normal percentage of folks here who don't mind thinking.

Quote :
Science substitutes the answers to important questions, that it cannot answer, with unimportant ones, that it can
Honest scientists realize this one in spades. The better ones say it out loud. The question is, who decides which are the important ones? Sure, "why am I here", "what's the meaning of life" - those science can't and shouldn't even try to answer at this point. Good vs evil - not in that domain at all. Some people would call those questions more important than anythng science even attempts to answer. But...who made you god to make that determination, perhaps "what can I do" is more important than "why am I here". I don't think that, but really, if you want to achieve full intellectual honesty, you have to consider that one.

But as Asimov said, the thing about the religion of science is that by golly, when we call down fire, it comes down, every time, and almost always on the right altar. If I curse you, I don't have to wait for some other being to carry it out - there's a nuclear explosion at your placem you're poisoned, or a bullet is incoming. Likewise, I can heal many things with near 100% certainty.

It's repeatable - and that's the key. If it isn't, it isn't science, as currently defined. So, science doesn't, and shouldn't attempt to, cover everything. When it tries to prove/disprove some religion - it's simply out of line, we don't get those kinds of answers from it. It doesn't define good vs evil, it simply defines what I can do and have it always work -and why it didn't if it doesn't. And that's what I meant when I said science doesn't handle the "why".

Chris MacDonald-Bradley is our resident crusty skeptic, he's useful that way, and willing to think at least a little bit. He's the court jester who can tell the emperor he's naked. CS Lewis had such a character in "That hideous strength" in his trilogy. His public persona and private ones are quite different - he's a cool guy.

Funny he gave up so easily - he doesn't normally. i think he's realized I've gotten him into some turf he's not the master of, yet. All the books on thermodynamics toss in the integration symbol too often, in places it's not justified, there's some circularity of definition going on I detected myself. So it stays internally consistent until you consider non linearities (like diodes) which it doesn't cover at all, and in truth it only makes honest statements about big averages - that are true under the assumptions it makes. I simply started a little further back and said, well, what if those assumptions don't cover everything - and what could I assume differently that didn't "break" all the stuff it gets right. It's been awhile, but I probably thought of that while playing guitar for the squirrels and raccoons in the yard. The mere fact that there is such a thing as Brownian motion proves I'm onto something it doesn't handle very well - because the assumption you're always averaging over huge numbers doesn't hold in every situation - observations do drive theory.

CS Lewis covers Merlin quite well in the book I mention above (which won't make sense until you've read the other two). He notes that Merlin really stood out among all "magicians" by technique. While most of them were really alchemists or people who were more or less satanists who practiced all sorts of interesting rituals of self-degradation, with uncertain results, Merlin apparently got his results just by being Merlin and getting the "energy" from his surroundings - kind of a resonance effect with what was already there. He left a very different footprint in history/mythology than the rest. I can kinda fall in with that one - there's a place here on my land where that "energy" is concentrated, as though humans hadn't "used it up" yet, and most people I take to that place I don't have to say a word - they get it and comment on it themselves. It's in fact a big reason I bought that land. But so far, that's religion, not science - a different field in which the meaning of even the word "energy" is quite different. I'll take it as a compliment though - you like my clown suit? That's the kind of thing I used to wear as a stage costume in the music business. I recently donned the extreme version to greet Dr Jon Howard at the airport (he flew over from England to collaborate), so I'd stand out enough for instant recognition, it worked well, but got interesting attention from airport security too. Now that was funny, we had a riot with those guys.

FWIW, I myself think "dark" matter and energy are a bandaid on a broken theory, and I''ve got company. Ed Witten's M theory would account for most of that, if it turns out to be correct anyway, and that one just subsumes all the current thinking, which becomes a simplified subset of M theory. I know of only one other person working on what I consider a possible replacement "Theory of everything" and strangely, he's another trader - Curtis Faith, one of the original turtles. He's working on a topology-based theory too, using fractional fractals, that is starting to make some sense, but it's a big job for a guy who doesn't specialize in science as I do to tie it all together. Until quite recently, I (and he) strove to keep him ignorant of "accepted knowledge" of current theories, so his wouldn't be tainted by what we know is at best incomplete thinking. It's coming along...
 
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We aren't hijacking "my" thread, this is PMBug's house, so that's up to him. ...

Pretty sure most everyone reading threads in BSTS is interested in discussion of alternative (off-grid / self sufficient) energy systems. So the discussions of the vortex / hydro-power generators is quite on point.

The broader subject of quantum physics and the nature of the universe should probably be moved to the STS forum. I'd split this thread, but the topics seem rather woven together, so I think I'll just leave it as is. Perhaps you guys would like to initiate a new thread in STS (or @ DCF's place) to carry on with the theoretical stuff?
 
Another phenomenal set of words DCF and looking like its drifting into the philosophical

Glad you see Merlin as a fascinating character from the hazy past. Perhaps you and he are the same incarnation .........

Better do as the boss says for this thread and pretend were interested in plummin or making something go round.
 
I'm cool with that. If we were doing this cosmology, whatever (I think someone else drug in the philosophy, and I just responded, but I'm fine with that too) over at my place, you'd have half a dozen other scientists chiming in too - with various specialties and varying openness of mind.

Ancona is already a member there. Anyone else who wants in send me a pm with a reasonable username (the ones here are fine) and a real email address - my board software needs that to send you the login stuff.

Or you can just email me at c l a b @ s w v a . n e t (remove the spaces).


I suggest someone build that vortex thing, and measure the power, then compare it with what's theoretically there in that much water. I think you're going to be real disappointed compared to a real hydrodynamically designed turbine, but who knows?
Hint - don't use a car alternator like that guy did, they are inefficient as hell, you're lucky to get a kilowatt out of one driving it with 4 hp...which should give 750*4 watts, or 3kw - pretty nasty "efficiency" in my experience. Those permanent magnet DC motors like they sell for treadmills are a heck of a lot better that way.
 
Thanks DCFusor!

Hey that's pretty amazing to have an opportunity to talk first-hand to a guy like you, who is not only open-minded, but also has the mental horsepower to understand the math behind the latest scientific/cosmology theories! Although it is a bit disappointing to me personally, that equipped in your knowledge, you are dismissing many of the brave new possibilities, I thought were possible :). But I am equally pleased to find, that in your view, some of the things I mentioned as a bit too bold assumptions for me to swallow (and too self-contradictory), you find just a last breath of too-narrow a view.

Generally, a fantastic read, and sorry for not responding some more, as your big input would warrant, to do some justice to your efforts to share your amazing knowledge , but I am on a self-imposed rehab from web (sort of ;) - just very busy on other fronts, and trying to juggle my time!), and reading & learning is all I can afford ATM. Great to know about your thoughts on solar in general, too, I am quite relieved to hear that PV is a big net-energy positive - as one way or another, solar is our only option, long term.

I'd like to borrow your brains again on another topic, too :) - let me start it where appropriate, later on!

cheers,
 
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