Perpetual Motion Engine (Mar, 1933)
This seems a bit sketchy, seeing as how it violates the laws of physics.
Cans Lift Up Water Column in Perpetual Motion Engine
THE latest in perpetual motion machines is a fuelless engine devised by a Frenchman of Paris, M. Miralle. The contraption functions on an application of Archimedes’ principle of floating bodies, and consists of a sort of thick set chimney made of sheet iron and equipped with fifteen flywheels.The machine is set going by turning one of the flywheels about fifteen revolutions, which subsequently sets the remaining wheels in operation. Over these wheels passes an endless chain fixed in the interior of the chimney like a motor, in which is also a series of chambers made of vegetable cans.
The chimney is filled with water so that the chamber and the endless chain are submerged in the liquid. One of the columns of chambers contains water and the other, through a process known only to M. Miralle, is filled with air. The air-filled chambers tend to rise to the surface of the water-filled chimney, thus setting the motor in motion. The photo shows M. Miralle standing beside his invention.
Perpetual motion does not exist. I’m guessing they didn’t teach basic physics back then.
Comment by huh — July 14, 2008 @ 5:54 am
The whole idea of perpetual motion machines is so silly. Even if you could build one, which is impossible, it would be completely pointless. What is the benefit of a machine that can only run itself, and just barely at that? If it can’t do any extra work the machine would be useless.
Comment by Mark — March 29, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
This seems a variation on the selective buoyancy perpetual motion machine.
Liquid filled cans sink, but air filled cans float.
(Filling the cans with air at the bottom of the loop takes more energy than the raising cans could produce.)
My favorite is the wooden wheel perpetual motion machine.
Wood floats, so if the left side of a wooden wheel was in water and the right side was in air, it would turn perpetually.
($#@! waterproof gaskets!)
Comment by jayessell — March 29, 2009 @ 5:40 pm
Hmmm… It seems someone hasn’t learned their physics too well. Perhaps think logically before you react illogically next time.
have any of you looked at “clems” perpetual motion? or looked up CEACU perpetual motion engines? it can be done and has been done, nothing new here. Clem’s engine produced over 300 hp for 9 days straight. The CEACU engine produces over 1,100 hp. these engines can run this hp at under 2,500 RPM however to start them to the point where they actually begin to perpetually run requires the use of a stepped (clutched) starter and surprise a battery. Still they are pretty cool and simple. check out http://keelynet.com/energy/clem1.htm for an illustration and more info. they use spray jets and compressed fluid/air.
However I am assuming (possibly wrongly) that a perpetual motion machine could also be efficiently made by creating cylinders under heavy vacuum (absence of air) much more closely related to a modern vehicles’ engine. I don’t think that it would work for a rotary engine though as it would be a little harder to create a sufficient constant vacuum on each side of the rotor.
Also another thing to look into is KERS (Kenetic Energy Recovery System). This is now as of 2009 allowed to be used in F1 racing. During braking the wasted kinetic energy is stored by either mechanical (at the flywheel),electrical,hydraulic, or pneumatic means. At the push of a button extra (built up) hp is released for several seconds. There is no reason that 200-500 extra hp can’t be realized. It may also be more usable if a stepped system is made to reintroduce the power in stages.
Therefore it seems that a Clems’ engine design used with a KERS would indeed produce quite a usable and interesting machine/vehicle!
Comment by john — June 6, 2009 @ 12:50 am
Hmmm…. Nonsense.
Comment by Firebrand38 — June 6, 2009 @ 2:08 am
Dang, what happened to the comment I was putting up last night? Did the system wonk? Don’t really want to rewrite that.
The short version is, no, the Clem with KERS would no longer allow the air chamber to rise, as the additional load would make it no longer lighter than the water. The endless chain would bog down under the additional strain.
KERS is a failure in the Grand Prix, not a success. Only the Williams team system is considered to have potential. The race in Istanbul will start in hours, most if not all are going WITHOUT the KERS this week. The talk is of banning the technology as an expensive white elephant. It was supposed to be the crowning achievement of this generation of racing engineers, a gift to the world from the fantasy life of Formula One and 9 digit technical budgets. Instead, they’ve backhandedly aided the world in learning that KERS isn’t practical afterall, at least in today’s world. Too large and too heavy for the energy it ‘Recaptures.’
You cannot realize 200-500hp with KERS because energy cannot be realized, only interpreted. As in you can only convert energy, not create it. Whatever process you use to generate electricity will give you less than the total potential, as some will be lost to heat/friction.
I remember I mentioned the Father/Son relatives with their ideas that you can generate a huge amount of electricity with small engine driving it if you help that engine bring it to speed and that you can build a never needs charging electric car just by hanging enough generators on it. But one horsepower translates to not quite 750 watts, and you won’t get that full amount from your generator, a 5hp engine will give you about one wall outlet of power if it runs full tilt. Meanwhile, an alternator cannot generate enough electricity to power an engine that will keep it at speed generating that power. The output of an alternator is so small as compared to the power needed to move an electric vehicle, even if it was practical to put enough in the system the weight of the load and the energy required to spin them would be greater than the electricity they could generate.
As long as people tell themselves ‘It’s spinning anyway, it’s free power’ they’ll make the mistake of thinking there’s no load created in trying to generate power from it. The point is made at the Formula One site, in the statement about slower cars holding back a driver without the KERS. “Christian Horner believes its race performances in both Bahrain and Barcelona were disguised because Sebastian Vettel got trapped behind cars with KERS (Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren and Felipe Massa’s Ferrari respectively).” The Red Bull team didn’t run KERS, and was therefore faster. Vettel has won this year, Massa and Hamilton have not.
http://www.formula1.com/news/f...../9427.html
(Well, that may lack the entertainment value of the other post, but it’s more to the point.)
Comment by -DOUG- — June 6, 2009 @ 6:27 pm
Imagine this:
A pulley that is part of a side on a container full of water (got that?), there is a can full of air attatched to the pulley. The can (plus pulley) goes through a hole in the side of the container which (by many different possible designs) puts the can into the bottom of the container of water, the acceleration of the can (air in water) launches it around the pulley, down the side (outside the container) and back into the container. Note the mechanism that puts the can back into the container is designed for minimal resistance and minimal (but inevitable) water loss (a larger container is better as there is not much extra pressure to force more water out).
Comment by Kiwi ingenuity — September 7, 2009 @ 6:34 pm
That perpetual motion claim is not last.
The most recent perpetual motion machine is called “gravitzapa”(?????????) ;
it is installed at the Russian satellite “Yubileiny” (?????????):
http://english.pravda.ru/scien.....ientists-0
Russian scientists test perpetual motion machine in space.
14.04.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru
Then, it changes its claim from the ciolation of the conservation of energy to the violation of
the First Law of newton. The article says:
The new engine lasts for 15 years and can be started about 300,000 times. It uses solar batteries for its power, engineers at the institute said.
Some common ideas recur repeatedly in perpetual motion machine designs. Many ideas that continue to appear today were stated as early as 1670 by John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester and an official of the Royal Society. He outlined three potential sources of power for a perpetual motion machine, “Chymical Extractions”, “Magnetical Virtues” and “the Natural Affection of Gravity”.
The seemingly mysterious ability of magnets to influence motion at a distance without any apparent energy source has long appealed to inventors. One of the earliest examples of a system using magnets was proposed by Wilkins and has been widely copied since: it consists of a ramp with a magnet at the top, which pulled a metal ball up the ramp. Near the magnet was a small hole that was supposed to allow the ball to drop under the ramp and return to the bottom, where a flap allowed it to return to the top again. The device simply could not work: any magnet strong enough to pull the ball up the ramp would necessarily be too powerful to allow it to drop through the hole. Faced with this problem, more modern versions typically use a series of ramps and magnets, positioned so the ball is to be handed off from one magnet to another as it moves. The problem remains the same.
More generally, magnets can do no net work, although this was not understood until much later. A magnet can accelerate an object, like the metal ball of Wilkins’ device, but this motion will always come to stop when the object reaches the magnet, releasing that work in some other form – typically its mechanical energy being turned into heat. In order for this motion to continue, the magnet would have to be moved, which would require energy.
Gravity also acts at a distance, without an apparent energy source. But to get energy out of a gravitational field (for instance, by dropping a heavy object, producing kinetic energy as it falls) you have to put energy in (for instance, by lifting the object up), and some energy is always dissipated in the process. A typical application of gravity in a perpetual motion machine is Bhaskara’s wheel in the 12th century, whose key idea is itself a recurring theme, often called the overbalanced wheel: Moving weights are attached to a wheel in such a way that they fall to a position further from the wheel’s center for one half of the wheel’s rotation, and closer to the center for the other half. Since weights further from the center apply a greater torque, the result is (or would be, if such a device worked) that the wheel rotates forever. The moving weights may be hammers on pivoted arms, or rolling balls, or mercury in tubes; the principle is the same.
Comment by Kouznetsov — March 1, 2010 @ 9:43 am
Never say Never. Flight by man was once impossible. The use of such a device would be, not to drive other devices, but to produce very tiny amounts of energy that, once accumulated, could be implemented to use as electricity.
Because temperature and other atmospheric “pressures” are constantly changing, no matter how slightly, those natural “pressures” might be used to produce very small amounts of energy (even played one against the other)(?). Constructed on a great level, lots of useful energy could be realized.
Comment by James B. Johnson — September 14, 2010 @ 5:43 pm
James B. Johnson: Sound horn! Non sequitur alert. “Flight by man”? As long as he obeyed the same laws of aerodynamics and physics as everything else it wasn’t “impossible” just for a time “impractical”. I love it when folks wax philosophic and don’t know what they’re talking about. Tell you what, devote that intellectual energy to actually building something rather than pining about things that used to be impossible.
Comment by Firebrand38 — September 14, 2010 @ 6:08 pm
JBJ:
Decades ago Edmund Scientific sold a clock that was wound by the expansion and compression of a can due to atmospheric pressure fluctuations.
This is an extremely inefficient heat engine, not a perpetual motion machine.
The sun drives earth’s weather.
No sun = no weather = clock stops = not perpetual motion.
*MY* idea for a Perpetual Motion machine is gyroscopes at the equator stealing power
from the earth’s rotation!!!
Comment by jayessell — September 14, 2010 @ 6:16 pm
jayessell: Quiet! You’ve said too much!
Actually JBJ makes the same mistake that a lot of the Great Unwashed make as in the example of the “sound barrier’ and the myth perpetuated in the movie The Right Stuff. It’s not that anyone doubted that the so called “barrier” could be broken or that it was ever “impossible”. The Bell X-1 (nee Glamorous Glennis) was shaped like a .50 caliber machine gun bullet which had been breaking the “sound barrier” for a long time (leave us not forget the German V-2 rocket). The trick was whether a plane with a human pilot could fly faster than the speed of sound and maneuver. The fact that it was done kind of renders the whole impossible thing moot.
Comment by Firebrand38 — September 14, 2010 @ 6:20 pm
About the clock I mentioned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmos_clock
Comment by jayessell — September 14, 2010 @ 6:29 pm
Someone has actually done some math about equatorial gyroscopes, see the link. In a way, I’d like to see a 1 >Million< metric ton flywheel going around 120 rpm, but that behemoth would be only capable of delivering a whopping ~600 Watts energy output from an axle which turns around once in a day. And all that with no-loss gearboxes and bearings… Nice idea though, as Earths rotational energy is really, really tremendous. Well, I got an artificial horizon gyro from boot sale for 1 euro, which takes about 15 W after the spun up, and the flywheel weights only about 1 kilo, But boy, does it resists trying to turn it against the remaining gimbals joint….
http://mb-soft.com/public2/earthrot.html
Comment by Jari — September 15, 2010 @ 4:47 pm