exchemist

Thanks for posting this. I was scratching my head thinking I had read something about chimneys. But they seem to need to be very tall, and are even more of a blot on the landscape than wind turbines. I wonder what sort of payback time they achieve and how they compare in Watts/m² with solar panels these days.

On the contrary, SCIRP has a very poor reputation. It seems to masquerade as being located in California, while really being a Chinese operation and is considered by Jeffrey Beall to be a predatory journal organisation. I quote a passage from the Wikipedua article about SCIRP: The company has been accused of being a predatory open access publisher[6] by Jeffrey Beall and of using email spam to solicit papers for submission.[4] In 2014 there was a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, Advances in Anthropology, with the outgoing Editor-in-Chief saying of the publisher "For them it was only about making money. We were simply their 'front'."[7] From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing

Anyone who think from the perspective of Space-time, are wasting their time. Oh no, not another Tesla crank. That's two in the space of a week! Tesla was a turn of the c.20th inventor, electrical engineer and Groucho Marx lookalike, who went mad* and died 80 years ago. Quoting what Tesla had to say about a branch of physics he knew nothing about, not being a physicist, does not enhance anyone's credibility. *In 1932 he announced he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays:

Work is Fd, force times distance. To calculate the work done, you need to know not just the force but the distance through which it is applied. Do not run away with the notion that you can get limitless power from the expansion of ice. The bigger the load, the smaller the distance through which it will be lifted. Ice is not incompressible. The work it does will be finite - and small compared to the latent heat released. But to be honest I think I am wasting my time now. At every turn, it seems, you generate another bogus complication, to evade acceptance of what I and others here have been telling you. I think you are determined to hold onto this daft notion of Tesla's, as you have these past 9 years, (I now discover you were posting on the same topic, in another forum I belong to, back in 2012) and that you are impervious to reason. Thanks for the "ice engine", though. I shall add it to my list of the more memorable crank attempts to get round the laws of thermodynamics, along with the Japanese infra-red photovoltaic in the box and the German surface tension one, which took weeks to unscramble. The common feature of all of them is to devise a scenario that is just complicated enough to exceed its proponent's powers of analysis - and hey presto, the laws of thermodynamics have been broken and free energy is available for all. Not.

I suggest you re-read what I have written about chemical potential energy. Nowhere have I suggested it is heat, because it obviously is not. Energy is converted from one form to another in the processes we have been discussing. I even drew a diagram with arrows. What are you hung up on? I am totally mystified.

Heat is DEFINED as a flow: the energy that flows between bodies that are at different temperatures.

I was reflecting on the ice engine today. It's quite an ingenious and entertaining idea, albeit an impractical one. The feature of it that differs from most heat engines is that it exploits the change in volume due a phase change in the working fluid, rather than the expansion on heating a gas. It occurred to me that this is also true of the earliest steam engines. These were "atmospheric engines", in which the power stroke exploited the reduction in pressure when the steam in the cylinder was condensed, by the injection of a cold water spray. So here, as in the ice engine, a power stroke is produced by a phase change, and is accompanied by a release of Latent Heat, whereas the heat input to the engine takes place on the return stroke, i.e. as the cylinder is refilled with steam. It seems that this feature - of the heat input taking place on the return stroke - is what is bothering @Tom Booth Perhaps he should think about Newcomen's atmospheric engine for a bit......

Before, you stated the ice engine does not convert ambient heat into work. And I said, on the contrary, it does. I went on to explain how this conversion takes place:- ambient heat -> chemical potential energy in liquid water ->work done in expanding the ice + heat output as Latent Heat of Fusion. I fail to see why this is an issue. But it appears, from your bowling ball analogy (or non-analogy), that you don't understand what I mean by chemical potential energy. Look, if two substances react chemically together with evolution of heat (what we call an "exothermic" reaction), they go from a higher energy state to a lower energy state. So we can say that the reactants have chemical potential energy, which is released and flows out as heat when they react together. That's all it means. What happens is weaker bonds in the reactants are replaced by stronger ones in the products. Crystallisation is a similar process, in that the unbonded molecules in the liquid state become bonded in the solid, with release of heat, which we call the Latent Heat of Fusion. So the molecules in the liquid state have chemical potential energy, relative to the solid.

Maa fiy sweat.

"Prove me wrong!" has been the cry of the crank down the ages. It does not work like that. It is for the person making the claim or hypothesis to provide evidence in support of it.

I do not understand what point you are trying to make here.

Fat finger trouble? I presume you meant to reply to the OP rather than to me.

My understanding is yes this is what happens. However the rate of decay is not such as to cause an appreciable bulk charge to accumulate, as a rule - there may be weird exceptions with some exceptionally highly radioactive species, I suppose. There are flows of ions and electrons at very low levels in the atmosphere and in the ground all the time, which we don't notice.

Yes it does. Ambient heat supplies energy to break the hydrogen bonds in the ice crystal, increasing the chemical potential energy of the working medium. This potential energy then flows out when the temperature is reduced and the ice diverts some of that energy into work, as the ice forms and lifts the weight. And then the cycle repeats itself. I've deleted the rest as it just adds confusion.

Yes. But in the end, what's new here is just a magnet. This has been "jam tomorrow" ever since I was a kid. I remember the ZETA torus (for some reason not called a tokamak, though it looked to me like one), with its promise of limitless power, just around the corner. And now I'm over 65 - and people are still designing magnets for toruses, with the promise of limitless power just around the corner...... Like everyone, I hope we are getting closer, but history makes me sceptical.

No. You continue to add confusion. I start to fear this may be deliberate on your part, to keep the Tesla dream alive. Suppose the ice engine converts 5% of the heat input from the ambient surroundings into lifting the weight. The other 95% is exported by the ice engine into the compartment of your freezer. Your freezer then re-exports this heat back into the ambient surroundings. To do that, it does work, input in the form of electrical power. So the amount of heat coming out of the freezer radiator is the 95% of the heat that the ice engine took from the surroundings, PLUS the extra heat due to the energy input from the electricity consumption of the freezer. The theoretical minimum this extra will be is the missing 5% that the ice engine converted to work. In practice, it will more - quite a lot more, since neither the ice engine nor the freezer heat pump will achieve Carnot efficiency. It does not matter how you dress it up, or make it complicated to obscure what is going on. That is the bottom line. You will end up consuming more energy from electricity than the work the ice engine does.

I don't think there will be a sharp ice/water interface, hurtling round the planet. There will just be a progressive wave of melting and thawing. I'm not sure I follow why the water has to move at all. Won't it just gently expand and contract in situ? Just as any other wave does not involve net physical motion in the direction of travel of the wave.

Was this item the only one made of this "slate", or were other objects made of it as well? And was it really slate, or could it have been siltstone? Real slate flakes easily into layers and is not ideal for carving, whereas siltstone is much more suitable. I quote an extract from the Wikipedia article on the Narmer Palette, which was thought to be made of slate but is actually siltstone. The Narmer Palette is a 63-centimetre-tall (2.07 ft), shield-shaped, ceremonial palette, carved from a single piece of flat, soft dark gray-green siltstone. The stone has often been wrongly identified, in the past, as being slate or schist. Slate is layered and prone to flaking, and schist is a metamorphic rock containing large, randomly distributed mineral grains. Both are unlike the finely grained, hard, flake-resistant siltstone, whose source is from a well-attested quarry that has been used since pre-dynastic times at Wadi Hammamat.[13] This material was used extensively during the pre-dynastic period for creating such palettes and also was used as a source for Old Kingdom statuary. A statue of the 2nd dynasty pharaoh Khasekhemwy, found in the same complex as the Narmer Palette at Hierakonpolis, also was made of this material.[1 From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narmer_Palette

Yes it's on this thread a couple of pages back. I was referring to the mechanism that causes frost shattering of rock. Water gets into cracks, freezes at night, jacking open the crack, thaws again, refreezes and jacks it open a bit more, etc. I was being a bit figurative, as it is not a constructed engine as such, but it does operate in a cycle, exploits a heat source and heat sink and does mechanical work, using water as the working fluid, by exploiting the ice/water phase change. So if you put it like that, it has all the elements of an engine. That's because videos are a crap way of communicating experiments. To analyse what you did, we need to see a precise description of the exact set up, with a diagram. Whatever you did, you did NOT run it without a heat sink. That I guarantee.

Yes, that would be the principle employed by the natural ice engines you get at the tops of mountains or in deserts, as @sethoflagospointed out a while back. You can certainly exploit the temperature difference between day and night to run an engine. Just don't imagine you can run a heat engine with only a heat source and no heat sink. That is wacko - like poor Tesla.

However the electricity you use to run the freezer will exceed the power output of the ice engine.

Nor has anyone. And there is no reason to think that is what is depicted in these carvings.

Bingo! You've got it - except that in fact you have to add back MORE heat than was taken away, in order to complete the cycle. So yup, its thermodynamics are just like any other heat engine. Exactly. The intermolecular force in the case of water comes mainly from hydrogen bonding. It happens that, because of the relative positions and angles the molecules need to take up, to maximise the energy released by forming these bonds, they have to move apart somewhat, compared to their average spacing in liquid water. Hence we get expansion on freezing. (One or two other materials also expand on freezing, but it is very unusual.)

Not so much weaponised by the wealthy as by the marketing departments of consumer goods companies, I'd have thought. Whole industries have been built on creating and fanning the flames of dissatisfaction. It is a commonly observed fact that poor rural families with very little by way of possessions often seem far happier and more contented than blokes in jags. I myself remember when I got rid of my old Morris Minor, in favour of an MGB roadster, that I was suddently assailed by worries about it getting scratched or stolen, whereas before I couldn't have cared less about the rusty old Minor. Same when I bought my first house.

....and we are where, now, exactly????