Wilmot McCutchen

The Maxwell-Boltzmann speed distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_distribution gives the average speed of the molecules of the gas fractions, and the molecular weight (molar mass) gives the mass, so then you have the momenta of the fractions.

I for one am interested, and have posted here. The stream-of-consciousness format is not a turnoff to me, as I enjoy watching an expert grapple with a problem. I have learned a lot from reading this thread.

There is the organic Rankine cycle. Only 30% of the energy in the fuel goes into rotating the turbines to make electricity, and 70% is wasted into the atmosphere. Along with enormous amounts of fresh water. Thermal power plants are the biggest consumers of fresh water, worst of all users. The obsolete wet cooling technology needs a serious look.

How about pitting? Here is a link to a more lively and informed discussion of the Celani experiment. http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/11/mfmp-celani-cell-live-run-nov-13th-thread/ Particularly interesting is this comment from Peter Roe: It’s interesting that the ‘activation temperature’ of 270C is very close to the point at which Akiya Matsuda has determined that hydrogen absorption by nickel changes from exothermic to endothermic (250C). Perhaps there is a connection, but as there is no hydrogen atmosphere it can’t be the obvious one. http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/24660/1/5%282%29_P71-86.pdf

How do you propose to get useful energy out of the New Fire? Of the three methods of confinement (magnetic, inertial, and lattice) which is the most promising for power generation? The Educate page at the Quantum Heat site could be supplemented to give the big picture of where this effort fits in with others, such as hot fusion, the Rossi reactor, the National Ignition Facility in Livermore CA. and the Taleyarkhan cavitation experiments. Is this research limited to LENR from metal lattice confinement? Does the fusion event pit the metal?

The positive charges in a conductor are immobile, but the conventional current direction is as if they could move. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_current#Current More interesting is the case where the positive charges are ions, whose motion in a vortex creates theta pinch in plasmas.

So what is the purpose of this, and its advantage over what is known? Maybe less math and abstraction would make that clear. Your proposal seems similar to the magnetohydrodynamic circulation stimulator (Bemer 3000). Do you intend to make a more focused electrode for near field effects on brain targets? Is modulation of the effect important and why? You say there is a problem with noise in the known devices, so what is the source of the noise and how does your proposal fix that? Are present devices operating at sonic frequencies?

H2 has a molecular weight (molar mass) of only 2 g/mol, whereas N2 and O2 are 28 and 32, respectively. So centrifugal gas separation might work. A vortex tube (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube) might be enough for your needs. The hydrogen plus water vapor would come out the cool end and the O2 and N2 would go out the hot end, continuously, as the mixture is injected. See also http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/59629-mechanical-gas-separation-for-post-combustion-co2-capture/

The mass does not disappear into some cosmic drain, does it? I don't have the math to understand the theories here, but I do recall something about "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity" as a principle of scientific inquiry. So without positing the existence of a drain into another universe, the converging streamlines of a collapsar or galaxy might rebound from the center without any central entity being there. Like a cavitation bubble. Axial jets (evidenced by gamma ray bursts and photography) show that something is coming out of the center, when everything should be disappearing in. The White Hole is the axial jets. The Black Hole might be a superfluous entity, like phlogiston, or zero.

Creating the fusion event is one thing; getting useful work out of that fusion event is another. This might provide a path to both: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8268136.pdf

Today in the Speculations forum (http://www.sciencefo...-go-on-forever/) I heard for the first time about Reidar Finsrud's machine. It is not perpetual motion, let alone free energy, but a machine said to have 99% efficiency. After 3 days in operation, it lost only 1/25 of a second so it appears to be harvesting energy from somewhere to offset friction and air resistance. For more details, and a video, check out that post and http://peswiki.com/i...erpetuum_Mobile The machine has been known since 1996 so I assume it might be known to some members of this forum. Finsrud calls the prime mover a "free force." The mechanism comprises a wobbling ball race connected to a "chaos pendulum." Has anyone worked on this? Sorry about the misspelling of Finsrud in the title of this post -- I couldn't figure out how to edit that.

Very short on details, and even locked up in a safe so no one can find out how it works. So that, plus the slick production, makes one wary. But a very interesting concept involving a tilted drive wheel having a ball race at its rim, which imparts momentum to "pedal hoops" disposed in the race path, and the pedal hoops drive three pendulums suspended from the drive wheel. The rolling ball passes under suspended magnets which somehow connect to an undisclosed mechanism hidden in a central shaft, which connects to the tilted drive wheel to keep the ball always just past the apogee of the race path, starting to roll downhill. The yin yang symbol is said to represent a "free force" which this machine demonstrates. It ran for 3 days and lost only 1/25 of a second (so says the video anyway) without any forcing. The inventor, Reidar Finsrud of Norway, has a good aesthetic sense ( http://www.galleri-finsrud.no/), and this is indeed a beautiful idea. Note that this machine has been known (although not totally disclosed) since 1996. The inventor does not claim a perpetual motion machine nor a free energy generator (over-unity device). This is a super-efficient machine that may be harvesting some ambient energy source to offset friction and air resistance and other dissipation. Like the mechanical fountain of youth.

The Rankine cycle requires that the turbine exhaust steam be condensed back to liquid water, which means that some form of heat rejection is necessary. Conventionally, this is done by wet cooling, which circulates cooling water through tubes in contact with the exhaust steam. The cooling water is then dripped down an updraft in a large cooling tower, resulting in evaporative cooling of the cooling water. Making the exhaust steam do work is another way of reducing its enthalpy and getting it to condense. See http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7987677.pdf

For macro-scale irreversible processes, the Constructal Law (cf. Bejan, Design in Nature (2012)) might be a more useful principle. "For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it." Area-preserving (no pressure drop) branched vascular networks are Nature's way of maximizing efficiency.

Swirl is common to spiral galaxies and hurricanes. Shear rate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shear_rate ) is the frequency of the rotation, and may be the common equation you seek. While momentum is always conserved, linear momentum can dissipate into angular momentum (Kolmogorov scaling), and swirl can collapse, converting angular momentum to linear momentum. See Shtern and Hussain "Collapse, Symmetry Breaking, and Hysteresis in Swirling Flows," http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.fluid.31.1.537?journalCode=fluid Axial jets of matter out of the galaxy center have no satisfactory explanation and seem to contradict the hypothesis of the all-devouring black hole. They may be caused by collapse of galaxy swirl so angular momentum becomes linear momentum escaping the black hole. That is just a conjecture based on how tornadoes are caused by swirl collapsing on touchdown (the vortex-wall interaction, see the Shtern and Hussain article linked above.

CR4 might be a good place. http://cr4.globalspec.com/section/electrical-engineering

Theta pinch on carbon ion vortices would self-tighten the vortices into nanotubes. A continuous reactor having axial feed and radial extrusion of nanotubes could have a very high shear rate for creating the vortices, and the carbon ions could be produced by electrolysis between counter-rotating disk electrodes. For example: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20090200176.pdf and http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0263309.html

Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction says that the induced electromagnetic force is proportional to the frequency of change of the magnetic field. High frequencies have a high effect. Your setup is not changing any magnetic fields except during the brief time that it is switched on and off. It is a simple electromagnet powered by direct current, and with only ten turns and no iron core it is a weak magnet. Alternating current instead of DC from a battery would demonstrate repulsion according to Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction and Lenz's law.

It is not merely the difference between granular materials and liquids. Granular materials will jam as they encounter a converging nozzle, such as a bottle neck. The Miller Lite vortex bottle for beer has vanes in the neck to guide liquid flow in a vortex. Along the vortex axis, which is a low pressure gradient, air flows up and in to fill the bottle continuously as the beer flows down and out. Foaming is less, therefore chugging is maximally efficient. Even without the vanes, you can get the same result by swirling the bottle vigorously. The hurricane is a good example of axial counterflow and the low pressure sink created by the swirling descending liquid (rain).

The Oatmeal's cartoon "Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived" shows why Serbian genius Nikola Tesla was a much mightier inventor (and a nicer man) than Thomas Edison. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla My favorite Tesla Patent is "Coil for Electro Magnets" US Pat. 512,340 (1894). This shows a bifilar pancake coil having a voltage between adjacent windings, the coil having high inductance due to high number of turns and strong flux linkage. The intrinsic electric field of the coil, due to the winding geometry hat has adjacent wires carrying current in the same direction with a voltage between the wires, absorbs the back emf and thus neutralizes the effect of mutual inductance of the wires at radio frequency excitation.

If you have no heat transfer in or out, so you are inputting only mechanical energy into the lubricating fluid, and if the lubricant prevents local hot spots and keeps thermal equilibrium in this adiabatic system, then the lubricant will be approximately the same temperature as the plates. You know the resulting enthalpy of the lubricant (the energy content of the material) once you know the horsepower driving the setup and the time it runs. You know the mass of the lubricant, and if there is no change of state, the resulting temperature of the lubricant can be found because you know the resulting enthalpy. Some of the power will go to heating the plates as well, so that will have to be taken into account. The solution is on a macro scale, using elementary thermodynamic principles. You may be interested in the wet clutch aeration problem, where there is a change of state in the fluid between relatively rotating (rotor-stator as well as counter-rotating cases) metal plates. See e.g. Yuan, et al., "Study on aeration for disengaged wet clutches using a two-phase flow model," J. of Fluids Engineering, vol. 132, 111304 (Nov. 2010).

Still not clear on some basics of your proposal. Just where is the "circled area" in your diagram? If the flow through the small pipe is in the opposite direction to what you show through the nozzle, and the small pipe is at the left of the diagram before the orifice, then you may increase the flow through the small pipe, which I suppose is your intention, by imparting swirl to the feed, such as by rotating the big pipe. In that case the vortex-wall interaction would collapse the vortex and jet water to the left as the feed flows to the right and through the nozzle. However, the flow through the nozzle might cease. The hydrocyclone relates here.

So true. The sage-on-a-stage model of education -- a scheduled data dump on bored undergraduates -- clearly does not work, as you can attest from personal experience. Education is lighting a fire, not filling a bottle, said Plutarch. Students who have just been through the course are the most qualified to teach it. But it seems that the objective is not education at all, but hazing, seeking to flunk out the requisite number of hopefuls to limit the upper level classes to manageable sizes for the convenience of the staff.

The buoyancy of the Colorado Plateau, or maybe a result of the turbulence in the crust -- both are plausible contributing factors to the observed uplift. I'm no expert on geology. The self-gravitational strain might be another contributing factor, but I don't know. Regarding other spheres, such as collapsars, the mechanism for producing the axial jets remains unclear. Earth uplift and collapsar axial jets may be due to this localized free surface expansion due to self-gravitational strain focusing at the axis of rotation. Just speculating.