Water Power
It is interesting that in the quest for new ways to generate power that we consistently focus on old ways of essentially passing a magnet by a coil of copper wire which has been the most consistent method of generating an electric current. There are other ways certainly and I’m sure sooner of later someone is going to figure out that the best way to generate almost unlimited current is to take advantage of the naturally occurring ones at both of the earth’s magnetic poles. Not withstanding there is a little experiment that I’ve been wanting to try and I may give it a shot later in the year as its well within my budget to do.
It goes something like this – that a column of aquious liquid that can suspend iron molecules evenly throughout the column. Like maybe buckey balls with an iron ion in their center in a very large column of glicerine maybe. You sort of get the idea. Wrap the column with copper wire and then attach an air hose to the bottom of the cylinder. Pump air. The air causes the iron molecules to circulate inducing an electric current in the wire and presto – instant energy.
Now the real question is simply this: The system is assumed to work because we are allowing the potential energy of the air bubbles to do the work as a result of buoyancy. However, is the amount of energy required to get an air bubble to form at the bottom of the cylinder greater or less than the energy output? Good question and one that I think the answer to is “less”.
Reasoning: To form an air bubble at the bottom of a column of liquid you have to overcome the force of the liquid and the tendency of gases to disolve in liquids under pressure. Which means you never quite get the full potential energy of those first few bubbles as you start the system up. However, once started you have three things going for you which are not quite energy for free but may sort of seem like it.
The first is the way buoyancy works and how gasses expand in a liquid as they rise to the surface. This puts kinetic energy into the liquid which establishes a circulation (2) and heat (3) which further enhances the viciousness of the liquid. Since electric currents are all about getting a magnet to pass across copper coils in a consistently cyclical fashion, I would suspect that these three forces driving a circulation pattern which would be very prominent near the surface of the liquid would be sufficient to create greater electric charge than the energy require to start the process off in the first place.
Now – taking a leap of faith for a moment. Lets assume that this all happens to work out. The neat thing then is that this contraption wouldn’t necessarily be used in order to power a car or city. Rather you would use something like this to ‘bootstrap’ other processes are at or close too 100% efficiency already, such as a hydro-sonic pump, and hence multiply the output. Now we are talking about something more capable of powering a city and without radioactive by-products kicking around for the next 500,000 years.
Will see what I can pull together and if the idea actually works. First step — anyone have about 2 miles of very thin copper wire? – K