In my world of limitless imagination I can see a sparkling future for Bessler’s wheel and I’m confident that once someone, me or any of we few stalwart optimists, succeed in revealing to the world a working version of his machine, it can come true.
We all know what is happening and we think we know why. The majority believe that climate change is happening and it’s due to a gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth’s atmosphere generally attributed to the greenhouse effect caused by increased levels of carbon monoxide, CFCs and other pollutants. Alternatively it’s a natural cyclic event caused by fluctuations in the sun’s output. It doesn’t really matter who’s right, may be it’s a bit of each.
Whatever the cause, pollution is an obvious problem causing millions of deaths yearly and therefore it is an urgent issue which needs immediate attention. Reducing carbon emissions is a small step, which only leads to other problems. Alternative energy sources are limited to other pollution producing technologies. The means by which we obtain and access electricity is another source of concern because of the many rare and not so rare earth elements used in that process.
Rare-earth elements are special minerals used in a wide variety of consumer and industrial products. Though they have exotic-sounding names, such as neodymium, scandium, and dysprosium, they are abundant right here on Earth. They are considered rare, however, because they appear in very small concentrations.
In addition, the process used to separate them from the rocks in which they occur is extremely difficult, because the elements have the same ionic charge and are similar in size. Typical separation and purification processes often require thousands of extraction and purification stages to be carried out. As such, there is a significant premium attached to these materials, and several market and geopolitical forces may cause them to escalate in value.
It may seem as if I’m warning off the use of electrics in their entirety, but I’m not. I’m just wondering if Bessler’s wheel might be used in some cases in the same way it was planned 300 and more years ago. Not necessarily for generating electricity, but pumping water for irrigation, dealing with flooding, air conditioning etc. This suggestion might seem unnecessary given the massive use of electricity but surely there are advantages of cost, maintenance and any reduction in the mining of rare elements is any advantage to be welcomed.
I’m sure there are other possibilities where Bessler’s wheel might be of use in a way which avoids electrics. Is there, for instance, any way that heat could be produced simply by having a continuously rotating device? I have some vague ideas but nothing that seems practical but it would be a real bonus if a method could be found. Heat pumps seem a possibility ?
Heat pumps work by pumping or moving heat from one place to another by using a compressor and a circulating structure of liquid or gas refrigerant, through which heat is extracted from outside sources and pumped indoors. I assume something on a large scale could be devised. Other ideas not requiring the power of electricity?
JC
There's a lot of ways to utilize free energy, but it really doesn't matter to list them unless we have a proof of principle.
ReplyDeleteJeff
Yep, I sometimes struggle to find something to write about.
DeleteJC
DeleteHi John, here is a patent and a thread discussing replication of a mechanical rotating device to heat water.
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/8b/25/84/229f920b9f25fe/US5188090.pdf
https://www.fieldlines.com/index.php?topic=129151.0
Thanks Ed. I haven’t looked at cavitation for many years but it does seem a simple means to heating water and therefore domestic heating with just a basic Besslerwheel? I believe there are potential problems with the destructive nature of cavitation but surely a way can be found to accommodate it. Isn’t there one developing this system?
DeleteJC
The largest Ferris wheel is Ain Dubai. 820' tall, 38 minutes for one rotation. 11,200 tonnes of steel. This would have some serious inertia. If a free energy wheel was this big, it would generate some real power.
Deletehttps://www.aindubai.com/en/faqs
Jeff
@Jeff. The London eye is 443 feet high and only 1700 tonnes, small in comparison to your example, but even that would potentially generate significant inertia.
DeleteJC
If there is ever a free energy wheel, and if the world was that desperate, then they're already built, ready to convert to B wheels.
DeleteJeff
Gravity wheels existed before nearly a million years ago, used on planets and spaceships in other star systems in this quadrant of the galaxy, one of the reasons gravity wheels were used to do work was because they could not be detected whereas electrical machines would show up if a system was scanned by an invader race, there was other races trying to wipe out humanity - gravity wheels were used to survive during the great Lyran expansion, there use on planets or in spaceships could not be detected by the races trying to destroy humanity .
ReplyDeleteThe dream he had was past life channeling .
DeleteThose hurricanes yearly hitting the US are getting more frequent, more intense, and more expensive to clean up and rebuild from in the aftermath. That's because your average hurricane releases the energy of tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs! Wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow capture that energy and, while we're doing it, remove the danger of property damage and deaths caused by hurricanes?
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking one solution would be to construct thousands of giant buoys that would be placed along the path that the tropical storms follow as they move from the west of Africa, cross the mid Atlantic Ocean, and finally arrive in the West Indies as fully formed hurricanes just before they hit the US. These buoys would just float around and would have propellers on them that would keep them positioned at certain locations.
Each of these buoys would have a giant vertical Savonius windmill on top of it that would obstruct the wind flow in a tropical storm and use its energy to spin the windmill's sails. The vertical axis of the windmill would then run generators inside the buoy and produce electrical power. That power would be used heat a huge supply of thousands of tons of salt contained in the bottom of the buoy which would act like a ballast weight to keep the buoy vertically oriented. This salt would be heated until it actually became molten! As this happened, maybe 90% of the energy in the tropical storm would be drained away by the thousands of buoys whose windmills its winds had turned and it would never become a hurricane.
When the buoys had absorbed as much energy they could, their propulsion systems would be activated and they would then travel to certain specially constructed seaports. There, by the dozens, they would dock with specially constructed power stations that would connect hoses to them that would pump water down through ceramic pipes that ran through the molten salt they contained. That molten salt would be at thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and the water would immediately turn or "flash" into superheated steam. That steam would leave the buoy through high pressure hoses and constantly drive turboelectric generators inside of the power stations for weeks that would then contribute electrical power to a global electrical power grid.
When the salt inside of the buoys was too cool to create the superheated steam, the buoys would disconnect from the power station and their propulsion systems would make them travel back to their designated locations in the ocean to wait for the next tropical storm to come along. The entire system would be controlled by a complex computer program.
The cost of all of this? Enormous, obviously. BUT, how much is it costing the world to keep cleaning up and rebuilding every year after hurricanes and typhoons vent their energies on land, buildings, and people? Probably well over a trillion dollars per year. I think the gigantic engineering project I'm suggesting here would be a lot less expensive in the long run. Also, since it taps a natural, renewable source of energy like wind, it will help to reduce our use of fossil fuels to generate electrical power and should help fight Climate Change.
Big problems require big solutions that, unfortunately, have big price tags attached to them. The cost of this one will have to shared by all of humanity.
jason
Sounds like it could work.
DeleteTo cover the construction costs, the United Nations could set up a global lottery. First prize would be $1 billion USD. There would be ten second prizes of $100 million USD, one hundred third prizes of $10 million USD, and finally one thousand fourth prizes of $1 million USD. A player would win the top prize by correctly picking 7 balls out of 100 hundred numbered balls drawn from a huge rotating drum.
The lottery drawings would be held once a week and each ticket would cost $5 USD. All prizes would be tax free and immediately paid out in a lump sum. The drawings would be live streamed weekly on youtube. Half of the money collected would go for the prizes and administration costs and the other half into an international bank to pay for the construction of all of those thousands of floating windmills and the special power stations needed to off load the energy they collected from the storms.
As soon as the first $50 billion USD was in the bank, the construction would begin. Each of the world's major industrial nations that did ship building would get to work on the floating windmills all using the same plans. Any nations with suitable coastlines near where all of the windmills were located would begin constructing the power stations needed to make this huge project work, again all using the same plans. Other nations would get to work constructing a global electrical power grid that could use the storm produced electrical power.
It might actually be possible to have it all up and running in only a decade or so.
Unfortunately, when it comes to "doing something" about a problem, people tend to do next to nothing until things get really bad. I don't think the climate change / hurricane problem is perceived as bad enough at the moment to create the "political will" for a project of this huge size. Most likely in another ten years or so it will be.
Right now the climate change deniers are still trying to convince everyone that what's going on is normal variation or due to sunspots. The conservative politicians they vote for are all saying that all we really need are a few new building codes to make buildings survive the high winds and local flooding caused by hurricanes. In other words, don't spend a lot of money getting rid of the cause. Just spend a lot less money trying to get rid of the effects. But, the high cost of this project would be paid for voluntarily by people and not through coercive government taxation. Also, all of the extra energy this project would provide would help to greatly lower the cost of electrical power and finally wean humanity off of fossil fuel power forever. The fossil fuel industry really hates that idea!
Anonymous and PROUD of it!
Anonymous4 October 2022 at 20:55
DeleteThank you for your comment, Ken Behrendt.
I like your idea, Jason, despite the huge cost it will have and I love playing lotteries. We're getting ready to spend up to a trillion dollars to fly over to Mars which will do nothing to fix Climate Change down here on Earth or lower our electric bills.
DeleteIf one of your giant floating buoy windmill things is damaged and sinks down to the bottom of the ocean all it will do is add a lot of salt to the ocean water which is probably where it originally came from anyway by using desalinizing plants. No toxic wastes will be released.
Also, by eliminating hurricanes that means no more merpeople will be killed by them and we won't be finding their lifeless bodies washing up on our beaches especially in southeast Asia.
Please everyone remember what I wrote two blogs back: DON'T EAT MERPEOPLE! Parts of them might look like fish, but the rests of them are just like us land humans...only wetter. How would you like it if you were swimming along minding your own business and some fishermen caught you in a net and then chopped off your legs and had them for dinner?! You wouldn't like it, would you? Well, the merpeople don't like that kind of treatment either.
Shemp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QflO2_uuVw
Delete@anon 00:19
DeleteThanks for the trip down memory lane! That was one of the best episodes I was ever in during my previous life. What a lot of people don't know is that we had to shoot it several times because we just couldn't get Christina to make it look like she was actually hitting me. She was such a gentle lady. I told her to really let loose and not to worry because I could take it.
BIG mistake! She actually hit me so hard that I flew through that door and was knocked out! She was really upset and crying after and when I came to I had to tell her not to cry because I was the one who insisted she hit me. She really packed a wallop.
The only other time I got hit that hard was when one of my mermaid girlfriends spun around quickly and accidentally hit me in the face with her tail when we were at the beach! Ouch!
Shemp
I too, liked your idea Jason, tremendous power potential, but organising such a huge project would require the cooperation of every nation on the planet - an impossible dream, however maybe there is some way of tapping into the power of a hurricane more locally which could generate enough energy for a large areas of the country.
DeleteJC
What Jason is proposing is actually a planetary weather modification system. To fully protect both the north and south hemispheres of our planet you are going to need a lot of the windmills to make it work like maybe tens of thousands of them.
DeleteBut aside from eliminating hurricanes there will be another side effect which I think everyone here is missing. Hurricanes and typhoons are one of the major ways that excess heat energy is moved from the heated waters of the atlantic and pacific oceans to the atmospheres over the north and south hemispheres of our planet. If you get rid of the hurricanes and typhoons that heat energy won't get to those hemispheres and their atmospheres should begin to cool off even if we do nothing to reduce the amount of CO2 in those atmospheres. So his big project could not only get us off of using fossil fuels that cause climate change by providing electricity, but it should also make climate change better by cooling the atmosphere by not allowing excess thermal energy to be dumped into it.
Another nice thing is that Jason's floating windmills would all be out at sea so no one on land would see them like we have to do with all of those damn noisy wind turbines that are popping up all over like giant weeds. But all of those floating sea windmills have to be located away from major shipping lanes so as to reduce the risk of ships colliding with and sinking them. However, since they would be as big as large ships, then they should show up well on another ship's weather radar in time to avoid collision. The crews of smaller ships without radar would be able to easily see them because they could have brightly flashing strobe lights on them visible from miles away.
There was a guy years ago that had a great idea for our planet or actually just the continent of Africa and IIRC he even got a patent on it. He was going to use ships to tow huge icebergs up the east and west coasts of Africa and then chop the icebergs up into little chunks and use insulated train cars to take them to distribution points around the Sahara Desert. The ice chunks would be dumped off there, completely melted, and sent flowing through pipes to irrigate the Sahara Desert so it could be turned into farmland whose produce would help feed all of Africa with any extra being exported to other countries.
DeleteHis idea would probably have cost a lot less than Jason's project, yet nothing was ever done with it and it's just another patent on file at the US Patent Office. Unless things really get bad with those hurricanes probably nothing like what Jason described will ever be done.
The rich who own the fossil fuel industry are determined to keep profiting off of the sale of their oil until the very last drop of it is pumped out of the ground and they can't find any more and the hell with any weather extremes burning it causes. They'll keep you paralyzed into doing nothing by keep telling you Climate Change is not caused by C02 and methane and it will all go away any day now. Try not to believe that misinformation because the longer the world waits to do something serious to stop Climate Change the more expensive it will be when we finally decide to do something...if it's not too late by then...and there are a few scientists now who are saying it is already too late!
@jason
DeleteHere's a global map that shows the typical paths as white arrows that hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones follow after they start out as tropical storms out at sea in the orange color areas. You're going to have to put all of your Savonius windmill buoys where the white paths start on this map. Most of the buoys will be north of the equator compared to how many will be south of the equator. I agree with anon 17:39 that tens of thousands of buoys will be needed to give good coverage over such large areas of ocean.
https://scijinks.gov/hurricane/cyclone_map_large.png
Assuming it costs $500 million to build one buoy and you need 20,000 of them, that's a total cost of $10 TRILLION dollars! If the special power stations cost $10 billion each and you need 500 of them, then that's an extra cost of $5 trillion dollars. Let's add another $5 trillion to upgrade and interconnect the world's individual power grids to make a global super power grid. So, the final total cost would be about $20 trillion dollars.
If you wanted to have it done in ten years, then AaPoi's UN lottery would have to raise $2 trillion per year. If there's a drawing every week, then each drawing would have to bring in $38.4 billion dollars in revenue per week, but since only 50% of a ticket pays for the project and the other 50% pays for the prizes, you would have to bring in $76.8 billion dollars in revenue per week. At $5 per ticket, you'd have to sell 15.36 billion tickets per week which is almost double Earth's population of humans! At a cost of $10 per ticket, you only have to sell 7.68 billion tickets per week which about equal to Earth's population. -
I don't see it likely that this project using my cost estimates could be completed in only a decade by selling lottery tickets. The number of buoys and power stations used will have to be reduced along with the cost of constructing them. The question is how much can these be reduced before the system would be too ineffective to use? This is project that would require a lot of cost analysis before beginning as well as computer modeling to see how much energy would be removed from a tropical storm as it moved through all of those buoys' windmills to prevent it from turning into a hurricane, typhoon, or cyclone. If it only removed a few percent of the energy, then it wouldn't really make much difference. It would probably need to remove at least 50%.
However, I do agree that it is a novel way to generate electricity while also slowing climate change. Too bad it would be so expensive to construct.
Assuming anon 05:48's cost estimate is accurate, I wondered how much it would cost if Jason's hurricane control plan had to be funded solely by US taxpayers since his cost figure of $20 trillion is about 2/3 of the US' current national debt of $31 trillion. Most of the other world's nations are drowning in debt and would all be looking to the US to fund this project.
DeleteIf we assume that there are about 150 million workers and corporations currently paying US federal taxes, then they would have to pay and extra $2 trillion per year. That works out to each of them on average paying an extra $13,333 per year. Since the US tax rates are "progressive" maybe 70% would pay only a few thousand extra per year while the remaining 30% would pay several times that figure. The corporations would immediately increase the prices of their products and services to pass their increased taxes on to their customers. As a result the inflation problem in the US would get even worse. The poor who pay no taxes would suffer the most since they would be paying higher prices for food and rent with the lowest incomes.
The mere mention of raising taxes in the US usually results in the politician suggesting it ending his or her political career after the next election. Yet just adding another $2 trillion to the national debt every year for a decade also seems like it would not work out. Many are wondering if the current $31 trillion can ever be paid off. A figure of $51 trillion a decade from now would be even more difficult to ever pay off.
@anon13:40
DeleteI agree that Jason's project if only funded by US taxpayers would be inflationary. But don't forget that it would be adding a lot of renewable energy to that global power grid he wants to be built. That would lower the cost to companies of manufacturing items and providing services which would bring prices down and be deflationary.
The two effects might cancel each other out because although the average US citizen's yearly taxes would go up, he would then be paying less per year for other things like electricity, food, manufactured products, and rent or mortgages. If the deflation was greater than the inflation, then his buying power and standard of living would actually increase.
Here's a little good news for a change.
DeleteThis article published in the magazine Scientific American last year says that if we could just stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere it would almost immediately stop the rise in average global air temperature. So, we can put the brakes on it if we can just figure out how to get all the energy we need without burning fossil fuels.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/theres-still-time-to-fix-climate-about-11-years/
I think the world's major governments are now all hoping that fusion power reactor plants will suddenly be perfected and we won't need fossil fuels anymore to make electricity. I've read elsewhere that billions of dollars are being poured into researching these reactors both privately and publicly. But, if that doesn't happen, then maybe projects like what Jason described will eventually be seen as desirable. The worse things get, the more people will be willing to try what today look like extreme solutions despite their high costs.
Thanks for that link Scientific American anon 04:28, very interesting!
DeleteJC
"Getting rid of all religions would actually make me very happy..."
DeleteThat kind of talk will get your immortal soul damned to the eternal fires of Hell for a long time. Most sinners do not realize that one second of Earth time is equal to 1,000 YEARS down in Hell!
Holy Believer
@HB
DeleteYou sound like you are seriously overdosed on religion!
There is no hell inside the Earth. It's just filled with a lot of hot molten rocks and metals. We don't have any immortal souls inside of us that make us move and think. That's all due to nerves and muscles and when they die that's it your dead forever. Your soul doesn't keep floating around forever in some sort of heaven or hell after you die. All there is out in space is stars, planets, and moons. There are no gods and angels out there or demons inside the Earth. Maybe just aliens living on other planets similar to our Earth.
You need to wake up to reality. Try staying away from the Bible and your other religion overdosed friends for awhile so you can recover your mental health. Think of it like staying away from the bottle long enough to sober up and stay sober!
There's a problem with Jason's project to tap tropical sea storm energy which nobody has mentioned so far.
DeleteThe Atlantic tropical storm/hurricane season begins around June and ends around November. That's only six months which means for the rest of the year all of his tens of thousands of giant windmill buoys would just be floating around out at sea doing basically nothing. This project would have a very high price for something that was only usable for about half a year. I assume that the same would apply to any parts of it set up in the other oceans of the world.
Here's a chart showing the monthly average of tropical storms and hurricanes from May through to December:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/1851-2017_Atlantic_hurricanes_and_tropical_storms_by_month.svg/800px-1851-2017_Atlantic_hurricanes_and_tropical_storms_by_month.svg.png
@anon22:31
DeleteJason's buoy system might work for more than just six months per year because the peak season for tropical storms and cyclones south of the equator in the Indian Ocean and around Australia is during the months of January to March. This is because of the reversal of seasons between the north and south hemispheres. That would extend the use of his system to about nine months out of the year.
I like his idea for storing energy using molten salt. Maybe this could be used on land to store excess solar power produced during the daytime and by windmills during stormy weather so it could be used at night and at times when there wasn't much wind? Seems like it would be a lot cheaper than using giant collections of lithium ion batteries.
Thanks to those who commented on my method for capturing, storing, and using the wind energy in tropical storms. It would be expensive and would require a lot of planning to make sure the cost was as low as possible and its effectiveness as high as possible. Like others here, I don't expect it to ever actually be used.
DeleteI should mention that I'm not the first person to suggest storing energy by using it to melt salt. Here's a typical design for a way of doing this on land. The salt is contained in two tanks which can be above ground. Both tanks have molten salt in them, but the salt in the lower orange tank is hundreds of degrees cooler than the salt in the upper red tank.
The molten salt in the lower tank is pumped up through a heater that uses outside renewable energy to raise its temperature higher. From the higher tank molten salt is then pumped to a steam generator and the steam it produces runs a steam turbine attached to a generator that then supplies electrical power.
My approach differs because I would combine the heater, molten salt storage tanks, and steam generator into a single tank to simplify construction inside of the buoys.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/4d8b1136-91a0-41a0-a844-be3f425b8309/cite202000137-fig-0002-m.png
jason
JC asked: "Is there, for instance, any way that heat could be produced simply by having a continuously rotating device?"
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly what happens when disc brakes are used to stop a moving automobile. The car's kinetic energy is converted into thermal energy as brake pads press against the steel discs and they both get hot. Sometimes when a racing car makes a pit stop and has to decelerate from around 200 mph down to 0 mph so they can change the worn out tires, the pit crew finds that the racing car's brake discs are actually glowing red hot!
You could have a Bessler wheel driving a metal disc that had brake pads dragging against it. Air would be made to flow over the hot metal disc to cool it as the air heated up and it could then be sent through duct work to heat a home in the winter. Periodically, the brake pads would be replaced with fresh ones just as an automobile's brake pads need to be replaced.
Another good idea and a comparatively simple one compared to Ed’s use of cavitation. I suspect the cavitation would prove more popular because it’s more hi tech
DeleteJC
Yeah cavitation and dragging brake pads would probably work but are they the best way to heat some air up to warm up a home? I think it would be a lot easier to just have your B wheel running a small dc generator and then put its current through the nichrome wire coils of a small electric heater. You then blow air through those coils to heat it and then through the duct work to heat the rooms of your home.
DeleteThe simpler everything is the more reliable it will be and the easier to fix if there's a problem. For maintenance you just put a squirt of silicone lube into the generator shaft bearings every year and replace the generator's graphite brushes every few years. Shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes.
Yes, that’s another good one, although I was trying to avoid any electricity being involved, even so little.
DeleteJC
Best water heater ever: The ohmic array direct resistance ac current
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL80w02r6SA
Another ingenious solution from a company called Heatworks. Uses electric but boiling a kettle water in 5 seconds!
DeleteJC
All great comments. But this is not how the world (economy) currently works.
DeleteIf tomorrow a car is invented that runs on water, then water will become as expensive as gasoline.
Revealing a working wheel might be the final blow to the economy.
Desalination of seawater through various means might be obtainable using less energy, i.e., Bessler’s wheel, producing much needed, cheap water?
DeleteJC
Hi, since the birth of the earth there is not a drop of water that has disappeared from the planet it can change form or state, that's all, climate change won't change anything, except that the resource moves... The hydrogen engine would not be a problem either.
DeleteA question I would like JC to address on this space... There are times when I think that the laws of thermodynamics are like a divine punishment, unsurpassable. If I produce a bicycle coupled to an alternator, it produces current as long as I pedal, indefinitely as long as I pedal, how to get out of this loop... Bessler seems to be showing us gravity pedalling forever, I like the idea... I think we need to change dimension, pure logic is a brake on reasoning, that's why we don't move faster. Bessler (brilliantly) hides from us an element outside gravity that is beyond us.
T H X 4
Maybe Bessler didn't discover some new feature of gravity. Maybe he just discovered some unique, but simple mechanism that tricked gravity into constantly doing work on a wheel and anything attached to it.
Delete