you have repeated "simple physics" multiple times now, which whether you mean it or not comes off very condescending, which may be the reason people become abusive. Inferred belittling of someone asking a question, especially a hypothetical one is arrogance on your part.

however in the example I gave you are creating an overabundance of energy (+80w) and creating a loop with additional supplementation.
so you are not ending up with less energy.

The fact that you inferred condescension does not mean that @MrChips implied condescension.

 

OFF TOPIC

The fact that you inferred condescension does not mean that @MrChips implied condescension.

I appreciate your input and your insight relating to all of this and my questions.

However when a phrase or comment is repeated multiple times, like I said above, whether intended that way or not, especially with a word like "simple" in it, begins to imply someone lacks basic understanding. Which I acknowledged as much, in a sense from the beginning, does then come off as being condescending.
Every one of these comment boxes says in it "Remember the human - be courteous to others"
My background is Mechanical Engineering and design, if a new kid was asking me a question and every time I answered, i finished with "Simple Mechanics" you don't think after a couple / few times that wouldn't be taken as condescending and he would tend to avoid asking me anything? do you think that's being "courteous"?
and I also didn't say I took it that way necessarily, but I can see how others might, which would instigate the "abusive" retort from others.

 

another OFF TOPIC....

Okay, I take back my congratulations. You are not different than other promoters of free energy. I suspect you knew exactly what would happen here.

WOW, I guess luckily, i saw the 2nd post before I saw this one.

Pertaining to your reply quoted below, i say thanks for explaining it using my example and showing me where my misunderstanding is.
now as for the above, I see where these issues are created...not by the people asking the questions with minimal understanding but by the "pro's" who know it all and lack the common courtesy, and understanding to allow newbies and novices to gain comprehension by going down a road they don't fully understand.

Thanks for that clarity as well.

And by giving you a drawn out example of what I was thinking and how I put it together, how in the world could you say you "suspect knew exactly what would happen here."? especially after I asked to let me push the "Grinder example" a bit further, even tho it wasn't a direct example of the application i would be considering.

"This is where you are going wrong.

If the generator is outputting 80W it will take more than 80W of adfitional power to keep the grinder and generator running at 1200 RPM."

 

If you are a mechanical engineer, then, presumably, you took physics courses and know about conservation of energy. So it should indeed be simple physics to you.

 

If you are a mechanical engineer, then, presumably, you took physics courses and know about conservation of energy. So it should indeed be simple physics to you.

WOW again. I didn't say I was an "Engineer" I never got an "Engineering Degree" I got in this business right out of high school and eventually got my BA in Mechanical Science and Design, however I have 30 yrs in the field I am in, and it has not involved the electrical side at all. And in the position I am in now, I work directly with the newbies and novices and college kids coming in who think they know it all because of their degree, and I hope none of them ever say I treated them like the way this conversation has devolved.

For years as a novice i was told "the only stupid question is the one you don't ask" I have tried to maintain that thought, both asking and answering.
more and more i see people get crap from asking questions about things they don't fully understand, and we wonder why we have some of the issues we have in the world. SMH.

 

Conservation of energy isn't unique to electricity. Mechanical science has the same constraints.
Would you expect a ball to bounce higher than the point it was dropped from?

 

The problem has nothing to do with the electrical side. It is basic physics. You are asking the generator to put out more power than is put into turning it. This is not possible.

 

There are ways to create more from less...
1 person can use pulley's to lift objects that would be too heavy for 3 or 4 people to lift
sizing sprockets can make it so RPMs on a bicycle increase or decrease without changing the input.
centrifugal force can maintain or increase the speed of something without added power

and while you may not bounce a ball higher than from where you dropped it, when you start to change materials or dynamics it gives different results. IE a super ball will bounce higher than a bowling ball. by adding force the superball will bounce higher, and the bowling ball becomes essentially more destructive.
so when questions come up, maybe someone just needs to hear (as Bob did at one point), "This is where you are mistaking" or this can't happen the way you think it will because... or you need to add this to your chain / build-up. Maybe someone has the right idea, but the wrong conceptualization of it.

all I was doing was asking questions to see initially see if circuitry wise something was possible.
I used an example, that I could think of to try to roughly relate what I was thinking in my head so others could get an idea that's all that was.

the bottom line is... my initial thought / question was in the affirmative. Thanks

 

1 person can use pulley's to lift objects that would be too heavy for 3 or 4 people to lift

Because he does it at a quarter of the speed. The single person and the group of four people are all expending energy at the same rate. The single person takes four times as long. Total energy expended is the same. No laws of physics were broken.

Centrifugal force cannot maintain or increase the speed of anything. It will gradually slow down.

 

See, this is where the basic physics comes in.

Work = force x distance

So with you pulley system, you use 1/4 of the force, but four times the distance. The work is the same. I learned this not while studying for my physics degree but in grade school science class. This is what I mean by basic physics.

Work is equivalent to energy, it has the same units. To do X amount if work, you need X amount if energy. The energy in a closed system cannot change.

The other basic relationship involved is power.

Power = energy / time

This is why your electric service is billed in Kilowatt hours. Kilowatts is a unit of power and, when you multiply by time you get energy. You pay for energy, not power. Journalists almost always get this wrong.

 

the bottom line is... my initial thought / question was in the affirmative. Thanks

If by that you mean we agree with the concept, you would be wrong. Not only wrong but very wrong.

Just a WAG, but I bet your trying to learn about electricity and how it works from Youtube videos?

 

Thanks for the welcome, and appreciate the reply.
i know this will be a bit vague and my apologies i was hypothesisizing with a friend about the ability to be able to do it.. so if this doesn't make great sense i am sorry, it's more so that I was hoping someone with more experience can tell me off the bat if it's really even a feasible concept. Thats how new I am. Seems like it should be, but I know sometimes what seems logical or reasonable is not always possible.

say a "tool" something rotary like a tool bench grinder, if you were to hook up a "generator" to it to use the grinder to turn the generator, which it's already doing, then run that generator output back into the grinder so the grinder itself drew less direct power. Does that make sense?

Welcome to AAC.

As you can tell this is a very controversial topic. Not because it doesn't have a simple answer—it doesn't and can't work that way—but because of the history of the subject.

First, I would like to apologize for the apparent harshness of my fellow AAC members. Unfortunately, you are taking the brunt of literally years of people appearing here and "innocently" asking about this or that "free energy" scheme only to turn out to be uninterested in the actual answer and only looking for confirmation of their naive and impossible ideas.

This isn't right, you are not those people, but we humans don't always do what is right. Hence the apology.

If we back up a bit and take your question as sincere and not related to those, it isn't too hard to explain why it is never going to work. There is an immutable physical law, sometimes rendered as a version attributed to poet Allen Ginsberg:

You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even get out of the game.​

This is a pithy restatement of the three laws of thermodynamics and it is universally applicable. It means when you are dealing with energy you can't end up with more than you put in, you can't use all of it because there is always a loss (nothing is 100% efficient), and you can't avoid these two things.

In other words, in every case where you are putting energy into something you will get less out. If the motion of one thing is moved by the motion of another, the moved one can't "give back" anything to the mover because it will never have more than, or as much as, was put into it in the first place.

No matter how much your brain wants to imagine it should work, it just won't. The math, if not our intuition shows this clearly. This is the same as perpetual motion machines they are so enticingly close to seeming possible, people will waste their entire lives adding just one more magnet or finding a lower friction bearing. They can't win. The game is rigged.

An analogy for your version is the overbalanced wheel. The idea is to take a wheel and put weights on it in such a way that the on past top dead center and others on the side in the direction of rotation pull the wheel over using gravity as a "power source". But gravity isn't a power source, it's more akin to a storage medium. When you lift something in a gravitational field you do work to impart potential energy to the object. When you let go, the potential energy turns to kinetic energy—and this will always be less energy than was needed to do the work of lifting!

Perpetuum Mobile of Villard de Honnecourt (about 1230).
​

The last thing I will say is bear in mind that while electricity has a tendency to abstract the work involved, it is identical to any other work. The AC power coming from your receptacle is almost universally generated by rotary motion so you can see it as spinning a wheel and be correct. The wheel's rotation is converted to electricity by a generator which has mechanical losses in its bearings and electrical losses in its windings.

The transmission lines and domestic wiring that get it to your receptacle also have losses. Most of these losses, mechanical and electrical, are in the form of turning the energy into heat. That heat can't be used to do work (that is, move a force through a distance) and so it is "lost" energy.

As an aside, you can say the only 100% efficient electrical application is resistive electric heating, but even in this case the losses to generate and deliver the power are still present. The only bit the 100% claim applies to is the electricity applied to the resistive element that heats up, this is because it is that heat we want. Still if you compare the heat generated by the fuel that turned the generator that initiates the process, there will be less heat from the element no matter what we do save adding energy to the system.

So, while I know it is seductive to consider the various sorts of "free energy" schemes that people have been pursuing since we built machines of any precision, the math doesn't lie. You can't win no matter how you dress it up. You have only what you put in and you can't use all of that.

Please accept my apology for the apparent harsh treatment. I hope you can understand how insulting it can be to someone who has spent their professional lives working with the limitations of these laws, knowing from long practical experience as well as theoretical unpinning that some things are impossible, to be told (not by you but by your forebears) that they are just fools, or ignorant, or liars, because they won't reveal that one little thing that will make the scheme work.

So you are suffering guilt by association, and I do hope you can be understanding. This is an excellent and welcoming place for people to learn and get help with electronics and many other related things. You are very welcome here, and I do hope you stay around and learn; and pass that knowledge on to others who appear here as neophytes so they, too, can benefit from the shared wisdom of this place.

If you have any questions about why this is impossible, please do ask them. But understand that if you ask them as if it is obvious that we are "missing something" rather than you trying to work out the incontrovertible fact that it can't be done, the response will be very unsatisfactory. I can tell you without rancor that anything we seem to be missing is actually something that you are missing and this has nothing at all to do with open-mindedness. Consider the date on that drawing up above, circa 1230!

People have been trying to make these ideas work for ~750 years! Consider the history of something like the piston steam engine. From conception of the idea to practical realization was only a couple of decades. This was thanks to people delving into the laws of thermodynamics. If and over-unity scheme was possible we would certainly be using it now.

I hope this response helps you understand the natures of both your proposed scheme and the community response to it. And, as I said above I hope this experience won't drive you away from a really great place with generous and knowledgable people.

Please excuse any typos or strange inline edits, I don't have time to proofread just now. I will do that later and if I spot something I will fix it.

 

People have been trying to make these ideas work for ~750 years! Consider the history of something like the piston steam engine. From conception of the idea to practical realization was only a couple of decades. This was thanks to people delving into the laws of thermodynamics. If and over-unity scheme was possible we would certainly be using it now.

I hope this response helps you understand the natures of both your proposed scheme and the community response to it. And, as I said above I hope this experience won't drive you away from a really great place with generous and knowledgable people.

https://royalsociety.org/blog/2018/09/perpetual-motion/
I saw Dreadco device at the RS Summer Science Exhibition, and Martin Poliakoff was inviting people to explain how it was faked.
I thought that the copper tube at the left was outputting a jet of air which could keep the wheel spinning.
Apparently, I was wrong, but it wasn’t revealed exactly how it worked.

 

https://royalsociety.org/blog/2018/09/perpetual-motion/
I saw Dreadco device at the RS Summer Science Exhibition, and Martin Poliakoff was inviting people to explain how it was faked.
I thought that the copper tube at the left was outputting a jet of air which could keep the wheel spinning.
Apparently, I was wrong, but it wasn’t revealed exactly how it worked.

The most successful frauds (that is, real devices about which fantastic claims are made) seem to share some elements. They are actually very high precision devices which offer extremely low losses and so very high efficiency (if something runs for longer than a lifetime, or even just longer than you have time to pay attention to it, it might as well be a perpetual motion device!) And, they include red herring elements whose only function is to confuse the person attempting to find out its true nature.

One thing that is a great strength of a well educated engineer, or even layman, is the understanding that the laws of thermodynamics have never been shown by anyone not to the the limit; and that they have prodigious predictive power given enough information, and will always tell the truth about what is going on.

This is not ”faith“ but reason. Our relationship to the world requires making statistical decisions. Of course this strength of relying on physical laws can also be a weakness if something not a law is taken to be one. But for some classes of things, and thermodynamics being one of them, there is no ambiguity. Even any possible alternatives to the current technology will be obliged to respect them.

For example, if “zero point energy” has any practical meaning, it will have to operate in the world bounded by thermodynamics. It would just be another energy source with precisely the same limitations as the ones we already use.

On the other had, the person that does not understand the nature of what it means for something to be a physical law. They are very likely to be heard saying things along the lines of “gravity is just a theory” having no idea what a scientific theory is and assuming that their casual, informal use of the word has the same meaning as the formal term.

They want to know the secrets that all those “math guys” and “scientists” don’t know. They will happily take the testimony of one scientist over a community of thousands if it confirms their beliefs in hidden knowledge. This is why such things, almost without fail, include a conspiracy element. That is the buffer to absorb the overwhelming evidence against the case they are trying to make. “Free energy”, “flat earth“, and “fake moon landing“ are cogent examples but not alone by far.

 

Ya’akov,

I appreciate your effort to calm things down here, but I am afraid you have been taken in by his attempts to disguise his true purpose.

Read again his respose to me here. This was the first post I would consider disrespectful.

isn't a stove and other appliances possibly run on 220 after the in home breaker box?? so that would make it NOT line power correct?
either way this has NOTHING to do with power lines, so if you just want to criticize, thanks for the help, but please stop replying.

My assertion that a house outlet is connected to the incoming power lines is apparently criticism. How dare I disagree with him!

Then, a couple of posts later, he uses the term “back feeding”, which was not used previously in the thread, which proves to me he knows more than he is letting on.

In my opinion he is like all of the others you referred to.

 

Ya'akov, I totally agree with BobTPH. While you were well meaning in your response, from his previous posting in this thread any slight response in his favor puts his mind to thinking he is on the right track in this.

 

you have repeated "simple physics" multiple times now, which whether you mean it or not comes off very condescending, which may be the reason people become abusive. Inferred belittling of someone asking a question, especially a hypothetical one is arrogance on your part.

however in the example I gave you are creating an overabundance of energy (+80w) and creating a loop with additional supplementation.
so you are not ending up with less energy.

Let me see if I can put it more simply.

No system, electrical or mechanical is 100% efficient.
Let us suppose that the generator is 50% efficient. (Take any efficiency less than 100%. The argument is the same.)
Therefore to produce 100W of power the generator will require 200W of input power. This is in addition to what is required to spin the grinder and the generator. You cannot come out ahead.

I cannot state it any simpler than that.

Edit: We are all governed by the Laws of Thermodynamics. Most importantly in this case, the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

 

Let us suppose that the generator is 50% efficient.

I wish I could get generators that good!

 

Edit: We are all governed by the Laws of Thermodynamics. Most importantly in this case, the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

But yet there are so many people thinking that laws are just made to be broken.